David Bowie Made Me Gay

by Darryl W. Bullock

  I was thought of only as a lesbian singer. I can remember that the New York Times listed Driver as one of the top albums of 1994. I was on a plane flying home when I first read it. I was so happy, but I couldn’t tell the guy in the seat next to me about it because under the photo of me was the caption “lesbian singer-songwriter”. Perhaps, they felt that I would have taken it as a sign of disrespect if they had not said “lesbian”, but they didn’t understand that this was not what I was selling. I was selling a way of thinking – a way of getting through a knot in your life.26

  The company had worked hard to break Ferron via radio, but although she picked up plenty of airplay in California, it did not translate into sales, and the break with Warner Bros. would have massive repercussions. As well as holding the rights to Still Riot, the company had also taken over ownership of her previous two albums (which they reissued in remixed form). ‘Warner Bros. came along with a deal that broke me at the knees. I ended up losing the rights to my work. I don’t think they did anything really awful on purpose. They just do what corporations do: they eat small things. They eat minnows, and for a minute, I was a minnow.’27

  It took her several years to recover from the experience. Although she continued to perform and record, Ferron also began to teach (at the non-profit Institute for Musical Arts) and to write poetry. In 2008 she released Boulder, an album of songs produced by long-time fan turned musical collaborator Bitch, with guest appearances by Ani DiFranco, the Indigo Girls and others. Queer writer, producer and performer Bitch (originally of the duo Bitch and Animal), who became friends with Ferron when they met on the Women’s Music circuit, also produced Ferron’s 2013 album Lighten-ing and the accompanying hour-long documentary film Thunder. Bitch (born Karen Mould in 1973), who more recently has been working under the name Beach, had toured with DiFranco, the Grammy Award-winning folk singer, songwriter and multi-instrumentalist (born in Buffalo, New York in 1970). DiFranco released her albums through her own independent label, Righteous Babe, built a devoted following through constant touring and saw the return when nine of her albums made the Billboard Top 50. Although for most of her career she self-identified as bisexual, since giving birth to her daughter in 2007 (and subsequently marrying her partner, music producer Mike Napolitano) she prefers not to talk about her sexuality in such fixed terms. ‘I think I was in my early twenties when I was having relationships with women. I’m in my early forties now. I’ve done a lot more talking about it, funnily enough, than doing it,’ she told interviewer Kathleen Bradbury in 2012.28 She’s certainly not the first artist to discover that sexuality can indeed be fluid.

  ‘One of the things that I’ve always prided myself on is in making public mistakes and being accessible,’ says Alix Dobkin. ‘It’s more honest; it resonates. When songwriters ask me to tell them about how to write songs I say that “if you want me to be interested in your song then send me something only you could have written”. I don’t want to hear any convention, I don’t want to be able to sing along with it the first couple of times I hear it, I’m not interested in that. It has to be original, and if you’re really honest then it will be original, because everybody is original. If somebody writes from their own true spirit, from their true soul then it’s going to be original. That’s what I’m interested in, not something that everybody else has done.’

  ‘Of course there is no way to predict how (signing to a major label) would have turned out,’ Holly Near adds. ‘It could have been wonderful, it could have been a disaster. But this is how my life turned out and it has been full of surprises, challenges, gifts, failures, successes – and music.’

  Mural of David Bowie in Brixton, UK, created by James Cochran in 2013. Murals such as the one above became makeshift memorials to the music icon following his death in 2016.

  A rare advertising flyer for Camp Records, circa 1965.

  Julian Eltinge starred with Rudolph Valentino in this mediocre silent film, which, despite its poor reception when it was first released as An Adventuress, was recut and rereleased as The Isle of Love after Valentino became a star.

  This daring advert for ‘Prove It On Me Blues’ (circa 1928) shows Ma flirting with two young women while a cop looks on.

  Advertisement for Bessie Smith, Columbia, circa 1929.

  Bette, a firm favorite at the Continental Baths, made her film debut in the 1971 religious satire The Greatest Story Overtold. The film was reissued as The Divine Mr. J, to capitalize on her fame and later resurfaced as The Thorn, an obvious play on Midler’s starring role in The Rose.

  UK press advertisement for Jobriath’s second album, 1974.

  Jackie Shane performing with Frank Motley and the Motley Crew.

  An early issue of Broadway Breveties, featuring Julian Eltinge in full drag on the cover.

  Brevities reports on New York’s ‘pansy’ balls, 1932.

  Liberace took Confidential to court over their cover story and won $40,000 in damages in 1957.

  Cris Williamson’s album The Changer and the Changed (Olivia, 1975) was one of the biggest selling independent albums of all time.

  John ‘Smokey’ Condon, circa 1974. This image was later used for the cover of the Chapter Music collection How Far Will You Go?—The S&M Recordings 1973–81.

  Marc Almond featured on the cover of Gay Times, 1987.

  Adam Lambert performing with Queen in San Jose on July 1, 2014.

  Artist Holly Near, one of the leading lights of the Women’s Music movement.

  Patrick Haggerty performing at Seattle Pride, 2000.

