Rosetta Tharpe (she adapted her stage name from her first husband’s surname, Thorp) was born on 20 March 1915 in Arkansas and began playing guitar and singing when she was just four years old. By the age of six she had joined her mother, Katie Bell Nubin, on stage and was performing in a travelling evangelical troupe before the pair moved to Chicago and became featured performers at the Church of God in Christ, with little Rosetta standing on a table so that the congregation could see her. In Chicago she became immersed in jazz and blues.
Not everyone loved her; ‘she fluctuates between a Mammy shout and very sad blues crooning,’ wrote one critic, noting, however, that ‘she’s receiving a hearty welcome’.10 She recorded her first sides for Decca in 1938: one of the songs laid down at that session, ‘Rock Me’, was a gospel/blues crossover that became the first ever gospel hit. Churchgoers were shocked at the mix of spirituality and secularism; she sounds like Bessie Smith or Ma Rainey but her message is one of redemption in the Lord, not of sex and drugs and pre-rock ’n’ roll. Moving on to perform in Broadway’s Cotton Club and Harlem’s famous Savoy Ballroom, she was a sensation, but embracing secular music hurt her standing in the church, and although she tried to split from her management and return to pure gospel, Tharpe’s handlers saw that there was money to be made: she had signed to a seven-year contract and she was going to continue recording the songs they wanted her to sing. The boogie-inflected ‘Strange Things Happening Every Day’ is proto rock ’n’ roll and predates Jackie Brenston’s ‘Rocket ‘88’ (often cited as the first true rock ’n’ roll record) by seven years. When (in 1947) she showcased her electric guitar playing prowess on a re-recording of her early hit ‘That’s All’, she paved the way for a generation of male guitarists including Chuck Berry and Carl Perkins.
Throughout the 1940s, she performed with fellow Church of God in Christ singer Marie Knight, and while the two women were touring, Marie’s two children died in a house fire in New Jersey. They were close; it has been suggested that they were lovers and, in 1948, Tharpe bought a house for the pair of them (and Tharpe’s mother) in Richmond, Virginia to live in when they were between engagements. However, they split acrimoniously in 1949, with Tharpe taking out notices in newspapers to announce that Knight was no longer associated with her act.11 Tharpe played several times in Britain: in 1958 a young drummer by the name of Richard Starkey saw her play at Liverpool jazz cellar The Cavern.12 When she came back to England in 1964 with B. B. King to appear in a TV special for Granada (recorded in a disused railway station), Britain’s nascent blues scene sat up and took notice. Although Gospel’s first superstar was not out to the public during her lifetime, it has been posthumously claimed that she was much less guarded in her private life and was either lesbian or bisexual, with promoter Allan Bloom claiming to have walked in on Tharpe having sex with other women during the ‘honeymoon tour’ which followed her third wedding.13 Sister Rosetta Tharpe died in October 1973, survived by her third husband, who she had married in front of 25,000 people in Washington’s Griffith Stadium in 1951. Her old friend Marie Knight fixed Rosetta’s hair and make-up for her final journey.
Sister Rosetta Tharpe was hardly the first artist to decide to stay in the closet – although in reality most had little choice in the matter. Władziu Valentino Liberace (known to his family and friends as Lee) made his first recordings in 1946, and as outlandish as he was, he resolutely refused to answer any questions about his sexuality. Revered as one of the world’s greatest entertainers, his enormous success – and ostentatious wealth – relied on his position as America’s non-threatening, asexual ‘mama’s boy’, and his low-brow popularisation of high-brow music would never have happened if his audience – including the 35 million that regularly tuned in to watch him on TV – had seen him as anything other than sexless. In the process of exploiting his own poor upbringing, he filled his devoted audience with the belief that anyone could make it big. He was the embodiment of the American Dream. Elvis was a fan: until Elvis displaced him, Liberace was the best-loved star in America, and when they met, Elvis made sure to get Lee’s autograph for his mother. Associating himself with Elvis was a smart move: the King of Rock may have alluded to homosexuality on his worldwide hit ‘Jailhouse Rock’, but no one seriously questioned his heterosexuality. Recorded in April 1957, the song’s homoerotic lyrics are not exactly guarded, especially in the third verse when one male prisoner opines to another to ‘come on and do the Jailhouse Rock with me’: for decades the word ‘rock’ had been used in songs as code for sex.
