David Bowie Made Me Gay

by Darryl W. Bullock

  Women had always had to battle to have their voices heard. In the UK (thanks mostly to the huge loss of life during the First World War) women over 30 were grudgingly given the vote in 1918. The nineteenth Amendment to the US Constitution, ratified in 1920, gave some women there the right to vote, but God help you if you had the misfortune to be poor, black, female and live in Alabama: you would not be able to exercise your right until 1965. In France and Italy, you had to wait until 1945 and in Portugal 1976. In Saudi Arabia women were not offered the opportunity to vote until December 2015; even today in Brunei no one can vote at all.

  The Civil Rights Movement provided the perfect training ground for a newly emergent feminist movement, then popularly known as Women’s Lib. Traditionally, women had always been confronted with more prejudice and more walls to break down than men, and this was no different in the male-centric, misogynistic record industry, where female artists had always struggled to have their voices heard on their terms. The Women’s Liberation Movement was intent on changing the world for the better, and women wanted to dance to the beat of their own life-affirming, woman-centric songs. ‘Looking back upon it all, I believe all movements lead to more movements, more freedom, because not just one struggle can encompass all of the ways in which people feel enslaved,’ Williamson explains. ‘You just have to shine where you are, in the time you have, and do all you can to make it better for everyone’. Here was a chance to redefine how women – whose contributions to culture were so often marginalised – were seen in the music industry, and it was a chance, too, for women from different countries and different cultures to band together and support one another. Female musicians and technicians would no longer have to beg at the table for crumbs: they were going to create their own supportive and nurturing industry. No longer would the face on the front of the album jacket be an industry-standard pretty girl who could sing a bit but who had been signed because her look would give teenage boys something to knock one out to. They would not use sex to sell their products. In the new world of Women’s Music, talent and original thought would come first; if you had something to say, at last you could say it. This was music of healing, of solidarity and of independence.

  Educator and women’s rights activist Madeline Davis could have had no idea that her song ‘Stonewall Nation’ (released as a 45 in 1971) would become recognised as the very first LGBT anthem. A founding member of the Mattachine Society of the Niagara Frontier (the first gay rights organisation in Western New York), Davis began her musical career singing in choirs before performing solo in coffee houses around Buffalo and in New York City, Seattle, San Francisco and Toronto. She began writing LGBT-themed music in the mid-1960s, while leading jazz-rock band The New Chicago Lunch and, later, her own Madeline Davis Group. In 1972, the year after ‘Stonewall Nation’, Davis taught the first course on lesbianism in the United States; that year she became the first openly lesbian delegate at the Democratic National Convention, held at the Miami Beach Convention Centre in Florida, where she delivered a powerful and moving speech challenging politicians to fight for equal rights for LGBT people. Although active in the Women’s Music scene, it was more than a decade before Davis produced her first album of lesbian-themed music, the 1983 cassette-only release Daughter of All Women, a seven-track collection of original songs, included a re-recording of ‘Stonewall Nation’. Ten years after that, she co-authored the book Boots of Leather, Slippers of Gold, the first written history of Buffalo’s lesbian community, and in 2009 she was honoured as the Grand Marshall of that year’s Buffalo Pride.

  All-female bands like the G.T.O.s, Fanny and the horn-led Isis (who played a residency at the Continental Baths, the infamous New York venue where Bette Midler and Barry Manilow got their first breaks), took a crack at smashing through that glass ceiling, but although each was signed to a ‘proper’ company, none of them managed it. Fanny came closest, although their breakthrough chart single ‘Butter Boy’ (about member Jean Millington’s brief affair with Bowie) peaked just as the band split. ‘They were one of the finest fucking rock bands of their time,’ David Bowie told Rolling Stone magazine in 1999. ‘They were extraordinary: they wrote everything, they played like motherfuckers, they were just colossal and wonderful, and nobody’s ever mentioned them. They’re as important as anybody else who’s ever been, ever; it just wasn’t their time.’7 Jean and David remained friends: she sang backing vocals on Bowie’s ‘Fame’ single and went on to marry his guitarist, Earl Slick. Jean’s sister (and co-founder of Fanny) June went on to work with Cris Williamson and appears on The Changer And The Changed.

  ‘I think the world would have been different if bigger companies had been involved,’ says pioneering lesbian folk singer Alix Dobkin. ‘The mainstream didn’t know about us and didn’t care about us and didn’t pay any attention to us, so there was really no choice other than to do it ourselves. I really wanted a major label, but I couldn’t get one for one reason or another – usually my own doing. I wanted to have too much control over the product … I wasn’t about to entrust the precious lesbian, feminist exciting image I had discovered for myself into the hands of these guys.’8

  During the early years of the Women’s Music movement, concerts were small and often held in village halls, gay centres or church basements. They were advertised by word of mouth, by cheaply produced handouts or for free on the few radio stations that had LGBT-friendly shows. Concerts were organised by volunteers, and performers often played for free. Organisers provided crèche services, ensured that venues had wheelchair access and even provided sign language interpreters, in an effort to make sure that these shows were as open and inclusive to as many women as possible. Margie Adam (born in 1947 in Lompoc, California) one of the pioneers of the Women’s Music movement, insisted on all-women crews during her performances and for her tours, creating a safe space for women performers and their audience as well as work for female technical crews.