  Press advert for Lavender Country

  CHAPTER 12

  Lavender Country

  ‘It don’t matter here who you love or what you wear, ‘cause we don’t care who’s got what chromosomes …’

  ‘Lavender Country’ by Patrick Haggerty

  With talk of a major US music event, the Americana Festival, adding a gay strand to its programme, a high-profile radio and television presenter coming out and LGBT artists finally getting the recognition they deserve, 2017 looks likely to be the year that country music finally wakes up to the needs of its LGBT audience and performers. Sometimes it can take a while to be fully appreciated. Just ask Patrick Haggerty, whose album, Lavender Country, was added to the Country Music Hall of Fame collection in 2000, more than a quarter of a century after it was first issued, but who is only now receiving the respect and attention due to him as a pioneer of the country music scene.

  Country (Country-Western, Country & Western; for simplicity we’ll stick to simply ‘country’) music has long ploughed its own musical furrow, one where steers, tears and beers – but seldom queers – provide the fuel for singers and songwriters. Originating in the 1920s, although country music is seen as a peculiarly American art form, its roots can be traced through English folk music, Negro spirituals, vaudeville, the blues, Appalachian music (adapted from the music brought over by British immigrants, including traditional Irish and Scottish fiddle music), Hawaiian guitar and even Alpine yodelling. Developing in the Southern states, initially under the names old-time and hillbilly (especially when the predominant instrument was the fiddle), the earliest recordings were made not in country’s spiritual home Nashville, but more than 200 miles south in Atlanta (by Fiddlin’ John Carson for the Okeh label) in 1923. Ralph Peer, who made those historic first recordings using rudimentary mobile equipment (basically an enormous horn that Carson performed live in front of), would go from Okeh to the Victor Talking Machine Company where, in 1927, he would cut the first discs (out of a makeshift studio in Bristol, Tennessee) from pioneering country artists the Carter Family and Jimmie Rodgers. If the blues was predominantly black, then country was aimed squarely at white, working-class America.

  Peer’s recordings helped to popularise country, and the fame of the artists involved quickly spread nationwide, thanks primarily to the influence of radio and the nationally available Grand Ole Opry programme, which began in 1925. It would not be long before Hollywood would get in o
n the act, promoting the image of the singing cowboy in his Stetson hat, elaborately embroidered Western shirt and blue jeans that is still the recognised uniform of the country musician today.

  For five decades, country music remained the bastion of hard-drinking, hard-working, womanising ‘real men’ and their hard-done-by women; if a country song referenced anyone other than a fists first, questions later macho hunk or a broken-hearted woman standing by her brutish husband, it would usually be in derogatory terms, like in Vernon Dalhart’s 1939 release ‘Lavender Cowboy’ (written by Harold Hersey in 1923), which was banned the following year from being played on the radio because of its suggestive lyrics, or Billy Briggs’ infamous 1951 recording ‘The Sissy Song’: ‘When I get sissy enough … I’ll go out behind the old red barn and let a grey mule kick my brains out’.

  Then, in 1973, along came Lavender Country.

  Now in his early 70s and still playing, Patrick Haggerty seems an unlikely musical trendsetter, yet Lavender Country truly was a ground-breaking release: the very first out-gay country album. k.d. lang may have hogged headlines when she came out as lesbian in 1992, at the same time as she released her fifth (and still most successful) album Ingénue, but Lavender Country had started to plough that particular furrow a full 20 years earlier, and today’s LGBT artists – including Canadian singer Drake Jensen, Ty Herndon, Billy Gilman, Steve Grand, Shane McAnally and Chely Wright – are proving that a genre that was once seen as the last bastion of ‘straight’ western music is slowly but surely opening up to everyone.

  According to the press release that accompanied its 2014 reissue, Lavender Country

  stands as nothing less than an artefact of courage, a sonic political protest document of enormous power, clarity, and grace. At once a scathing indictment of the injustices perpetrated on the homosexual community, a proud proclamation of gay identity, and a love letter of bracing intimacy and eroticism, the album radically appropriates the signifiers of the conservative country genre, queering its heteronormative vocabulary into a deeply personal language.

  Brought up on a dairy farm within a loving and supportive family, Haggerty wrote songs for Lavender Country that are filled with both humour and deep emotion. With titles such as ‘Cryin’ These Cocksucking Tears’ and ‘Back In the Closet Again’, the record is very much a reflection of his own experiences, from his upbringing in rural Washington, through his dismissal from the Peace Corps because of his sexuality, his incarceration (at the hands of the family physician) in a mental hospital (an experience he shares with Lou Reed and Tom Robinson) and his struggle to be heard as a young gay man when he came out, empowered by the Stonewall Riots. ‘Most of us were angry,’ he says of those days. ‘I think anger spurred us all on. I’d been kicked out of the Peace Corps and ended up in a mental institution. I spent eight years jobless; no one would hire me because my mouth was so big. All of us knew that we were potentially sacrificing our lives.’1 Haggerty attests that he had ‘more than one personal friend murdered’ for being gay.

