The inference was obvious: sexuality was fluid. Or at least it was so long as that fluidity helped sell records and gain column inches in the press. When the actor and singer Peter Straker appeared as a woman who is really a man (though it’s never made clear in the movie whether Jo is the son or the daughter of a West Indian High Commissioner, or if in fact they are trans) the issue of androgyny left the recording studio and the concert stage and became comedic fodder for the big screen. Straker had his first stab at pop stardom as part of the original London cast of Hair: The American Tribal Love-Rock Musical, which opened at the Shaftesbury Theatre on 27 September 1968 and ran for almost 2,000 performances.
The US and UK productions of Hair provided a training ground for a number of actors and musicians, and would also bring Richard O’Brien and Tim Curry together for the first time, five years before they would collaborate on The Rocky Horror Show. Born in Jamaica, Straker released a one-off single for Polydor (a version of the Jacques Brel song ‘Carousel’) and appeared in the aforementioned movie Girl Stroke Boy (as the girl/boy of the title) before signing to RCA, who issued his first album, Private Parts, in 1972. All of the songs on the album were written by gay songwriting duo Ken Howard and Alan Blaikley, who had written the British Number One single ‘Have I The Right’ for the Honeycombs; the pair based the songs on aspects of Peter’s own life, including the death of his father. ‘The album is very personal,’ he told Peter Holms and Denis Lemon of Gay Times. ‘I discussed everything with Ken and Alan. We tried to be explicit – as explicit as Jacques Brel.’16
The startling cover, featuring a naked Straker with a map of Hampstead Heath projected onto his body, made it fairly evident what audience RCA were looking for, and as the concept album dealt with issues including bisexuality, early sexual experiences and death, the company marketed Private Parts almost exclusively to a gay audience, with a number of ads for the album and subsequent singles in the gay press. Despite a well-received performance with full orchestra at the Queen Elizabeth Hall, Private Parts didn’t sell, and it would be five years before Straker got to record again.
A long-time friend and collaborator of Freddie Mercury, Straker’s next album, This One’s On Me, would be co-produced (and financed) by the Queen frontman and issued by the band’s label, EMI. Again the album, and its single ‘Ragtime Piano Joe’ bombed (although the single did make the Dutch Top 30), as did the follow-up, Changeling; moving to Elton John’s Rocket Records (Elton and Queen were both managed by John Reid at the time, and Reid and John were lovers for several years), Peter issued his fourth album Real Natural Man. Straker appeared in the video for Mercury’s ‘The Great Pretender’ single, sang backing vocals on his Barcelona album and is still performing today. A few years after Girl Stroke Boy bombed at the box office, comedian Red Foxx starred in the movie Norman … Is That You? (based on the play of the same name), which switches this around a little but intrinsically plays with the same idea. Thelma Houston, whose next single would be the huge international hit ‘Don’t Leave Me This Way’, recorded the song ‘One Out Of Every Six’ for the soundtrack. Howard and Blaikley’s next project was writing for a duo named Starbuck: their singles ‘Do You Like Boys’, ‘Wouldn’t You Like It’ and ‘Heartthrob’ were aimed squarely at gay record-buyers but, like the Straker recordings, failed to sell.
Private Parts came out at a point where RCA, buoyed by the success of David Bowie and Lou Reed, would sign pretty much anything that could potentially be marketed to an LGBT audience. The company had a Filipino-born singer Junior (aka Antonio Morales), whose ‘Excuse Me For The Strange Things I Do’ (an English-language version of the Spanish hit ‘Perdóname’) was offered free to ‘all gay discos, clubs and bars’ to promote.17 Junior had been a member of Spain’s biggest pop band, Los Brincos, and his single, co-written by out-gay manager and songwriter Simon Napier-Bell (who, during his long career in the music industry has managed Marc Bolan, the Yardbirds, Boney M, Sinitta, Wham! and many others) had provided him with a huge hit in Brazil and in other South American territories, but British fame eluded him.
