Laura Nyro (1947-1997).

When singer-songwriter Laura Nyro died of ovarian cancer on April 8, the statement issued by her manager listed her "life partner" as a woman, Maria Desiderio. To the shock and sadness over her premature passing (she was just 49) was thus added a double take for many old fans: Laura Nyro was gay?

Judging from most of her early songs and from the limited personal information she offered journalists, few would have thought so. She wrote passionately about loving men in such lyrics as "I belong to the man / Don't belong without him" ("Sweet Lovin' Baby") or the famous "Bill, I love you so / I always will / I've got the wedding bee blues." In her own life wedding bells rang for her and a man named David Bianchini, and she later gave birth to a son named Gil.

One of Nyro's most beloved early songs, however -- from the album Eli and the Thirteenth Confession -- was about a woman. To "Emmie" she sang, "You were my friend / and I loved you." Depending on how one read the lyrics, the song could have been simply a paean to friendship or a secondhand observation about "Emily and her love to be / Carved in a heart on a berry tree." Nonetheless, many budding lesbians and gay men took it as one of the first gay love songs in pop music. At the tribute concert to Nyro, held October 27 at the Beacon Theater in New York City, singer-songwriter-producer Desmond Child spoke about how the homosexual eroticism he sensed in that song helped him recognize his own homosexuality. Several of the women performers at the tribute (which included lesbian artists Sandra Bernhard, Toshi Reagon, and Rhiannon) cited the influence of "Emmie" as well and how that song (along with the rest of Nyro's remarkable body of work) sparked not only a lifelong appreciation but a feeling of sorority -- whether Nyro was a "sister" or not.

By the time Nyro had released the album Mother's Spiritual in 1984 (after a recording hiatus of six years), that sisterhood became more apparent. Suddenly the male pronouns had disappeared from her lyrics, and she sang to her "lover" rather than her man. In one lyric she even declared, "I'm not looking for Ms. or Mr. Right." In a subsequent have album and her final studio recording, Nyro never overtly declared her love of a woman but did add a new coda to the live version of "Emmie" in which she suggested that her friend could be daughter, sister, mother -- or lover.

She had found her own Ms. Right 17 years ago in Desiderio, a painter who was credited as "art consultant" on Nyro's last two albums.

They lived a quiet life among Nyro's beloved trees in rural Connecticut and raised Nyro's son, who's now 19. They were both intensely private people, and their relationship was never publicized until after Nyro's death.

Whether Nyro considered herself lesbian or bisexual is moot when it comes to her musical legacy. Thirty years after she emerged on the music scene as a precocious 19-year-old, the impact of her stirring songs and spellbinding voice haven't diminished. As with all great art, her universal messages of love, justice, and passion transcend labels -- and even mortality.