  ‘There was a difference between the early lesbian artists and the gay male artists because the lesbian artists had the women’s movement to buoy them up,’ says Patrick Haggerty of Lavender Country. ‘It meant that their music was more widely available. There was an outlet for women’s music, but there was not an outlet for gay men’s music, in fact it was very difficult for us to make it in any kind of significant way, even in the gay community.’

  Cris Williamson explains:

  Women needed our music where others did not, so they had to have it. Ginny Berson [concert promoter, educator and co-founder of Olivia Records] was instrumental in the early Olivia days, organising by asking – at a concert, for example – if anyone would want to help us get the music out by going to radio stations and record stores, or have listening parties for women to introduce them to this music. Women would volunteer to do it with no previous skills most likely, but a deep desire to help women.

  Women’s Music flyer, c. 1982

  Women in the States were the first to curate women-only cultural events, set up women-only run record companies and to encourage other women to learn how to fill the technical and managerial roles in the recording industry, but even within the confines of this female Utopia there were problems. Radical feminist musicians disagreed with some venues that allowed men to attend their concerts, and some Women’s Music festivals prohibited men, trans people or even male children over a certain age from attending. ‘It was important, especially in those early days, to find women of like-mind who were making their way, making music and art of all kinds,’ Williamson adds:

  I think it was echo-location of sorts: sending out signals, and hoping for return, just to know where you were in the scheme of things, or that you were, and that your music mattered an awful lot to other women, and men, too, if they were open to listening, open to witnessing strong women in the house. Being heard, appreciated, loved, helps any artist to grow and further, because she can believe in herself, in her own mystery, her own Self. This was true for me. I was received and passed on as a treasured thing
. And still this is true, and still I am inspired.

  But as the movement flourished, costs rose: more people wanted to attend so larger venues had to be hired; press advertising was essential to sell tickets to fill the larger venues and the pressing and distribution of records only added to the ever-spiralling costs. Former volunteers wanted (and deserved) to be paid for their time, and artists who were now selling records would no longer play for free (and why should they?) Women’s Music was a victim of its own success, and as it became bigger and more influential, the old co-operative or collective ideal was subsumed by a more straightforward business model. Suddenly there were bosses, albeit female ones, to answer to in a field that had once been anti-boss, anti-capitalist.

  With these rising costs making it harder and harder for new acts to break through, Women’s Music festivals became the way to discover new artists. They were also huge social events, where hundreds of women, many of them lesbian or bisexual, could meet, socialise and support each other. Women’s Music festivals began in earnest in June 1974 when Margie Adam, Meg Christian and Cris Williamson co-headlined the first National Women’s Music Festival, which took place in Champaign-Urbana, Illinois, but the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival, started by young musician Lisa Vogel and her friends in 1976, quickly became the world’s premier space for women’s music, and provided a platform for artists from the internationally acclaimed Laura Nyro, Sweet Honey in the Rock, Tracy Chapman, Jill Sobule, Sia, the Indigo Girls and many others to lesser-known acts Bitch and Tribe 8.

  ‘Festivals were a place women could gather together in the summer, somewhere, be together, camp if they wished, eat together, and listen to their artists make the music they’d come to know and love,’ says Williamson. ‘Only a few festivals maintained their success. There were once producers in each and every major city and some towns in between, and we all went there, did shows, shared profit and loss together, but the music got there and was presented to mostly women audiences.’

  The New York-born, Philadelphia-raised daughter of Jewish Communist Party members, Alix Dobkin was a stalwart of the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival from its inception through to the 1990s. She grew up in a musical home listening to everything and anything. ‘Broadway show tunes were a great influence,’ she reveals, ‘and folk music of course, folk music from all over the world,’ which included the music of Soviet Russia found in The Workers Songbook. By the time she was in her early 20s, she was working as a professional folk singer playing the Greenwich Village scene alongside artists such as Buffy Sainte-Marie and Bob Dylan:

  The Village scene was wonderful; it was a great, supportive, welcoming community – especially in the very beginning when we all shared stuff. It was just epic. We met regularly and we hung out and we sang and we shared new songs – it was very exciting. I came from Philadelphia, which had a very active folk scene, and that was also a very caring, supportive community. I had lesbian friends in Philadelphia, and I knew of people like Frances Faye [the lesbian singer, born Frances Cohen, who began her recording career in 1936], but I didn’t have much to do with the gay scene in the Village. The Village really had several, very different artistic scenes; there was jazz, there was the whole gay scene and the folk scene.

