David Bowie Made Me Gay
Page 15
Both women were lucky in that they had the support of the two women closest to them. In Morley’s case, her second wife Christine Parker, who she had married in 1970 – the year that she went to Casablanca to transition – stayed her side as she transitioned, and continued to be her staunchest ally and closest friend.7 Angela died, after a fall, in 2009 and was survived by Christine: ‘Angela and I stayed together because we had a great relationship,’ Parker told Jack Curtis Dubowsky. ‘We saw no good reason to divorce’. In 1966, Carlos met Rachel Elkind, who was working at Columbia Records as an assistant to the company’s president Goddard Lieberson: ‘It wasn’t until I met Rachel that someone had the courage to tell me I should be doing more than fooling around’. Elkind convinced Carlos that a full album of Bach’s music arranged for and played on the Moog would provide the record-buying public with the ideal introduction to electronic music. Rachel would become an integral part of Wendy’s life, setting up (initially with Benjamin Folkman) a creative partnership they dubbed Trans-Electronic Music Productions, Incorporated (TEMPI). Carlos and Elkind moved in to a house together, converting one floor into a studio that Carlos could have 24-hour access to.
Carlos, however, felt that the world was not ready to meet Wendy: although she was now living privately as a woman, albums continued to appear under her deadname and, on the rare occasion she had to face an audience – or when she met with film director Stanley Kubrick – Wendy would use make-up to affect a five o’clock shadow, add stick-on sideburns and appear to the public as male. Carlos and Elkind worked together on the soundtrack for Kubrick’s 1971 film A Clockwork Orange, processing Elkind’s singing voice through a vocoder, created by Bell Laboratories in the 1930s but modified by Carlos and Bob Moog for musical purposes in 1970. The vocoder that the pair developed was employed by German electronic music pioneers Kraftwerk on their groundbreaking Autobahn album before turning up on recordings by Pink Floyd, Giorgio Moroder, the Alan Parsons Project, the Electric Light Orchestra and countless other hit-makers. When Moroder linked his Moog to an analogue sequencer to create the bubbling synthesiser lines that dominate Donna Summer’s ‘I Feel Love’, a whole new genre was born. Bowie, living and working in Berlin at the time, recalled that collaborator Brain Eno (whose work with Roxy Music had been influenced by Wendy’s pioneering experiments) ‘came running in and said “I have heard the sound of the future”. He puts on “I Feel Love” by Donna Summer and said “this is it, look no further, this single is going to change the sound of club music for the next 15 years”, which was more or less right.’8
Carlos and Elkind’s final collaboration was for another Kubrick soundtrack, The Shining. While working on the soundtrack, Carlos decided, in an interview with Playboy magazine in 1979, to finally discuss her transition. It was time for her to stand on her own: Rachel was now married and she and her husband would move to France shortly afterwards.
The press, naturally enough, were all over the story, however to her astonishment the media were surprisingly understanding: ‘Carlos’ latest creation is himself – or rather herself’;9 ‘Walter Carlos, best known for creating Switched on Bach has pulled a switch on himself and is now Wendy Carlos’.10 ‘The public turned out to be amazingly tolerant or, if you wish, indifferent,’ she later told People magazine of her decision to go public. ‘There had never been any need of this charade to have taken place. It had proven a monstrous waste of years of my life.’11
Wendy Carlos’ recordings popularised the use of electronic keyboards, and her development work with Bob Moog helped make the equipment accessible to a whole generation of musicians. Before the 1970s were over, the Fairlight CMI, which paired a polyphonic synthesiser with a digital sampler, would herald the next revolution in electronic music. By the mid-1980s, the machine could be heard on hit records by Peter Gabriel, Kate Bush, David Bowie, Frankie Goes to Hollywood and countless others, but it was prohibitively expensive for most musicians; they had to go to a studio which had one or employ a producer (like Trevor Horn) who had invested in one. All that changed with the Prophet-5, the first totally programmable synthesiser on the market that – importantly – was both portable and affordable. Soft Cell, the Pet Shop Boys, Erasure, Patrick Cowley and many more invested. In a hat-tip to tradition, the Prophet-5 came with a wooden casing – just like a Moog.
