From the New Black Man:
Nearly 35 years before the release of Lady Gaga's Born This Way, a Gospel singer turned Disco star, recorded a song bearing the same title, which became one of the era's most important Gay anthems. That a Baltimore bred, African-American man, who came of age during the height of Civil Rights movement could so seamlessly wed the Gospel impulses of this nation's most affecting social movement, with the nascent impulses of the GLBT movement-"Yes I'm gay/tain't a fault 'tis a fact/I was born this way"-should not be surprising. That Bean did so recording for Motown Records, a company that symbolized the push for Black integration and respectability in the 1960s and 1970s, should elicit some wonder.
Read more here.