The singer's new track, "Born This Way," was intended as an anthem to diversity and acceptance. But as Jacob Bernstein reports, her core fanbase thinks it's just a pandering piece of pop. 
 
 In her new single "Born This Way," Lady Gaga implores listeners "don't be a drag, just be a queen," and says, "it doesn't matter whether you love him or capital H-I-M." The singer has said she wanted to create the ultimate gay anthem, and perhaps she's succeeded. By Friday night, the track had raced to the top of the iTunes charts and gotten a stellar plug from her gay consigliere in cyberspace, Perez Hilton. Rolling Stone also applauded Gaga's effort, with Rob Sheffield giving the song four stars. 
 
 Still, among a specific set of urban gay men—many of whom had bought tickets to her shows, worked out at Equinox with her album The Fame Monster blaring in their ears, danced to her music on Fire Island, and discussed her outré wardrobe with a tendency that would alarm even the most pro-gay straight people—the reaction was surprisingly mixed. 
 
 Some of the swipes were minor. Aaron Hicklin, the editor of Out (one of the earliest publications to put Gaga on the cover) was the first to break ranks. On Saturday, he took to his Facebook account and wrote a message saying, "Gaga shmaga." He urged friends to go out and buy the new Adele album instead. 
 
 On Monday—after Gaga performed the song at the Grammys with a troupe of scantily clad dancers while donning a ponytail reminiscent of early '90s Madonna—Andy Cohen, the Bravo host, wrote on his blog that he found her number "very Blond Ambition meets Express Yourself." This did not appear to be a compliment. 
 
 Eric Ord, an openly gay chap working in New York in commercial real estate, said, "I think she sees herself as the gay messiah and it bugs me." According to him, the song would be like "white people writing a song about breaking free from slavery and expecting black people to worship us for it." (To be fair, Lady Gaga has said she's attracted to both men and women.) And Aaron Newbill, a modeling agent, referred to an old quote where Gaga said she wrote the song in 10 minutes. "She should have taken at least 11," he said. 
 
 "I sort of liked Gaga more when she sang about dancing as opposed to trying to be the voice of a generation," says a gay party promoter in New York. 
 
 Michael Caulfield / Getty Images 
 
 Even among Gaga's most reliable demographic—denizens of the gay club world—the reaction was far from uniformly positive. Jared Needle, who with his business partner Josh Wood is the biggest gay party promoter in New York, said, "I find the lyrics cliché and the melody overly Madonna-esque. It seems pretty en vogue at the moment to pander to people's concerns about bullying. It's a good PR move because it's hard to hate a song that speaks to acceptance—unless that dialogue seems forced, inauthentic, and disingenuous. I sort of liked Gaga more when she sang about dancing as opposed to trying to be the voice of a generation." 
 
 It's worth noting that artists who get political always get blowback from people who think they ought to stop proselytizing and just entertain. Madonna has heard it numerous times, especially when she approached issues like AIDS and sexuality nearly 25 years ago. So did Bono, back when he and his band sang about Martin Luther King Jr. on "Pride (In the Name of Love)." And at least one gay I know was quick to defend Gaga on the issue of using the song as a marketing ploy. Said Corey Johnson, the political director for Towleroad.com and a consultant who's worked on numerous political campaigns for Democrats, like Howard Dean and Mark Green: "Gaga has used her celebrity to advocate for equality more than anyone else—not just by tweeting but actually going to the state of Maine to activate young people to contact the two moderate Republican senators there and bring discharged veterans to the Video Music Awards. She has walked the walk and I don't second guess it, not even for a moment." ||||| radio vulture Lady Gaga Keeps It Simple on ‘Born This Way’ — and That’s Clever 
 
 Good news about Lady Gaga: She’s smart enough to know precisely when to stop acting smart. 
 
 Consider this: I just woke up, at five-thirty in the morning, to attend to the unveiling of her big new single, “Born This Way.” (Big enough that there was basically no question, before anyone even heard the thing, that it would run straight to No. 1 on the charts  Billboard’s 1,000th official chart-topper, actually.) I dragged diligently out of bed. I made a serious pot of coffee. I got all psyched to bring as much high-level analytical skill as I could muster to whatever this song turned out to be. Time to make the critical doughnuts, etc.  no point in rolling out of bed early just to say “nice song.” 
 
