David Bowie Made Me Gay

by Darryl W. Bullock

  His decision to die offstage, to keep his private health battles to himself, coupled with the fact that his career had recently been undergoing a renaissance, only served to amplify the sense of shock. These days we are bombarded with the ins and outs of so-called stars’ private lives; for Bowie to swear the few who knew about his terminal cancer diagnosis to secrecy meant that when the announcement of his death was made, it was almost as shocking as the assassination of his friend and occasional collaborator John Lennon had been in December 1980. Like Lennon’s, Bowie’s death had a far greater impact than that of most musicians – greater even than that of Queen frontman Freddie Mercury, who in 1991 became the first major rock star to die from AIDS.

  It somehow seems right that a wider audience would mourn Bowie, for he was more than a musician. David Bowie was an actor, a writer, a painter, a fashion icon and a trendsetter … and he was directly responsible for the proliferation of lesbian, gay, bisexual and trans musicians we have today. ‘David Bowie was the perfect fantasy and foil for the teenage gay kid at the time,’ says Kid Congo Powers, former member of The Gun Club, The Cramps and Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, and currently fronting Kid Congo Powers and the Pink Monkey Birds. ‘He was a rock star, androgynous, hedonistic and an alien from outer space, typifying exactly what a gay teenager experienced. We felt like aliens growing into our bodies and experimenting with alcohol and drugs. I could relate to the Bowie image – hook, line and sinker.’1

  In January 1972, less than five years after a change in UK law meant that gay men were no longer to be persecuted for simply having sex, Bowie told Michael Watts, a journalist from the Melody Maker, ‘I’m gay and always have been, even when I was David Jones,’ a statement that would resonate with a number of young people and have far-reaching repercussions.

  ‘I was desperately searching for some kind of gay identity when I was a teenager, and books and films and pop music were one of the ways I found that,’ Frankie Goes to Hollywood’s Holly Johnson told Gay Times in April 1994. ‘It was like that feeling the very first time you go to a gay club: you realise that there are other people like you. It was all quite a revelation. David Bowie, Marc Bolan, Roxy Music, Lou Reed. I used to tell people “Oh, I’m bisexual, just like my hero David”!’2 To Paul Rutherford, he ‘was too wonderful. He was like a gift from the Gods, with that kind of talent’.3

  The use of gay imagery on the Hunky Dory track ‘Queen Bitch’ (one of Bowie’s attempts to out-Lou his idol Lou Reed) did not go unnoticed, nor did his penchant for performing mock fellatio on stage with guitarist Mick Ronson. Bowie’s accessible androgyny appealed to all: you didn’t have to be gay to appreciate it. ‘The first time I recall having my ears truly tickled by Bowie was when I was on holiday in Weymouth with my parents in a wretched caravan,’ reveals XTC frontman Andy Partridge.

  On a Saturday morning the radio was on and the BBC played ‘Andy Warhol’ [also from Hunky Dory]. I vaguely knew who Andy Warhol was by then but what I was taken with was Bowie’s flamboyant singing, a sort of gulping yodel that caught me aside swipes. A mental note was made about this boy. I was up in London, shopping for clothes in Kensington Market in the summer of 1972, and was having a burger for lunch in a café there, when a record stall a few feet away put on the just-released Ziggy Stardust album, very loud. Man, I was in heaven. I’d just bought a sailor jacket, which I was to dye red (it went pink!), and I was having a burger and a milkshake, with ‘Moonage Daydream’ bending my brain. It was the same record stall that featured in the Clockwork Orange film. Seriously. It was all too perfect.4

  When Bowie draped an arm around Ronson on the BBC’s flagship music show Top of the Pops a few months later, a nation was outraged. Well, the majority of the nation, anyway: there can be little doubt that the indignation of their parents only helped to endear the otherworldly Bowie to young viewers. For the generation that would spawn the out-gay pop stars of the 1980s, Bowie’s outrageous campery and sexual androgyny was a revelation, and for many watching that Thursday evening as David and Mick pushed the bounds of acceptability during their performance of ‘Starman’, Bowie’s current hit single, their own personal journey began. ‘Bowie did not make me gay,’ says Andy Bell of international hit act Erasure, ‘but it was pretty staggering seeing him perform on Top Of The Pops. The music was for a slightly older crowd in school who tended to over-intellectualise; as a boy from a council estate I felt a bit out of my depth’.5

