Lady Gaga (Pt.1): How She Manipulated the Conspiracy Theorists on Her Way to Becoming The Biggest Pop Star on the Planet

0:00 Disgraceland is a production of Double Elvis. This is a story about one of the biggest pop stars on the planet. A Grammy winning, chart topping, staggeringly successful musician, an artist who refuses to be easily defined, a shape shifting, influential, five tool multi hyphenate icon, a singer, a songwriter, an actor, an endlessly compelling superstar with legions of followers from all over the world. She's more than mainstream. She is the mainstream.

0:47 Yet she's the voice of the marginalized, the alienated, the isolated, of freaks and monsters everywhere, and she inspires more than just fandom and obsession. She's compelled countless conspiracy theorists whose claims about her are as absurd as they are horrifying. She's a man, She's a murderer. Are these claims true?

1:13 And if not, why won't they go away? What is it about this artist that drives these persistent conspiracies. The artist I'm talking about is, of course, Lady Gaga, an artist who yes, makes great music. Unlike that music I played for you at the top of the show. That wasn't great music. That was a preset loop from my melotron called Fishnets on Delancey MK One. I played you that loop because I can't afford the rights to so What by Pink? And why would I play you that specific slice of dirt bike dating Cheese? Could I afford it?

1:58 Because that was the number one song in America on October fourth, two thousand and eight, And that was the day Lady Gaga's friend and musical collaborator Lena Morgana died, an event that kicked off one of the wildest, darkest rumors in modern music history. On this episode, Influencer per shape Shifter, Icon of sex or intersex, borrowed or stolen identity, suicide or murder, Illuminati or Catholic schoolgirl gone wrong, the Lady Gaga story you didn't know you needed. I'm Jake Brennan, and this this Disgraceland. Most people spend hours perfecting the outfits they're going to wear to gain entrance into exclusive nightclubs.

3:00 The opposite is true if one seeks admission to Berlin's lab Oratory, part of the notorious Bergaine nightclub complex, which opens at eleven fifty nine pm Friday evening and closes around nine am Monday morning. Bergaine's doormen are as selective as Studio fifty four, as notorious Mark Bennecket once was, but twice as cruel at Bergaine, outrageous outfits are not encouraged.

3:28 It's best to rock your simplest jeans and T shirt combo and act like you don't care, which, of course you very much do. The doorman's harsh East German stare betrays nothing. His face is blank as death and bleak like a Berlin mourning. Though your heart is in your throat, you play it cool. You're not drunk, you're not obviously high.

3:52 You haven't spoken a word while in line, so the dorman has no idea that you don't speak German. He gives you a slow one or with gestapo like suspicion, and steps aside, clearing a free path to the heavy industrial door covered in graffiti. You return a stare with your own blankness and proceed through the door, which somehow opens on its own before you get to it. Inside this mammoth, fourth story brick and mortar tribute to Sodom and Gomorrah, you're surrounded by a blackness, only penetrated in minuscule moments by brief bursts of strobing white light. The pulsing house music pommels you somehow, It's both muffled and suffocatingly loud. Your ear drums hollow out. Then the walls are, your stomach vibrate. You wonder if this is what havana

4:42 syndrome feels like. The thought disappears, and so does the twinge of nausea as your heart rate quickens with anticipation. While you pass through Brigaanne's labyrinth of long, winding hallways beneath forty foot ceilings. You walk past secret passageways to even more secret rooms where you and others will partake and acts that, decades ago, where they not kept secret, would have resulted in harsh societal condemnation, persecution, jail, violence, and even death. You press on up countless staircases, slipping through various entrances into a maze work of club settings.

