David Bowie Made Me Gay

by Darryl W. Bullock

  ‘There seems to be a rule about it,’ Patrick Haggerty adds:

  First it was OK to be gay, then it was OK to be gay and be out, then it was OK to be gay and be out and be a professional, then it was OK to be gay and be out and be on TV, then it was OK to be gay and be out and win office – and all of these developments were barriers that needed to be broken down. Well, the barrier that we’ve been facing all along is that it’s OK to be gay but it’s not OK to sing about it. That’s the barrier, and that’s been true my whole adult life. It’s OK to be gay but it’s not OK to sing about being gay. It has been very, very persistent and very difficult to overcome, and of course the last barrier is Nashville – and even they are crumbling.’

  ‘There have been many times that I’ve wanted to walk away, because it gets very tiring and I feel like I’m banging my head against a brick wall,’ Jensen admits,

  but then I think about what questions I’m going to ask myself right before I die. I always worry have I done what I needed to do, and in the end, when you’re no longer breathing somebody else takes the big house and the big car and everything else. One of the questions that I ask myself is “what is the legacy?” What about being the guy that allows a 20 year-old to believe that he can do it? One of the people that taught me how to stand up and move forward, no matter what happens, was Boy George …

  People come up to me all the time to tell me that they love what I’m doing, and that’s the gas in the tank. That’s how I get it back. One young transgendered girl ran up to me at the last show I did and said “I just want you to know that I follow everything you do. I’m so happy to meet you. You’re one of my heroes”. And what do you say? I say: “thank you so much, now tell me about you” … you need to be able to be there for them, that’s your job and I think the greatest artists understand that.

  In January 2017, Country Music Television’s Cody Alan, host of CMT’s Hot 20 Countdown and winner of the Academy of Country Music’s National Broadcast Personality for 2010 and 2013, publicly came out as gay, telling his 132,000 Instagram followers, ‘I realised that this could have a great, positive impact on many people who may be country music fans and may feel like they don’t fit in. But they see a guy like me on TV who is country and gay, and they recognise that there’s a place for you here, and that country music is a warm, welcoming space.’

  Patrick Haggerty’s re-emergence on the scene inspired filmmaker Dan Taberski to produce the multiple award-winning documentary These C*cksucking Tears: ‘I’m working with a lot of straight country musicians,’ Haggerty adds:

  They’re way more sophisticated, and way more progressive than the trite, tired and boring lyrics they’re being forced to sing, but most of them are doing what they have to do to be heard in Nashville. When they hear something like Lavender Country it’s like they have been locked up in a stinking basement for 20 years and someone finally gave them a breath of fresh air … I can really feel the walls tumbling in Nashville. I think that having a gay component to the Americana Festival [an annual, week-long festival and conference for American music fans and industry professionals] is the beginning of the end and the fact that the Americana Festival is being forced to add a gay component has the potential to crack things wide open for everybody. The industry has very tight politics: closet cases high up in the industry are fucking freaked out … Straight people want to support gay rights, but when they go to gay executives for advice they shut them down … I’m not speaking unkindly about the gay community; the gay community has made enormous strides and we’ve done wonderful things and having Lavender Country be acknowledged is another wonderful thing that we did.

  Early Village People press photo, 1978

  CHAPTER 13

  Can’t Stop the Music

  ‘The Village People get good reviews because they are a disco group (gasp) with gay (erk) overtones which straight rock critics can appreciate for its sense of humor’

  ‘Village People: First Flash Wears Off’, Doylestown Intelligencer, 25 May 1979

  In Philadelphia in 1975 Jacques Morali and Henri Belolo, two Morocco-born but Paris-based business partners, were looking to secure their first major hit. Private gay dance parties in Philadelphia and DJ and club promoter David Mancuso’s legendary LSD-laced New York loft parties were giving rise to a new sound, influenced by European pop, soul and glam rock, and the duo had been drawn to the City of Brotherly Love in search of ‘the next big thing’. The music they heard was music to dance to, music for all classes and all colours, at odds with the guitar-heavy sounds that dominated the US airwaves but not a million miles away from the string-laden pop sounds Morali had been associated with back in Paris. With records mixed together to provide a continuous soundtrack, disco dominated gay clubs years before it went mainstream. The first disco hits that crossed over into the pop charts – the records of Barry White, George McCrae, Gloria Gaynor and Donna Summer – had already proved themselves to be huge successes in LGBT clubs and had helped fill the basement dance floor of New York’s notorious Continental Baths, where a young gay DJ called Francis Nicholls, known professionally as Frankie Knuckles, was making a name for himself.