  ‘I first saw David Bowie as Ziggy Stardust, performing at Lewisham Odeon in 1973 just before my twelfth birthday,’ Boy George revealed in a touching tribute to his hero published just two days after his death. ‘I have been a loyal fan since that first concert. As a teenager growing up in Suburbia, I was very much the odd one out and Bowie was the light at the end of a very grey tunnel. He validated me and made me realise I was not alone.’6 Fellow hit-maker Marc Almond felt the same way. ‘He was so much more important to me than my teachers,’ he told The Guardian’s Jude Rogers. ‘He got me into books, music, films – that’s what great pop stars can do’.7 For a nation brought up to laugh at the colourless campery of John Inman, Larry Grayson and Melvyn Hayes (early evening television was full of nancy boys in the 1970s), David Bowie exploded from the TV set like a rainbow-coloured angel. The opening couplet of ‘Rebel Rebel’, where he sang ‘got your mother in a whirl; she’s not sure if you’re a boy or a girl’, simply cemented his stature as the figurehead of the disenfranchised.

  ‘It was only really on discovering the music of David Bowie that music suddenly was about me instead of about somebody else,’ says singer-songwriter, broadcaster and human rights activist Tom Robinson. ‘That experience, of hearing music that I loved and having it emotionally resonate with me, was an enormously important factor for me, and I did say to myself in my early 20s that if I ever had the chance to make music that would also resonate with people like me – rather than people like them – then I would do that. And over the years that’s what I’ve tried to do. I was able to write songs where, ultimately, the relationships were kind of same-sex, implicitly or explicitly.’8

  Bowie may have backtracked on that later, telling Playboy in 1976. ‘It’s true – I am a bisexual’ (and admitting that his first sexual experience, at 14, was with ‘some very pretty boy in class in some school or other that I took home and neatly fucked on my bed upstairs’),9 and seven years later confiding in journalist Kurt Loder that talking to Melody Maker was ‘the biggest mistake I ever made. Christ, I was so young then. I was experimenting,’ but it did not really matter. In her 1993 book Backstage Passes – Life On The Wild Side With David Bowie, the Thin White Duke’s first wife Angie insisted that she had caught David in bed with Mick Jagger; other biographers have made similar claims. Bowie’s backing singer Ava Cherry stated that Angie did indeed find the two rockers in bed together – but that she was also there: ‘They made love to me,’ she told the New York Post. ‘It’s called a cookie. I was the tasty filling. It was wonderful, just like it should have been – everybody on their respective side doing whatever they do. We were friends’.10 Gay, straight or bisexual: whatever word Bowie chose to define his sexuality, this particular cat was out of the bag – or rather the closet. He’d said it, in print, and for thousands of young LGBT people across the world, life was suddenly a little less suffocating.

  Whatever side of the sexual fence he fell on, Bowie’s death heralded an understandable outpouring of grief, and social media platforms were littered with comments from straight, gay, trans and bisexual writers, artists and performers whose lives had been affected by him. Stars including Bruce Springsteen, Paul McCartney, Madonna, Bono and Lady Gaga paid homage in print and on stage. Many echoed Marilyn Manson’s sentiment about how Bowie ‘changed my life forever,’11 including film director Guillermo Del Toro, who said that ‘Bowie existed so all of us misfits learned that an oddity was a precious thing. He changed the world forever’.12 It may sound like a bold claim, but it’s true: although others had been gingerly trying t
o prise open the closet door before him, Bowie was the first rock icon to discuss his sexuality in such open terms in those post-Wolfenden Report years.