In 1956 an article in the British newspaper the Daily Mirror (by columnist William Connor, writing under the pen name Cassandra) described Liberace as ‘the summit of sex – the pinnacle of masculine, feminine, and neuter. Everything that he, she, and it can ever want … a deadly, winking, sniggering, snuggling, chromium-plated, scent-impregnated, luminous, quivering, giggling, fruit-flavoured, mincing, ice-covered heap of mother love’. Liberace, at the time the highest-paid entertainer in the world, sent a tongue-in-cheek telegram to the Daily Mirror that read: ‘what you said hurt me very much. I cried all the way to the bank,’ although he would later sue the newspaper for libel, testifying in a London court that he was not homosexual and that he had never taken part in homosexual acts. During a six-hour address to the court, Liberace stated that ‘on my word of God, on my mother’s health, which is so dear to me, this article only means one thing, that I am a homosexual and that is why I am in this court. “Fruit-flavoured, masculine, feminine and neuter” – all this points to one horrible fact which has damaged me in my career and my reputation, has made me the subject of ridicule and caused me great embarrassment.’14
‘“Are you a homosexual?” Liberace was asked by [his representative, Gilbert] Beyfus. “No, sir.” Said the pianist, looking straight at the bewigged judge, Sir Cyril Salmon. “Have you ever indulged in homosexual practices,” the attorney asked. “No, sir, never in my life.” “What are your feelings about it?” “My feelings are the same as anyone else’s. I am against the practice because it offends convention and offends society,” the pianist said.’15
Lee testified that, at a performance in Sheffield ‘there were cries from the audience of “queer” and such things as “go home, queer”,’ which upset him ‘very much, and it upset the audience too.’16 He won the suit, perjuring himself in the process, and the £8,000 damages he received led Liberace to repeat his new ‘I cried all the way to the bank’ catchphrase to reporters.
The Daily Mirror was not the only publication prepared to take a pop: the headline in the July 1957 issue of the US magazine Confidential trumpeted ‘Liberace’s Theme Song Should Be “Mad About the Boy”!’ Once again, Liberace sued, this time filing a $20 million libel suit and telling George Putnam, a reporter for Los Angeles broadcaster KTTV that ‘It’s real heartbreak to see your life’s work destroyed so viciously by a magazine in an article of this kind. It’s a lie. It’s trash.’ He eventually settled for $40,000.
Lee kept up the pretence to the end: even after his former chauffeur and lover Scott Thorson filed a $113 million lawsuit against him (in the first same-sex palimony case in the US), he denied any kind of homosexual involvement. In December 1986, less than two months before he died, Liberace settled the case for $95,000. The week after his death (on 4 February 1987) the Daily Mirror made a half-hearted attempt to recover the money from his estate, running the headline ‘Any Chance of a Refund’.17 ‘He was a huge influence on me,’ Elton John admitted in 2013. ‘He wasn’t publicly out – but he didn’t give a flying monkey about what he was wearing; he just went for it. That, of course, influenced me. My thing was to leap on the piano, do handstands and wear clothes that would draw attention to me because that’s the focus for two and half hours. Liberace gave me that idea.’18
Cassandra’s accusation would not have come as a surprise to the average newspaper reader, as Britain saw a major crackdown on homosexual activity in the post-war years. Home Secretary Sir David Maxwell Fyfe pr
omised there would be ‘a new drive against male vice’ that would ‘rid England of this plague’. In 1947, distinguished army officer Lord Colwyn of the Gordon Highlanders was court-martialled after pleading guilty to ‘five charges of gross impropriety … in which Italian men were involved during Lord Colwyn’s overseas service’.19 Arrests for importuning were common and high-profile cases made sensational headlines. By the end of 1954, there were 1,069 men in prison in England and Wales for homosexual acts, and undercover police officers would pose as gay men soliciting in places including public lavatories (known as cottages) and cruising grounds in municipal parks in an effort to add to that number.
