Sophie B. Hawkins almost killed her career by coming out in the 90s. She didn’t let it stop her.

Sophie B. Hawkins doesn’t watch the news. Who can blame her? As a journalist who left the hard news beat to focus more on good news in an attempt to save my sanity, I’m not going to judge. After all, I fled to Mexico when my marriage of 25 years took a dramatic turn; I understand avoidance.

“I sort of shelter myself on purpose,” she said in a recent interview. “I really get into my family and my work, my art. I have to say I’m very triggered.”

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“When a trans woman was shot, a song just came out. I wish I could play it for you, but my manager will probably say I can’t. I want to release it. I want to release a video of it because it’s about all the hate crimes against trans and gay people.”

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A few days later, Hawkins posted a video on YouTube of herself singing the song in her home studio.

As a fan of the out singer for decades, I’m even more willing to forgive how our recent interview started. After all, her hit songs “Damn, I Wish I Was Your Lover” and “As I Lay Me Down” were a huge part of my coming-of-age as a gay man in the early 90s.

Democrat Bill Clinton was running for president and HIV/AIDS was ravaging the gay community when Hawkins was openly discussing her sexuality. While the fallout — both from her record label and the public in general — bruised her career, Hawkins has never stopped making music.

While she worked on two Broadway musicals and released three other albums without much support, her new album, Free Myself, is the singer’s long-awaited return to the industry.

LGBTQ Nation sat down with the Grammy Award-nominated artist to talk about the new album, her public coming out, and the importance of love and family.

SOPHIE B. HAWKINS: It’s a wonderful thing to be able to write songs about things that you can’t live with.

LGBTQ NATION: In my case, it’s nice to focus on something else other than the negativity. It’s all in the background, but my job is to make something beautiful.

Oh, that’s funny, because that song is called “Make Something Meaningful.” I think that what you’re saying is true about all of life and humanity for all of time. It is always there in the background, whatever your thing is, whatever you’re dealing with. And we do have the job of focusing on the creativity in our lives. That’s the only way to make humanity better and ourselves happy.

Not to put it simply, but the light has to win; you have to find the light somewhere.

Jung said until you make the unconscious conscious, you will either be in prison or led by your unconscious, and you’ll call it fate. We have the keys to be completely aware. And to be really, really happy as humans.

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Tell me about the new album. Is there an overarching theme to it?

It wasn’t obvious to me until right before I was releasing it that I would call it Free Myself. But it became obvious because as I took away certain songs and then put in some newer songs, it looked like I was describing a time of my life when I had struggled enough and fought enough and spent enough time in battle and climbing mountains that I was able to just accept who I am as an artist and a mother and this human waking up in the morning and what are my real exact true thoughts. And that’s what this album is about.

Even “Love Yourself.” It sounds like such a happy song. But it’s born of strife, that of all these years of consciously finding those oppositional forces within myself and facing them, talking to them, wrestling with them. A lot of people wake up at four in the morning and say, “I hate myself.” And we think of everything we’ve done wrong that we can’t bear. The greatest thing in life is when you have those moments, and you can look in the mirror and say, “No, I love myself,” and you start working on it.

One of the hardest life lessons to learn is not to look at yourself through other people’s eyes and realize the good things that you have inside of yourself.

There’s so much pressure. I’m your age. It was suggested maybe I should get a facelift, do Botox, or all these things to maintain some sort of glamour or beauty. And I said to myself, I’m only in my mind. And if I do all those things to myself, then I will be seeing myself through their eyes. How they think I look. I don’t want this. I only want to be in my mind. I decided not to do anything physical because I realized I didn’t live so much in my physical body. I’m living in my mind. We all are. We live with our thoughts and our emotions. And that’s not to do with our skin.

I think many people do it mostly to make others happy instead of themselves.

Yes. And I wonder how honest it is that people do it to make themselves happy because they really weren’t seeing themselves through their own eyes and not other people’s. We all have to come to terms with aging, and getting older is incredibly powerful. I think it’s like an elite club I’ve gotten into, and I’m enjoying it very much.

You went on hiatus for a while. What spurred that? What did you do?

It’s funny. I kept writing and recording. I wrote two musicals during that point, and one of them almost got produced. We even had a reading with Kristen Chenoweth. So I wasn’t on hiatus. I was writing musicals. I was writing my album. I wrote a book. Not a memoir, an actual book. But I couldn’t figure out how to get my work out there. I was focused on the musicals because it was exciting to me to be able to work with people instead of always writing the albums alone and then just getting together with musicians and going on tour. But the musicals, as musicals usually do, sort of stalled. You know, artists go through times when they’re not popular or wanted, or people don’t see them in the same way. But I did keep working.

You famously came out as omnisexual in the 90s, well before a lot of other celebrities were coming out as part of the queer community. Was there a reason why?

