In the summer of 1980, Robyn Crawford was working at the East Orange Community Development Center as a youth counselor when she was stopped in her tracks by an unfamiliar face. The young woman was wearing a silk plaid blouse, slim-fitting shorts, red-striped Adidas Gazelles, and a visor with the Red Cross logo stitched on it. She introduced herself by her whole name—Whitney Elizabeth Houston—which tickled Robyn. They both had taken jobs as youth counselors and got to know each other while working with kids in Columbian Park near Whitney’s family house in Doddtown. It was a bond that formed almost immediately, and they were inseparable that summer. If you saw one, you saw the other. Robyn was nineteen at the time. She was a stunning beauty—slim and tall, with light caramel skin—and two years older than Whitney, but Robyn was enamored of her sweetness, grace, and maturity. Whitney, in turn, was grateful to finally have a close friend in her life. For years she lacked true companionship outside of her brothers. The Black girls in her neighborhood bullied her for being prissy and neat, the way her mother implored her to be, and the white girls at her private school ignored her for not being one of them. She had the choir at New Hope, which was her first love, but her parents’ separation and Cissy’s alleged affair had scandalized the church. Robyn was an escape from all that. There was comfort and freedom in their friendship. In Robyn, Whitney found a confidant to whom she could divulge her ambitions, her fears, and her desires. She also found a protector, someone who was unyieldingly loyal and had her back—which she became aware of rather quickly when rumors began to spread about their closeness. “I remember thinking: ‘I’ve known this person seems like all my life,’” Whitney recalled. They spent hours laughing and sharing secrets. With Robyn, she could be Nippy, the tomboy who loved Jesus and singing in church and preferred to wear blue jeans and T-shirts and smoked Newports and got high and cursed. With Robyn, she didn’t have to be the Whitney she needed to present in order to appease a mother who was foremost a woman of faith. With Robyn, she could just be.
Whitney and Robyn’s first kiss came in those first weeks of getting to know each other during their summer together. It happened the way first kisses tend to between two people who realize they might have feelings beyond friendship. They were hanging out in Whitney’s living room, after a long walk in the neighborhood, when they found themselves face-to-face. Their lips met, bound by all that had been unspoken between the two. That first kiss was long, warm like honey, and would have led to more had Whitney not been so worried about her brothers coming home. Robyn’s nerves were racing. They crossed a line. But had she crossed a line? They didn’t talk about whatever it was that was happening between them, but the closeness deepened. Whitney regaled Robyn with stories of singing with Chaka Khan in the studio, and of Cissy’s work with her cousin Dionne and her “auntie” Aretha Franklin. They listened to Cissy’s recordings with Elvis Presley and the Sweet Inspirations. She’d pick apart Aretha’s records and school Robyn on her mother’s runs and the licks she did that made whatever track they listened to special. Whitney invited her to come to New Hope to hear her sing, and Robyn was knocked out by the power and majesty of the big voice that came out of her little body. They made love after that church service, their bodies connecting for the first time. “Whatever energy we had between us all that time was expressed though our bodies that night. It was free and honest. It was tender and loving,” Robyn revealed in her exquisite 2019 memoir detailing her life with Whitney after decades of silence. “We both wanted to touch and explore each other, and we did until we fell asleep in each other’s arms.”
Robyn and Whitney lost themselves in each other that summer, entangled in a deep bond that existed in a space without definition. Afternoons were spent sunbathing at the Jersey Shore, where Whitney found solace in rushing into the ocean for a dip, or curled up at the park. Their first experience going to a gay club was that summer, the night ending with them making love in their rental car before a cop busted them and told the ladies to move along. On occasion Robyn and Whitney made the trek to Harlem to buy a dime bag of weed and try to score a bit of cocaine. They’d get high as Whitney offered her latest music lesson. Robyn shuttled Whitney to her modeling gigs and to the club shows she did with her mother at Sweetwater’s, and Whitney went to see Robyn at her college basketball games. They were partners in a traditional sense but never had a real conversation about labels. “Lesbian.” “Gay.” “Bisexual.” “Girlfriend.” Those words didn’t ever come up. Both had been with men, and what was happening between them remained unspoken. Their affection had fully blossomed, but they hid that part of their relationship from everyone—even those who suspected something. “We were friends. We were lovers. We were everything to each other,” Robyn wrote in her book. “We weren’t falling in love. We just were. We had each other. We were one: That’s how it felt.” The ways of the church taught them that what was between them was wrong, a sin that damned them to hell. Guilt or judgment never lingered in the air after their flesh touched, but they still didn’t want anyone to know. Cissy surely would have had a fit, though Robyn suspected her own mother knew her relationship with Whitney went beyond friendship.
They lived in their bubble, sneaking in lovemaking and partying when their mothers weren’t at home or when they had enough cash to get a hotel or take a little getaway to Asbury Park. It worked for them. As Whitney was laying the groundwork for her singing career, Robyn was right there with her. She was her audience and a sounding board when Whitney wanted to toss around ideas about the songs she hoped to one day record. Laying around in bed together is where Whitney first got the idea to cover Chaka Khan’s “I’m Every Woman,” jotting it down in a notebook Robyn reminded her about years later. In those moments alone, they plotted their future together. Whitney knew where she was headed, and she was bringing Robyn along. “Stick with me, I’ll take you around the world,” she promised. However, they knew the final destination—pop stardom—didn’t hold space for their kind of love, and shortly after Whitney signed her record deal with Clive Davis, she gifted Robyn with a slate-blue Bible and said they should end the physical side of their relationship. It would make her journey more difficult, Whitney reasoned. In her book, Robyn explained that Whitney told her that she wanted to have children one day and that living that kind of life—the life they were living—meant they would go to hell. Though Robyn also shared a similar understanding of religion to Whitney’s, gifting her with a Bible as a reminder of why their bond couldn’t exist in a particular way felt like a cruel cover for the true reason why their bond couldn’t continue. Whitney was a woman diving into the music business. There were already the baked-in barriers of trying to break into the biz—and even though her legacy gave her an opening, Whitney was still a Black woman being groomed for a record deal. Making it was going to be hard enough on its own. God forbid you were Black and gay or bisexual.
But Whitney was also a woman of the church. Yeah, she had plans for pop fame, but she was sneaking around with Robyn because she didn’t want her mother to know. She didn’t want her brothers to know. And she most definitely didn’t want the congregation at New Hope to know. There was no space, period, for the sin she and Robyn were indulging in. Black religiosity has historically grappled with its shame regarding sex, and even though it still does, there’s been some progress from leaders making efforts to evolve their theology and ethics regarding sex and sexuality. It took the suffering of untold generations and years of sex scandals outing some of the Black church’s most high-profile men for there to be some real cultural shift, and it’s still a conversation that’s met with polarizing hysterics despite how progressive we have become as a society. Even if Whitney didn’t end up taking off the way she would, she knew her and Robyn’s public relationship couldn’t appear as anything other than platonic friendship, for there was church on one side and the music business on the other. They had already had conversations about how their relationship—as undefined as it was—would impact Whitney’s recording career. People around them were already gossiping about their close-ness, and where they were headed, there would only be more eyes, and more judgment, on them. “You know what we shared. You know how I feel about you and we will always have that,” Whitney told her. Even if there wasn’t the fear of damnation, there was the reality that the music industry, like much of the world in the 1980s, was an intolerant place where homophobia openly thrived.
Excerpt from the new book Didn’t We Almost Have It All: In Defense of Whitney Houston by Gerrick Kennedy published by Abrams Press © 2022
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