‘I was sitting at the bar signing autographs when this man came up and asked me to autograph his handkerchief, which I did. Then we talked and had some drinks. All of us were going over to the Statler [hotel] for a nightcap and I asked him if he wanted to join us guys. The fellow said he did, and walked out with us.’
Ray had been the victim of police entrapment, an all-to-frequent device used to arrest gay men – and the jury felt he had been coerced, taking less than an hour to find him not guilty. Still, the damage had been done: Ray’s career hit a downward slide, and although he kept working, he did not have another chart hit after 1959. Years of heavy drinking eventually took their toll, and he died of liver failure in February 1990.
The Brass Rail, where Johnnie Ray fell victim to police entrapment
If Ray was the ‘father of rock and roll’, then either Little Richard or Esquerita can lay claim to being the mother. Esquerita (born Eskew Reeder Jr or Steven Quincy Reeder in 1935 in Greenville, South Carolina) was an early rock ’n’ roller who inspired the camp approach of Little Richard, although they seem to have influenced each other equally; Little Richard may have ‘borrowed’ some of his style from the more flamboyant Esquerita, but the latter man did not begin his recording career until long after Little Richard first made it big. A self-taught pianist, Eskew Jr spent his early years playing piano in church before, in his late teens, dropping out of high school and moving to New York to join the gospel group the Heavenly Echoes around the time that they released their 1955 single ‘Didn’t It Rain’/‘Your God is My God Too’.
Inspired by the ‘dirty blues’ of Ma Rainey and Lucille Bogan, Eskew left the Heavenly Echoes and began playing his own, raucous music for just about anyone who would put him on a stage. Discovered playing in a bar by Paul Peek, Gene Vincent’s rhythm guitarist, he was signed to Capitol Records (Vincent’s label) and recorded his first session for the company in May 1958. His debut album, Esquerita! featured Elvis’ backing vocalists the Jordanaires.
Over the next decade, he would record for a variety of labels and with a number of up-and-coming players, including Big Joe Turner and Allen Toussaint. In 1963, he recorded an unreleased session for Berry Gordy’s Motown label and the following year played with Jimi Hendrix on Little Richard’s Greatest Hits, an album that consisted of re-recordings of Little Richard’s biggest songs for his new label, VeeJay. Sadly, and not through lack of trying, Esquerita never really made the grade as a solo artist. Changing his name to The Magnificent Malochi, he signed with Brunswick Records in 1968, releasing the one-off 45 ‘As Time Goes By’/‘Mama, Your Daddy’s Come Home’ which featured famed New Orleans keyboardist Dr. John on organ. Reissues of his classic 1950s material followed, but if they made any money, none of it filtered down to the artist himself.
During the 1970s and early 1980s, he did what he needed to do to get by, often playing in dives in New York for little money; at one point he wound up in prison. Esquerita died of AIDS in October 1986 in Harlem, and was buried in a pauper’s grave. In 2012, Norton Records issued a new Esquerita album, Sinner Man: The Lost Session.
‘Little’ Richard Penniman freely admitted that Esquerita influenced his wild style of piano playing, and he also told interviewers that the first time he clapped eyes on Eskew’s exotic look he was blown away. Little Richard told Charles White, author of the excellent biography The Life And Times Of Little Richard: The Quasar of Rock, that he had met Reeder at the Greyhound bus station in his home town of Macon around 1951:
One night I was sitting there and Esquerita came in. He was with a lady preacher by the name of Sister Rosa, whose line was selling blessed bread. She said it was blessed, but it was nothing but regular old bread that you buy at the store. Esquerita played piano for her and they had a little guy singing with them by the name of Shorty. So Esquerita and me went up to my house and he got on the piano and he played “One Mint Julep” way high up in the treble. It sounded so pretty. The bass was fantastic. He had the biggest hands of anybody I’d ever seen … I said, “Hey, how do you do that?” And he says, “I’ll teach you”. And that’s when I really started playing.26
Little Richard, a man who has clearly struggled to define his sexuality but has at times been happy to admit to being gay, began recording that same year and was a huge influence on another genderfluid icon, David Bowie. When asked who or what made him first want to sing, Bowie said:
Little Richard. If it hadn’t have been for him, I probably wouldn’t have gone into music. When I was nine and first saw Little Richard in a film that played around town—I think it was probably Girl Can’t Help It—seeing those four saxophonists onstage, it was like, “I want to be in that band!” And for a couple of years that was my ambition, to be in a band playing saxophone behind Little Richard. That’s why I got a saxophone.
