Melissa Etheridge Chose David Crosby Over Brad Pitt to Father Her Kids

Melissa Etheridge is currently promoting the release of her 17th album, Rise. She received her first-ever nomination for the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, although she didn’t make the final cut this time round. And she’s still an LGBTQ+ icon. It’s easy to forget just how radical it was for Etheridge to be out in the ’90s. Not only that, but her relationship with Julie Cypher and the birth of their kids was obsessed over as both an important landmark for American queer rights and the focus for a lot of well-organised homophobic ire. The identity of the sperm donor for their kids, Bailey and Beckett, was treated as a public mystery to be solved. Who was the daddy? Was it Tom Hanks? Brad Pitt? Who was the lesbian ideal for a dose of DNA? It turned out to be none other than David Crosby, the legendary rocker and hellraiser, who was revealed to the world via a Rolling Stone cover (I wrote about it for my newsletter, shameless plug.)

In a wide-reaching and very fun interview with Vulture, Etheridge detailed the moment she realized that Crosby was the man to help make them a family. And yes, she did consider Brad Pitt:

I know it’s a funny thing. This was the early ’90s. It was rare to be gay “out,” and to have kids was unheard of. My girlfriend had been adopted, so she wanted her kids to know who the parent was. I said, “That’s great, but I don’t want someone who wants to be a parent.” I want to be the other parent. Brad Pitt was a good friend of mine and would have been the obvious choice at the time. But Brad really wanted kids and loved kids. I was like, I can’t say, “Can I have your child?” So we were looking around, and I knew David and his wife, Jan. We had gone to visit them in Hawaii, and they had just had their son Django and were so grateful. We told them how we were thinking about it, and Jan actually said, “Well, why don’t you use David?” And David’s like, “Yeah, well, okay.” We thought about it and came back and we said, “Hey, if you’re serious, that’s perfect.” They had their child and didn’t want to raise anybody else. Our children called him “Bio Dad” for a while. It was more like an uncle relationship. It was perfect.

I mean, bullet dodged, Melissa? I’m sure Angelina’s kids would have some advice to offer.

Crosby certainly seemed like a random choice. He was already a father at the time, and married to his wife, Jan Dance. He was a notorious hellraiser who once spent spent nine months in a Texas state prison after being convicted of several drugs and weapons offenses. You name a drug and Crosby did it, to the point where he had to undergo a liver transplant in 1994 after ravaging his body with drugs and alcohol. But he kept on going for decades after everyone expected him to die. He was a hardy guy, and one of the great survivors of rock (and a total a*sehole, by his own admission.) Still, if I was picking someone from CSNY to have a kid with, I’d go with Neil Young.

A couple of years ago, Etheridge said that she was still hearing about other kids that Crosby had fathered during his many years on the road. So, there is a solid chance that you, dear reader, might be David Crosby’s child and just don’t know it yet.