*
Still living and working in New York, Carlos has continued producing original music (she scored the Disney sci-fi film Tron in 1982), has overseen a reissue programme of her vast archive and has worked on a number of classical arrangements using the latest digital advances. Still in the thrall of technology, more recently she has been developing a new type of synthesizer, the WurliTzer II, marrying pipe organ technology to a digital instrument. Although Wendy has given a number of interviews over the years, she guards her privacy and shies away from any discussions regarding her sexuality and transition, as is her right. ‘They don’t even wait until I’m dead to slander me, when it no longer would be considered slander,’ she wrote in an open letter on her website (www.wendycarlos.com). ‘That makes it inevitable that when I do die my sexuality will constitute their one phrase clichéd description of me, the bastards. Watch if I’m not right on this, when I won’t be here to do it myself …’ She has very little patience with writers and media outlets who misrepresent her, either:
They have tried to turn me into a cliché, to treat me as an object for potential scorn, ridicule, or even physical violence by bigots (no joke in these dangerous times of beatings and deaths at the hands of the intolerant). It’s no fun to discover someone else’s fetishistic hang-ups, to inadvertently confront an unsuspected slice of unwholesomeness in another. Even less amusing is to find yourself the target of painful bigotry and prejudice.
At the end of the 1990s she was unwillingly thrust back in to the spotlight when she sued Scottish musician Nicholas Currie, aka Momus, over the lyrics of his song Walter Carlos. The case was settled out of court in Wendy’s favour.
The Campaign for Homosexual Equality march, London Pride 1974
CHAPTER 10
After Stonewall
‘I’m sure gay rock will be the next thing. Now that gay is open they need their own music and their own bands to follow, just like everyone else. Why not?’
David Arden of Jet Records1
28 June 1969 – the date of the first night of direct action in the Stonewall Riots – is often referred to as the most important date in the modern LGBT movement. While it’s certainly true that the riots, a reaction to years of police oppression, were a catalyst for the start of the Gay Liberation movement, in truth the people were already massing, learning valuable lessons in how to protest effectively from the Civil Rights Movement, Women’s Lib, the anti-war protests of the mid-1960s and the civil unrest seen on the streets of Paris in May 1968.
Police raids on LGBT bars were commonplace in America in the 1950s and 1960s, and several other violent protests had already taken place: in Los Angeles in the spring of 1959 at the all-night coffee shop Cooper’s Donuts2 and in August 1966 at Gene Compton’s Cafeteria in San Francisco’s Tenderloin district. But when the New York City Police Department decided to raid the Mafia-run Stonewall Inn on Christopher Street, the members of Greenwich Village’s LGBT community that used the bar as its base decided they had had enough, and the violent demonstrations that erupted are now enshrined in history as the most important event in the fight for LGBT rights in the United States, if not the world.
Three important things happened after Stonewall. Firstly, there was a palpable change in attitude from LGBT activists. Polite requests for better treatment of LGBT people, such as the annual picket outside Philadelphia’s Independence Hall (organised by the Mattachine Society, an early gay rights organisation established in Los Angeles in 1950), were quickly replaced with more militant action from a politically aware community who had experienced the success (in media terms, anyway) of the mass demonstrations against nuclear weapons, the Vietnam War, police brutali
ty and racism. Secondly, LGBT people became more visible: in Canada the first ‘legal’ gay wedding took place, between singer Michel Girouard and his accompanist Rejean Tremblay (same-sex marriage was not recognised, but Quebec’s Civil Code allowed for a legal partnership similar to marriage, regardless of sex), and le couple issued an album in celebration. LGBT characters were seen in the cinema and, in 1972 the hit Australian soap opera Number 96 – which regularly attracted around a fifth of all Aussie TV viewers – became one of the earliest prime-time TV shows to introduce a gay character, the lawyer Don Finlayson ‘in his natural surroundings and behaving just like an ordinary person’.3 Ellen DeGeneres may have grabbed the headlines when she came out on her self-titled sitcom, and there’s no doubt that she lowered the drawbridge and allowed Will and Grace, Queer Eye for the Straight Guy and so on to traverse the ramparts of Castle Primetime, but Number 96 beat her by a quarter of a century. Finally, just a week after the riots began, the Gay Liberation Front was formed by a politically active splinter group of the Mattachine Society in New York; on the first anniversary of the Stonewall Riots the world saw the first ever Gay Pride marches, held simultaneously in Chicago, Los Angeles and San Francisco. In October 1970, Aubrey Walter and Bob Mellor founded a British branch of the Gay Liberation Front; London saw its first Gay Pride march in 1972, the same year that Gay News, Britain’s first widely available LGBT newspaper, was founded. Other countries soon followed suit.