  One of the regular performers at the Continental Baths was the Bronx-born, Puerto Rican singer Joseph Montanez Jr, alias Sir Monti Rock III. Monti had one of the first crossover disco hits when, as the glitter-plastered, feather boa-wearing frontman of songwriter Bob Crewe’s studio band Disco Tex and His Sex-O-Lettes, he made the charts with ‘Get Dancin’’ (released in November 1974) and its follow-up ‘I Wanna Dance Wit’ Choo’, although he had in fact issued his first 45 (‘For Days and Days’) in 1965. Thrown out of home at 13 for being gay, he worked as a male prostitute before making a name for himself as the hairdresser to the stars. Operating out of a salon in department store Saks Fifth Avenue, Rock became something of a minor local celebrity, appearing on The Merv Griffin Show and Tonight with Johnny Carson dozens of times. His sexuality was no secret: in 1966, while on Merv Griffin with Jayne Mansfield, comedian Henny Youngman referred to Rock as ‘Lawrence of Fire Island’ (in a reference to New York’s well-known gay resort) and made several crude jokes at his expense. ‘I was gay, but people didn’t mention “gay” in those days,’ he says. He was sacked from Saks for appearing nude in a gay magazine’s photo spread. Not that it mattered: in 1969 he was cast in the Hollywood movie 2000 Years Later with Terry-Thomas and Edward Everett Horton. Surely stardom beckoned?

  Back in Philadelphia, Morali and Belolo assembled a studio group and recorded an album, Brazil, one side of which contained all but instrumental disco versions of classic 1940s songs including ‘Brazil’ and ‘The Peanut Vendor’. Needing vocalists for the project the duo pulled in three women, Cassandra Ann Wooten and Gwendolyn Oliver of the girl group Honey & the Bees, and Cheryl Mason Jacks – and The Ritchie Family was born. The group, which took its name from arranger and assistant producer Richie Rome, took ‘Brazil’ to Number One in the US dance charts. The following year The Ritchie Family scored again: ‘The Best Disco in Town’, a medley of recent disco hits, was an international smash, going Top Ten in the UK, Australia, the Netherlands and Norway, and providing them with a second US dance chart-topper.

  Unfortunately, things were not going so well for Monti Rock. Following his two hit singles, he put together an outrageous stage show, but his time in the spotlight was up almost as soon as it had begun. His second album, Manhattan Millionaire, stiffed and with no records to be made he tried his hand at acting once again, appearing as the DJ in Saturday Night Fever and in a ‘blink and you’ll miss it’ cameo in the dreadful Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. In the 40 years that have passed since then, Monti has attempted several comebacks, issued a one-off single in Germany (1982’s ‘In Havana’) and has become an ordained minister, offering marriage ceremonies in Las Vegas. Name-checked by both Elvis Costello and the Pet Shop Boys, he’s still trying to make it big today. ‘I’m not a singer. I’m not an actor. What I am is somebody who believes so much
in myself that I can make you believe.’1

