Melissa Etheridge came out publicly 26 years ago, not long before she released her aptly titled album, “Yes I Am.”
Isn’t she tired of talking about her big reveal?
“Are you kidding? We can’t get gay enough right now!” the two-time Grammy winner tells The Post, laughing. And “right now” is Sunday, when the 58-year-old rocker kicks off the WorldPride closing ceremony in Times Square — the capstone of a month of programming that pays homage to LGBTQ people and the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall riots.
The raspy-voiced singer was laid-back and full of humor over the phone from Vienna, Va., where she performed at Wolf Trap as part of the tour for her new album “The Medicine Show.”
“It warms me up” to play at WorldPride, she says, and sees it as a time for solidarity.
“It’s seriously important that people from around the world have a place where they are welcome,” she says. “I want to support all our brothers and sisters — we’re all in this together.”
In 1969, when gay, lesbian and transgender patrons faced off against police at Stonewall in the Village, Etheridge was an 8-year-old in Leavenworth, Kan. “If there was a story about it, it was buried in the paper,” she says of the uprising. “We didn’t talk about those kind of people back then.”
Gay liberation didn’t resonate for her until she was a teenager, she says, when she started her own coming-out process. One of the first people she told, at 18, was her father, John, a high school psychology teacher and counselor. She remembers it as a wonderfully anticlimactic experience.
“I nervously sat down and said, ‘Dad, I have to tell you something . . . I think I’m a homosexual,’ ” she says. “He kinda just went, ‘Oh, is that it? Is that all? Oh, OK.’ ”
As her self-awareness blossomed in the early 1980s, so did her pursuit of music. After attending Boston’s Berklee College of Music for just a semester and a half, Etheridge moved across the country to Los Angeles, where she often performed in gay clubs.
‘I want to support all our brothers and sisters — we’re all in this together.’
Why not come to New York?
“I was kind of afraid of New York in the ’80s,” she says. “It scared me a bit. I was from the Midwest. What did I know?”
When she did come to New York, she says, she hung out at the Cubbyhole, Henrietta’s and other lesbian bars. Asked whether she performed in any gay clubs here, she gets cheeky.
“Oh, not music,” she replies, chuckling. Any fond memories she’d care to share?
“Well, see — no. Now, you’re being cheeky,” she says with a laugh and vaguely offering, “New York City always knows how to have a good time, that’s for sure.”
Wherever she went over the years, her late father’s support stayed with her as she became more open about her orientation. (“My mother was a different story,” she says.)
“That really helped me to be strong in my own life,” she says. “To come out so early.”
Etheridge’s public declaration came at an LGBT ball following President Clinton’s inauguration in January 1993. It was, she says, “a relief” to come out just months before the release of “Yes I Am,” with its gay-positive anthems “I’m the Only One” and “Come to My Window.”
“The songs were born of a love of another woman. Knowing that I was coming out and was going to represent as a big lesbian, I was hoping they would just help,” she says. “People tell me they still do, 25 years later, so that means a whole lot.”
Along the way, Etheridge has had her own ups and downs. Diagnosed with breast cancer in 2004, she underwent chemotherapy. Bald but unbowed, she appeared the next year at the Grammys, where she sang “Piece of My Heart,” with Joss Stone, as a tribute to Janis Joplin. She’s been cancer-free for 15 years. In May, she celebrated her fifth wedding anniversary with “Nurse Jackie” creator Linda Wallem, 58.
“I’m so very happy — three’s the charm,” she says, alluding to previous failed relationships with actress Tammy Lynn Michaels (2001-2010) and film director Julie Cypher (1990-2000). She and Michaels share the parenting of twins Johnnie and Miller, now 12. And folk/rock legend David Crosby was the sperm donor for the kids she had with Cypher: Bailey Jean, 22, who graduated from Columbia University in May, and Beckett, 20.
Meanwhile, Etheridge’s music endures. Laura Linney performed a wobbly karaoke version of “Come to My Window” in an episode of “Tales of the City,” the Netflix series based on Armistead Maupin’s books.
“I love Melissa Etheridge and, God, I hope she forgives me,” Linney said of her “horrifying” rendition in a recent interview with gay website pridesource.com.
“Oh, she was perfect, absolutely perfect!” an ecstatic Etheridge says.
Expect to hear a far better rendition of that song and others when Etheridge takes the WorldPride stage Sunday. Although she doesn’t embrace the term “trailblazer” — “I don’t see myself that way,” she says — she wants to bring a message of empowerment to the LGBTQ crowd.
“I’ve certainly had my journey since I came out,” she says. “I just hope to be able to bring some inspiration to them.”
WorldPride closing ceremony, Sunday at 7 p.m. in Times Square. Hosted by Margaret Cho, with Deborah Cox, Jake Shears, MNEK and the cast of Broadway’s “The Prom”; free. NYCPride.org