5:21 You wonder how you'll describe this the Burgane Nightclub Complex to your friends. Imagine if Trent Reznor designed a music and dance mall dedicated to debauchery. That's about the best you can come up with. As you rub shoulders with the like minded hedonists from all over the globe, different countries, different backgrounds, with different looks and different sexual orientations, though mostly gay, and each of them seeking a different version of what you seek, the freedom to be who you truly are, and to align your true identity with your most honest sexual desires. The word freak seems pejorative, but that's not how you see it. You view the word the same as the composer of the Stuart Price remix

6:05 that's blasting across the Burganne dance floor, the same way that that composer views the word freak as a badge of honor. And that composer, of course, is not only your favorite pop star. She's your champion, your icon. You're one of her little monsters, and she's your quote unquote mother monster. One of the biggest stars of the twenty first century. Lady Gaga, who was just as you were, born this way, an artist who told the world that she always felt like a freak, An artist who took her awkward feelings of high school alienation and isolation and used them as fuel fuel to empower her and her millions of fans, you included. She empowered all of you to embrace your true identities and to reclaim the word freak,

6:56 and with that reclamation comes liberation. Freedom. And so here you are inside the Bergane nightclub complex, outside the entryway to the lab Oratory. The club stylizes its name as lab dot Oratory, a semi clever take on the word laboratory. Thus my kind of strange pronunciation of the club's name. Lab Oratory isn't just any club. It's a sex club with rules. Lab Oratory is for men only on most nights, and the club's motto is play safe, dress dirty. Before one can enter, one must make a prerequisite stop in the locker room. You know the drill. Lab Oratory advertisements are clear. There's a strict dress code, fully naked, shoes only under the locker rooms fluorescent lights. You strip down, stuff your clothes in a plastic bag and throw the

7:54 bag into a locker. Eagerly, you make your way into lab Oratory, again, fully naked except for your sneakers. The club's flyers prohibit not only clothing but also cologne, and you immediately understand why. The smell hits you almost as hard as the music. In a word, a club smells like men, a raunchy, exhilarating mix of pheromones, sex, and the sweet scent of vodka, which famously is odorless until it passes through one's sweat pores. All of it fills the air and your nostrils, and with the music, you're already enthralled before your brain even begins to register where your eyes are seeing black and white sexual psychedelia, a dom doom dance floor jammed with different body types, all nude, all sharing the same space, strangers clinging to some type

8:49 of communal intimacy, and you now know that you'll never be able to explain this. It's something that can only be felt. This is something far too experience, like love or faith, something that words too often failed to describe. Gas Masks hang from the wall. Men speak to you with gestures, signals, not words. Words are no good here.

9:14 The music is too loud, and the shared frequency that everyone is plugged into makes speaking unnecessary. You all want the same thing, not sex, freedom, and everyone in this club understands what that means. This isn't the nineteen seventies. This isn't New York's meatpacking district. Floor shows and spectacle fisting are outre This is the twenty first century. And though lab oratory is primal, and though nearly every kink is allowed, this space is also profoundly respectful. To repeat, the so called freak is celebrated, and with this respect comes the type of tenderness that would otherwise be absent from a nightclub full of naked men dancing and fucking to the sound pounds of Lady Gaga house mixes. After all,

10:04 laboratory is the setting for one of the most notorious chapters of what has become the myth of Lady Gaga. It's the place where one of the most unsettling and controversial conspiracy theories surrounding the pop star would be finally put to bed. Ever since Lady Gaga burst into mainstream public consciousness in two thousand and eight, conflicting information about who she was and where she came from has persisted.

10:56 To hear Gaga tell it back then. Anyway, the young twenty three year old pop star described herself to interviewers as having grown up as an outsider, a quote unquote goth girl with hair dyed black. Equally obsessed with David Bowie and Judy Garland. Gaga strategically offered other bits for her past, too, like the fact that before she became a global sensation selling out stadiums and countries all over the world, she worked a poll on New York's Lower East Side as a burlesque dancer. Or that Gaga, like many feral denizens of the LS back in the mid oughts, from the Strokes to Ryan Adams, knew exactly what it meant when a fellow barhawk whispered meet me in the bathroom.

11:39 These biographical sketches of Lady Gaga's past, doled out in the many interviews she gave as her career began to skyrocket, are not false, but they do color only between the lines of a carefully designed, artist driven creation myth. It's an origin story that leaves out a lot, and as it pertains to Gaga's high school year, presents it almost and I say the word almost very intentionally, an almost false depiction of who she was. Do I think that we should fault Lady Gaga for this? Absolutely not. Most of the best artists, from Bob Dylan to Lou Reed to Jack White Bowie and too many others to name.