  While our Parisian pals were holidaying in New York, the gay Morali (who, after an abortive attempt at a solo career with the 1967 EP Elle Aime, Elle N’Aime Pas had moved into writing and production) spotted a man on Christopher Street in Greenwich Village wearing a full Native American costume. The pair followed him into the Anvil, West 14th Street’s notoriously sleazy pick-up joint, where they soon spotted him. They could hardly miss him, for the man they would soon discover was called Felipe Rose had climbed up onto the bar and was shaking his stuff with wild abandon. Inside the Anvil that night the two men saw just about every macho man stereotype they could think of; the bar was full of construction workers, cops in uniform, leather-clad (and heavily moustachioed) bikers, GIs in full fatigues and jolly Jack Tars who had probably never set foot on a ship. Inspired by their visit, Belolo and Morali placed an advert in the Village Voice: ‘Macho types wanted: must dance and have a mustache’. Around sixty guys showed up at the ‘audition’; not one of them made it into the studio for the first Village People EP – four songs each depicting an aspect of gay life in the US. The vocals would be handled by Victor Willis, a straight actor Morali discovered in the Broadway production of The Wiz: ‘I had a dream that you sang lead vocals on my album and it went very, very big,’ Morali told him.2 Felipe, as ‘Indian from the Anvil’ won himself a small credit for playing ‘bells’; he was also the only member of the group to appear on the sleeve. A cheap video was shot for ‘San Francisco’: of the seven men featured dancing and singing along to the tune only Rose and Willis made Morali and Belolo’s final list. At the same time, just a 10-minute walk from the Anvil, at a club called Century 21, a young gay DJ by the name of Walter Gibbons was making a name for himself as a genius on the turntable, stretching out beats and splicing them into other songs to create his own exclusive mixes. Soon he would become the first star DJ commissioned by a record company to create a remix from the original multi-track recording and, with Loleatta Holloway’s Hit And Run, produced the first proper disco-mix 12" single.

  Casablanca, who had already tasted huge disco success with Giorgio Moroder and Donna Summer, signed the new act to a multi-album deal: all Morali and Belolo had to do was find the rest of the singers for the project. Through a further casting session they found Glenn Hughes (the leather man), Alex Briley (the GI) and construction worker David Hodo. Morali found Randy Jones, his cowboy, dancing with Grace Jones. The classic six-man line-up was in place, and Morali and Belolo wasted no time in getting them in to the studio to record the vocals for the first full-length Village People album, Macho Man. Everyone involved in the project, bar Morali and Belolo, was surprised when, in September 1978, the title song became a hit, making the Billboard Top 30.

  In their first two years together, the Village People hit Number One in the UK (and Number Two in the US) with ‘Y.M.C.A.’, made the UK and US Top Three with ‘In The Navy’, had a Top 20 hit with ‘Go West’ (later covered by the Pet Shop Boys), and were awarded six gold and four platinum records, selling over 20 million singles and 18 million albums worldwide. They filled major concert venues, caused near-riots when they appeared in public and were featured heavily on television, in the press and on radio. You simply could not escape them. According to celebrity photographer Mick Rock, Queen singer Freddie Mercury ‘was never the same again’ after seeing an early Village People performance at the Anvil: ‘Freddie was “utterly mesmerised” by the sight of Glenn Hughes. The Anvil experience was presumed to be the inspiration for both the “leather” and “gay clone” looks which Freddie would adopt’.3 Their massive success with straight audiences and their knowing nod to the gay scene that begat them made them seem subversive: young girls and grandmothers could dance to their non-threatening disco-pop 45s, and gay men could enjoy the scarcely veiled double entendres which filled the group’s celebrations of LGBT life. The Village People were fun. ‘It’s not important who we are and what we are,’ Randy Jones claimed. ‘Only that people have a good time listening to us’.4 Then Victor Willis, who co-wrote all of their hits, decided to leave.

  Although most members of the group had been guarded about their sexuality (‘I never took this job with the idea of becoming a professional pervert or a public sleaze’ David Hodo told reporters),5 the man who struggled the most with the group’s gay image was the married Willis, and he was not happy when Morali came out in the press in 1978. ‘The group has never performed gay. Nobody has ever come out in drag. The group performs a masculine show. Gay people like us, straight people like us. But we’re not a gay group,’ he told whoever would listen,6 although few took his protestations seriously: after all, this was the man who had co-written ‘Hot Cop’ and ‘Macho Man’, and had fronted the band’s Cruisin’ album. His departure came just as the group were preparing to star in their first (and, so far, only) movie, the ultra-camp Can’t Stop the Music, and although Ray Simpson would replace Willis, the Village People would never have another substantial hit. The film’s title track failed to chart in their home country and the movie itself, co-starring Caitlyn (then publicly known as Bruce) Jenner, was a box-office bomb. It shouldn’t have been: the Village People were hot, the cast was filled out with accomplished talent, it was directed by the award-winning comedy actor Nancy Walker and produced by Alan Carr, who just two years before had backed Grease. Unfortunately the Village People themselves stank: ‘it’s dumb, but great fun … musically they are terrific. So what if they can’t act?’ was one of the kinder reviews.7

