Oh God, I Could Do Better Than That

When the AV Club posted an article titled, "What Did David Bowie Mean to You?", my initial reaction was: not a whole lot.  The article itself, composed of short tributes by several AV Club critics, is quite good, often moving, and it at least acknowledged the queerness in much of Bowie's work and personae.

An earlier article on the recording of Bowie's second album, The Man Who Sold the World, didn't acknowledge it, and I thought that was a significant omission because the original cover English cover art, replaced with something more neutral on the US release, upset a lot of critics (Not as much as the original cover art for Diamond Dogs did, though.)  So did the song "Width of a Circle," with its account of the singer's encounter with a leather boy.  I suppose it could be taken as a positive sign that the musicians in Bowie's band for that album apparently didn't react negatively when he brought in those lyrics, but I wish someone had asked them about it.

Because when I thought about it, I realized that what Bowie did mean to me for a while in the 70s was that he was a major-label artist who recorded gay content.  Hunky Dory, his third album, had "Queen Bitch," a sort of tribute to the Velvet Underground with lyrics about rival queens pursuing a piece of trade.  As I remember it now, I bought Hunky Dory because of "Queen Bitch," and while it was a fine rocker and the lyrics were a breakthrough of some kind for major-label pop, I was also disappointed.  When Lester Bangs wrote later that he "thought [Bowie] wrote the absolute worst lyrics I had ever heard from a major pop figure with the exception of Bernie Taupin," I was relieved to find that I wasn't the only person who thought so.  It just occurred to me that Bowie could be seen as the Kilgore Trout of pop, after Kurt Vonnegut's fictional science fiction author who had great ideas, but was a terrible writer.  In "Queen Bitch," for example, it seemed to me that Bowie had picked up some American street slang but didn't really know what it meant or how to use it.  On the other hand, I admired his admonition to his newborn son: "Don't pick fights with the bullies or the cads/'Cause I'm not much cop at punching other people's Dads."  One reason why Hunky Dory stands out among his product is that for once Bowie spoke personally, even intimately, in his lyrics, with touching results.

Bowie continued to play with erotic and gender ambiguity for his next few albums.  One of my favorites from The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars is "Lady Stardust," whose "lady" is a "boy."  I like some of the rockers better ("Hang On To Yourself," "Suffragette City"), but lyrically, "Lady Stardust" is interesting.  On Aladdin Sane, "ambiguity" is the key.  Several of the songs can be heard as gay or straight, such as "Panic in Detroit," whose narrator might be male or female.  In "Cracked Actor," for example, about a middle-aged movie star who picks up a hustler on "Sunset and Vine," the hustler might be male (I always took it for granted), but might also be female (as a homophobic straight friend insisted).  Lester Bangs, as I recall, disliked Bowie's cover of the Stones' "Let's Spend the Night Together," which he saw as a gay remake, but I've never been sure of that; the eye of the beholder, I guess.

Then came Diamond Dogs, which included "Rebel Rebel," probably his best-known and most-covered song about gender confusion.  "You've got your mother in a whirl / She's not sure if you're a boy or a girl."  Bowie never resolves it, which is fine. I took it for granted in those days that other performers would take advantage of the opening Bowie had created by coming out, which took a lot more courage then than it does now.  It didn't happen.

It's always been seen as Bowie's trademark that he changed stage personae like a "chameleon," a word that often recurs in the reviews.  (It's funny to see him complaining about the short attention span of the media in this conversation with William Burroughs from 1974; he was one to talk!)  But within each era he also wrote for different characters: the "I" of "Cracked Actor" isn't the "I" of "Panic in Detroit," and on Ziggy Stardust the "I" changes from song to song.  This fit with the theatricality that numerous rockers were playing with in those days, from the Doors to the Who, and the dramatic monologue was used by other singers as well.  Musically, in terms of his songwriting as well as his singing style, Bowie belonged more to English theatrical tradition than to rock; he was often compared to Anthony Newley in reviews.  But I think that his performance of different characters in his songs bothered a lot of critics, especially Americans it seemed.  They wanted to believe that if Bowie sang a song about sex with a boy, it had to be his own experience, despite all the lyrical evidence that it wasn't necessarily so.  Randy Newman (a much better lyricist) got away with it, but in general playing roles upset the critics' Puritan sensibilities.  (Lester Bangs came from a family of Jehovah's Witnesses, for what that may be worth.  Despite his raunchy talk and substance abuse, Lester was quite a Puritan.)

