David Bowie Made Me Gay
100 YEARS OF LGBT MUSIC
Darryl W. Bullock
WITH 17 COLOR AND 44 B&W PHOTOGRAPHS
LGBT MUSICIANS HAVE SHAPED the development of music over the last century, with a sexually progressive soundtrack in the background of the gay community’s struggle for acceptance. With the advent of recording technology, LGBT messages were for the first time brought to the forefront of popular music. David Bowie Made Me Gay is the first book to cover the breadth of history of recorded music by and for the LGBT community: How have those records influenced the evolution of the music we listen to today? How have they inspired whole generations of disenfranchised LGBT youth? How could we ever have Lady Gaga without Billie Holiday and David Bowie?
Through new interviews and contemporary reports, David Bowie Made Me Gay uncovers the lives of the people who made these records, and offers a lively canter through the scarcely documented history of LGBT music-makers. Darryl W. Bullock discusses how gay, lesbian, and bisexual performers influenced Jazz and Blues; examines the almost forgotten Pansy Craze in the years between the two World Wars (when many LGBT performers were fêted by royalty and Hollywood alike); chronicles the dark years after the depression when gay life was driven deep underground; celebrates the reemergence of LGBT performers in the post-Stonewall years; and highlights today’s most legendary out-gay pop stars: Elton John, Boy George, Freddie Mercury, and George Michael.
An entertaining treasure-trove of untold history for all music lovers, David Bowie Made Me Gay is an inspiring, nostalgic, and provocative reminder of how far the fight for equality has come, and the battles that are still to be waged.
Advance Praise for
DAVID BOWIE MADE ME GAY
“Well-researched and brimming with intrigue, Bullock’s comprehensive study not only makes the work of scores of musicians sing anew; it also demonstrates how the pendulum of acceptance can swing from era to era.”
—Kirkus (starred review)
“A wonderful encyclopedia of queer music, an encyclopedia with a plot: the history of one hundred years of social change … Ambitious, wide-ranging, unpredictable, fast-paced, and highly informative, David Bowie Made Me Gay is also very entertaining.”
—Christopher Bram, author of Gods and Monsters and Eminent Outlaws: The Gay Writers Who Changed America
“A whirlwind tour through how queer musicians have changed the rhythm and the beat of music and culture for almost one hundred years. Everyone knows that music is sexy, and sex is better with the right music—and LGBT people have been pushing the boundaries of music and sex for decades … This book does not miss a beat … A must read for anyone interested in, or fascinated by, music and popular culture.”
—Michael Bronski, author of A Queer History of the United States and Professor of Practice in Media and Activism, Harvard University
“A look back at a century of LGBTQ music, [Bullock’s] history lesson serves as a primer of a movement in which Bowie was key.”
—Billboard
“A highly comprehensive history of LGBT music, spanning a century from early jazz and blues to today’s most recognizable pop stars out of the closet. Bullock meticulously chronicles the LGBT community’s vast influence on music through a historical lens, revealing how society’s oscillation between acceptance and persecution has shaped what we listen to today.”
—The Washington Blade
“A fun and enlightening read, Darryl Bullock’s David Bowie Made Me Gay is to popular music what William J. Mann’s Behind the Screen is to Hollywood filmmaking: a convincing account of the hitherto ignored influence of LGBTQ people in a popular medium … Bullock’s treatment of the past 100 years is an engaging ‘one-stop’ of many genres—[its] detailed coverage of women’s music is welcome—and uniquely inclusive of both the US and UK. A valuable addition to the history of popular music as well as queer studies, and should appeal to general readers of all sexualities.”
—Vicki L. Eaklor, author of Queer America
“Music fans are likely to treasure this tome as it highlights the contribution from many artists now forgotten or, in some cases, unappreciated during their lifetimes. It also demonstrates that not only have there been LGBT recording artists since the dawn of recorded music but many did little to hide their sexual orientation.”
—Gay Star News
“David Bowie Made Me Gay recovers the lost history of music made by, and for, the LGBTQ community. Bullock touches on artists as unalike and historically far-flung as the flamboyant ragtime-era pianist Tony Jackson … [whose music], decades before Lady Gaga’s gay-positive song ‘Born This Way’ hit the airwaves, gave hope to fearful, isolated LGBTQ kids.”
—Publishers Weekly
Copyright
First published in hardcover in the United States and the United Kingdom in 2017 by
Overlook Duckworth, Peter Mayer Publishers, Inc.
NEW YORK
141 Wooster Street
New York, NY 10012
www.overlookpress.com
For bulk and special sales please contact [email protected], or to write us at the above address.
LONDON
30 Calvin Street, London E1 6NW
T: 020 7490 7300
E: [email protected]
www.ducknet.co.uk
For bulk and special sales please contact [email protected],
or write to us at the above address.
Copyright © 2017 Darryl W. Bullock
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
ISBN: 978-1-4683-1625-4
Contents
Advance Praise
Copyright
Dedication
A Note on Sources
Introduction: Once Upon a Time in a disco far, far away …
1.
