Alicia Keys dressed like a tomboy to avoid male catcalls

Alicia Keys’ style sure has changed from 2002 to 2015. Source: Getty Images

FEW artists have made such grand transformations as Alicia Keys.

In a lengthy new blog post about hiding herself, the 34-year-old mother of two recalls how her old tomboy appearance caused many to label her gay, when she in fact dressed in a less typically feminine way to deflect unwanted attention from men.
“I definitely started hiding when I got old enough to walk down my NY streets alone,” the New York native wrote. “I started to notice a drastic difference in how men would relate to me if I had on jeans, or if I had on a skirt, or if my hair was done pretty.”
Keys says she could feel the “animal instinct” and those situations scared her. “I didn’t want to be talked to in that way, looked at in that way, whistled after, followed,” she continued. “And so I started hiding. I chose the baggy jeans and timbs, I chose the ponytail and hat, I chose no makeup, no bright colour lipstick or pretty dresses. I chose to hide.”
When her debut album, Songs in A Minor, was released in 2001, her tomboy image brought unwanted attention. “I had the baggy/braided/tough NY tomboy thing mastered, that was who I was (or who I chose to be) and I felt good there,” she said. “Then because of the way I spoke or carried myself, people started calling me gay and hard and I wasn’t gay, but I was hard and although I felt comfortable there, it made me uncomfortable that people were judging me and so slowly I hid that side of myself.”
In hiding her tomboy side, Keys says, she began wearing dresses and let her hair out so people “could see more of the ‘real’ me.”
As time went on, Keys arrived at a point at which she chose to stop hiding altogether. “You are allowed to be smart,” she affirms. “You are allowed to be tough. You are allowed to be sexy … You are allowed to be yourself!!”
“I don’t have to hide anymore, I don’t have to pretend and hold back, I don’t have to think that my intelligence, beauty and sensuality are intimidating to others,” she said.
Now more than ever, Keys has come out of hiding, using social media to let people into her private life with husband Swizz Beatz. Just days ago, Keys posted a very sexy recreation of Sintra Arunte-Bronte’s famous Jamaica tourism poster from 1972.

Alicia Keys

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This article originally appeared in the New York Post.