As Bowie moved away from his queer period, disavowing and disowning his previous avowal of bisexuality, I largely lost interest in him, though I dutifully listened to and sometimes bought each album as it came out until sometime in the 80s.  It wasn't because of the lack of queer content -- there was often some excitement among the fans over ambiguous songs like "Boys Keep Swinging" -- but because I didn't find his music interesting.  (There are plenty of heterosexual musicians whose work I like.)  I've been listening to Blackstar, his farewell album, and while I'd like to like it, it's not working for me.  The dirgelike music suits his mood, I guess; he knew he was dying when he recorded it.  But the lyrics don't grab my attention, they're the usual Bowie word salad, and the music doesn't reach me either.

The writers in the A.V. Club piece are at least twenty years younger than I am, and first encountered Bowie's music ten years or more after I did.  They grew up with him, either as a musician or as an actor.  His role as the Goblin King in Labyrinth made a big impact on several of them.  Of course he meant something different to them than he did to me.  I'd begun returning to his music several months ago, before the world knew he was sick, and much of it does work for me, as I've said above.  The songs I liked forty years ago, I still like; those I didn't like haven't grown on me.  As with any artist, we create our own meanings for Bowie.

Allow Me To Explain Through Interpretive Dance

Credit for the title of this post must go to Threadless T-Shirts, which I learned about through a comment by karina at Nicola Griffith's blog. I must have that shirt.

But a few words about this number from The American Astronaut, a tiny-budget artsy-fartsy science-fiction / Western musical which is one of the gayest/queerest movies I've seen in a long time. Because it mostly doesn't use standard gay-male codes and tropes, it's easy to miss just how queer it is. Watching The American Astronaut for the first time I kept waiting for its mainly all-male universe to resolve into mere "homosociality" and a heterosexual love interest, but it never did. The main character (writer/director Cory McAbee, in the john stall in this clip), who has separated himself from love, ends up running away from the Southern Belles of Venus into outer space with a dumb-blond boy who wears the campiest outfit this side of Aleister Crowley. And how about that hot little bear who dances his heart out in this scene? At first you'd think that he and his partner were just practicing for a dance contest and were unaware of McAbee's presence, but by the end they make it clear that they know he's there and that the song is indeed a message for him. A rare gift.

There Won't Be A Problem Till The Girls Go Home

I don’t make any claim to historical completeness in what follows; I’ve not mentioned numerous performers who’d be relevant in a complete discussion of queer popular music. I don’t follow music and journalism/criticism as I did before the early 1990s, so I’m not sure I’m right about the trend I describe; this is just how it looks to me. With that in mind….

For me personally, how little has changed for gay people in the US can be summed up in one question:

Where’s the gay popular music?

It may be a generational thing. I know from gay.com that gay performers are releasing CDs. The ones who get attention on gay.com are, of course, mostly young, male and photogenic. Whether their music is any good or not, I can’t say. More important, I can’t tell how much of it has gay content – that is, whether they sing love songs to other males.

We have some out gay and lesbian performers, but few of them actually sing same-sex love songs. Has Melissa Etheridge recorded any love songs explicitly addressed to women? I’ve heard some live recordings by her covering other singers’ songs, like a magnificent dyke version of “Piece of My Heart,” but her own material? How about k. d. lang? Has Elton John sung any lyrics addressed to a male since “Daniel”? Rufus Wainwright will talk about his life in “gay hell,” but can he record a love song to a cute boy? (This is a generational thing, I’m sure. I found Wainwright’s first album boring, hate his voice and his preening performance style, and refuse to spend money on his later work.)

I remember reading a joint interview with Elton John and his lyricist Bernie Taupin, laughing derisively because their 1973 song “Daniel” had been interpreted by some people as “homosexual.” “Daniel” was included on the 1996 Love Songs compilation, which seems to concede that those people were right. Jackson Browne wrote some ambiguous songs of male friendship that I added to my own repertoire, like “Song for Adam”; I also appropriated his “For a Dancer,” whose subject isn’t gendered, but which always made me think of a gay male friend I used to dance with. In that vein there’s also Simon & Garfunkel’s “The Only Living Boy in New York.” And I hear Dylan’s “Mr. Tambourine Man” as a love song to a man; that’s how it makes most sense, as Dylan’s most open-hearted and generous love song to anyone. Whether it’s “gay” is another question, though “Ballad of a Thin Man” surely is. (So blatant as to be almost invisible: “Jailhouse Rock” and the Animals’ “House of the Rising Sun.”)