Alongside all of this political upheaval, LGBT music started to infiltrate the mainstream. In 1969, American singer Jewel Akens, who had a Top Three hit in 1965 with ‘The Birds And The Bees’, recorded ‘He’s Good For Me’ for the small West One label. Reissued in 1973 to cash in on the publicity David Bowie, Lou Reed and the rest of the new crop of LGBT acts were receiving, the disc was marketed in the pages of The Advocate as ‘the first gay rock single 45’.4 Jewel was married and insisted that he was not gay himself, but he took a co-composer credit on the 45 and followed up the release with the sexually ambiguous ‘What Would You Do’. Swedish singer Johnny Delgada’s ‘Vi är inte som andra vi’ (‘We Are Not Like The Others’) was an early (1970) attempt to write a ballad specifically for gay men. Also issued in Germany as ‘Wir Zwei, Wir Sind Nicht Wie Die Andern’ – both countries put the record out in a picture sleeve featuring two naked young men cuddling up to each other – it was an odd career move for the singer and composer better known in his home country as Johnny Bode who had begun his recording career in 1929. Sterilised while undergoing treatment in a psychiatric hospital, at one point Bode enlisted with the German army and apparently was sent to the Grini concentration camp – although he was known to be a pathological liar, so any of the above could be untrue.
London-born singer-songwriter Labi Siffre, who scored his first chart hit in 1971 with ‘It Must be Love’ (also a Top Five hit for Madness a decade or so later), met his partner Peter John Carver Lloyd in July 1964. The pair would remain together until Carver Lloyd’s death in 2013, having been a couple for 49 years. Labi Siffre was an anomaly: an openly gay, mixed-race singer whose work tackled homophobia and racism head-on and who had several UK chart hits, including four Top 30 singles. In 1998, ten years after he had his last chart single, his 1975 song ‘I Got The’ was sampled by Eminem for his international hit ‘My Name Is’; Siffre originally refused to allow his work to be sampled until certain lyrical changes were made. Siffre also wrote the anti-apartheid anthem ‘(Something Inside) So Strong’, which in 1987 provided him with a Top Five hit of his own and won an Ivor Novello award, presented annually for songwriting and composing and named in honour of the Cardiff-born gay composer. In recent years, Siffre has turned to other forms of writing, issuing three collections of his poetry and producing the play Deathwrite.
Suddenly, LGBT-themed songs, and LGBT performers, were everywhere. A reviewer in Gay News called Lou Reed’s ‘Make Up’, from his Bowie-produced album Transformer (which features the line ‘We’re coming out, out of our closets’), ‘the best Gay Lib song I have heard,’ going on to say that ‘Transformer is an essential record. The record sleeve, especially the reverse side, is remarkable too’.5 The back of the sleeve featured Reed’s roadie Ernie Thormahlen sporting a very visible erection: photographer Karl Stoecker would later reveal that this was, in fact, a plastic banana that Ernie had thrust down the front of his tight jeans.6 Reed’s international smash ‘Walk On the Wild Side’ provided a window onto the gender-bending antics of various members of Andy Warhol’s Factory, and in doing so opened up an exotic new world of possibilities, one where you could change your look, change your name and even change your sex if you wanted to. Formerly singer, guitarist and songwriter with the Velvet Underground (a huge influence on Bowie, who recorded a cover of Reed’s ‘I’m Waiting For my Man’ in 1967 with his band, former Joe Meek protégés the Riot Squad), as a teenager, Reed suffered a breakdown and was forced to undergo electroshock therapy; an experience he described in detail in the book Please Kill Me: ‘They put the thing down your throat so you don’t swallow your tongue, and they put electrodes on your head. That’s what was recommended in Rockland County to discourage homosexual feelings. The effect is that you lose your memory and become a vegetable.’7 He would also document the experience in his song ‘Kill Your Sons’.