  Now living just outside Seattle with his husband J.B. (the couple had been together for years before J.B. even heard of Lavender Country) Haggerty and his friends – keyboard player Michael Carr, Eve Morris (violin, acoustic guitar and vocals) and guitar player Robert Hammerstrom – formed a four-piece band, which he dubbed Lavender Country. With financial support from Seattle’s Gay Community Social Services – who provided counselling, a community centre, health information and more to the local LGBT community – Lavender Country released their sole eponymous album in 1973. Featuring eleven songs, nine written by Haggerty and one apiece from Morris and Hammerstrom, only 1,000 copies of the album were pressed, sold through the pages of gay-friendly publications in the Seattle area. The original sleeve notes confirm the band’s desire to ‘confront the oppression gay people experience daily and affirm the joys of liberation,’ yet when local DJ Shan Ottey (who later directed the documentary Mom’s Apple Pie: The Heart of the Lesbian Mothers’ Custody Movement) played ‘Cryin’ These Cocksucking Tears’ on air her station, KRAB, received an obscenity fine from the Federal Communications Commission and she lost her licence to broadcast.

  The group continued to perform together for the next five years, but although they played prestigious dates such as San Francisco Gay Pride, none of the musicians were making a living. Eventually the band fell apart, and Haggerty took a job in the social work field with Seattle City Council’s Human Rights department. In the late 1980s, he was one of the founders the Seattle chapter of AIDS-advocacy organisation ACT UP, and he ran for office in state senate and city council elections, both times as a candidate for the left-wing political party New Alliance, which had supported a multi-racial, pro-feminist and pro-gay platform since its formation in New York in 1979.

  The album would have been no more than a footnote if it had not been for an article written by Chris Dickinson which was published in the Journal of Country Music in 2000. Titled ‘Country Undetectable: Gay Artists in Country Music’, that piece announced to the world that a new organisation, the Lesbian and Gay Country Music Association (LGCMA), had been formed with the express intention of challenging the boundaries of country music, and belatedly introduced Lavender Country to the world. Looking back now, it seems ridiculous that LGBT artists were all but invisible in country music; however, only a few years earlier, country artist Mike Deasy, a guitarist who had played on sessions for the Monkees, the Beach Boys, Simon and Garfunkel, Tiny Tim, Ella Fitzgerald and countless others, recorded the hateful ‘God Hates Queer’, which featured the lines ‘you’re going straight to hell and there you’ll fry’ and ‘I don’t need no AIDS from no gay plague’; homophobia was still being offered a home in Nashville, and few people were surprised when, just a few months after she began to champion country’s LGBT artists, Chris Dickinson lost her job.

  Still, her article reawakened interest: Lavender Country was reissued (this time on compact disc) and, in June 2000 at Seattle’s Gay Pride Day, Haggerty launched a follow-up EP, Lavender Country Revisited, featuring re-recordings of three tracks from the album plus two new songs.

  ‘Lavender Country might have been forgotten if it weren’t for the work of Chrissie Dickinson,’ said Doug Stevens, founder and president of the LGCMA and leader of the OutBand. ‘Her article shocked the Nashville scene with its celebration of openly gay country musicians. Chrissie wrote about gay country singers with admiration and respect. She celebrated our contribution to the tradition of country music.’2 Born and raised in Mississippi, in a house with no indoor plumbing but with a colour television,3 Stevens, a classically-trained counter-tenor, grew up surrounded by country music (his parents and grandparents were all musicians) and pursued a successful career in classical music. In 1990 he received the devastating news that he was HIV-positive: his then-partner abandoned him and he spiralled into what he described as

  an eight-month depression. I remembered seeing an interview with Tammy Wynette on TV when I was a kid. She had said that when she was depressed, she wrote a song about what she was feeling and it made her feel a lot better. So, I decided that I would write a song about a man whose lover left him because he was HIV-positive. I thought that it would take a long time to write. I had never tried to write a song before. But I put pen to paper and within 15 minutes I had a nice song. It made me feel much better, so I wrote another one, then another one, and another one. The songs that came out of me were country songs. I saw that gay people didn’t have country music about our lives, even though we bought a lot of music. So, I decided to form a country band to perform the music that I was writing about my life and experiences as a gay country man, living in the big city.4

  Stevens formed the OutBand in 1992 to perform his original, gender-specific songs for primarily gay audiences. ‘Just as country music is the most popular music in the US it is also the most popular music among gays and lesbians,’ he said.5 The OutBand played all over the USA, Mexico and Northern Europe; at one point Stevens was fronting two
different versions of the band, one in San Francisco and the other based in New York City, and for a couple of years Patrick Haggerty was a member. The two men also toured and recorded together in the band Pearl River. ‘The Chris Dickinson article put me in touch with Doug,’ Haggerty reveals, ‘and I worked with him for a few years. That was good for me because he was a fabulous teacher and he was in touch with some fabulous musicians who believed in me. They took me under their wing – I was really raw and really green and they showed me a lot of good shit!’ Stevens retired from recording in 2007, transitioned, and is now – as Teresa McLaughlin – happily married and working as a freelance writer.