Article written by Rachel Pepper July 1997, Queer San Francisco.

Quote:

One artist who Perry's not so fond of is dyke icon Melissa Etheridge.
Recently, Perry was quoted in an interview saying if left alone in a room
with Melissa Etheridge and Joan Osborne, she'd "kick the fuckin' shit out
of them." The reaction to this statement, which was probably intended to be
satirical--although Perry doesn't like either singer--was swift and scorching.
"I obviously offended the queen of the gay community,"
Perry says of the incident and its aftermath.

Perry is especially critical of how long it took Etheridge to come out,
and of how heralded she was by lesbians once it finally happened.
Perry says she herself has "been out since day one,"
and has never let that dampen her own career.
 

It may be a first. One of PeTA's pet celebrities finally has woken
up to the full consequences of the animal rights agenda and backed away
from the extremist organization. "It was my mistake," declared musician
Melissa Etheridge in the Jan. 23 issue of the Advocate.

 Not even a year after she posed nude in PeTA's "I'd rather go
 naked than wear fur" campaign, Etheridge said that she has "made a
 decision not to do any more visible work for PeTA" because "there are
 so many gray areas" about animal rights.

     "My father died of cancer, and I've lost too many friends to AIDS.
 So I do believe in animals losing their lives to eradicate cancer and AIDS
 from our lives; I believe in that," said Etheridge.

  She admitted that the ad, in which she and companion Julie
  Cypher posed nude together as a couple, stirred up "serious
  controversy." "I was contacted by people looking for cures for AIDS
  who were saying, 'I can't believe you helped PeTA, because they don't
  support animal testing.' I got impassioned letters about this from people
  in the fur trade, saying, 'You don't know what you're talking about.' I
  got letters like I'd never received before."

  Still, Etheridge emphasized that she has never worn fur and never
  would wear fur. She does, however, eat meat and wear leather.

      PeTA didn't seem to mind this inconvenient bit of philosophical
  dissonance when it contacted Cypher about doing the ad, saying it was
  doing a series of photographs of couples. Etheridge made it clear where
  she stood on the issues, and PeTA assured her that others who had
  posed for the ads were not necessarily consistent in their stand on animal
  rights.

  View the picture from the PeTA campaign.