A colorful tour with a message

Cyndi Lauper vividly recalls having to come out to her friends and family.

"Oh yeah, when I was 15, I was in a duet with my best girlfriend, she was 14, and her and my friend Skip around the corner, we were all really close," she says in her trademark, Noo Yawk-accented waterfall-of-words style. "They all came out [as gay] . . . And I said 'I love you, you're my best friend, I want to keep writing with you, but here's the thing.' " Then Lauper's famous hiccup of a laugh comes across the phone line and she says, "I had to tell everybody I was straight!"

Growing up with those friends and her adored older sister Elen, who revealed her sexuality to the singer around the same time, always informed her perspective, says the vocalist, who turns 54 next Friday.

"All my life I got to see firsthand discrimination against people that I loved, whether they were black people or women or gay people or lesbian or bisexual or transgender, so I felt like I wanted to make a difference sometime in my life."

Lauper is hoping that time is now. Tomorrow night at the Bank of America Pavilion she will headline the inaugural "True Colors" tour, a 15-date outing she hopes to turn into an annual event. The five-hour show presents a half-gay, half-straight lineup of new and vintage acts hand-picked by Lauper. There are the dance-floor anthems of Brit synth kings Erasure, the baroque pop charms of Rufus Wainwright, Blondie lead singer Debbie Harry's mix of rock and jazz, the dramatic stylings of Boston's own cabaret punk rockers the Dresden Dolls, and exuberant indie dance trio the Gossip. Comedian Margaret Cho will handle the emcee duties. A portion of the proceeds will benefit the Human Rights Campaign, an advocacy organization that lobbies Washington for equal rights for lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgendered individuals. PFLAG and the Matthew Shepard Foundation -- which will be handing out purple rubber "Erase Hate" bracelets -- will be on hand to raise awareness.

She decided to christen the tour with the title of her 1986 hit album and song -- written by Tom Kelly and Billy Steinberg -- because of "what that song came to mean to the [gay] community."

"A long time ago when I was pregnant with my son I started reading e-mails [from fans]," says Lauper, whose son Declyn is now 9. (To fully understand Lauper's innately circuitous speech patterns, imagine a digression here in which she muses about e-mail being "so modern, to me it was like outer space!" In fact, the voluble Lauper goes off on comic tangents so frequently -- including detours about lost cellphones, psychics, the year she appeared in a giant champagne glass on a gay pride parade float -- the phrase "but anyway" is pressed into service seven times in a 15-minute interview.)

"It wasn't one e-mail, it wasn't two or 10, it was almost all of them about [how] when people came out they were cut off from their jobs, their families, and their friends and they became very, very depressed and they heard the song 'True Colors' and it got them through," says Lauper, still audibly touched at the notion.

From the drag queens who doll up as Lauper and flock to concerts to the gay pride celebrants who adopted her 2004 empowerment anthem "Shine" as their own, the classically trained, inimitable Lauper has always touched a chord with gay audiences.

In a word, Erasure's Andy Bell calls her "amazing"; he was the first artist to join her circus. (Bell knows a thing or two about penning songs that have served as gay anthems -- he says Erasure's "A Little Respect" gets much the same response as "True Colors.")

Calling from the Chicago tour stop, Bell says the troupe is having a ball so far and he's pleased at the impact the tour is having. "It just means so much to the local communities when you're doing something this big because it gives them a boost," says Bell, who has been out since the beginning of Erasure's career in the mid-'80s. "And also lots of people who might not necessarily go to a gay pride festival might come to something like this."

Inclusivity is part of Lauper's aim and extends to the range of participating acts, which have varied from city to city, with folks like the Indigo Girls, Rosie O'Donnell, and the Cliks also taking part.

She calls Gossip singer Beth Ditto, "a pistol," Wainwright "a riot," and is near speechless in her admiration of the Dresden Dolls. "I mean the clothes alone, come on!"

Joe Solmonese, president of HRC, sees Lauper trying to not only raise awareness but strike a musical balance by bringing along fresh talent that can serve as the "coming-of-age music" for this generation of LGBT youth, as Lauper and Erasure did for him. And, he says, "the timing [for the tour] could not be more appropriate because we're right in the middle of trying to pass the hate crime bill in between the House vote and the Senate vote."

While some of the artists might say a few words from the stage and there will booths where patrons can sign petitions and fill out postcards to urge their congressional representatives to support the hate crimes legislation, Lauper doesn't want the show to be bogged down in politics.

"I wanted to make a tour that would include people, that would be joyous, that you could go and sing really loud and you could dance as hard as you want and laugh as hard as you want and wear this bracelet that reminds you not to hate."