Bowie told Vanity Fair in 1998 that his most treasured possession was ‘a photograph held together by cellophane tape of Little Richard that I bought in 1958,’ and he admitted, ‘when I heard Little Richard, I mean, it just set my world on fire’. Bowie later said that, after his father bought him a copy of Little Richard’s ‘Tutti Frutti’ that ‘I had heard God’. ‘Tutti Frutti’ was originally about anal sex between two men, but the original lyrics – ‘Tutti Frutti, good booty/If it don’t fit, don’t force it/You can grease it, make it easy’ – were cleaned up for mass consumption by songwriter Dorothy LaBostrie.
As the man who (in his early years) performed in drag as Princess Lavonne once said, ‘Elvis may be the King of Rock and Roll, but I am the Queen.’ He told filmmaker John Waters (for a 1987 Playboy interview), ‘I love gay people. I believe I was the founder of gay. I’m the one who started to be so bold tellin’ the world! I was wearing make-up and eyelashes when no men were wearing that. I was very beautiful; I had hair hanging everywhere. If you let anybody know you was gay, you was in trouble; so when I came out I didn’t care what nobody thought. A lot of people were scared to be with me.’
Along with Buddy Holly (with whom Little Richard once claimed to have enjoyed a threesome), Carl Perkins and Elvis, Little Richard was one of the biggest influences on the Beatles. The flamboyant legend’s dress sense and wild, powerful voice are credited by Rolling Stone Keith Richards for making ‘the world change from monochrome to Technicolor’.27 But his difficulty in reconciling his deeply felt religious beliefs (at the height of his fame, Little Richard gave everything up to go in to the church) with his homosexuality has caused him to vacillate between being out and diving back in to the closet. ‘I used to be a flaming homosexual from Macon, Georgia, until God changed me,’ he declared from the pulpit of a New York church.28
Jazz, with its casual attitude to drink, drugs and sex, provided a number of gay and bisexual musicians with cover, yet on the whole the post-war jazz scene was fiercely homophobic, in startling contrast to its early years. One of the few out-gay musicians of the time was pianist and composer Billy Strayhorn, who teamed with Duke Ellington and wrote hits such as ‘Lush Life’ and ‘Take the “A” Train’. Ellington didn’t care about colour or sexuality, he was only interested in musicianship, and Strayhorn was incredibly loyal to the man whose support enabled him to live his life openly, even if it meant Ellington receiving the credit for much of Strayhorn’s work. As one of his friends said: ‘The most amazing thing of all about Billy Strayhorn to me was that he had the strength to make an extraordinary decision – that is, the decision not to hide the fact that he was homosexual. And he did this in the 1940s, when nobody but nobody did that.’29 For almost a decade, Strayhorn lived openly with his partner, pianist Aaron Bridgers. The couple were introduced by Ellington’s son, Mercer,30 and only split after Bridgers decided to move permanently to Paris. They would remain friends for the rest of Strayhorn’s life. The last piece Bridgers wrote and recorded, 1999’s ‘Phil’, was dedicated to Strayhorn.