In 1953, rumours started to circulate that a prominent ‘27 year-old bachelor peer’ had been up to no good. Soon after, Lord Montagu of Beaulieu fled the country, first to France and then to America, from where he knew he could not be extradited. Choosing to return and face his accusers, in December that year the bisexual Montagu was acquitted of committing a serious sexual offence against a 14-year-old boy. Montagu was adamant it was a set-up: he had accused the boy of theft but the police, aware of his position in society and sexual predilections, were after him. Three weeks later, the police came for him again. The media had been tipped off and were on the doorstep waiting when they arrived. Montagu, along with landowner Michael Pitt-Rivers and Daily Mail correspondent Peter Wildeblood, was charged with ‘conspiracy to incite certain male persons to commit serious offences with male persons’ (two young airmen, Edward McNally and John Reynolds). This was the first time that such a charge had been used since the trial of Oscar Wilde almost 60 years earlier. Montagu was the only one of the three men to protest his innocence. ‘Because I was,’ he told the Evening Standard in 2007. ‘It was guilt by association’.20
The result of this sensational trial would see a peer of the realm jailed for a year (his co-defendants were incarcerated for 18 months apiece): more importantly, it presaged a change in attitudes towards homosexuality in Britain. Partly as a result of the case, in September 1957 the Committee on Homosexual Offences and Prostitution issued a report recommending changes in the law. Better known as the Wolfenden Report (after the chairman of the committee, Lord John Frederick Wolfenden), the report recommended that ‘homosexual behaviour between consenting adults in private should no longer be a criminal offence’. It would take a further decade, but the Wolfenden Report eventually led to the passage of the Sexual Offences Act 1967, which decriminalised homosexual acts in private between two men over the age of 21 (the act applied to England and Wales only). Subsequent acts would reduce the age of consent to 18 then, in 2001, to 16 when, for the first time in British history, regardless of gender, the age of consent was the same for both heterosexual and homosexual acts.
When Cole Porter wrote the song ‘Farming’ for his 1941 Broadway production Let’s Face It, he became the first person to use the word ‘gay’ to mean homosexual in a popular song: ‘George’s bull is beautiful but he’s gay’. The word had been used liberally before (by Bing Crosby in his 1929 hit ‘Gay Love’, for example), but this was the first time it had been used in a pejorative sense; Bing’s love had been fun, happy and heady – although at no point does the song mention the gender of the object of Mr. Crosby’s affection. ‘Farming’ used the ‘G’ word as a way of emasculating the bull in question.
The Broadway musical is as central to LGBT culture as our culture is central to the existence of the Broadway musical: heterosexual audiences may laugh at the endless references to nancy boys, the swishy dance numbers and the effete leading men, but without out (and LGBT-friendly) writers, composers, costume designers, choreographers, directors and – naturally – actors, the Broadway musical as we know it would simply not exist. This is abundantly clear today, when the biggest shows include The Lion King (music by Elton John), Hairspray (by out-gay film director John Waters), Falsettos (a musical about the AIDS crisis) and Wicked (seriously, how could a show with its roots in The Wizard of Oz not have been crafted to appeal to both lesbians and gay men? There’s a reason that gay men are often referred to as ‘friends of Dorothy’, you know), but it has always been the case. Porter was married but gay (and would write the outrageous ‘Tom, Dick or Harry’ for the 1948 production of Kiss Me, Kate which includes the repeated line ‘A Dick! A Dick! A Dick! A Dick!’), as was Leonard Bernstein, composer of the huge international hit West Side Story, and his lyricist Stephen Sondheim, probably the greatest composer of the Broadway musical still living today. Then you have Noël Coward, Lionel Bart, lyricist Lorenz Hart (co-writer, with Richard Rodgers, of The Boys from Syracuse and Pal Joey; repressing his homosexuality drove the rough trade-loving Hart into the alcoholism that ultimately killed him), John Kander and his lyricist Fred Ebb (Cabaret, Funny Lady, Kiss of the Spider Woman), and Ivor Novello. Yet although musicals were dominated by LGBT artists – so much so that Broadway earned the nickname ‘The Gay White Way’ – it wasn’t until the 1959 show The Nervous Set and its central song ‘The Ballad of the Sad Young Men’ that America got to see gay men portrayed on stage as anything but bright, fey and fun young things. A few years later, Hair: The American Tribal Love-Rock Musical proved a useful training ground for a number of LGBT artists (Jobriath, Joan Armatrading, Peter Straker and Valentino among them) and included a scene where two men kiss, but Broadway would have to wait until Earl Wilson Jr’s 1976 musical Let My People Come, which debuted in 1974, and explicitly tackled LGBT issues in the song ‘I’m Gay’.