  Two years after Bowie broke down the door, Freddie Mercury told the New Musical Express. ‘I am as gay as a daffodil, my dear’.13 No one seemed to notice and, unlike Bowie’s shock disclosure, no one seemed to care. ‘I like that Freddie,’ said Little Richard. ‘But he was not a queen!’ Revisionists have insisted that this was Mercury coming out; others have claimed that the band’s 1975 mega-hit ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ was Mercury’s attempt to out himself to his audience. This simply isn’t the case: Mercury was playing with the NME reporter and stopped short of outing himself proper. He coyly admitting to being ‘camp’ and he claimed that at boarding school he had acted ‘the arch poof’; bandmate Roger Taylor echoed his words, adding, ‘Freddie’s just his natural self: just a poof really,’ but the meaning was clear: he’s outrageous, but he’s not ‘bent’, and the revelation barely got a reaction – even when he ‘pranced around the stage in a ballerina outfit that made him look like a moustachioed Tinkerbell’.14 The year after, Bowie’s friend and fellow glam idol Marc Bolan (who, like Bowie and Mercury, used make-up to enhance his androgynous appeal) admitted to being bisexual, but again this went almost unnoticed. The world, and especially the British media, was either not ready or simply not interested. It all seemed a little calculated, fake even. As Marc Almond says: ‘It didn’t strike me then that Freddie was actually gay’.15

  Besides, Bowie, Bolan and Mercury all had women in their life. Mercury was already known for his outré stage persona, and although he would continue to camp it up, he would never open up in public about being homosexual. ‘I remember back in an interview where I said, “I play on the bisexual thing,”’ he recalled in 1976. ‘Of course I play on it. It’s simply a matter of wherever my mood takes me. If people ask me if I’m gay, I tell them it’s up to them to find out.’ Apparently, those around did not need much convincing. When Mercury split from his long-term girlfriend Mary Austin, saying he thought he was bisexual, Mary is reported to have told him ‘No, Freddie; I think you are gay’.16 Even his later lover, the German soft-core porn star Barbara Valentin, described him as ‘mostly gay’.

  Mercury’s sexuality was no secret to those who knew him; as he became more comfortable in his private life, he also became far less guarded about how he was perceived by the public and the press and, for the most part, they left him alone. However, once he started making more headlines for his hedonistic lifestyle than for his music, the British tabloid press began circling. The message was clear: do what you like in private, but if you dare to bring your sexuality in to the real world we’re going to pounce. When, in 1986, the News Of the World ran a story claiming that Mercury had recently undergone an AIDS test, the article outed him as bisexual. Subsequent stories in the same newspaper, and in sister publication The Sun, continued to dig around in his sex life, finding his former personal manager Paul Prenter willing to spill so long as the reporters kept opening their cheque books: Prenter himself died of AIDS, outlived by a few months by his former employer. On the day Freddie Mercury died, the News Of the World (which went to print before his death was announced) quoted him as saying: ‘I’ve had a lot of lovers. I’ve tried relationships on either side – male and female. But all of them have gone wrong.’17 That last sentence was not quite true. Mary Austin, the woman Mercury had referred to as the love of his life, has stayed loyal to this day, refusing all requests for interviews. Eight years before he died Mercury met Jim Hutton; the pair became lovers and Hutton moved into his house, finally bringing some stability in to his life – although as far as the public and press were concerned, Hutton was simply Mercury’s gardener.

  Freddie Mercury performing in New Haven, 1977

  Bowie may have been open with some of the intimate details of his sex life, but he was not the first superstar of the music industry to attempt to poke a stiletto heel through the closet door. In September 1970, 16 months before Dame David had been summed up in Watts’ Melody Maker article for being ‘a swishy queen, a gorgeously effeminate boy … as camp as a row of tents, with his limp hand and trolling vocabulary’18 – and 10 months after she and Bowie had shared a stage at the London Palladium – Dusty Springfield, one of the biggest stars of the 1960s, came perilously close to revealing that she was bisexual. In an interview with Ray Connolly of The Evening Standard she owned up to sharing her home with another woman – American singer/songwriter Norma Tanega – and told him, that ‘so many other people say I’m bent, and I’ve heard it so many times that I’ve almost learned to accept it. I don’t go leaping around to all the gay clubs but I can be very flattered. Girls run after me a lot and it doesn’t upset me. But I know that I’m as perfectly capable of being swayed by a girl as by a boy. More and more people feel that way and I don’t see why I shouldn’t.’19 Although she was hailed as Britain’s ‘best ever pop singer’ by Rolling Stone magazine, as Connolly reveals, ‘by 1970, when we spoke, her career in the UK was already in decline. In those days, stars had to keep churning out hit singles at a rate of three or four a year and Dusty was hardly releasing any singles at all. I don’t believe that the article affected her career adversely. Much more damaging was her decision to go off to California in 1971, abandoning her fan base in the UK.’20

  She would not enjoy another major chart hit in her home country until her rediscovery by a new, gay-friendly audience, thanks to her association with the Pet Shop Boys in 1987. Purely coincidentally, Bowie worked with the Pet Shop Boys himself, on 1996’s ‘Hallo Spaceboy’.