There can be little doubt that, if Ellington had not protected Strayhorn, he would not have been able to enjoy as active and open a sex life as
he did. Being out of the limelight helped: there’s no way that someone with a profile as high as Miles Davis could have come out as bisexual during his lifetime (he was outed posthumously by comedian Richard Pryor).31 Likewise, much has been made in recent years of singer and pianist Nina Simone’s bisexuality, although for most of her career she was married to a psychologically and physically abusive ex-policeman, Andrew Stroud.32 Vibraphone player Gary Burton turned professional before he had finished his teens (his first recordings were issued in 1960, when he was still only 17) but it took two marriages and a whole lot of soul searching before he was finally comfortable enough to come out publicly, which he did in 1994 after having been in a gay relationship for a number of years. ‘I have been asked what it’s like being white in a field of music that’s considered African-American,’ he told Francis Davis of The New York Times. ‘I think it would be equally valid to ask me what it’s like being gay and playing a form of music that’s seen as macho. It’s interesting that the subject never seems to come up’.33 Burton married his long-time partner, Jonathan Chong, in 2013. Band leader and pianist Billy Tipton, whose performing career began in the 1930s, spent his entire adult life hiding a secret from his audience – and from the women he shared his home with. Billy had been born a woman, Dorothy Lucille Tipton. Tipton went to great lengths to pass as male, binding his breasts and telling female partners that his genitals had been damaged in an accident. The Billy Tipton Trio recorded two albums of jazz standards in 1957, but it wasn’t until he passed away (in January 1989 at the age of 74) that his common law wife and adopted sons discovered that he had been leading a double life. ‘No one knew,’ said Kitty Oakes, the woman Tipton claimed to have married in 1960. Although the couple had separated some 10 years earlier, Oakes refused to talk about their life together, saying that Tipton died with the secret and that should be respected. ‘The real story about Billy Tipton doesn’t have anything to do with gender,’ she added. ‘He was a fantastic, almost marvellous, and generous person.’34
Would it surprise anyone to know that George Cory and Douglass Cross, the men who wrote the music and lyrics to ‘(I Left My Heart In) San Francisco’ were a gay couple? Written in 1953 for the singer Claramae Turner, the song became a worldwide smash and multi-million-selling hit when it was recorded by Tony Bennett in 1962. The men met during the Second World War and spent the rest of their lives together. Friends of Billie Holiday (according to Bennett, who is a huge Holiday fan), the couple also knew Bennett’s pianist Ralph Sharon, who brought the song, originally called ‘When I Return To San Francisco’, to the singer. The pair composed the song in a moment of homesickness, having moved to New York to try to make it in Tin Pan Alley. In 1969, ‘I Left My Heart In San Francisco’ was named the city’s official song. Douglas Cross died in 1975, and Cory – broken-hearted after losing his partner of 30 years – committed suicide three years later … a short time after he had returned to live in San Francisco.
For many decades, LGBT people have identified with the autobiographical songs and tragic life of French chanteuse Édith Piaf, one of the many women seduced by Marlene Dietrich according to her daughter Maria’s biography – and Maria Riva Dietrich was no fan, referring to Piaf as a ‘guttersnipe’ in a 2003 interview with CNN’s Larry King. However Piaf, whose singing career began in the smokey jazz and cabaret clubs of the Pigalle and Champs-Élysées is better known for her tempestuous relationships with men, some (including the actor-singer Yves Montand) bisexual themselves, than for having a string of girlfriends. Although ‘the little sparrow’ moved freely through Paris’ LGBT underworld and Piaf was no stranger in the Pigalle’s lesbian bars, if she was indeed bisexual then she kept quiet about it. Dietrich, incidentally, was Piaf’s matron of honour when she married Jacques Pills in 1952.
When Lesley Gore hit the big time in 1963, the same year that Piaf died, she was still just 17 – the perfect age for the protagonist in her first million-seller ‘It’s My Party’. Less than a year later she scored big with ‘You Don’t Own Me’, a fantastic proto-feminist disc that was denied the Number One spot in the US by the Beatles and ‘I Want to Hold Your Hand’. The singer, who was born Lesley Sue Goldstein in Brooklyn on 2 May, 1946, realised that she was a lesbian when she was in her 20s, and although there was no public announcement, it wasn’t exactly a secret either. ‘I just never found it was necessary because I really never kept my life private,’ Lesley admitted. ‘Those who knew me, those who worked with me were well aware’.35 As well as maintaining a recording and composing career – she co-wrote several songs for the soundtrack of the hit 1980 film Fame – she also acted (she appeared in two episodes of the Batman series in 1967, and in several episodes of the TV soap All My Children) and from 2004 hosted the PBS television series In the Life, which focused on LGBT issues. Lesley, who died in 2015, spent the last 33 years of her life in a committed relationship with jewellery designer Lois Sasson.
