The Heartbreaking Love Story Of Whitney Houston and Robyn Crawford
By: Mad Dyke
Tags: Music, LGBT, LGBTQ, Gay, Queer

When I was visiting LA last summer, my friends and I thought it would be funny to go on a bus tour of Hollywood homes. But, as we should’ve expected, it turned dark real quick. As our bus rumbled down Wilshire Blvd and we passed the Beverly Hilton hotel, our chipper tour guide excitedly explained, “And that’s where Whitney Houston died!” She added that she thought it was really kind of the hotel to completely renovate the room in which Houston passed away, not allowing it to be exploited for reporters or tourists. Yes, how kind of them.

In the seven years following Houston’s death, there’s been nothing but sensationalized headlines about the singer’s tumultuous marriage to Bobby Brown, her prolonged drug use, and, every so often, her “lesbian incest scandal.” That’s the way many media outlets have described Houston’s relationship with her longtime best friend and executive assistant turned creative director, Robyn Crawford.

After allowing the dust to settle and the media circus to calm down, Crawford has finally spoken publicly about her relationship with Houston — and it’s far more heartbreaking and complex than any tabloid could ever encapsulate. In her new memoir, A Song for You, Crawford admits for the first time publicly that she and Houston were romantically involved when they were teenagers in Newark, New Jersey. “We were friends. We were lovers. We were everything to each other,” she writes. “We weren’t falling in love. We just were.”

However, their romance was short-lived, according to Crawford, with Houston ending things once she signed a record deal at 19. “She said we shouldn’t be physical anymore,” Crawford writes, “because it would make our journey even more difficult. She said if people find out about us, they would use this against us, and back in the ’80s that’s how it felt.” And so, Crawford “kept it safe.”

But while Houston might not have been comfortable being in an open same-sex relationship while she catapulted to global stardom, she still wanted Crawford by her side, to serve as her support system, deal with the record label, and, as The New York Times puts it, “absorb the logistical burdens of fame.” (Also, we can assume, to hug and kiss and spoon and have sex with.)

While Crawford remained loyal to Houston and never told anyone of their physical relationship, she continued to pine after her. When writing about a night the singer got dressed up for a date with Eddie Murphy, in “a black dress and low-heeled slingbacks,” Crawford recalls thinking, “Boy, I wish she was doing that for me.”

Over the course of several decades, Crawford and Houston’s relationship grew abusive, with the singer once slapping Crawford across the face because she’d spent time with another woman, “a rare indication of Houston’s possessiveness (and perhaps of things left prudently undisclosed),” according to the offensively heterosexual Times. I guess “things left prudently undisclosed” is how they say “they were still fucking.”

The reason there’s so much mystery surrounding Houston’s sexuality is because she would adamantly deny rumors she was anything but “heterosexual. Period.” Initially, in the early days of her career, Houston wasn’t offended by the accusations, telling news outlets in 1988 that the rumors didn’t bother her because she knew she “wasn’t gay.” However, as more rumors swirled (involving high-profile queer women like Jodie Foster and Kelly McGillis, of Top Gun fame), she grew tired — and her internalized homophobia grew stronger. By 1990, Houston was blatantly offended by the rumors of her being queer, saying she “cried over” them, adding “Maybe it’s because they don’t know who I’m sleeping with, so they decided I’m gay!”

Aside from society’s overall disdain for gay people, a big reason Houston may have felt so uncomfortable discussing her relationships with women is her family’s homophobia. They were apparently so against Houston’s relationship with Crawford that in 1995, musician Kevin Ammons filed a lawsuit claiming Houston’s father, John, had hired him to break Crawford’s legs and arms, because she was a “lesbian … trying to sabotage” Houston’s marriage with Brown. While John denied these claims, there’s plenty of evidence Crawford wasn’t welcome in the Houston family.

Houston’s mother, Cissy, wrote in her 2013 autobiography, Remembering Whitney: My Story of Love, Loss and the Night the Music Stopped, that she didn’t want Crawford around her daughter. Others close to the family claim some relatives “blamed” Houston’s sexuality on her being molested as a child by her cousin, and famous soul singer, Dee Dee Warwick. Cissy and Dee Dee’s sister, Dionne, have denied these claims.

Following Houston’s death, more people have felt comfortable discussing the late singer’s sexuality, with famous daytime lesbian Rosie O’Donnell saying she always knew Houston and Crawford “were together.” Sandra Bernhard, who is also gay, outed Houston on O’Donnell’s show, saying she felt like the singer’s inability to come out of the closet contributed to her death, an idea Houston’s former husband agrees with.

Brown told Us Weekly in 2016 that if Houston’s family, particularly her mother Cissy, had been more understanding of her sexuality, things might’ve gone very differently for her. “I really feel that if Robyn was accepted into Whitney’s life, Whitney would still be alive today,” he said. “She didn’t have close friends with her anymore.”

After being by her side for more than two decades, Crawford left in 2000. She’d discovered burned spoons in Houston’s house and attempted to get her into rehab, to no avail. At the time, she also suspected Brown was physically abusing Houston. For a while, Crawford felt completely lost personally and professionally — she had to, as she puts it, make a “conscious decision to … not get sucked back into Whitney World.”

Somehow, she managed to put the pieces back together, fall in love, and start a family of her own. But Houston would still occasionally try to pull her back, leaving voicemails “with no return number,” according to the Times, and dangling job opportunities in front of her.

Despite everything — the cruel tabloid headlines, the physical abuse, the disdain from Houston’s family, even the threat of having her legs and arms broken — Crawford writes about Houston with nothing but love. She remains calm throughout the prose and almost never disparages her, according to the Times, mostly writing about the bad things done to Houston, not the bad things she did.

It makes sense when you consider what she wrote in a 2012 obituary for Houston in Esquire: “She knew I was never going to be disloyal to her. I was never going to betray her.”