Adele is not putting up with hecklers at her concerts, especially ones who don’t support inclusivity.
The singer was caught off guard when a fan yelled “Pride sucks!” during a break between songs at her “Weekends With Adele” Las Vegas residency on June 1, the first day of Pride Month.
“Did you come to my f— show and just say that Pride sucks?” she said, turning toward the audience from her piano. “Are you f— stupid? Don’t be so f— ridiculous. If you have nothing nice to say, shut up, all right?”
The 16-time Grammy winner was met with resounding applause as she flipped her hair and quickly moved on, jokingly asking the crowd if there were any husbands who had been dragged along by their partners.
Adele has long used her platform and concerts to voice her support for the LGBTQ+ community, wearing a dress with a rainbow train at a concert during Pride Month last year and honoring victims of homophobic violence during her shows.
“I’d like to start tonight by dedicating this entire show to everybody in Orlando and Pulse nightclub,” she said through tears as she took the stage in Belgium in 2016 just hours after initial details about the mass shooting were revealed. “The LGBTQIA community, they’re like my soulmates since I was really young, so I’m really moved by it.”
She appreciates that her music has apparently some inspired fans to live authentically, telling Out in 2015, “I get a lot of mail from people who tell me that I make them really happy to be themselves, and really comfortable with who they are, which I love.”
The “Rumor Has It” singer explained in the same interview that she once received a letter from a teenage fan who used her music to come out to his friends. “He fancied someone at school, but he wasn’t out. And he listened to ‘Someone Like You’ and came out to his best friend and then to the boy he fancied, and it turned out that he was gay as well, and now they’re together — he’s like 15. I had to leave so I didn’t burst into tears.”
In 2018, Adele became an ordained minister so she could officiate at the wedding of bestie Alan Carr — the comic and broadcaster whom she stayed with after the 2011 release of “21” — and Paul Drayton, who at the time had been together for eight years. The “Set Fire to the Rain” singer paid for the event and hosted it in her own backyard, though the men wound up divorcing in 2022.
Adele received significant online support for her quick response to the heckler Saturday. “Want to know how to challenge bullies and hate this Pride Month? Take a page from the icon that is @Adele,” the Human Rights Campaign tweeted. “Your voice is powerful in song and in spreading allyship and joy.”
“It’s pretty funny that the idiot heckler paid big money to do this,” one fan posted, noting the irony of a person shelling out for expensive tickets and subsequently making an enemy of the performer. “Adele wins again.”
Adele will play four more shows this month in Las Vegas before heading to Munich in August.