Camp Records order form, c. 1965
CHAPTER 7
Camp Records
‘He’s well adjusted, I suppose; he doesn’t care if the whole world knows. He goes cruising every night, wearing pants that are too damn tight …’
‘Homer the Happy Little Homo’ by Byrd E. Bath1
At the beginning of the 1960s, the American men’s magazine Adam lent its name to a series of stag party albums; records designed to be played at bawdy, boozy all-male gatherings. Issued by the Fax Record Company, dozens of these discs, by mostly anonymous performers, appeared, containing ribald songs interspersed with slices of blue humour. One of these albums, Sex Is My Business, was, according to the sleeve notes, ‘the result of actual interviews with prostitutes, homosexuals, pimps and “Johns” in which we hear them tell the fascinating and almost unbelievable story of their lives; their experiences, how they work, what they do and why, the money they receive and the money they pay; their fears, anxieties, hopes and strange loves … all in their own words in a frank, graphic and revealing description of a way of life few of us know or understand.’2 Another, Nights of Love on Lesbos, claimed to be a ‘frankly intimate description of a sensuous young girl’s lesbian desires’:3 in reality it was a recital of parts of French poet Pierre Louÿs’ Songs of Bilitis, but in an attempt at achieving some mark of respectability its sleeve notes were penned by Frederick van Pelt Bryan, the US District Court judge who was instrumental in allowing the publication of Lady Chatterley’s Lover. Sold under the counter in specialist shops or, more usually, through adverts in men’s magazines, these albums spawned several imitators, with other companies eager to tap into the titillation. It’s here, in the land of slightly risqué mail order, that the Camp label was born.
Although in the strictest sense the modern-day use of the word camp derives from the French se camper (to pose in an exaggerated fashion), in gay circles since at least the early years of the twentieth century the word has meant one thing only: effeminate. In places where people spoke Polari, this flighty, limp-wristed aesthetic got its name from the acronym KAMP, an effeminate man who was Known As a Male Prostitute. The actor and comedian Kenneth Williams wrote that ‘To some it means that which is fundamentally frivolous, to others the baroque as opposed to the puritanical and to others – a load of poofs’4 and he should have known: the closeted Williams and his out companion in comedy Hugh Paddick (who spent the last 30 years of his life with his partner, Francis) made a bona little living, thank you very much, as the über-camp Julian and Sandy, stalwarts of the hit Brit radio show Round the Horne. It’s very clear from listening to the material where the little-known Camp Records label got its name.
Originating from a company called Different Products Unlimited in Hollywood, California, Camp Records (run by the elusive E. Richman) specialised in producing gay-themed novelty records which they advertised, under the banner ‘racy … ribald … madly gay … way out!’ in the back pages of publications such as Drum: Sex in Perspective (a revolutionary magazine from the Janus Society with a national circulation of around
15,000), One and Vagabond, a mid-’60s catalogue aimed exclusively at gay men. Mail order businesses that specialised in gay and lesbian books, such as Washington DC’s Guild Book Service (run by gay publishing pioneer H. Lynn Womack), San Francisco’s Dorian Book Service and Philadelphia’s Lark Publications also carried stock of the discs. The releases were, naturally, ‘shipped postage paid, in sealed plain package’.
Described by their own press releases as ‘wilder, madder (and) gayer than a Beatle’s hairdo,’ Camp Records issued ten 45s. None are dated, but according to correspondence on the company’s headed notepaper, the first two releases (the single ‘Leather Jacket Lovers’ and album The Queen Is In The Closet) seem to have been issued around July 1964 and the third, the 45 release ‘Ballad of the Camping Woodcutter’/‘Scotch Mist’, was released at the end of November. The only ads that have surfaced for the label were published in 1964 and 1965. No new releases appeared after late 1965. The material typically consisted of parodies of well-known songs with their lyrics rewritten to reflect a camp sensibility: ‘I’m So Wet (the Shower Song)’ is a rewrite of the French folk song ‘Alouette’; ‘London Derriere’ is a rewrite of ‘Danny Boy’ (aka Londonderry Air …), and ‘Scotch Mist’ is ‘The Bonnie Banks o’ Loch Lomond’ (better known perhaps as ‘You Take The High Road’) with new lyrics. Some of the discs featured new songs in various styles including rock ’n’ roll (‘I’d Rather Fight Than Swish’ and ‘Leather Jacket Lovers’), Sinatra-style crooner-pop and Latin jazz.
David Bowie Made Me Gay Page 11