September 29th is a day that will go down in ginfamy (that is gay infamy) as the day that Mariah Carey, Madonna, Barbra Streisand, and Britney Spears battled for supremacy in gay hearts and minds. Who will stand victorious?

That's right, today is the drop date for Mariah Carey's Memoirs of an Imperfect Angel, a collection of slow jams that includes her instant classic cover of "I Want to Know What Love Is;" Madonna's greatest hits double-disc collection Celebration, that features two new singles; and Barbra Streisand's Love is the Answer, a collection of cabaret standards. Not to be outdone by those older and wiser, Britney Spears tried to steal some of the spotlight by releasing the single "3" today. Smooth movie Britney. And it's pretty good, as far as catchy, crappy pop songs go.

So, who will be the big victor in the Diva Death Battle 2009? Lady Gaga of course! What? She doesn't even have an album out today! Precisely, but she is poised to be the gay icon of the youngest babygays that are just taking their first fledgling steps on the big pink road we call queendom. While there is definitely plenty of crossover between the Madonna/Mariah/Britney crowd, only confirmed bachelors of a certain age are going to be purchasing the new Streisand.

Every generation of gays gets their own singing female deity to worship (whether we like it or not), and as Streisand crowd ages and the diva herself gets closer to retirement age, it's going to be up to Gaga and her ilk to entertain "the children." Madonna's influence may spread now that her greatest hits CD will educate a new generation of kids, but those dancing at Campus Thursdays at the local gay bar weren't even born when "Burning Up" was first burning up the charts. Mariah is no spring chicken either, and her album of slow jams isn't really ready made for dance floor remixes that will spread her new sound across the floors of a thousand gay dance palaces.

As long as Britney can hold it together, she'll continue to be relevant for a certain crowd that came out to her hits earlier this decade, but it's Gaga who will be holding sway from 2010 on. Let's just hope that she has enough kooky kostumes in that pretty little head of hers to keep her going for the next 20 years, when the rest of us are sitting around telling our gay nephews, "When I was your age, Madonna, Mariah, and Barbra once came out with new CDs on the same day!"