Brought up in the West Country, Steve Swindells moved to London in 1973, when he was 21. Then a member of Bristol-based rock band Squidd, the out-gay Swindells persuaded the band to play at one of the earliest fundraising benefits for the Gay Liberation Front at Fulham Town Hall. Approached by Mark Edwards (‘a posh, gay hippy from Dorset with a pretentious beard’),18 who had produced Curved Air’s Air Conditioning album and who had worked with Howard and Blaikley (on the 1968 singles ‘The Tide is Turning’ and ‘Uh!’ by The Barrier), he was quickly signed as a solo artist to RCA, releasing the album Messages the following year. Pictured on the cover as a leather boy, a judge, a piano player and in full drag, and with songs about Earl’s Court (London’s gay ghetto), the album was unlikely to find mainstream acceptance.
A second album was recorded but remained unreleased until 2009. Splitting from Edwards, who he branded ‘a junkie, an alcoholic and a psychopath’, Swindells joined the UK chart-toppers Pilot before becoming the keyboard player for the Hawklords, a band formed by former Hawkwind members Robert Calvert, Dave Brock and Simon King. Since then he has written for Who vocalist Roger Daltrey (he contributed the song ‘Bitter and Twisted’ to the soundtrack of McVicar), formed the short-lived band DanMingo with Culture Club drummer Jon Moss and tried his hand at DJ-ing and club promotion, as well as becoming a regular contributor to gay magazine Attitude.
In their desperation to sign anyone who would appeal to this emerging new market, RCA offered out-gay actor Peter Wyngarde a contract, and the resulting eponymous album is one of the single most peculiar things you are ever likely to hear. Central to the album is a song called ‘Rape’, which manages to incorporate huge gobs of racism and sexism and so offended Alan McGee (the owner of Creation Records and manager of Oasis) that he refused to reissue the album. Peter Wyngarde is also notable for ‘Hippie And The Skinhead’, the tale of young Billy, a ‘queer, pilly, sexy hippy’ who ‘one night went to troll the “Dilly”’ (the use of Polari echoing its appearance in the Tornados’ ‘Do You Come Here Often’) and picked up a skinhead called Ken. It was only when the two of them engaged in their rough sex games that Ken discovered that Billy was actually a woman. Billy, apparently was a cross-dressing bisexual, or quite possibly transgender; Ken it would seem, was a latent homosexual. Wyngarde’s career – up until that point he had been one of the biggest stars on British TV thanks to his starring roles in Department S and Jason King – was all but over after he was arrested for importuning in a bus station in Gloucester. Although he would later appear (behind a gold mask) as General Klytus in the movie Flash Gordon, the former lover of actor Alan Bates would never fully recover from the ignominy.
The company also bankrolled brothers Clive and Peter Sarstedt and Junior’s manager Simon Napier-Bell, who together produced the album Fresh Out Of Borstal by the band Fresh. Coming just a year after Peter Sarstedt had enjoyed the huge hit ‘Where Do You Go To, My Lovely’, Fresh Out Of Borstal is a bizarre semi-documentary of life in an all-male remand home and one of the songs, ‘And The Boys Lazed On the Verandah’ (covered by pop singer Lou Christie in 1971) made very explicit references to gay sex. Fresh made a second album, Fresh Today, but their odd skinhead/glam sound failed to ignite much interest. Clive, who was originally managed by Joe Meek, changed his name to Robin Sarstedt and had a solo hit in 1976 with ‘My Resistance Is Low’.
With a career that spans five decades and worldwide sales in excess of 300 million units, Elton John – the man Bowie called ‘the Liberace, the token queen of rock’19 – is the most successful out-gay musician of all time. His re-recording of ‘Candle In the Wind’, released as a tribute to Diana, Princess of Wales, is the world’s best-selling single; he has had seven consecutive Number One US albums and 58 Billboard Top 40 singles, including nine Number One hits. In Britain, as of December 2016, he had clocked up seven Number One albums and 69 Top 40 singles, including seven Number Ones. In
1998 he was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II, making the man born Reg Dwight Sir Elton John.
