Creativity Quote by Lesley Gore

Gore’s line lands with the weary precision of someone who’s watched the room “modernize” without actually changing who holds the keys. The phrase “what’s left of it” does double duty: it nods to the industry’s post-peak contraction while implying that even a diminished gatekeeping machine can still enforce old prejudices. Less power, same reflexes.

Her comparison to film is strategic, not charitable. By conceding that Hollywood has become “much less” homophobic, she isolates the record business as a stubborn outlier and dares it to explain itself. It also hints at visibility politics: film had, by the 2000s, begun rewarding certain kinds of queer stories and stars, while pop music often demanded queerness be coded, disavowed, or packaged as spectacle. The music industry can sell transgression all day, Gore suggests, but it balks at queer autonomy behind the scenes and in the contract language.

“It’s always been a man’s world” isn’t a generic feminism tag; it’s an indictment of infrastructure. In music, the myth of the lone (male) genius still props up A&R habits, touring hierarchies, radio promotion, studio culture, and who gets taken seriously when they say no. Coming from Gore - a teen idol who later lived as a lesbian without the industry’s permission slip - the subtext is personal: success didn’t exempt her from a system that profited from her voice while policing her life.

The intent is blunt accountability. Not celebration, not confession - a warning that progress in culture doesn’t automatically mean progress in the business.