Her rise to stardom coincided with the AIDS epidemic, and, Lauper-a neon-haired free spirit-distinguished herself through her continued commitment to the LGBTQ+ community. For her second album True Colors, Lauper wrote the melancholic “Boy Blue” as a tribute to a childhood friend named Gregory Natal who'd recently succumbed to the disease. While promoting the single in 1987, she made the radical move to donate its proceeds to AIDS organizations.

“I was told it was an unpopular cause but I’ve really only ever believed in unpopular causes,” Lauper recently told Vogue. “I’ve always seen my job as trying to shed light where there’s darkness. Where there is no love, you give love, right?”

Lauper continued to give back in 2008 when she co-founded True Colors United, an organization that aims to prevent and end homelessness among LGBTQ+ youth. Through an array of initiatives including community organizing and public engagement, the non-profit advocates for research and funding to improve the lives of LGBTQ+ youth in America, who are 120% more likely than their peers to end up on the streets or in unstable housing.

This week, Lauper is launching the organization’s tenth annual Cyndi Lauper & Friends: Home for the Holidays benefit concert. Presented in the past as a live event at the Beacon Theater, this year’s virtual line-up will premiere this Friday, December 11 exclusively on TikTok at 8 PM ET (with additional streams on Lauper’s YouTube and Facebook handles the following Sunday, December 13). The concert is True Colors United’s biggest fundraising event of the year, with 100% of the proceeds from the virtual extravaganza supporting the non-profit’s work.

Ahead of the benefit’s premiere this Friday, Lauper spoke to Vogue about putting together her first virtual Home for the Holidays, the legacy of the “True Colors” song, and working with the United Nations on their latest PSA.

How are you holding up these days?

Same old, same old. [I’m in] my place in Manhattan. These days my office is now my studio is now my dressing room is now everything else. I've kinda cornered myself away right now because I have some guys coming in to fix the radiator. It’s an old vintage one that’ll go to the Smithsonian one day so I can't screw it up too badly.

I associate you so closely with New York, so I’m glad you’ve stuck it out through all this discourse about how the city is supposedly dead.

I love New York and I won't be leaving it anytime soon. I lived here through the "I Love New York'' tourism campaign back when people actually used to say: “New York, New York, so good they named it twice!" My family went to every museum when I was little and I still remember holding my father’s hand while walking around the Museum of Natural History. I don't give a you-know-what who comes and goes because a lot of those people weren't even from the city.

I associate you so closely with New York, so I’m glad you’ve stuck it out through all this discourse about how the city is supposedly dead.

I love New York and I won't be leaving it anytime soon. I lived here through the "I Love New York'' tourism campaign back when people actually used to say: “New York, New York, so good they named it twice!" My family went to every museum when I was little and I still remember holding my father’s hand while walking around the Museum of Natural History. I don't give a you-know-what who comes and goes because a lot of those people weren't even from the city.
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I’m really excited to check out the Home for the Holidays benefit concert. How has the process of programming it as a digital event compared to years’ past?

I'll be honest, I didn't know how it would go but there's some stuff that's pretty cool. It’s much harder than anything we’ve done before. When it’s live you work and work towards this one night where everyone is ready to rip their last hairs out. Because it’s virtual this year it just seems so prolonged because there’s always something to play around with. First you have to acquire the talent and this year we had help from this wonderful Broadway director Jeff Calhoun. We had a really interesting group of people send in stuff on their iPhones.

Can you talk about the process of assembling this line-up? It’s a really fun mix of icons, current stars, and rising names.

I can't even believe that we've been doing it this long. This year a lot of people stepped up and I'm so grateful. Taylor Swift recorded a little intro for the whole thing. Bette Midler, Billie Eilish, and Brandi Carlile are all on board with Cher and Dolly-I mean come on. Shea Diamond sings a Christmas song Justin Tranter wrote that’s so cute. I was really blown away by the fact that they all took the time to do this.

I noticed a lot of your former collaborators like Billy Porter and the cast of Kinky Boots are included as well.

He’s incredible. I'm so excited for everything that’s happened in his career since Kinky Boots. He's become this amazing, iconic guy and I just love watching him. I wanted up-and-comers like Phoebe Bridgers and Kim Petras alongside icons like him and Boy George. Adam Lambert and King Princess have both done the show before and they’re back as well. Even LL Cool J stops by! I’m just so grateful to everybody.