John Pirellis of the New York Times asked me if I was a lesbian. And I knew that I couldn’t say I was a lesbian, in all honesty, because of my relationships with men. I couldn’t honestly say I was a lesbian, and I couldn’t say I was straight. I always knew that the straight/gay thing was not for me. I always wanted to have access to all of my feelings. I knew my sexuality was not based on gender. I always felt it was based on the soul of the person, and I delight in people’s, you know, bodies, but that only goes so far. A real sexual relationship is in the mind, I think, in the spirit, the soul. If I don’t honestly really love somebody, I don’t care what they have. I don’t want to be around them in any intimate way. I don’t need to have sex for sex’s sake.

So I thought, what do I really identify with? This has to be true; this has to be real. And this has to last. So I couldn’t say straight. And it couldn’t say gay. So I just at that moment coined the term omnisexual, and he said, explain it. And I said, “Well, omni is all. But it’s also one, and all of my desires go into a sort of oneness of my being. And it’s not based on your gender, so if I were with you, John, it wouldn’t be straight. And if I were with a woman, it wouldn’t make me a lesbian. Or it doesn’t mean I’m not committed. I don’t ever cheat on people. I’m always in a singular relationship. But I don’t like having to define myself within a group. It doesn’t make sense. It just doesn’t feel real. I’ve never felt either straight or gay. And yet I feel straight and gay, and more.

You made up that term for an interview, and now it’s become a literal word. Do you take ownership of that? Do you feel proud?

I’m really proud of it. I mean, some brilliant people have used it. Nicole Kidman called Virginia Woolf omnisexual when she played Virginia Woolf in The Hours, that beautiful Michael Cunningham story. She actually said in the interviews after the movie that Virginia Woolf was omnisexual. I was like, “Wow, I wonder if she knows that I coined that word.” David Geffen, he used that word. The most interesting thing is my child came home with a bunch of his friends. And they said that they were omnisexual. They had no idea that I had anything to do with it. It was really funny. And they were 12 at the time.

So how do you think coming out impacted your career? Was it positive? Or negative?

Sony was very angry with me, especially the head of Sony. You have to have somebody from the record company who really believes in you. And for me, it was the head of the company. And he was so mad at me. And I think because he saw me in a certain way, he was projecting a certain image onto me. And then suddenly, I wasn’t that.

And then it wasn’t long before they said, move to Europe. America doesn’t get you. And so I did. I moved to London, and I made my second album. And it was the sort of like, you don’t exist, we don’t like you anymore. It was sort of sad. It was hard. But I didn’t make a deal out of it. I didn’t call it out.

Do you think sexual orientation will matter as much with your new album? With your career? Is it more of a positive than a negative this time around?

Well, I do think that my ideas are in sync with the world now. I think the way that I live is completely normal to my children or even a generation before my children. I don’t think it’s an issue now. So I think that’s great. For me, the deeper issues are appreciating myself, loving myself, and deserving to have a sense of freedom within a relationship and dignity. That’s what will affect me more. The whole gender thing has never affected my actual internal life. Only the way people project onto me.

You spoke out quite often about gender roles and gender expectations throughout your career. So I feel almost like you were bringing trans people into the conversation and kind of laying the groundwork as a cisgender person.

You bring up a point that I never get to talk about. I hope that that’s true. I hope that I have, in some way, paved the way. In 1992, I was saying on pop radio, to the DJs, that some babies were born with ambiguous sex, and that we had to acknowledge as a society that people are forced into the wrong gender, and that it’s normal sometimes to be born with more than one gender, or ambiguous gender and that nobody talks about it. Even back then, I talked about the book Gender Outlaw by Kate Bornstein. The DJs were all these super macho guys. And they were like, she’s crazy. She’s not. It is related to the trans movement.

I got up on stage and had to sing Tom Petty songs the other night with no rehearsal. I didn’t know the band. I’ve never seen Tom Petty before. And I cannot believe the incredible male rocker that comes out of me when I’m singing something like that. The women in the band, the background singers, were just looking at me. They felt so free, so happy to see this woman just get up and start doing a male rocker thing. There was so much joy, so much glee, and I could see it free them. The world is more welcoming to where I have been.

So where do you see the queer community currently? Especially lately, it’s been a rough few years. But the 90s weren’t exactly easy. So where are we? Where are we going?

I think it is darkest before the dawn. I do think that the trans movement is extremely important in so many ways, and not the least of which is male-to-female. Transcendence is needed. We need a lot more feminine energy in this world. I ask women to embrace trans women, I don’t even know if that’s the right way to say it because it’s more. It’s another view on female power. Wherever it’s coming from, please let’s open the doors because we need it. It’s nothing against male energy. The feminine energy is much more community-oriented. It’s much more forgiving and tolerant, and that will be good for everyone. I’m not against the opposite; I’m totally for women becoming men. But I’m just saying embrace the feminine Goddess energy.

When I met Sasha Colby, I said, “There we go. This woman should be president of the United States.” She embodies everything regal and royal about being human. We need this kind of energy. I think it’s actually because she’s trans that she’s so elevated. We need it. Let’s go.