Robyn Crawford Coming Clean with Lena Waithe About Her Relationship with Whitney Houston is Everything

Actor and Director Lena Waithe interviewed Robyn Crawford in the latest issue of Oprah Magazine and it’s amazing.

A taste: “After more than 30 years out of the public eye, Crawford—now 56, married to Lisa and living in New Jersey with 10-year-old twins—is surprisingly revealing in A Song for You: My Life With Whitney Houston. From the first time a teenaged Houston offered Crawford a joint to the day Crawford quit Houston’s team after a Bobby Brown tantrum, the author writes sentimentally, but also candidly. And between the juicy moments the internet will latch onto—after all, with a front row seat to her best friend’s life and career, Crawford saw everything—there is a coming of age story. A Song for You may be set to the life of Whitney Houston, but this is Crawford’s tale, one of a woman who lost her family to AIDS, struggled with substance abuse while watching her best friend spiral, and grew up sexually fluid long before society came to embrace open conversations about queerness.”

Waithe arrives an hour early for this interview; a lifelong, diehard Whitney Houston fan, she devoured A Song For You in three days and is eager to let Crawford know the impact she’s had on her. “I don’t exist in this world without you being as authentic as you were,” Waithe tells her when they first meet. “Because yes, I grew up watching Whitney Houston on TV, but I would always zero in on you. You’ve got to be special for somebody to look past Whitney Houston and go ‘Who’s that?’“

Waithe adds that even before she had fully realized her own queer identity, she connected to Crawford. “I saw myself in you. And I didn’t know why back then; I was a young person who didn’t have the language to understand who I was yet. But I was aware I wasn’t like everybody else. That, I knew.”

And then, as a moody gray sky rains down outside the window beside them, Robyn Crawford tells Lena Waithe her story—her way.