David Bowie Made Me Gay
2.
Pretty Baby
3.
Bull Dyker Blues
4.
The Pansy Craze
5.
Europe Before the War
6.
Strange Fruit
7.
Camp Records
8.
Do You Come Here Often?
9.
Electronic Sounds
10.
After Stonewall
11.
Living With Lesbians
12.
Lavender Country
13.
Can’t Stop the Music
14.
The 1970s: Political and Pink
15.
The Aggressive Style Punk Rock
16.
The 1980s: Small Town Boys
17.
Hope and Homophobia
18.
Scandal
19.
Out and Proud in the Twenty-First Century
Acknowledgements
Bibliography
Image Credits
Endnotes
Index
About the Author
This book is dedicated to the families and friends of the people who lost their lives, or who were injured, in the Pulse Nightclub shootings in Orlando, Florida in June 2016. We are family.
A Note on Sources
All quotes from k anderson, Andy Bell, Blackberri, Guy Blackman, John ‘Smokey’ Condon, Ray Connolly, St. Sukie de la Croix, Sean Dickson (HiFi Sean), Alix Dobkin, Robbie Duke (Patrick Pink), Patrick Haggerty, Drake Jensen, Dane Lewis, Mista Majah P, Holly Near, Andy Partridge, Tom Robin
son, Paul Rutherford, Paul Southwell, Rod Thomas (Bright Light Bright Light) and Cris Williamson, unless otherwise credited, are taken from exclusive interviews conducted by the author. The interview with John Grant was conducted by Ian Leak, and is used by permission.
David Bowie on the cover of Gay News, 1973
INTRODUCTION
Once upon a time, in a disco far, far away …
‘When I asked him what kept him going to discover new music, John Peel looked at me, smiled, and said: “The next record I hear might be the best record I have ever heard”. Since that moment that has been my life’s motto’
Sean Dickson, a.k.a. HiFi Sean1
Now, I know what you’re thinking: surely the world doesn’t need another book about music, does it? Well, maybe it does.
Over the centuries, countless volumes have been written about the lives of the musicians and composers who have enriched our world with their performances, and we have become accustomed to lapping up the lurid minutiae of our favourite musicians’ lives. We have all heard the (completely false, of course) story about Mick, Marianne and the Mars Bar, and we are intimate with the childhood traumas of the individual Beatles. We (quite literally) know what Elvis’ last movements were before his fiancée discovered his lifeless body – assuming, of course, that you believe Elvis did in fact die in 1977 and he isn’t still wandering in and out of the crowds that gather at Graceland daily as a white-haired man in his 80s. Yet although the lives of many mainstream artists have been laid bare in print, there have been surprisingly few attempts to document the influence of gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender musicians on the development of the music we listen to today. True, for years now tabloids and newsstand weeklies have been filling their pages with such trivia as Elton’s latest falling-out with Madonna, lists of Freddie Mercury’s former sexual partners or stories about what really caused George Michael’s tumble onto the tarmac, but while celebrity spats and the more sensational aspects of someone’s sex life or drug use may grab the headlines, the contributions that many LGBT recording artists have made in propelling popular music forward have been all but ignored.
Obviously, there were LGBT writers and performers before wax cylinders and shellac discs became the norm. Seventeenth-century baroque composers Jean-Baptiste Lully and Arcangelo Corelli were both gay; Tchaikovsky, despite his disastrous marriage to ‘a woman with whom I am not the least in love’ (as he described her),2 and all Soviet efforts to portray him as heterosexual, had a string of male lovers – including his own nephew. Both Schubert and Handel have been outed by biographers, and even during the Victorian period, when urban myth would have you believe that the redoubtable monarch refused to believe that such a thing existed, lesbian composer Dame Ethel Smyth was already making a name for herself for her operatic and sacred scores.
The discovery, in the second half of the nineteenth century, of a method to record and preserve sound meant that music quickly became much more accessible to a vastly wider audience. Suddenly, LGBT musicians were no longer limited to the music hall stages or opera houses of the world’s major cities; they could reach into the homes of everyone coming to terms with their own sexuality. Sitting in your room scared and confused, hearing a voice on a record telling you that you were not alone, was like having a comforting hug from a friend. And just as everyone who bought the first Velvet Underground album or attended the Sex Pistols’ legendary gig at Manchester’s Lesser Free Trade Hall is said to have gone on to form their own band, those voices that came crackling through the horn, out of the speaker or over that transistor radio would influence every generation of LGBT musicians that followed.
