I'm Coming Out

In 1979, Diana Ross took her daughters to see Chic in concert, then commissioned the band's founders Nile Rodgers and Bernard Edwards to write material for a new album. The pair went to her apartment and interviewed her for a couple of days, and one night Rodgers visited a club called The Gilded Grape, where he spotted at least six or seven Diana Ross impersonators. He called Edwards from outside and suggested that a song called "I'm Coming Out" would have the same power for Ross that James Brown's "Say It Loud – I'm Black and I'm Proud" had, since she was revered by the gay community. The next day they built the song in the studio.

The lyrics carried an extra meaning for Ross, who was leaving Motown Records and coming out from under Berry Gordy's thumb. According to a BBC4 documentary, she loved the record until disc jockey Frankie Crocker told her that "I'm coming out" was the phrase gay people used to announce their homosexuality, and that listeners would assume she was coming out herself. She allegedly ran back to the studio in tears demanding to know why the writers would damage her career, but was later convinced otherwise and released the single, which Motown put out on August 22, 1980 as the second single from the album Diana.

Producer Meco Monardo, Rodgers's neighbor, contracted the horns for the album and stayed after a three-hour session to record a jazz trombone solo near the end of the track, something Rodgers wanted precisely because no hit record had featured one. The song reached number five on the Billboard Hot 100 and topped the Hot Disco Singles chart.