12:18 The best artists painstakingly fueled their own myths by carefully cultivating their origin stories Bob Dylan wasn't raised by Carnie Barker's and Lou Reed didn't go to Harvard. Jack White wasn't Meg White's brother, David Bowie didn't fall to Earth, and Lady Gaga wasn't born with a penis. More on that when we returned to Labratory in a moment, But first, let's quickly look at who Lady Gaga was before she was Lady Gaga. She was Stephanie Germanada, and she grew up rich on New York'supper West Side. You know the guest wi fi you used to get onto the Internet with your computer in hotels, the one that's literally called guest WiFi. Her dad, Joe Germanada, invented that. He also invented Stephanie Germanada aka Lady Gaga. Joe and his wife

13:11 raised their daughter Catholic, sending her to a prestigious private school, the exclusive all girls Convent of the Sacred Heart in Manhattan. The school is set in a converted mansion, and if you want an idea of what type of exclusivity we're talking about, Convent of the Sacred Heart's past students include Anderson Cooper's mother, Gloria Vanderbilt, heiress to the Vanderbilt Fortune, Caroline Kennedy, the daughter of President John F. Kennedy in both Paris, and Nikki Hilton. I didn't attend Catholic school, but I imagine it's a fairly stuffy experience. I can see how someone like Lady Gaga might describe her experience there as that of an outsider being made to feel like a quote unquote freak. But former classmates and photos

13:57 of Stephanie Germanada's school days, which one can now find on the Internet, they all paint a different picture of her school days. Classmates describe her as social involved. Even outgoing photos reveal a smiling, fresh faced, enthusiastic student wearing her school uniform to code and eagerly participating in masks and in student plays in musicals. To this day, Lady Gaga remains close with a number of her high school classmates.

14:27 Her loyalty to her friends is surpassed only by her loyalty to her family, where Gaga has made no secret about the fact that, despite being one of the biggest stars on the planet, she still often returns to her parents three story duplex to surround herself with their love and the familiar comforts of her childhood home. All of this is at odds with how Gaga has described herself.

14:50 We're all very aware of how nineties and early aughts outsiders and freaks looked and behaved. They were seldom seen smiling in yearbook photos with other student it's eagerly attending Catholic Mass, ambitiously going for lead roles in school plays, or heading home on weekends to hang with their parents.

15:08 After becoming rock stars, their histories look quite different. Actually, late nineties and early odds outsiders were infrequently, if ever, pictured in candid moments in their yearbooks smiling. Real music driven outsiders didn't eagerly attend anything except punk and DII shows, never mind Catholic Mass, and they didn't go out for school plays, and, god willing they ever achieved rock star status, the last place they were going to go as a young twenty something was home to mommy and daddy on the weekend. But all of this said, I don't think Lady Gaga was lying about feeling like an outsider, despite the person we now know that she was pretty fame because Lady Gaga had something that ninety nine percent of

15:53 her fellow humans don't have a blinding, almost suffocating ambition to be the biggest star on the planet. From an early age, she was absolutely driven to make it as a performer, specifically as a singer and songwriter. You can see it in those pictures from Sacred Heart, and you can see it in those embarrassing videos of Stephanie Germanada from her NYU days back in the early two thousands on stage at the Bitter End, about as uncool a New York venue as you could find at the time, fighting her way through led Zeppelin covers to a near empty room with a half ass hippie band backing her up.

16:33 And you can see it in later photos of a reinvented Lady Gaga from her Lower East Side days, working the bars on Ludlow and Delancey for every ounce of credibility she could scrouch and leotard's and go go boots. During a time when she was clawing her way toward a major label record deal, Stephanie Germanada wasn't going to be denied. If you spoke to those who have known Lady Gaga for a long time, they'd I'll tell you that this ambition was always there. She was always hustling.

17:02 She worked her way into a development deal with the top notch producer. She was writing, demoing, constantly, chasing down live gigs, hanging out at the right places, showing up at the right parties, seeking out the right people to be seen with, and sleeping with the hottest bartender on the Lower East Side, a long haired metal head named Loof because of course he was. And she was scouring the trendy digital blog pages of last night's party and the Cobra Snake for pictures of herself from the night before.

