Lady Gaga may be an Oscar-nominated actress, beauty mogul and global icon, but she says her relationship with the Little Monsters who supported her back when she was “just” a singer is still going strong.

Speaking to Vogue about the fans who showed up at the London premiere of her new film, Joker: Folie à Deux, Gaga said, “It’s hard to describe almost two decades long of a relationship with this community.”

“When I first came out, a lot of interviewers all over the world wanted to ask me about my clothes,” she continued. “I would often get made fun of … or there would be a lot of probing questions: ‘Why the stage persona? Why the name? Why all of it?’”

However, “My fans always felt that I wasn’t really that weird. I feel like my fans always have kind of had a secret handshake with me of, like, you know, ‘We’ve got you … we know who you are … you don’t have to apologize for who you are.’ I still feel that way.”

“That’s really cool, to run into fans at a movie premiere when you’re 38 and you’re still, like, doing hand signals and going like, ‘It’s cool, just be yourself.’”

Gaga also tells Vogue that a song on her new album, Harlequin, is a “very, very personal look” at herself and, as she puts it, “my relationship with playing broken women throughout my career, in different ways.”

Gaga mentions a line from the song “Happy Mistake“: “A lonely disposition/ portrait of a strung-out girl/ How did I get so addicted to the love of the whole world?”

“It’s kind of a confession of what it’s like to live dual identities,” she says. “The ultimate confessional Lady Gaga song, in a way.”

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