  Willis would return briefly, after the group released their disastrous (and virtually unlistenable) new wave album Renaissance, but to no avail. Soon the Village People’s original police officer would run afoul of the real cops: in February 1997 he was arrested at Reno’s Flamingo Hilton hotel on robbery, drugs and false imprisonment charges and, unable to raise the $56,000 bail, was jailed.8 Charges for false imprisonment were later dropped but he was arrested again in July 2005 when Californian police found him in possession of ‘a .45-calibre handgun as well as rock cocaine and drug paraphernalia’.9 After several years out of the spotlight, and a number of line-up changes (only Felipe Rose and Alex Briley remain), the band did achieve a renaissance of sorts and – by finally embracing their status as gay icons – have become a staple of LGBT Pride events around the world.

  *

  If you wanted to meet a member of the Village People then the best place to go – if you were glamorous or famous enough to get past the uppity door staff – was Studio 54. Co-founded in 1977 by gay entrepreneur Steve Rubell, Studio 54 was the place to be seen for every hip New Yorker. It was housed in a former TV studio on Manhattan’s West 54th Street; on any given night you could see Grace Jones (one fan went so far as to handcuff himself to her ankle during a performance),10 Donna Summer, Gloria Gaynor, Sylvester and Two Tons O’ Fun, The Village People, Klaus Nomi or any one of dozens of other LGBT favourites on stage while you rubbed shoulders with Andy Warhol, Liza Minnelli, Mick and Bianca (or Mick and Jerry), Elton John, Freddie Mercury, David Bowie, Salvador Dali, Donald Trump and just about everyone who was anyone who happened to be passing through the city. Infamous for its excesses (Bianca Jagger rode a white horse into the club on her birthday), the sex and the obscene amount of drugs being snorted in every dark corner, the fun and frolics were short-lived. In 1980, after a disgruntled employee reported the club’s shady financial goings-on to the IRS, Rubell and business partner Ian Schrager were jailed for tax evasion and the club was sold.

  After a period in Los Angeles, where he ‘lived as a woman for a few years’11, in 1970 Sylvester James moved to San Francisco and became a member of the city’s outrageous cabaret collective the Cockettes, occasionally performing a drag tribute to Billie Holiday. Preferring to run his own show, he took on a pair of female backing singers, Martha Wash and Izora Rhodes, who at that time were known as Two Tons O’ Fun but who would later find everlasting fame as the Weather Girls and enjoy a huge international hit of their own wi
th ‘It’s Raining Men’. Openly gay throughout his career (he had left the church to pursue a career in secular music as the congregation disapproved of his sexuality), he said that it was his grandmother – who herself had been a blues singer in the 1930s – who encouraged him to embrace his sexuality. ‘She’d met quite a few gay men, and so she saw the signs in me early in my life,’ he told journalist Alan Wall. ‘When I was in my teens she told me to live the way I wanted to, not to pretend. So I took her advice and did exactly that.’12 So identified was he with the city that 11 March 1979 was declared ‘Sylvester Day’ and the singer was awarded the keys to the city by Mayor Dianne Feinstein.13

  Forever known for his 1979 hit ‘You Make Me Feel (Mighty Real)’, Sylvester’s gay anthem only became a hit after his friend Patrick Cowley, inspired by the electronic disco created by Giorgio Moroder for Donna Summer’s epic ‘I Feel Love’, offered to remix what had been, until then, a mid-tempo gospel tune. Cowley’s bouncing synthesiser style became synonymous with Sylvester, and the duo’s signature sound has been cited as an influence by the Pet Shop Boys and New Order: in issue 30 of their fan club magazine Literally, Neil Tennant and Chris Lowe discussed how their song ‘Psychological’ (from the album Fundamental) was inspired by Cowley’s productions.