‘Tis the season to love or hate on Mariah Carey

At the stroke of midnight on Oct. 31, Mariah Carey revealed on her social media a short video of herself, frozen in a block of ice. 

Halloween characters like “Friday the 13th’s” Jason Voorhees and Ghostface from “Scream” help thaw her out of hibernation, using hairdryers, as Mariah herself hits one of her signature high notes, breaking free from the ice and alerting us once again that the Christmas season, also known as Mariah Carey season, has officially begun. Mariah Carey season started 30 years ago for me, and hasn’t ended yet.

When I met Mariah Carey, she told me she loved me.

I was 16. The boy I was in love with, my friend since fifth grade, got us tickets to Mariah’s first set of concerts for her Music Box tour.

My understanding was Mariah was nervous to perform live and had arranged for a series of practice concerts including two at the Mullins Center at U-Mass Amherst. My friend snagged us two tickets, using his brother’s clout as an employee at the U-Mass stadium to secure us 16th row floor tickets for $10.50 each.

Mariah needn’t have feared performing live. Only 25 at the time, she  delivered some of the most incredible vocals I’d ever hear live. Her eight-octave range was on mighty display for the hour and a half set. She moved from one side of the stage to the other, not a lot of choreography or back-up dancing to distract from the voice. My young gay heart fluttered, and I thought, “It doesn’t even make sense that she can sing like that.”

It’s my personal belief that every gay man gets at least one diva to call his own. I’ve ridden in cars with Kelly Clarkson gays, smacking the roof as they thumped out the beat to “Since U Been Gone,” and been pushed to the edges of dance floors by my Beyoncé brethren, ready to show off their “Single Ladies” choreo. Mariah has long been my girl.  

I have my straight brother to thank for first exposing me to Carey. I was in high school, draped in my goth gear, a dedicated listener to the Cure, Depeche Mode and Erasure, when my older brother played me a cassette single of Mariah’s debut single, “Vision of Love.” The release lined up pretty closely to my coming out of the closet, and perhaps I was looking around for a power ballad diva to declare, “Here I am,” the way I just had . . . and there she was.

Over the years, I’d grow into my new Queer identity at a similarly fast rate as Mariah was establishing herself as a one-name icon. With every boy I kissed, with every new life experience, Mariah was putting out a new album to coincide with the changes in my own life. Before the end of the decade, she put out seven discs of new music that formed the soundtrack to my 20s.

From the jump, a huge segment of the population seemed to hate on Mariah as much as I loved her. When I listened to her second album, “Emotions,” released in 1991, my heart jumped at the titular song’s final high notes, as Mariah reshaped the world of pop to account for what she could do. After Mariah, other singers tried to emulate and put as many syllables into their phrasing as Mariah did effortlessly. It was a stylistic change we still hear in today’s pop music, and I felt honored to be alive for it. Her one sentence, 40-plus note runs annoyed many, yet delighted me. I said at 16 and I say it still, she could just sing “la la la,” and I’d listen.

Still, loving Mariah as I was still getting comfortable in my own Queer skin in the ‘90s felt like a covert affair. Boys my age were supposed to like Metallica, Grateful Dead and Public Enemy, not bops like “Dreamlover.” When I bought a Music Box concert t-shirt at the Mullins Center, it went unworn, tucked neatly at the bottom of my drawer, moved from my home in Massachusetts to college in Ohio, to all my homes since, never to be worn for fear of someone commenting that only queers like Mariah Carey, or just insulting her generally.

I’ve heard every dis of Maria imaginable since falling in love with her. She sings with no heart. She’s all show and no substance. When she liberated herself in the late ‘90s from her marriage to Tommy Mottola, brought more hip-hop  into her albums, threw away all her turtlenecks and wore more revealing clothing, there were new reasons to hate on her. Now she was somehow deemed slutty for wearing short skirts and bikinis. I got an up-close lesson in sexism from the world that saw Mariah and reduced her, defined her, by how much cleavage she showed, not her growing list of No. 1 songs, most of which she’d written. Forget that her sustained note on the word “anymore” on her cover of Badfinger’s “Without You” goes on for 15 glorious seconds, forget that she already had two Grammys – let’s talk about her hemline.