Although he wasn’t out at the time, Johnny Mathis recorded several songs with an underlying gay theme, including ‘The Best Of Everything’, ‘All The Sad Young Men’, and ‘A Time For Us’. When he first signed to Columbia in 1956, being black and gay and out was simply not an option: Johnnie Ray already filled two of those spots for the company; Mathis chose not to hide his sexuality but to not discuss it at all. His non-threatening image and yearning ballads meant that he could appeal to both men and women, to both straight and LGBT audiences. Johnny Mathis was Liberace-safe. After he revealed that he was gay, in an interview with Us magazine in 1982, he received death threats. ‘A few people in the Southern states didn’t like it,’ he told Britain’s Sunday Express. ‘I was in no real danger but when you’re young it’s difficult to get over. It doesn’t bother me at all now, and it’s not even a big deal any more which is wonderful, but I learned to isolate myself from negative things.’21
Born on 10 January 1927 as the second child of farmers Elmer and Hazel Ray, Johnnie Ray’s career was anything but conventional. In 1951, shortly before Ray was signed to Okeh records, he was arrested in Detroit for accosting and soliciting an undercover vice squad officer in the restroom of the Stone Theatre, a burlesque house. He pleaded guilty and, offered the choice between 30 days in the slammer or a $25 fine, he wisely paid up and was released. The incident failed to make the news locally, but would continue to haunt him.
Called the ‘father of rock and roll’ by Tony Bennett, legend has it that before he was three years old, Ray was already playing the piano; however, an accident at 13, when he fell and suffered a concussion, severely affected his heath: crippling headaches and depression followed until his hearing was tested the following year. Damage from that accident had resulted in Johnnie losing around half of his hearing, and he wore a hearing aid for the rest of his life (Morrissey chose to parody this, appearing on British TV show Top of the Pops wearing an old-fashioned hearing aid of the type Ray used). Destined for the stage, his career included a short stint as a straight man in a comedy act when he was just 19 years old before he got his big break at the Flame Show Bar, a ‘black and tan’ night club in Detroit with a mixed-race clientele. Ray fit right in, and he soon came to the attention of a talent scout named Danny Keasler. ‘I want you to hear a singer who’s terrific,’ he is reputed to have told his bosses at Columbia. ‘He’s a boy who sounds like a girl!’22
He recorded his first single, the self-penned ‘Whisky and Gin’, on 28 May 1951. Within months he had scored hi
s first million-seller, ‘Cry’, and captured the hearts of screaming bobbysoxers. And almost immediately the stories about his sexuality began to spread.
Known affectionately as the Nabob of Sob or the Prince of Wails, Ray had more than twenty hits during the 1950s. At the highest point of his career he made well over a million dollars a year, sold out shows around the world, and appeared in movies including There’s No Business Like Show Business with Ethel Merman, Donald O’Connor and Marilyn Monroe. He was often mobbed by his adoring fans: during his Australian tour of 1954 it was reported that he earned around £30 a minute from his shows and that ‘he also had three tuxedos and several ties and shirts ripped to pieces by emotional fans’.23 On a previous visit to Brisbane, ‘Ray had a new 15 guinea drape coat ripped up the back, his shirt torn and the tassels ripped off his shoes’.24 In May 1955, he was knocked unconscious by a mob of screaming fans as he arrived at his Edinburgh hotel.
In the spring of 1952, Ray married Marilyn Morrison. She was aware of Ray’s homosexuality but told a friend of his that she would ‘straighten it out’. The couple separated before the end of the year and divorced in January 1954. Sixteen months later, he announced his engagement to Silvia Drew, one of his backing singers. In 1959 Ray was arrested by the Detroit vice squad on a charge of soliciting an undercover police officer at the Brass Rail theatre bar, one of the city’s gay bars (there were three Brass Rails in Detroit at the time: he appears to have been arrested at the one on Adams St. across from Grand Circus Park). Released after another night in the cells on a $500 bond, this time Ray hired an attorney and fought the charges. ‘I can only say that the whole thing is a complete misunderstanding,’ he told reporters. ‘I have witnesses to testify to the validity of anything I say at my trial’.25
David Bowie Made Me Gay Page 10
