1983 · Behind the Songs
How a Broadway show tune became a declaration of identity — and Gaynor’s second anthem.
In 1983, Broadway composer Jerry Herman wrote a showstopper for his new musical La Cage aux Folles — a defiant, brassy declaration of self-acceptance called “I Am What I Am,” sung in the show by a drag performer refusing to apologize for who he is. It was a great theater song. But when Gloria Gaynor — the woman who had given the world “I Will Survive” — recorded it as a single that same year, it became something more: a second anthem, and one of the defining statements of LGBTQ pride in the 1980s.
The fit was almost eerily perfect. “I Will Survive” had been about enduring; “I Am What I Am” was about celebrating — the next step in the same journey. Gaynor, whose voice had already carried one generation-defining declaration of resilience, brought the same conviction to Herman’s lyric. She didn’t sing it as a cover of a show tune; she sang it as a personal creed, and her audience — particularly the gay audiences who had embraced her since the disco days — heard it that way too.
The single gave Gaynor a renewed presence in the 1980s, a decade when disco’s commercial collapse had sidelined many of her peers. More importantly, it cemented her unique status: the rare artist with not one but two songs that function as anthems of identity and survival. Where “I Will Survive” belonged to everyone, “I Am What I Am” belonged especially to those asserting the right to be themselves — and Gaynor, who had fought her own battles in the music business, sang it like she knew exactly what that meant.
Listen for the theatricality — this is Gaynor at her most dramatic, embracing the song’s Broadway roots rather than smoothing them out — and for the joy underneath the defiance. “I Am What I Am” doesn’t plead or explain; it declares. In the arc from “Never Can Say Goodbye” to “I Will Survive” to this, you can hear an artist’s whole philosophy: first you dance, then you survive, then you stand up and tell the world exactly who you are.