by Ann Powers
Rock audiences were not ready to embrace straightforward homosexual desire. (Though Rob Halford of Judas Priest came out long after he rose to fame, and Adam Lambert crossed over from the pop realm to front a new version of the progressive rock band Queen in the mid-2010s, mainstream rock has still not produced a male star who was out from the beginning of his career.) The dazzle of glam and the Grand Guignol spectacle of rockers like Alice Cooper and Iggy Pop differed from the actual gay liberation movement taking hold in cities like New York and San Francisco. That was deeply confrontational, too. “I don’t like the word ‘gay’—aside from being a dumb, weak word and a part of that ‘positive’ stereotype, it seems like a cover-up,” Aletti wrote, voicing the determination to be wholly acknowledged. “I prefer the word faggot ’cause it has a harder, nastier sound that has nothing to do with the cocktail party and drawing room definition of the ‘acceptable’ homosexual.”
What Aletti demanded was a far cry from the “swishy,” ambiguous, ultimately hetero-affirmative teasing of David Bowie or his fellow glam pioneers. “They’re not a fag band,” an editors’ note read above an early New York Dolls profile in Creem. David Johansen did more than flirt with homophobia in the ensuing interview. “‘A lot of people thought that we were the band that was gonna camp on the Sixties for the old queens,’ spits David with a look of disgust, ‘but you can tell ’em that I said “those used-up queens can all go screw!”’” The rest of the band loudly voices their support of this motion.”42 Bowie’s connections to the emergent gay culture were more intimate; in the late 1970s, he was lovers with the Dutch transgender cabaret artist Romy Haag and performed on American television with the pioneering queer performance artists Joey Arias and Klaus Nomi. Yet Bowie was also famous for bedding hundreds of women. His relationship with wife Angie Bowie was perhaps the most visible of the era embodying the “open marriage” trend, and for most of the 1970s it allowed Bowie to remain an ally and a dabbler, but not, as Aletti might say, a faggot.
Rock’s moment of androgyny chic did produce one bona fide gay liberationist: Jobriath, a twenty-six-year-old former theater kid whom the high-powered music-biz entrepreneur Jerry Brandt molded to be the next Bowie. Signed to a huge Elektra Records contract, Jobriath and Brandt planned a tour intended to be the spectacle to end all spectacles, involving a “Kama Sutra altar” and a reenactment of the death scene in King Kong. The press went wild, publishing extensive interviews with both Brandt and Jobriath, in which the men (who claimed to have met in a gay bar) made grand pronouncements about bringing popular music into the next decade: “The drug culture is dead, Broadway is dead. The only thing that’s keeping us alive is sex. I’m selling sex. Sex and professionalism,” said Jobriath, while he kindly dismissed Bowie: “David Bowie is a good lad. I become a true fairy onstage.”
Brandt invested huge hopes and capital into Jobriath, but two albums in Elektra executives pulled the plug. Brandt and Jobriath fell out. Jobriath’s only tour ended fabulously but smokily on September 20, 1974, in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, of all places. Jobriath French-kissed his guitarist onstage in front of a crowd full of students and drag queens, and received four encores, even after a malfunctioning motor in the hall’s cooling system caused the room to fill up with smoke. Jobriath returned to New York, adopted the stage name Cole Berlin, and became a cabaret singer. He was an early casualty of the AIDS epidemic, dying in 1983.43
That the most committedly gay transgressor in 1970s rock ended his brief career in a conservative Southern college town says much about the craze for sexual and gender openness that overtook America in the 1970s. The semester before Jobriath performed in Tuscaloosa, the University of Alabama’s alternative-minded New College sponsored a “Sex Week” featuring appearances by Linda Lovelace and Screw magazine editor Al Goldstein, a standing-room-only lecture by a male-to-female transsexual, and a student play about homosexuality entitled (hello, Ray Davies) Boys Will Be Girls, Girls Will Be Boys. Jobriath was able to find momentary support, even adulation, in outposts where people were hungry to enact the fantasies popular culture was presenting them. But the era’s true stars only occupied those fantasies provisionally. In his 1971 anthem, “Changes,” Bowie demanded that his fans face the strange. He kept turning toward something new, a strategy that served his own restless muse but also made his music a better sell to a mainstream perhaps not ready to accept some of those “strange” ways of being as normal. “In the mix of male and female friends making up my glitter coterie,” Farber wrote, “I was the only one who was gay (and the only one who knew that I was gay).” Farber noted that one of the most flamboyantly “swish” artists of the 1970s, Freddie Mercury of Queen, remained closeted in his fans’ eyes, even though during concerts he did things like address his male fans as “my little bathing beauties.” Only after he died from complications of AIDS in 1991 was Mercury’s bisexuality openly discussed by those close to him.44
As identity-based activism increased in the early 1970s, gay liberationists and feminists (occasionally together) increasingly demanded larger social change. Turning politics into rock and roll theater, activists played rough with stereotypes of sexual allure. The 1968 Miss America pageant protest co-organized by rock critic Ellen Willis saw women parading a sheep on the Atlantic City boardwalk and throwing high heels, makeup, and lingerie into a “Freedom Trash Can.” Gay activists staged bold displays of pleasure like dance-ins in Central Park, which also served as ways for men and some women to cruise potential sex partners.