In 1976, at the height of his fame and on the eve of the release of his latest album Blue Moves, John gave a candid interview to Cliff Jahr of Rolling Stone magazine (sadly, Jahr died of AIDS in August 1991). He talked openly about going to New York gay disco 12 West, about his adventures with John Waters’ leading lady Divine at another gay club, Crisco Disco, and that he believed, ‘There’s nothing wrong with going to bed with somebody of your own sex. I think everybody’s bisexual to a certain degree. I don’t think it’s just me. It’s not a bad thing to be. I think you’re bisexual. I think everybody is.’20 John was lonely; he was tired of the constant cycle of touring and recording and he wanted someone to settle down with. ‘But … as soon as someone tries to get to know me I turn off. I’m afraid of getting hurt. I was hurt so much as a kid. I’m afraid of plunging into something that’s going to fuck me up. Christ, I wish I had somebody to share all this with.’
The backlash wasn’t immediate. ‘Sorry Seems to Be the Hardest Word’, his next single was still a sizeable hit, and Blue Moves made the US Top Three. However, it came at a time when he was ready to make changes, splitting with long-term writing partner Bernie Taupin, dismissing members of his band and coming off the road for a period. Was it the change in direction, or were tastes simply changing? For whatever reason, his career in America hit a major trough after the interview, and Blue Moves would be his last Top 10 album in the States until 1992’s The One.
John would dominate the pop charts in the 1970s, but it was his close friend Rod Stewart who, in 1976, became the first major star have an international hit with an unambiguously gay-themed song. ‘The Killing of Georgie’ tells the tale of a young man who is kicked out of his family home for being gay. He moves to New York and finds love, only to die at the hands of a gang, the victim of a mugging gone wrong. Stewart’s song was based on a true story: ‘George was a friend of mine,’ he told Keith Howes of Gay News.21 ‘I’d forgotten all about him until I moved to America. America just encourages you to write more radical things because it’s all killing and death and robbery and violence. I’m surrounded by gay people so there were no objections.’ It was the most overly romantic song on an album scarred by misogyny (on one song, ‘Ball Trap’, Stewart tells his girl that he would ‘rather see you dead with a rope ‘round your neck’); in the same interview, Stewart admitted to going to bed with a pre-op transsexual in Melbourne and to being sexually attracted to the model and singer Amanda Lear, widely believed at the time to be transsexual.
Chris Robison, a former member of Steam and Elephant’s Memory (a band who had played on John and Yoko’s Sometime In New York City and Yoko’s Approximately Infinite Universe and had issued their own self-titled album on the Beatles’ Apple label), issued his first album Many Hand Band in 1972 and, although he was not signed to a major (Robison issued the album on his own Gipsy Frog label; it has since been reissued by Chapter Music), he was the first musician to issue a gay-themed rock album. ‘The lead track was “I’m Looking For A Boy Tonight,”’ says Tom Robinson. ‘It was just a quite crude, country-picking song, not particularly interesting musically, but it was blatant, out there and without precedent as far as I know. Then there was Steven Grossman, who made one album called Caravan Tonight. It was standard kind of wimpy acoustic singer-songwritery love songs, except that they were about his boyfriends. That was pretty courageous for the time.’
Brooklyn-born Steven Grossman’s Caravan Tonight (1974) was the first album dealing with openly gay themes and subject-matter to be released on a major label, Mercury, and came out within months of Jobriath, the eponymous album from the Bowie clone born Bruce Wayne Campbell in Philadelphia in 1946. Often credited as the first openly gay man to be signed to a major company (Elektra), there can be no denying that his Jobriath has a gay aesthetic, but when Jobriath introduced himself to the world with the head-turning announcement, ‘I am the true fairy of rock,’ no one took him seriously. This was Bowie-lite, music swathed in the pomp of glam rock but with a staged, unnatural feel and sexually ambiguous lyrics. Grossman’s words made it very obvious who he was attracted to. Jobriath sang about three-legged aliens, movie stars and the history of Rock ’n’ Roll; only one song, ‘Blow Away’, used the ‘G’ word. Critics accused him of being ‘the ultimate in hype, [an] unscrupulous plagiarist who just happens to have had a great deal of promotion’.22
Performing in gay clubs such as The Firehouse, in coffee shops and at open mic nights in folk clubs including Gertie’s Folk City in New York, in 1973 Grossman answered an advert in The Village Voice for ‘a singer-songwriter who writes about the “gay experience”’.23 His tender, heartfelt songs were heavily influenced by the big singer-songwriters of the day: if you ignore the fact that he’s clearly singing about men having emotional issues with other men, you could just as easily be listening to songs written by Joni Mitchell or Cat Stevens. This ‘meek and gentle man’ had ‘both the innocence of a child and the pain of one who has been through it all and has somehow emerged reasonably unscathed’.24
Coming out at a time when Bowie, Cooper, Reed and the Dolls were wilfully blurring the lines between masculine and feminine, and promoting casual sex with just about anybody you fancied the look of, Caravan Tonight’s songs about looking for love and wanting acceptance sounded dated, but the album pulled in excellent reviews. ‘I don’t know Bowie’s material because I politically disagree with his whole trip,’ Grossman told an interviewer in 1974 ‘It’s all right to encourage role reversal by dressing the way he does, and by wearing make-up, if that’s what he’s doing: if he’s using it as a gimmick, though, I think it is a gimmick that perpetuates a certain stereotype of gay people, that disallows the possibility that you can be gay and be whatever you want to be.’25 Jobriath, on the other hand, milked it for all it was worth – or at least his manager did.
