Lady Gaga Says Drag Persona Jo Calderone Was How She 'Explored' What She Was Looking for in Men

Mar. 15, 2025

Lady Gaga in February 2025; Lady Gaga as Jo Calderone in August 2011.Photo:Arturo Holmes/Getty; Jason Merritt/Getty

Arturo Holmes/Getty; Jason Merritt/Getty

Lady Gagais retiring her drag persona Jo Calderone, but she appreciates what he taught her.

In an interview withThem, the pop megastar revealed how Jo — the edgy chain-smoking alter ego that was part of herBorn This Wayera — helped her process how she was feeling about men at the time.

“That was actually kind of a big moment for me as a woman to put all the pent-up fear or anger I had about relationships into one character,” said Gaga of the character she debuted in 2011.

Jo Calderone in August 2011.Steve Granitz/WireImage

Steve Granitz/WireImage

She continued: [“Yoü and I”] was actually, I think, the first video that I ever did where I played multiple me’s, and I brought that back onMayhem. But Jo was an important character for me. It’s the way I explored what I was looking for in men, and also what I was maybe lacking in myself."

“But I wish Jo all the best,” she added.

Elsewhere in the conversation, Gaga also addressed how much of a departure her 2016 albumJoannewas from her forthcoming LPMayhem.

“I was trying to make a home for myself duringJoanne, and it was almost a completely new me,” she recalled. “I think that was a hard time for some of my fans, because it felt so different from the ‘me’ that they knew. But it felt so needed for me.”

She continued: “It was like I just wanted to strip everything away. I was living on a farm and making my record like 10 feet from Neil Young at the studio in Shangri-La, and I was working with Mark Ronson, and I got to work with Beck, who’s one of my heroes. I just wanted to understand and get much closer to who I was before it all.”

“But in a very strange way, it took me further from myself. My desire to go backwards and look in the rearview mirror was so strong that it made me unwell. It’s so interesting because it’s the most stripped-away that people feel that they’ve ever seen me, but I know how far away from me I was,” said Gaga.

The “Bad Romance” hitmaker noted that she’s “much more confident and sure of who I am” onMayhem.

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Last month, duringher lie detector testwithVanity Fair, the"Abracadabra"singer revealed Jo’s fate when she was asked about what happened to “this person” as a picture of her drag persona was shown.

“Oh, this person is no longer with us,” Gaga said without setting off the polygraph test.

Mayhemcomes out on Friday, March 7.

source: people.com