And there were pride parades, the first of which took place in 1970: joyful, carnivalesque moving actions in which politically minded organizers mingled with participants costumed in their own preferences—leathermen, drag queens, radical fairies, butch dykes on bikes. This was Sylvester’s home base. He participated in a proto–pride parade not long after moving to San Francisco in 1970, honoring the newly concocted Aquarius Day. The event amalgamated “a countercultural hodgepodge of queens, flower children, and rock-and-rollers, where the lead float was the band Black Sabbath,” according to his biographer Joshua Gamson. Sylvester encouraged the Cockettes to scream from the float instead of just waving and batting their eyelashes. “The crowd screamed back,” Gamson writes.45
In a few years, Sylvester would realize that his path did not lie within this undifferentiated mass of sensual searchers and embark upon his own career, separate from the Cockettes, moving from soulful rock to the new, gay-led subculture of disco. An ad for Sylvester and the Hot Band, his funky new group, adorned the back cover of Creem in 1973 and made his allegiance to gay pride clear: “All men are created equal,” the copy read above a picture of Sylvester in sequined blouse, leggings, and platform sandals.
Sylvester was not the only African American artist to participate in androgyny chic in the early 1970s. Labelle, a Philadelphia trio that began as a 1960s girl group led by the gospel-fired vocalist Patti LaBelle, found itself at a career crossroads in 1970, when Dusty Springfield’s English manager, Vicki Wickham, approached them with a rejuvenation plan. Wickham saw potential in LaBelle’s charisma, Sarah Dash’s purity of voice, and Nona Hendryx’s musical curiosity. Taking the group to England, Wickham helped them immerse in the rock world that had transformed Jimi Hendrix. Encouraging the then-Bluebelles to change its name to the more rock-flavored Labelle, and to begin recording the genre-defying songs penned by the also newly renamed Hendryx, Wickham guided Labelle into a previously unexplored space where glam met funk and soul via strictly female interplay. She connected the trio with costume designer Larry LeGaspi, who’d worked with the majestic drag queen Divine, and who would later design the famous costumes for the horror-glam band KISS.