Glam rock and genderfuck never interested me much. I was haunted and tantalized by a 1974 album on Apple, “Brother”, by two Dutch brothers, Lon and Derrek Von Eaton. The cover showed the two young men, shirtless, cuddled together. I never cuddled like that with my brothers.

Here’s the ironic thing: there seems to have been more gay/lesbian/queer pop music recorded and released on major labels in the 1970s and 1980s than there is now. Much of that music is admittedly problematic in terms of “positive images”: David Bowie’s queer songs often depicted (male) homosexuality as decadent, doomed, deadly. The same is true of Jobriath, or Gary Numan, or Mitch Ryder, the Ramones, or The Smiths. But often the songs were ambiguous and ambivalent: is Bowie’s “Queen Bitch” a positive or negative song? Ryder’s “Cherry Poppin’”? Others were simply matter-of-fact, like some of the Buzzcocks’s work and Pete Shelley’s witty, wicked “Homo Sapien.” For many gay people, just the fact that the songs had been recorded and released was positive, and the music was important in their coming out.

There was also lesbian music, not just on Olivia and other small women’s labels, most notably Nona Hendryx, both as a member of LaBelle and in her solo work; and more recently Toshi Reagon. But the women’s music movement and festivals were important in giving exposure and space to women-loving women. Gay men preferred drag queens – men impersonating this or that diva, ventriloquizing their desire for other men through a female mask. It was Gloria Gaynor's version of "I Am What I Am," the draq-queen manifesto from La Cage aux Folles, that was played in the gay clubs; I'm not aware of any version by a male singer that was even released, aside from the Broadway cast album. (I'm not complaining because a woman recorded it; only that gay men evidently weren't interested in hearing it sung by a man.)

I’ve found that most gay men I’ve talked to about this are at best apathetic about hearing men sing love songs to men, and a surprising number are homophobically hostile. (When I’ve performed before gay audiences, the men’s faces would contort into disgusted grimaces when they realized I was singing gay material. I got a much better reception from straight audiences, probably because they didn’t realize what I was doing.) The gay male tradition involves identification with female actresses or singers, whether popular or operatic.

I was already out when this music appeared, so it whetted my appetite for more. At the time I took for granted that these beginnings would be followed by more and better. To my surprise, it was the opposite: the seventies and eighties were the high-water mark of queer pop music, and since then gay/lesbian material has been pushed back to the margins. This is at least partly because gay people don’t seem to be interested in it, but there actually was a backlash in the male pop music mainstream. Lester Bangs (who’d coined the term “punk rock”, maybe unaware that a punk is the kid who gets punked – fucked – in jail) called Bowie “the chicken-headed king of suck rock” (a great name for a band, I think). When the Ramones emerged in the 70s, the Village Voice celebrated their leather-jacketed scrawniness with a front-page tribute: They’re Not Queers. (Which didn’t keep them from recording the odd love song to boys. And I admit, I bought their first album just for the cover photo.) There was the whole “Disco Sucks” thing, and then hip-hop’s overt homophobia gave white – not to mention black – boys license to yell “fag” as much as they wanted. (It gave their misogyny free rein too.)

Yes, I know that gay people are a minority, quite a small one. But there are lots of niches in pop music. Does it matter how many people listen to klezmer, for instance? And homosexuality, construed as failed manhood and butt sex, obsesses straight males, especially the younger ones who are the main constituency of pop music.

I don’t demand constant overtness. I like ambiguous material, like Elvis Costello’s “Secondary Modern”, which may or may not be about a high-school boy pitching covert woo to another boy at a party: “But there won’t be a problem till the girls go home.” But I do also want overtness, by which I don’t mean necessarily sexual explicitness but rather unmistakable expression of love, romantic passion, what have you. (See Pete Townshend’s amazing, ambivalent, aggressive “Rough Boys”, from 1980.) The play Falsettos didn’t impress me much, but I was still thrilled and moved to tears by the sight of two men singing duets of love to each other. I want more; can I have a little more? Evidently not -- or, as Harvey Fierstein might say, Not enough.