 And this one seemed like it might be complicated, too. Because we’d already seen the lyrics to “Born This Way,” and I can’t even tell you how skeptical they made me. “You’re black, white, beige, chola descent / You’re Lebanese, you’re Orient?” Gaga said she wrote this in ten minutes; rhyming “chola descent” with “Orient” is what happens when you do that. The main hook  “don’t be a drag, just be a queen”  that’s a good one, good for pop, applicable to all. But it comes after months and months of what one terrific critic has already called “The Great Gay Pander-Off of 2010”: A long run of housey dance tunes in which half the women of pop sing reassuringly about embracing and celebrating ourselves for whoever we are. 
 
 These songs are all fundamentally good-hearted and probably good for the world, but they’re also strange. They nod to gay struggles, or all the attention that’s been paid to bullying and suicide. (Ke$ha has variously claimed that “We R Who We R” was inspired by teen suicide, or else by seeing a drag show long before “It Gets Better” was a thing.) But the real goal is to do what pop does, and open up that circle of self-acceptance to anyone who wants in. And that’s something worth thinking about, and maybe even being skeptical of, because at some point we might all start using gay men as simple totems or avatars for whatever little personal struggles we go through, right down to the point where some horrible egomaniac on a reality-TV show starts talking about having been born that way. This is a weird amount of pop songs in which, to put it really bluntly, white women point to gay men to explain to all of us how to survive. Not bad, just weird. Because all of these songs get to look like they're giving something to a community they're really taking something from. 
 
 “Born This Way” opens up the circle as wide as it can, shouting out ethnic backgrounds with fascinating specificity, and working in a line about the disabled. Never mind that I guarantee you Lady Gaga will eventually make some aesthetic choice that offends or disappoints members of every community she reaches out to. Consider instead that the greatest trick Lady Gaga has pulled  the thing that makes her a genuinely impressive pop star  is creating an atmosphere where people can legitimately feel like revolutionary all-embracing gender-queering “little monsters” by listening to one of the most popular artists in the country. That’s rare and makes for vital pop. 
 
 And it’s with all this in mind that I sit down with the serious pot of coffee and listen to “Born This Way,” wondering what all will be in there and how it will make me feel about all these issues, wondering what kind of musical presentation can possibly pull off these somewhat bonkers lyrics about being-who-you-are  (the only people excluded by this type of song are those who are not exactly sure who they are in the first place)  and the answer comes and it’s bonkers mecha-disco! The sound of Lady Gaga shouting in my ear that I am totally overthinking things, this time. The song’s so disco that the mention of a mother’s “boudoir” in the first verse becomes totally natural and hilarious. The song’s so disco that the line about people being “Orient-made” barely even registers, because it sounds like something nobody would have thought twice about saying in 1978. The vocals are so bonkers disco that I almost wish we could make them extra-bonkers by having Christina Aguilera sing them. Beyond which, this song has Gaga, an artist constantly compared to Madonna, cheerfully swiping some melodies from Madonna's "Express Yourself"  because this is not the kind of song where that feels like a big deal, or anything much at all seems like a big deal. 
 
 I guess I’d forgotten that this is the thing to do when you’ve reached the top, and everyone is celebrating you and awaiting your next move: Just sort of celebrate back. “Born This Way” is loose and uncomplicated and fundamentally just fun; it uses fans’ goodwill toward Gaga to throw a party instead of an art happening. After a year of everyone up to Camille Paglia bringing all kinds of intense critical thought to everything Gaga does  what does she mean, what is she saying, what is her effect on the culture  this is smart: Come raging back with something simple, gleeful, and straightforward. 
 
 My bad!
– Lady Gaga's "Born This Way" debuted to wildly enthusiastic reviews from the likes of Elton John and Perez Hilton, who see it as the new gay anthem—but other prominent gays are not so happy about it, writes Jacob Bernstein on the Daily Beast. Critiques ranged from the mild ("Gaga shmaga," wrote the editor of Out) to less mild ("very Blond Ambition meets Express Yourself," wrote Bravo host Andy Cohen) to the downright severe: "It seems pretty en vogue at the moment to pander to people's concerns about bullying," a party promoter says. "I sort of liked Gaga more when she sang about dancing as opposed to trying to be the voice of a generation." Another gay man came up with this analogy for the song: It's like "white people writing a song about breaking free from slavery and expecting black people to worship us for it." (Although, Bernstein points out, Gaga has said she's attracted to both sexes.) A modeling agent, noting that Gaga once said she wrote the song in 10 minutes, said "she should have taken at least 11;" a DJ and former drag performer called the track "cheesy and overproduced." But what about Madonna, whose "Express Yourself" so many people have compared the track to? She's a fan, Gaga assured Jay Leno last night. Watch that video in the gallery or click to listen to the song.