  For a while, Dobkin was married to Sam Hood, owner of the famous Gaslight Café in Greenwich Village – the place where Dylan would get his big break – but by the early 1970s she was in a relationship with photographer, radio presenter and co-founder of the radical women’s quarterly magazine Dyke, Liza Cowan. After a succession of knock-backs from major companies, she decided to strike out on her own. ‘I wanted to record, like everybody else, and I wasn’t having any success,’ she admits. ‘I didn’t have any success at Columbia and I didn’t have any success at Elektra, and so I had to do it myself. Judy Collins set up appointments for me because she liked my music. She set up an appointment for me with someone at Elektra – a Vice President or something.’ The meeting didn’t go to plan. ‘I said, “Well, okay, but I have to have women musicians,” and he said “fine, no problem,” and then I told him that I had to have a woman producer and that was “fine, we’ll find one”.’ However, when she told the label executive that she needed to have control over her own image, things suddenly became less genial. ‘“Who do you think you are?” he shouted. So that’s why I didn’t get the contract with Elektra. Thank God!’

  In 1973, with flautist Kay Gardner, Dobkin produced Lavender Jane Loves Women; two years later she followed that up with Living With Lesbians. At around the same time as Lavender Jane Loves Women was released, a group of women musicians allied to New York’s Lesbian Feminist Liberation group got together to produce A Few Loving Women, a collection of original songs sold to raise money for the cause. There had been feminist recordings before: in 1972 the New Haven Women’s Liberation Rock Band joined forces with the Chicago Women’s Liberation Rock Band and issued the split album Mountain Moving Day, but Lavender Jane Loves Women and A Few Loving Women were the world’s first explicitly by-lesbians-for-lesbians albums.

  Dobkin and Gardner met at the Manhattan Women’s Centre: adopting the name Lavender Jane for their group they advertised in the lesbian press for other women to play music with (and for), and made their live debut at the Women’s Centre in August 1973. Once they were joined by bassist Patches Attom, their album was recorded just two months later. Dobkin quickly became part of the burgeoning Women’s Music scene on America’s East Coast, releasing five further albums. ‘I guess there was a gap: none of the music out there really satisfied me in terms of my feminism and lesbianism. So yes, there was a gap that I needed to fill, so I wrote the songs and adapted them to satisfy that.’ Musician and producer Gardner (born in Freeport, New York in 1941) later became involved in establishing the Acoustic Stage venue at the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival. An accomplished choral arranger and composer, and early advocate of sound healing, in 1978 she co-founded the New England Women’s Symphony. Kay Gardner died of a heart attack at her home in Bangor, Maine in 2002.9

  Alix Dobkin has performed widely around the world and for many years was an advocate of women-only space, performing only for women and appearing regularly at women’s music and lesbian festivals. ‘There is a lot of humour; it’s the Jewish side of me – you laugh or you cry. Plus it’s so funny. A lot of this stuff is funny. I learned from Woody Guthrie about that; he has great humour and Dylan has great humour, and, of course, the Broadway musical – the humour and the very subtle literary rhymes. There are all kinds of wonderful ways to get the message across. Music is wonderful but it has always been a vehicle for my politics.’

  Cris Williamson says:

  I remember thinking I had no political ideas. I had ecological ideas, ideas about the protection of the Earth, the air, the water – but were those ideas political? Some of my fans early on certainly questioned me about them, saying, for instance: “What does water have to do with Feminism?” Now we know, more than ever, that water and its protection is certainly a political and a social issue. I felt free in those days, and in these times as well, to speak my mind, my heart, my soul, and to offer up these thoughts in the shape of music that was palatable, and easily retained. I, like many around me, was making myself up as I went along. The Women’s Movement helped us immeasurably by encouraging us to be as we were, to stop trying to fit ourselves in an old mould, and create new models of strength and courage that we could then pass on to society. These new models of behaviour, of Feminist political thinking have penetrated society, like water dripping upon a stone. There is pride in this: in being whoever you are, as you are, and being happy in this world on your own merits.

  For many women, especially for lesbian musicians, the growing Women’s Music circuit offered more than just the chance to play their songs; it was a space to breathe. Says Dobkin:

  They were family, and it was my tribe. It was like finding your home, somewhere where, finally, you were the centre. You were important, and we only found that together. For
lesbians this was the only place that we were really important, so it was very exciting. We were charged up by it. It was the most exciting period in my life. It was absolutely thrilling to me, as someone who values originality and uniqueness above everything else to be confronted with this goldmine, this field of possibilities. I knew that whatever I wrote about my life was going to be original; nobody had ever written about it before. Now that’s quite something for an artist, to realise that whatever you did would be the first. That’s pretty amazing. That’s what knocked me out and inspired me, and it was the same when lesbianism met feminism: both had existed for millennia, but never had they combined before we came along, and that was so powerful.