Bruce Campbell’s mother left the family home when she became pregnant with another man’s child. They later reconciled, and when Bruce went AWOL from the army he became Jobriath Salisbury, adopting his mother’s maiden name as his new surname. The musician and keen amateur painter reinvented himself as an actor, appearing in the Los Angeles production of Hair, before joining the band Pidgeon who signed to Decca and released their only album in 1969. The album was nothing special, but Jobriath was proving to be an accomplished piano player and a decent songwriter. Jerry Brandt, manager of Chubby Checker and Carly Simon, heard Jobriath’s demo (Clive Davis, then head of Columbia, famously dismissed the singer as ‘mad, unstructured and destructive’) and decided to track him down. Finding him living and working as a houseboy-cum-male prostitute in Los Angeles, he signed him to an exclusive contract. One of the first things Brandt did was secure a spot for his new protégé on the PBS television series Vibrations.26
Recording at the fabled Electric Lady Studios in Greenwich Village (with a backing choir that included Vicki Sue Robinson – who had a huge disco hit with ‘Turn the Beat Around’ – and actor Richard Gere), Jobriath (now using the surname Boone) and Brandt took any and all of the press they could get in an effort to break into the public consciousness. It didn’t matter to them that the media thought he was a joke, so long as people bought the records and came to the shows. Sadly, they didn’t. ‘Elektra Records signed another new weirdo for $300,000 down,’ wrote King Features’ syndicated columnist Jack O’Brian. ‘Jobriath, who swung right off boasting he’s a “true fairy” and insists “the energy force today comes from homosexuals and Puerto Ricans”’.27 Brandt, a man with a habit of referring to himself in the third person, was an unashamed huckster intent on promoting Jobriath as bigger than Bowie. In an interview conducted with the pair of them, Jobriath said, ‘Asking me if I’m homosexual is like asking James Brown if he’s black. There’s a lot of people who are running around, putting make-up on and stuff just because it’s chic; I just want to say that I’m no pretender.’ A huge promotional push in the UK prior
to Christmas 1973 – including ads on the side of London buses, adverts in the mainstream media and posters in record stores – did nothing to break him in Britain. A promised four-night stint at the Paris Opera House, featuring Jobriath ‘performing his own music backed by a rock band, 12 dancers and $200,000 worth of sets he designed himself’ and ending with him recreating the death scene from King Kong28 failed to materialise. The records were not selling, the tickets were not selling and there was no money to make it happen. An appearance on the late-night TV show Midnight Special, hosted by a clearly confused Gladys Knight, did nothing to help bolster his already-flagging career. ‘I recall that The Old Grey Whistle Test played a clip from the Midnight Special show that he did, performing “Rock of Ages”,’ says fan Andy Partridge of English rock band XTC. ‘He’s in a segmented clear space helmet; he presses a button on the top and it opens down like a flower, or a Terry’s chocolate orange! I really liked the song and I thought the band looked great, a bit like The Impossibles, a US cartoon pop group from the 1960s that I liked. It was all very choreographed but no more than the Beatles or Bowie and a host of others.’
David Bowie Made Me Gay Page 16