Still, not wanting to draw attention to myself by wearing her t-shirt, I was a covert MC fan, though anybody who knew me knew I was a stan before stans were a thing. I even saw “Glitter,” quietly defending my Mariah while also appreciating the over-the-top melodrama of the romantic musical drama. The 2001 film proved a box-office and critical bomb, though to die-hard fans it’s still a campy classic as fun to cringe at as “Showgirls” or Cher and Christina Aguilera’s “Burlesque,” with some soundtrack cuts like “Lead the Way” where Mariah’s vocals soar as high as they ever did. 

I’ve heard horror stories, too, of how Mariah is in person, how she’s a right diva, but the night we met, she was everything I hoped she would be. At 16, leaving her concert with the first boy I ever loved, I was timid and scared when he suggested we hop a fence around the Mullins Center, go to the back and see if we could catch her. His idea seemed nuts to me; I’d never seen anyone famous before other than on a stage and hardly believed they existed off of them. At the backdoor of the venue, we waited with a dozen other fans, each smartly holding thick black markers and concert programs, while I stood next to my friend and wondered what any of us were doing there.

Signed Mariah Carey concert ticket (Courtesy of Jason Prokowiew)When Mariah stepped out the back door, she was glowing, petite and beautiful and also larger than life, with that shock of early Mariah curly brown hair cascading down to her shoulders. If I were straight, I might have fallen in a different kind of love, but my love was uniquely Queer and all Mariah’s, if she would have it. My friend pushed me into the throng of fans waiting to interact with Mariah. I stepped out of several people’s ways, hoping in my shy heart that she’d cut off the interactions, hop into her awaiting limo and drive away into her even brighter future.

As the crowd jostled to get closer to Mariah, I found myself face to face with Mariah. On another day, I might have thanked her for flailing her hands in the air as she sang, because that’s what I did now, alone in my room, pretending I could hit all her notes as I danced around, unleashing a tightly held, more stereotypically feminine energy into the air, two fingers in my ear as I mimed hitting her biggest notes, keeping up with her endless runs.  

On that day, all I could muster was “I. Love. You.” Each word felt heavy on my tongue as I labored through the simple sentence, stunned by the glow that surrounded her.

“I love you, too,” she said, effortlessly, breathily. I had nothing for her to sign, nothing else would come out of my mouth, and I handed her my ticket stub as I stared at the curves of her cheekbones. Another fan handed her their marker, and she chicken-scratched her initials onto my ticket before moving on to her next admirer. My mouth hung slightly ajar.

Many of the divas of my youth are legacy artists now, putting out albums without as much hoopla as they once garnered. Janet and Madonna still tour. We’ve lost greats like Whitney, but I can still count on Mariah’s return each year around this time, as the tinkle of sleigh bells right around Halloween lets us all know, Christmas is coming, and so is Mariah. Her ubiquitous “All I Want for Christmas Is You” hits and then dominates the airwaves once again, in rotation with classics like “White Christmas.”

Mariah Carey: Merry Christmas To All! (James Devaney/CBS)

Mariah herself leans into this legacy, this joke that she’s in some sort of stasis the rest of the year, waiting to thaw out and dominate Christmas, hence this year’s video and last year’s.

Folks are divided about “All I Want for Christmas Is You” as they’ve always been about Mariah herself. My friend Shannon Williams believes it should be the “national Christmas song.” My friend Eliza Andrews calls it “the worst: overplayed and oversung.”

It’s not my favorite either. Mariah’s catalog is too expansive for that, but it keeps Mariah in the public consciousness year after year, in a world that usually doesn’t give much room to its pop divas to thrive past their 30th birthdays.

And Mariah milks her position as caretaker of Christmas in genius ways. In her 2022 CBS holiday special “Mariah Carey: Merry Christmas To All!” in the midst of her holiday set she inserted a medley of some of her biggest pop hits, from “Honey” to “Heartbreaker.” I imagined a flurry of downloads as newbies heard bops like “Fantasy” for the first time, and ‘90s kids went full-on nostalgia mode.

Some 30 years after Mariah told me she loved me, I dug my concert t-shirt out of storage. It’s tighter now, but I wear it proudly. Mariah has been through a lot and her music has seen me through a lot. I owe it to my diva not to be ashamed. It’s Mariah season, and I’m dressed for it.