Although it was widely assumed that Reed, like Bowie, was bisexual, in an incendiary 1973 interview he told writer Lester Bangs, ‘The notion that everybody’s bisexual is a very popular line right now, but I think its validity is limited. I could say something like if in any way my album helps people decide who or what they are, then I will feel I have accomplished something in my life. But I don’t feel that way at all …’ adding that in future he ‘may come out with a hardhat album. Come out with an anti-gay song, saying, “Get back in your closets, you fuckin’ queers!” That’ll really do it!’8 Tom Robinson remembers, ‘For those of us involved with Gay Liberation, this was disappointing at best and at worst, downright betrayal. Had a queer hero deceived us, or deceived himself? Or had Lou been a heterosexual impostor all along, only in it for the money?’9 After his death (on 27 October 2013), his sister Merrill Reed Weiner wrote:
It has been suggested that ECT was approved by my parents because Lou had confessed to homosexual urges. How simplistic. He was depressed, weird, anxious, and avoidant. My parents were many things, but homophobic they were not. In fact, they were blazing liberals. They were caught in a bewildering web of guilt, fear, and poor psychiatric care. Did they make a mistake in not challenging the doctor’s recommendation for ECT? Absolutely. I have no doubt they regretted it until the day they died.10
Glam rock gave men an excuse to wear make-up, don outrageous satin clothes and stick sequins on their faces. The glittery icons on Top of the Pops may have looked like dockers underneath the glitz, but this manufactured androgyny created a safe space to camp it up without necessarily getting beaten up. In its own way, glam rock (or glitter rock as it was referred to in the States) subversively blurred the fine line between straight and queer. The New York Dolls were not averse to using the new trend for gay rock to further their career; in fact they embraced it, donning street-gutter drag and glitter-rock make-up for the cover of their debut LP. Briefly managed by Malcolm McLaren, the Dolls’ look and sound owed a lot to both Lou Reed and shock-rocker Alice Cooper. Cooper, mostly because of the name and the make-up, was routinely being ‘outed’ by the press. Even before he (then leading the band of the same name) had even had a hit, when he/they were still signed to Frank Zappa’s Straight Records label, Cooper was talking about how ‘biologically, everyone is male and female … what’s the big deal? Why is everyone so uptight about sex?’11 In August 1974, in an incredible interview in Spec magazine, the former Vince Furnier revealed the truth:
‘I’m straight … but if I could have chosen my own sexuality, I think I might have chosen to be bisexual … I think in the future everyone will be bisexual. And everything would be so much simpler then – you’d just make lov
e with anyone you liked, and it wouldn’t matter what sex they were, and maybe it also wouldn’t matter what color they were, or what age, or anything, except that you liked them … I actually prefer the concept of pansexuality, rather than bisexuality. The prefix “pan” means that you’re open to all kinds of sexual experiences, with all kinds of people. It means an end to restrictions, it means you could relate sexually to any human being, it means an end to unreal limits. I like that idea.12
The unbridled sexuality of the New York Dolls, Alice Cooper, Lou Reed and the like was more about androgyny (or, as Cooper put it, pansexuality) than about being gay or bisexual. In an interview with Ted Castle, David Johansen – the Dolls’ singer – said, ‘sexuality is a very personal thing … whatever you perceive as sexuality, that’s what it is. And it’s not for one person to say that they’re heterosexual or homosexual or bisexual, because none of those things are real. People are just sexual.’13 In 1974, during an unguarded moment backstage in Hamburg, teen heartthrob David Cassidy came out to the German monthly Du Und Ich. ‘I’ve nothing at all to hide,’ he told reporter Valentino Rhonheimer. ‘I have many friends, men friends who I sleep with – and I enjoy it. I don’t let anyone dictate to me who I shall sleep with, just as I don’t tell anyone who they should sleep with. I only know that I wouldn’t want to sing to audiences who didn’t like me just because I had slept with a man.’14 Gossip about his sexuality has followed Cassidy for all of his life, but in this instance he may have been simply kidding around: although he has gone on record on many occasions to say that he supports LGBT rights, in his 2007 autobiography he backtracked on his candid admission, saying, ‘I had some thoughts about homosexuality – I’m sure we all have some thoughts about it as we’re growing up, finding ourselves. So I was, at times, unsure. It was only when I was actually confronted with the situation that I realised … I’m really just not into it.’ The book is surprisingly frank about his sexual exploits and his close friendships with a number of LGBT celebrities and, as he wrote, what did it matter ‘if I slept with men, women, snakes or sheep’ anyway? One thing the book did reveal was that his father, the actor Jack Cassidy, was also bisexual, and that dad had enjoyed a long affair with Cole Porter.15