  Springfield’s admission, couched though it was, was a brave move and one she knew would likely alter people’s perception of her. ‘D’you realise,’ she told Connolly, ‘what I’ve just said could put the final seal to my doom? I don’t know, though. I might attract a whole new audience.’

  ‘I never knew why she decided to say what she did to me,’ Connolly adds, ‘but she actually goaded me into it. So she obviously wanted it out.’ Like Bowie, she struggled with the straitjacketing, telling The Los Angeles Free Press in 1973, ‘I mean, people say that I’m gay, gay, gay, gay, gay, gay, gay, gay. I’m not anything. I’m just … People are people … I basically want to be straight … I go from men to women; I don’t give a shit.’ A decade later, she took part in a symbolic marriage to her then-lover, actress Teda Bracci, on a mutual friend’s California ranch. Battling depression, drink and drugs (the pair first encountered each other at an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting), the couple’s relationship was always volatile and often violent. Prone to self-harm and with her career at an all-time low, on one occasion Dusty was admitted to Cedars-Sinai hospital with her face swollen and blackened and her front teeth missing after the two women had fought using saucepans and skillets. The resultant plastic surgery altered Dusty’s appearance forever. Understandably, the relationship did not last.

  Deported from South Africa in 1964 for refusing to perform before segregated audiences (apartheid reminded the singer, born Mary Isobel Catherine Bernadette O’Brien, of the prejudice shown back in England to homosexuals), no pop singer before her, at least not one who had enjoyed such mainstream success, had dared to even suggest that she (or he) may be a ‘queer’. Raised a Catholic, her choice of material in her later years showed that she was becoming much more comfortable with her position as a gay icon: ‘Closet Man’ (from the 1979 album Living Without Your Love), ‘Soft Core’ (from 1982’s White Heat), and others answered any questions people still had about where her sympathies lay. Sadly for Springfield and her legion of fans, the singer, who died from breast cancer in 1999, was subject to homophobic abuse for years. As recently as 2014, Roger Lewis, writing in Britain’s Spectator magazine, chose to use a review of a biography about Springfield as an opportunity to poke fun at a her and many other celebrity lesbians: ‘You can always spot a lesbian by her big thrusting chin. Celebrity Eskimo Sandi Toksvig, Ellen DeGeneres, Jodie Foster, Clare Balding, Vita Sack
ville-West, God love them: there’s a touch of Desperate Dan in the jaw-bone area, no doubt the better to go bobbing for apples.’21

  *

  Of course, there were other gay, lesbian and bisexual people in the music industry before David or Dusty. Just a few years before either of these pop idols opened up, the Beatles’ manager Brian Epstein had died after an accidental overdose, his pill-popping exacerbated by his closeted homosexuality and having to deal with blackmailers including his former lover, the out-of-work actor Dizz Gillespie. Epstein’s death came just two weeks after the grisly discovery of the bloody corpse of gay playwright Joe Orton, bludgeoned to death in a jealous rage by his lover Kenneth Halliwell. The same year that Epstein and Orton died (Orton had been having talks with Epstein about writing the script for the next Beatles movie; his body was discovered by a chauffeur who was to relay Orton to a meeting with the group), the pioneering British record producer Joe Meek took a gun and killed first his landlady and them himself. Epstein, Orton and Meek all knew each other and had all been persecuted because of their sexuality. Like Epstein, Meek, who scored a pre-Beatles Number One single on both sides of the Atlantic with ‘Telstar’, had been the victim of blackmail. It’s no wonder, then, that it was widely accepted that coming out would mean the instant death of one’s career – or worse.

  But it wasn’t always that way.

  Tony Jackson

  CHAPTER 2

  Pretty Baby

  ‘You can talk about your jelly roll, but none of them compare with Pretty Baby …’

  From the unpublished original lyric to ‘Pretty Baby’ by Tony Jackson, c. 1911

  Our story begins in the red-light district of New Orleans, an area no bigger than 38 blocks that was formally designated as The District but, in a sarcastic doff of the cap to city councilman Sidney Story, was known to one and all as Storyville.