17:29 For Lady Gaga, the hustle never stopped. She lived, worked, slept, and dreamed. Hustle. Everything she did, including engaging in her favorite topic of conversation, herself, was all about making it. This type of ambition isn't only blinding, it's isolating. When you orient your life around a goal with the type of drive that causes you to behave differently than anyone else you know and come in contact with, well, you're by definition alienating yourself. So was Lady Gaga an outsider back in her formative years, Yes, absolutely she was. She just invented an origin story her audience could better relate to and that speaks to her genius. But what about her penis you ask? Oh? Yeah, right back to the

18:18 lab oratory in Berlin. When Lady Gaga and her entourage entered the Bergane nightclub complex in twenty ten, Stephanie Germanada's identity had long since been supplanted by the Mother Monster, the Gagaloo, Gags Gaga, Lady Gaga, the new queen of pop. By twenty ten, Lady Gaga was caught in a hurricane of unprecedented success for a new artist. I could fill the entirety of this podcast giving examples of just how staggeringly successful Gaga had become by twenty ten, only three years into her professional career, but I'm not going to do that. After releasing her day album The Fame in two thousand and eight, the woman didn't just have hit singles.

19:04 She had the biggest selling singles of the year. She captivated the world with her performance at the fifty second Grammy Awards, drew more than a few comparisons to mid career Madonna, chief among them by pissing off the Catholics with their song Alejandro, which the Catholic League deemed blasphemous and as she won three Grammys, countless MTV Video Music Awards, topped critics lists, and Rolling Stone, seemingly everywhere else, and by the end of twenty ten was named by Time magazine as one of the one hundred most influential people in the world. She also became the first person ever to achieve a billion views on YouTube for her Bad Romance video. But it was her Glastonbury performance in two

19:46 thousand and nine that really stoked the imaginations of the conspiracy theorists. The show was a triumph. It cemented Lady Gaga on the world stage. The audience simply could not get enough of Gaga, not just her performance, but her personality. They ate, as they say, from the palm of her hand, and in the end, Lady Gaga sent them away by shooting flames out of her nipples literally well literally out of her bra anyway. But shortly thereafter, videos and photos from the performance began circulating online. Videos and photos that online sluice claimed showed a bulge beneath Gaga's skirt, a bulge that supposedly proved that Lady Gaga was intersex quotes fake quotes that is from Gaga supposedly confirmed that she

20:43 had both male and female genitalia. They went viral instantly. Gaga refused to deny the claims. Her management denied them for her, which, given the fact that her father is part of her management team, you can understand why. But still Gaga said nothing on the subject. In the corner of the Internet that is concerned with all things Gaga was flooded with altered imagery exaggerating the bulge in her crotch. Silly, yes, absolutely, but it's astonishing how many people fell for this ridiculousness and how persistent this rumor was until Gaga visited lab Oratory with her entourage. After visiting lab Oratory, Gaga, her security, a few friends, her makeup artists, and the British journalist Caitlyn Moran from the Times of London filled the dance

21:36 floor of another Bergang complex nightclub, this one with its own set of sex swings, bathtubs and beds. According to Moran, Gaga was unlucky in love this evening. Despite her pop star status. The gay clientele were happy to host, but Gaga apparently struck out in her attempts to get laid that hole, not having a penis thing being an issue in all, but that's not the proof that should have finally dispelled the intersex rumor. After ditching her McQueen designed cloak and braving the bar by herself wearing just her fishnets, panties and a bra, Gaga invited Katelyn Moran into the Berganne Club's bathroom for what Moran thought would be an opportunity to do blow with her favorite pop star, but which turned out to instead be an extended girl hang,

22:25 whereupon the reporter witnessed with her own two eyes Lady Gaga squat on the toilet and relieve herself through her fish nets and so irrefutable proof of Lady Gaga's lack of male genitalia was famously published by Kitlyn Moran in the Times, but of course the conspiracy theorists wouldn't accept it.

22:48 A year later, in a sixty minutes interview with Anderson Cooper, no less, Gaga wondered aloud why she should quote waste my time and give a press release about whether or not I have a penis. My fan don't care, and neither do I. The conspiracy theorist went wild with this non denial head over to Reddit, and you'll find that they still haven't let go of it. And to think the whole quote unquote, Lady Gaga is a hermaphrodite thing is only the third most popular conspiracy theory surrounding this global pop star. We'll be right back after this. We're, We're, We're.

