Her brother, who danced in the pop star’s early music videos, including Lucky Star, and served as tour director for her, passed away on Friday in Michigan due to cancer.
The 66-year-old singer said in a moving Instagram post that their relationship “grew out of an understanding that we were different” but that it was difficult to describe.
“Society was going to give us a hard time for not adhering to the status quo,” she continued.
“Dancing was like superglue to us as we took each other’s hands and danced through the chaos of our childhood.”
The singer said that, as a gay young man, “dance saved him too,” just as it had saved me when I discovered it in our small Midwestern town.
Her words go as follows: “My brother and I again took each other’s hands and danced through the madness of New York City when I finally found the courage to travel to New York to pursue a career in dance.”
She went on to say that the two “were in the epicentre of all of these things exploding” and that they “devoured art and music and film like hungry animals” in the metropolis.
We danced together on stage in the beginning of my career and subsequently, he became my creative director of several tours.