Labelle was as connected to funk as it was to glam. Funk was psychedelic soul, pioneered by James Brown and brought into the 1970s by Parliament-Funkadelic. Led by seasoned doo-wop veteran George Clinton, P-Funk, like Bowie, set its music within elaborately staged scenarios that explored existential alienation using science-fiction story lines. The colle
ctive also developed its own style of carnivalesque sartorial androgyny. Albums like Funkadelic’s Maggot Brain and Parliament’s Mothership Connection form a core part of the Afro-Futurist lineage also shaped by jazz great Sun Ra and Jamaican innovator Lee “Scratch” Perry. P-Funk’s music was sexy and hilarious, and also experimental and mind-expanding, tackling themes of societal corruption, racism, and freedom through mind expansion alongside lustier topics in songs like “Standing on the Verge of Getting It On.” “Alice Cooper and David Bowie, they were doing their thing,” George Clinton said later. “That whole period, everybody was going for theatrical rock. So we just said, ‘Let’s go all the way with it. Let’s do it all.’”46
Nona Hendryx soon found that the permission rock artists had to experiment—not often afforded women in soul or pop, although male funk artists enjoyed it—freed her mind. Her writing followed. Her compositions for Labelle confronted world politics, the strictures of the entertainment industry, and, though in a somewhat metaphorical way, lesbian sex. “We are not afraid to sing revolutionary songs,” she told Billboard. “That sets us apart from other female groups.”47
The group’s high point came on October 6, 1974, when it played the Metropolitan Opera House. “Wear Something Silver!” the posters advertising the event read, and the crowd obliged—the even mix of gay men and mostly African American heterosexual couples dressed in tinseled finery were documented with a spread in People magazine. Labelle wore LeGaspi’s space costumes that night, their garb reflecting the title of the group’s latest album, Nightbirds. At one point Patti LaBelle was lowered from the ceiling by a wire while wearing huge yellow wings. “There can rarely have been so many bearded gentlemen in dresses, razzle-dazzle sequins and arched eyebrows at a Met performance before,” a bemused John Rockwell wrote in the Times. For Aletti, however, the show was a triumph—a performance that openly connected with a gay audience while refusing those “polite” stereotypes he abhorred.48
Labelle only had one major hit, “Lady Marmalade,” a stomper written by Bob Crewe and Kenny Nolan about a fiercely empowered sex worker in New Orleans. Hendryx’s songs tended to be too experimental for radio, taking sinuous shapes inspired by Funkadelic’s long jams and the urban pop symphonies of singer-songwriter Laura Nyro, a sometime collaborator. While male rock and funk stars like Bowie or Clinton were extolled for pushing musical boundaries, Labelle left mainstream audiences puzzled. Like Janis Joplin, these women were considered excessive: too stylized, too weird, too loud. The group did not reach the fame of its male counterparts. In New York, however, it was a sensation, especially among gay men and black and Latin audiences.
“Lady Marmalade” was a hit propelled, in part, by the disco craze that followed glam rock’s brief interlude. Disco allowed for outliers like Labelle and Sylvester, who enjoyed his biggest hits as part of its whirlwind, to flourish. With few exceptions—notably the Runaways, Suzi Quatro, and Fanny, the first all-female band to record a major-label album, in 1970—hard rock remained the provenance of white males, no matter how much mascara its practitioners applied. To appeal to a mainstream audience with as many women as men, rock would have to do what male porn stars never did: go soft.
DO THAT TO ME ONE MORE TIME
In 1975, the writer Jane DeLynn hadn’t yet had an orgasm. She’d tried analysis, consciousness raising, the usual tools of the Me Decade, but nothing had worked. So she signed up to attend a workshop by Betty Dodson. A women’s health advocate whose 1972 polemic/guide Liberating Masturbation: A Meditation on Self Love had become a sensation in feminist circles, Dodson believed strongly that claiming pleasure could be a radical and transformative act. She gathered activists and homemakers, professional women and bohemians like DeLynn in her New York apartment, to share stories and massage, play with sex toys, and come.
“I felt odd as I walked through the living room, for on the deep brown wall-to-wall carpeting sat fourteen naked women, my classmates,” DeLynn wrote in an account she published in Crawdaddy magazine that December. “They were mainly suburban housewives in their thirties and forties. At twenty-seven I was clearly the youngest. Most of them sat hunched over, arms around drawn-up knees, embarrassed at the nudity that revealed stretch marks, moles, sagging breasts, cesarean section scars. They were surrounded by the accoutrements of slick American sex—stereo speaker, large pillows, bowls of fruit, handcrafted pottery mugs of herbal tea. I slowly got undressed in the bedroom where a second set of speakers was softly playing Elton John.”49
It’s telling that the only male element in a room full of women stripped down and eager for optimal genital excitement was a pop star few would have called a paragon of 1970s virility. The flamboyant, cuddly Elton John was a ubiquitous and flexible presence on American radio throughout the decade, an Englishman who’d become an adult-contemporary music favorite with a sound that veered from glam rock to country stylings to barrelhouse rock and roll. Closeted until coming out as bisexual in Rolling Stone in 1976, John was briefly a teen idol, but mostly a translator of riskier artists’ ideas for the masses. He and lyricist Bernie Taupin even penned a more accessible take on David Bowie’s alien imagery with the astronaut love song “Rocket Man (I Think It’s Going to Be a Long, Long Time).” In DeLynn’s story, though, John wasn’t a harbinger of glamour. His background presence signified something else: the healing and gently stimulating presence of soft rock.