    

What was your original mission with True Colors United and how has it evolved over the years?

At first our goal was to advocate for the LGBTQ youth that are facing or experiencing homelessness by creating a central online hub where they could connect with different outreach centers. There are over 4.2 million youths on the streets and LGBTQ youth are some of the most vulnerable. When Gregory [Lewis, True Colors CEO] went out to do research at all these different homeless centers, he came back with statistics saying that up to forty percent of the homeless youth population identify as LGBTQ while only seven percent of the country’s general youth population identify as such. That's quite a discrepancy. I didn’t really wanna have a charity that doesn’t do anything. I wanted to see it to move forward and True Colors has raised over $3 million these past ten years.

I assumed the “True Colors” song was always intended as a tribute to the gay community, but I only recently found out that Billy Steinberg originally wrote it about his mother. When did you realize it had such resonance with your LGBTQ+ fans?

"True Colors" was always meant for everyone. But back when I was pregnant with my son in ‘97 the internet was new and people started contacting me from different parts of the country. I started getting all kinds of messages and every other one seemed to be about that song. They were from people disowned by their families or who’d lost their friends or their jobs. A lot of them said they’d been completely suicidal when they heard this song and that it saved them. That felt pretty powerful. I’ve always believed in equality for all, not just some. I grew up during the civil rights movement listening to the words of Dr. King and Malcolm X and all those folk artists like Joan [Baez] and Bob Dylan. They stood up for what they believed in because they realized it takes everyone to change a situation.

I read that there was a period in your youth where you ran away from home and were temporarily homeless. How much did those experiences color your current activism?

It was a different time and I was very lucky. I backpacked to Vermont and ended up at a youth hostel because that's kinda what you did. I was on welfare for a minute and didn’t even have enough money for toilet paper. I wanted to work so they sent me to an office because at that time there were programs for younger people who demonstrated a little ambition. They asked me what I wanted to be and I told them an artist. I thought I was gonna paint but they got me a job at a kennel where I took care of the animals and cleaned the cages. I thought I'd never wanna leave a life tending to those animals. I loved it so much. I would sing and work and paint and eventually they even helped me get a GED.

I had a lot of LGBTQ people in my life in the ‘70s and ‘80s. Gregory Natal was my neighbor and he was thrown out of his home at twelve years old. It was an abusive situation where the mother chose to get rid of the kid, not the husband. He wound up on the streets so the issue of homelessness gets to me. It really does. If a young person is told that even God doesn't love them, what do you think they’re gonna do? How do you think they’re gonna behave? I'm a friend and family member of this community and where I come from, you don't stand by and watch your people being discriminated against and stripped of their human rights.

Is there any moment from your history with True Colors United that you’re particularly proud of?

We’ve made a lot of headway. We changed the regulation where shelters receiving federal funds could not discriminate against who they took in, but that was rolled back under the current administration so now we have to work even harder. But onwards and upwards. It's a long road, but we've brought people together and we’re only looking forward to what comes next. During Home for the Holidays we're premiering an animated United Nations PSA I did a voiceover for that’s gonna launch as a global campaign. It’s pretty groundbreaking because the UN has never really acknowledged that LGBTQ+ homelessness is an issue before. But it’s an issue everywhere because LGBTQ+ are disenfranchised everywhere. I'm really excited about working with them and the fact that they're advocating for social justice worldwide.

On that note, what are your goals for True Color United under the next administration?

For me personally, it’s about continuing to do preventative work that addresses the homeless LGBTQ youth population. Of course the term “LGBTQ” is kinda color-blind in that it encompasses everybody. I wanna step into the different brackets to focus on the youth of color since they have even higher risks of homelessness. We recently worked with Senator [Jack] Reed and Senator [Susan] Collins on a bipartisan effort they created to fund housing for homeless youth. The parties are supposed to represent the people but sometimes they only represent themselves and whoever’s funding them. It was a real eye opener for me to see how things could actually be when people worked together to solve a problem. I'm just trying to make the world safer for these kids. The youth are our future-all of 'em, not some of 'em. And they deserve a place to call home, especially during the holidays.