Bullock - David Bowie Made Me Gay: 100 Years of LGBT Music

DAVID BOWIE
MADE ME GAY

100 Years of LGBT Music

DARRYL W. BULLOCK

First published in the United Kingdom and the United States
by Duckworth Overlook in 2017

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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.

The right of Darryl W. Bullock to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Typeset in Dante by M Rules

Printed and bound in Great Britain
by TJ International

UK ISBN: 9780715651926
US ISBN: 9781468315592

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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.

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 Robinson, 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

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 lifes motto

Sean Dickson, a.k.a. HiFi Sean

N ow, I know what youre thinking: surely the world doesnt 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 fiance discovered his lifeless body assuming, of course, that you believe Elvis did in fact die in 1977 and he isnt 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 Eltons latest falling-out with Madonna, lists of Freddie Mercurys former sexual partners or stories about what really caused George Michaels tumble onto the tarmac, but while celebrity spats and the more sensational aspects of someones 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), 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 worlds 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 Manchesters 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 its 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 hasnt 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.