The LGBT community has spent over 100 years pioneering musical genres and producing some of the most lasting and important records of all time. However, even though every music mogul worth his wage packet (and, sadly, even today it’s almost invariably a ‘he’) is fully aware of how important the Pink Pound is in supporting the careers and record sales of their ‘gay-friendly’ acts (do you really think that Cher, Madonna or Kylie would have lasted as long as they have in the cut-throat music industry without their fiercely loyal LGBT fan base?), far too many LGBT musicians have seen their stories ‘straight-washed’ or completely brushed under the carpet. The roles of LGBT people in the theatre, in the cinema, in photography and in classical music have been thoroughly examined by worthy writers, but the contributions of members of our community in the fields of pop, folk, punk, electronica and so on have been all but ignored, unless you happen to have been lucky enough to be one of the handful of artists to make the big time. It hasn’t helped that, until very recently, pop music has been seen as second-class, ephemeral and disposable; a victim of snobbery and of its own success.
And that is simply not fair: LGBT people were there as jazz gestated. We were in the maternity ward during the birth of the blues, and in the first few decades of the twentieth century, many LGBT performers enjoyed a level of fame and a freedom that would not be seen again until the 1970s, when a new wave of politically active gay musicians demanded to be heard. We dominated the disco era, and the pop charts of the late 1980s and early 1990s would have been barren without our influence: the hit-making machine that was Stock, Aitken and Waterman (with over 100 UK Top 40 hits to their collective names, including seven Number One singles) freely admit that their signature sound was developed from the Hi-NRG music they had witnessed filling the floors of gay clubs.3
Yet while they were happy to camp it up on stage in some of the world’s biggest arenas, many LGBT artists struggled to come to terms with their own sexuality – or remained in the closet at the behest of their management team. Andy Fraser, producer and co-author of the massive rock standard ‘All Right Now’, did not come out until 2005, and by that time he was already fighting AIDS. Freddie Mercury, the man for whom the word ‘flamboyant’ seemed to have been invented, never fully came out to his adoring public. The day before his death (which came, according to his death certificate, as the result of bronchial pneumonia brought on by AIDS), he still felt unable to admit to the world that he was gay, even when he asked fans to join him and his medical team ‘in the fight against this terrible disease’. George Michael only revealed that he was gay after he was forced to by his arrest in a public convenience in California. At least Fraser and Michael had the opportunity to discover how liberating coming out can be. Rob Halford, the frontman of the devil-baiting hard rock act Judas Priest, says that outing himself (during an interview in 1998) was ‘the greatest thing I could have done for myself. It didn’t affect Priest one iota: the record sales didn’t plunge, the show attendance didn’t plunge. Unconditional love will accept you for who you are, and I think that was the blessing I had from the fans’.4 Michael Stipe was the singer and spokesperson of the biggest band in world when he admitted to being ‘an equal opportunity lech’;5 a year later, R.E.M. signed what was then the biggest recording contract ever awarded (estimated at some $80 million) and their next album was an international Number One hit. Like Stipe, who prefers the word ‘queer’ when describing himself, Elton John has proved beyond doubt that a gay artist can have a worldwide fan base and still be open and honest about their sexuality although, as many of the bigger LGBT acts have discovered, he can still only get radio play (and, subsequently, hit records) by singing songs about the opposite sex – especially on the ultra-conservative American airwaves.
The world tends to view the Stonewall Riots in 1969 as the dawn of our age of empowerment, yet gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender musicians have been causing a scene for a whole lot longer than the last 50 years. LGBT musicians have powered many of the most important stages in the development of music over the last century, and that music has, in turn, provided a soundtrack for our community as it has struggled for acceptance and fought for equality across the globe. As we carry on fighting for our basic freedoms in many countries around the world, music continues to inform, inspire and – above everything else – unite us all. This book is not int
ended as a fully comprehensive guide to every LGBT musician who has ever entered a recording studio, but it is my hope that, through its pages, you will discover some of the people who spent their lives fighting for us to be heard.
Dusty Springfield press advert, 1966
CHAPTER 1
David Bowie Made Me Gay
‘There is old wave, there is new wave and there’s David Bowie’
RCA promotional advertisement, 1978
2016 was a terrible year for the entertainment industry. For a while, it seemed that every time you opened a newspaper, or every time your smartphone signalled an update from Twitter or Facebook, the noise heralded the death of yet another great: in the first five months of the year alone, the music world lost Prince, Maurice White of Earth, Wind & Fire, Glenn Frey of The Eagles, Jefferson Airplane’s Paul Kantner (coincidentally on the same day that Signe Anderson, the Airplane’s original singer, also passed away), Keith Emerson of ELP (his erstwhile musical partner, Greg Lake, would follow him through the pearly gates in December), Beatles producer Sir George Martin and so many more that people started taking bets on who we would lose next. By the end of the year we had also lost Leonard Cohen, Pete Burns of Dead or Alive and George Michael.
It wasn’t just the music world, of course. Authors, entertainers, sports personalities, film and television stars and more were dropping like ninepins, but none of them (with the possible exception of Sir George) had the cultural impact and not one evoked the devastating feeling of loss quite as much as the death of David Bowie. With a recording career spanning 52 years behind him, and a heartbreaking new album (Blackstar) issued less than 48 hours before his untimely passing, Bowie’s death resonated around the world. For many people, the death of the man born David Jones in the London suburb of Brixton signalled the end of an era. And it was.
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