Kylie Minogue was a lifeline for gay people – her documentary is a hard watch

It’s no exaggeration to call female pop stars like Kylie Minogue a lifeline for closeted gay teenagers.

When we’ve had to spend every waking day hiding so much of who we are from friends, family, even our own parents, the female pop star isn’t just the only person who won’t judge you – they embrace you, celebrate you and even rely on you, like you do them.

Kylie Minogue, arguably more than any other performer, has devoted her entire career to the gay community. I remember seeing her 2006 Showgirl: Homecoming tour, and every single sequinned costume, song choice and bare-torsoed dancer felt handpicked to treat the gays.

Kylie didn’t just see us, she was inspired by us and loved us. That quite literally meant the world to 17-year-old me.

And that’s in part what makes watching her three-part series Kylie, the first truly in-depth documentary about the superstar, such a hard watch.

The aptly titled Kylie, the latest celebrity documentary for Netflix from the director and producers of Beckham, is at its heart a celebration of one of the most resilient women imaginable — someone who has faced adversities like no other but who, through it all, has, at least in public, kept that signature smile: a constant beam even when both her career and life have literally been on the line.

2027 marks 40 years since her debut single I Should Be So Lucky. As she steers into her fourth decade in music, the timing of Kylie feels particularly fitting when she’s still at the top of her game, releasing some of the biggest – and best – music of her career and selling out world tours in minutes.

As I write this in a local climbing centre, Can’t Get You Out of My Head is coincidentally playing on the carefully selected playlist.

But Kylie is a documentary less about the music and more about the determination of a woman who has survived a ruthless 90s tabloid press, radio stations banning her music, heartbreak, grief and cancer – twice.

Bucking the trend of celebrity documentaries that are nothing more than PR-fluff, this is a series full of fresh revelations, though none of them is easy listening.

The series closes with Kylie revealing she was diagnosed with cancer for a second time in 2021, though she assures viewers she now has the all-clear. It’s a miracle she managed to keep such a secret private while she remained such a focus of the tabloids, and her career was thriving. But it was a necessity.

Her first diagnosis came days before she was due to start a world tour and headline Glastonbury – she couldn’t keep it to herself, her family made prisoners to paparazzi swarming their home in their darkest hour.

Earlier, she reveals she paused chemotherapy after her first diagnosis to try to have children through IVF, but while holding a letter she wrote to the child she never met, she says: ‘That was not my path.’

Kylie’s love life has often been a strange source of fascination right from the get-go. Her first boyfriend after finding fame, Jason Donovan, is one of the few contributors to the series, surprisingly candid when reflecting on their relationship and losing Kylie to the clutches of INXS frontman Michael Hutchence, who swept the then 19-year-old singer off her feet and, almost 30 years after his death, still seems to hold her heart.

‘I’ve been looking for something like that ever since – and haven’t got it,’ she admits, with a look of both acceptance and heartbreak.

For a woman who has achieved so much, her life has in many ways been defined by different forms of grief – the grief of the family she never had, of a life lived with the looming threat that cancer can return at any point, and the grief of losing the love of her life too soon.

As someone who once called Kylie Minogue a lifeline – who only really felt like themselves and could see who they wanted to be when alone in their bedroom with nothing but the Fever album – knowing the woman who gave me so much couldn’t ultimately find the one thing she was looking for is really quite devastating.

Perhaps it’s partly why Kylie resonates so strongly with our community. Our lives more often than not don’t look like the ones around us; the two-point-four-children dream didn’t belong to us for such a long time and even now, with the legalisation of gay marriage and the possibility of adoption or IVF, it’s still not a straightforward path to build the life others seem to create so easily.

But more than that, Kylie has always remained determined to be her true self through her music, avant-garde fashion and unapologetic sexuality. When the media once talked about her like she was a criminal, she still did it her way, regardless.

Through it all, this is a documentary about hope. It’s about looking at a life filled with triumph and understanding that even when life might not go the way you planned, if you’re lucky, lucky, lucky, you hold on to the things worth celebrating.

It’s as open as Kylie is ever going to get; she’s fine-tuned the remarkable art of giving us just enough to feel like we know her, taking her into our hearts and making her an honorary national treasure when, actually, we don’t know her at all.

As all pop icons should be, she remains an enigma. After watching Kylie, even her most ardent fans will understand her story a little better — even if she is still as mysterious as ever.

Kylie is available to stream on Netflix now.

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