Soft rock was the understanding yin to the arrogant yang clanging through American arenas in the 1970s, a ballad-based form that strove for the immediacy and frankness of hard rock but set aside its cocky noise. “It’s meaningful, a lot of the songs in soft rock are meaningful, and you can get into the words,” said Grand Funk’s singer Mark Farner when asked about its growing popularity in 1970. “But I like to express myself, through my guitar, I like to scream when I feel like it.”50 Many women got off on the wails of Farner and his peers, but at times a gentler touch appealed to both genders. This was especially true during private moments—not only in masturbation workshops but on any given night where a couple, triad, or solo adventurer stayed home in search of a little euphoria.
If arena rockers put their genderfuckery in fans’ faces, soft rockers took them by the hand and encouraged them to explore their own potential. Early on, self-defined poets like Leonard Cohen and expressionist troubadours like Tim Hardin—both arty sophisticates—were linked to the form. But so was Kris Kristofferson, the Nashville songwriter who’d written “Me and Bobby McGee,” a heartrending tale of love and loss Janis Joplin made famous, as well as the groundbreaking country seduction “Help Me Make It Through the Night.” Handsome enough to be the movie star he became, known for a murmuring but resonant drawl that he couldn’t have pushed to a scream if he wanted to, Kristofferson stood at the other end of the spectrum from glam’s big show. “He is possessed of a deep, roughly hewn voice with tinges of country and western that draws out every last drop of emotion and feeling from the songs he performs,” an admiring male critic wrote in 1971. Though plainspoken, Kristofferson and his ilk were certainly expressive: regular guys getting in touch with their feelings.51
This was the mandate of domestic life in the 1970s: become your best, most communicative, and erotically engaged self. As in the 1920s, when women’s newfound desire for freedom pushed men, too, toward companionate marriage, 1970s women’s liberation threatened to leave uncaring men in the dust. The decade gave rise to a new stereotype—the sensitive male, “a man ambitious and successful in his professional life who is also intensely concerned about his emotional and personal life.” Those words described the actor Alan Alda in a 1976 feature from the women’s magazine Redbook, which enthused about Alda’s vocal support for an International Women’s Day and willingness to do household chores. They could have also applied to confessional singer-songwriters like James Taylor and Jackson Browne.52
With women demanding reproductive freedom, voicing radical critiques of the family structure, and telling men all those previous decades
of orgasms hadn’t been genuine, men felt lost. Women who were courting enlightenment but not yet ready to step into a wholly feminist milieu also craved guidance. Many wanted to repair marriages they now could admit were flawed, but did not want to abandon. “I think that a lot of the so-called feminists—single women, professional women—don’t feel they need help, or that they have other things to occupy themselves,” Dodson told DeLynn about her orgasm students. “It’s the suburban housewife who knows she wants to make changes.” These average people needed guidebooks, and capitalism obliged. Explicit how-to books flooded the publishing market.
The most famous is The Joy of Sex, a “gourmet guide to lovemaking” written by English physician Alex Comfort. Topping the bestseller list for eleven weeks in 1972, it remained in the top five for a year and a half longer. The book’s tone is jovial, extending the cookbook metaphor to chapters that recast terms like “feuille de rose” (anal stimulation) as “sauces and pickles.” Its lavish illustrations were pornographic, yet somehow as cuddly as Winnie the Pooh. They showed a very hairy man and a short-coiffed woman, distilling the moment’s aura of gender-role reversal into one smiling couple, coupling in every way imaginable. Comfort adopted a tone of kindly authority, noting that “this is a book about valid sexual behaviors” and that “sex is the most important sort of adult play.” He cast sex as the only arena where problems couples might be trying to overcome in therapy or consciousness-raising could truly be resolved; his naturally androgynous couple had returned to a private Eden to remake the world anew.53