23:35 Lady Gagay wasn't the least bit phased about anonymous Internet trolls questioning her physiology online, but having her home invaded that was truly horrifying. Flashback two thousand and six, New York's Lower East Side. The shower felt good on her body, despite the fact that it, like most of the utilities and Lady got one seventy six Stanton Street apartment, barely worked half the time, unlike her Stephanie Germanada, worked all the time. At least it seemed that way. Even when she wasn't working, she was looking for work, which in itself was its own kind of work. Her friend, Lady Starlight, danced burlesque at the Slipper Room on Orchard and Stanton, close by Stephanie's apartment. Burlesque dancers are often confused with strippers,

24:29 but the difference between the two is significant. The point of burlesque is to tease and entertain, to tell a story through the dancing on stage. The removal of clothing typically never gets fully nude. The point of stripping or pole dancing is often sex. Strippers, depending on local laws, remove as much clothing as possible, usually until they're fully nude, and they entice clients into back rooms for paid private shows and often more. But like stripping, burless dancing is hard work. More often than not, the dancers work on stage in heels, and it's a real workout, and it's intense.

25:09 Which is not to suggest that though burlesque is considered more of an art form than stripping, the creeps aren't part of the gig. They are, and the sexual harassment can be just as stressful as the physical fatigue. None of this stopped Stephanie Germanada from pushing Lady Starlight to get her an audition as a burlesque dancer at the Slipper Room. Stephanie needed the money and perhaps the experience as well. These were the days before Stephanie became Lady Gaga.

25:38 These were the formative years Stephanie was still defining herself as an artist. She was signed to a development deal with Rob Fusari, a successful producer who'd worked previously with Destiny's Child and Will Smith. This guaranteed Stephanie precisely nothing. However, she had no record deal, not yet, so every bit of her energy was focused on creating a demo with Fusari that would net her one, and the fact that she was involved in an on again, off again romantic relationship with her producer only made this time in her life more messy. Stephanie made Lady Starlight proud. She nailed her Slipper Room audition, and soon the pair had their own show, The New York Street Revival and Trash Dance.

26:27 The lights in the slipper Room fade to black, the audience a mix of downtown hipsters and bridge and tunnel herbs, all of them sipping cheap, overpriced beer and wine and water down cocktails. Eagerly awaits the show, and then Queen's Radio Gaga explodes from the speakers, and there she is a dancer like they've never seen, five foot two but commanding. Nonetheless, her hair is black, bangs peased out over her shoulders.

27:03 She's in fishnets and panties and grinding to Queen, which transitions effortlessly into a song the audience doesn't recognize but vibes with. Nonetheless, it's one of Stephanie's originals, Electric Kiss. As the show progresses, Stephanie strips down tojust her panties and pasties, and the show is Trey rock and roll, which is to also say, it's dirty and slutty, and the audience is enthralled. The club's owner is happy, but he knows what's coming, and that would be jealousy. The other girls aren't going to stand for this much attention being heaped upon one dancer. The discord is going to lead to changes, and he knows he'll soon have to fire Stephanie, whose star is clearly too big for the slipper room, which he does. Trapesing home through the grime

27:57 of the Lower east Side, Stephanie, with her big eighties metal hair and leotard and go go boots, is gockdat and mocked by some neighborhood boys who mistakenly take her for a sex worker. She ticks it in stride, unlocking her Stanton Street apartment building door to head in for a much needed shower, and the water is hot and the steam is thick. Her body seems to melt with satisfaction under the shower's pressure, and then a noise, a clanging.

28:29 What the hell is that? Stephanie whips back the shower curtain and she swears she sees the outline of a body escaping from her bathroom doorway through her tiny apartment. She grabs a towel and gets out of the shower. Motherfuckers. Those neighborhood boys, the shits followed her home and somehow that jimmyed her door and work their pervy asses into her apartment to sneak a peak of her naked in the shower. There was a gross invasion of privacy One then, like her experience berlet dancing, no doubt helped shape the songs she was currently demo, songs that would eventually appear on her debut album, The Fame, specifically her song Paparazzi, which is both a devotion to and a critique of fame.

29:17 The influence of Lady Gaga's apprenticeship on the Lower East Side on her art is immense. You can still feel the burlesque influence in her music as recently as her latest twenty twenty five Grammy nominated album Mayham. Perhaps more significant is the camp influence Gaga pulled out for her iconic arrival at the Met in twenty nineteen, choosing as one of her four outfits a fishnet and panties number with bangs but minus the teased hair to elevate burlesque into high fashion, her nostalgic return to where burlesque influence came.

29:52 Mind you after she obtained true pop icon status by turning into critical and commercial star performance on the big screen opposite at the Cooper in the blockbuster remake of Judy Garlands and then Barbara Streisand's A Star Is Born. But back in the mid adds on the Las, Stephanie Germanada was still trying to find herself amid the crime and grime of Lower Manhattan. For starters, she needed a stage name. Stephanie Germanada wasn't going to cut it. Her father had done a lot for her career. He used his connections to secure her early gigs, paid for piano lessons, negotiated her contract with Rob Hussari, even paid for her Stanton Street apartment. But he hadn't given her a stage name at birth, as Madonna's father had Queen's Radio Gaga

30:40 wasn't just a song Stephanie danced to. It was a song she was obsessed with, so much so that her producer began playfully calling her Radio Gaga. And one day her producer, Rob reached out to Stephanie via text Radio Gaga, meet you at the studio at noon. But Rob's phone auto corrected his message from Radio Gaga to Lady Gaga.

31:06 And that was that. Stephanie Germanada had a new name. That's if you believe her version of her origin story. There's another Lady Gaga origin story from back in those days, a story that doesn't involve cute, rom com rated text message anecdotes, a story that instead involves murder. On October fifth, twenty eighteen, a major motion picture entitled A Star Is Born, co starring the by this time massively successful popstar Lady Gaga, was released on YouTube. A video promoting the film prompted this comment from a user and I quote. And then, on the ten year anniversary of her suicide, Lady Gaga releases a movie about an aspiring pop star who benefits from using the look and sound of another star who

32:19 was driven to kill himself for the sake of her career. Okay, and what the hell is this all about? That's what you might be asking yourself, Or if you're a massive Gaga fan, you might have been asking yourself this back in twenty nineteen. Who's suicide? Exactly? Exactly? Who is this YouTube commentator talking about? The digital conversation swiftly moved over to Reddit, where one commentator added in response to the YouTube comment, Yeah, like taking her song, changing one letter and branding it as hers, while basically also stealing her music style and fashion style as well, taken on by Gaga right after she sacrificed her buddy for it all.

33:00 Another user chimes in with, on the other hand, Gaga's adoption of her friend's style after her sudden death might just be how she's coping with losing a close friend. It might be her way of keeping her friend alive in her heart. But this sober reasoning is quickly torpedoed by yet another commenter, who says, the way I heard it, her friend actually killed Lady Gaga and has been wearing her skin for the last couple of years. So who is this friend who suddenly died? Who killed herself. Who is Lady Gaga being accused by conspiracy theorists on the internet of murdering after stealing both her music and style to obtain fame, and that friend of Lady Gaga's would be Lena Morgana. Lena Morgana was more than a friend

33:51 to Lady Gaga. She was an artistic collaborator. The two of them worked together alongside producer Rob Hussari during Gaga's early demo days. In pictures of the two from that time, they do indeed resemble one another, with a similar sense of fashion and attitude, but only one aspiring artist became a star. The other one, Lena Morgana, will be dead before Lady Gaga released her first album, before her first single made the charts, before her first major music videos were ever released. One of those videos, for the song Paparazzi, shows Lady Gaga being thrown to her death from a building.

34:33 The video was released in May two thousand and nine. Seven months before that, Lena Morgana was found dead thrown from the roof of the Staten Island Hotel. I'm Jake Brennan. In this episode of Disgraceland is to be continued Disgraceland was created by Yours Truly and is produced in partnership with Double Elvis. Credits for this episode can be found on the show notes page at disgracelampod dot com. Rate and review the show and follow us on Instagram, TikTok, Twitter, and Facebook at disgracelampod and on YouTube at YouTube dot com, slash at disgracelandpod, rock a roll up. He's the Bad band Land