David Bowie Made Me Gay

by Darryl W. Bullock

  Like Victor Willis, trouble seemed to follow Sylvester. In 1980 he was arrested and charged with armed robbery and grand larceny after taking part in a swindle involving $55,000 worth of rare coins.14 He claimed he was the victim of a frame-up, and that the crime had been perpetuated by a lookalike, but he still spent time in jail: ‘Sylvester spent his first night in the slammer with an accused murderer and the next few nights with six transvestites accused of prostitution before he was finally set free’.15 Two years later he sued his (by then former) manager for having had his hand in the till. Sylvester had been signed to Fantasy Records by Harvey Fuqua, a former member of the hit group the Moonglows, who had previously been a talent scout for Motown: soon Two Tons O’ Fun were also signed to a separate deal. Yet despite healthy sales and a number of huge hits on the US dance charts, neither act was seeing much financial return and both began to suspect that not everything was right with the deal that Fantasy had given them. Sylvester left Fantasy and in November 1982 filed a lawsuit against them, alleging that the company had failed to pay him all of the money that he was due from the sale of his records. Although it was discovered that Fuqua and Fantasy had withheld more than $218,000 from his star, he was unable to pay more than $20,000 back. Sylvester signed a new deal with Megatone Records, a company that had been co-founded by his old friend Patrick Cowley. Megatone aimed its releases squarely at the gay market, its roster featuring a number of out-gay artists including San Francisco-based singer Paul Parker.

  As the demand for disco abated, Sylvester, who had been as noticed for his outrageous, feminine attire (which earned him the nickname ‘the Queen of Disco’) as he was noted for ‘bringing disco to its roots, bringing with it aspects of Rock ’n’ Roll, gospel and blues,’16 dropped the dresses and toned the campery down: ‘People used to leave my concerts commenting on the costumes, the make-up, the lights – anything but the music,’ he told Gay News. ‘I was more into being a performer; now the music is first and foremost’;17 but as many other acts had found, his straight audience deserted him.

  Shortly after Sylvester terminated his involvement with the Cockettes, Harris Glenn Milstead, better known as John Waters’ leading lady Divine, also passed through their ranks. Born in Baltimore into a conservative, upper-middle-class family, Harris became the breakout star of Waters’ Dreamland set-up, appearing in cult cinematic hits including Pink Flamingos, Female Trouble and Hairspray, and – around 1974 – in several avant-garde performances alongside the Cockettes. In 1980, as Divine, Milstead recorded his first single, ‘Born To Be Cheap’. It wasn’t a hit, but it managed to get some attention. Soon Divine could be found, squeezed into a far-too-tight animal print dress, strutting her stuff around gay clubs in Britain and America, and this exposure helped the second single, ‘Native Love’ become a minor dance hit. Divine became a surprise star of Britain’s nascent Hi-NRG scene, thanks to her work with dance producer Bobby Orlando, who would also work with the Pet Shop Boys at the start of their career.

  Although Milstead saw Divine as a role he played as a character actor, it was Divine the public – and the media – wanted. In 1987, fed up with not being taken seriously, Milstead decided to refuse to do any further media appearances in drag: ‘I stopped doing the interviews after I appeared on a show in the States. Tom Schneider was the interviewer’s name. He said, “Are you a transvestite?”, I said no, not at all … he then said, “why are you sitting here in a dress?” I of course replied that “well, you insisted that this was the only way I could come on the show”!’18 A hit act in the UK with seven charting singles, Divine failed to spark as a singer in her home country. In London, Divine appeared at the Hippodrome, riding on the back of a baby elephant. The night she appeared on the British TV show Top of the Pops (19 July 1984, lip-synching to ‘You Think You’re a Man’) the country experienced a small earthquake. No doubt veteran morals campaigner Mary Whitehouse would have linked the two seemingly unrelated events. Described by People magazine as the ‘Drag Queen of the Century’, Milstead died from a heart attack in March 1988. He was in Los Angeles to appear, as Uncle Otto, in an episode of the hit US sitcom Married … With Children, one of the few male roles he had been offered during his career.

  John ‘Smokey’ Condon’s life reads like the script to a John Waters movie, full of sex, drugs, prostitutes and wild music. Maybe that’s not so surprising when you discover that he – like Waters and Divine – was raised in Baltimore and hung out with the actors from Water’s fabled Dreamland stable. Thrown out of his abusive family home for being gay, before he was 16, John was living ‘above a nightclub called the Bluesette. I rented a room for $40 a week. I used to hang out with a lot of musicians, jam with them and what have you, and I started hanging out at the bars at a place called Fells Point in the harbour with all kinds of people from Baltimore, all the John Waters people, and partied with them mostly every night of the week.’19 He continued to attend school, intent on graduating. ‘I went to High School whenever I could; it was important for me to graduate. I got suspended four times in my senior year for wearing outrageous clothes and things like that. They just didn’t know what to do with me. They said, “you need English to graduate” so I took an English course and I washed dishes in a coffee shop to pay my rent and I graduated.’ For a time, Condon dated Waters’ leading man David Lochary, the outlandish star of Pink Flamingos and Female Trouble (who sadly died in mysterious circumstances in 1977), but Baltimore was becoming a bit too small for him. He explains:

  I hooked up with a guy named Larry, and we started living with a drag queen named Christine. I was like 16 or 17, and I didn’t know she was a drag queen! She would go out at night and prostitute so we would sleep all day and stay up all night and party, but she finally had enough of Larry and asked us to leave, so we hitch-hiked up to New York. We got a ride in the back of a vegetable truck. Life is very strange sometimes. We got a ride to the outskirts of New York and we walked for blocks and blocks and got to this nightclub, and this limo pulled up and a friend of mine got out. He took one look at me and said, “Oh, we’ve got to go dancing!” I had been sleeping with the manager of Hair in Baltimore, and the friend from the limo had been the star of the show, so we lived with him and we partied in New York.’

  John Condon arrived in New York a few weeks before the Stonewall Riots. ‘The night after Stonewall they had a march,’ he explains. ‘I made it to the first bar and thought, “That’s it; I’m not going any further”!’ He quickly decided that New York wasn’t for him. ‘I went back to Baltimore and I was just hanging out. The Doors were playing at the Civic Centre; I was just hanging outside, and Vince Treanor, their road manager came up to me and said “Do you want to go to Europe with us?”’

  After the tour, he moved to LA and met E. J. Emmons. ‘E. J. had been a sound engineer for The Doors. I was just part of the entourage, I just hung out with them. I got to meet a lot of musicians, but it was all a bit bigger than life. Vince was in this really crappy apartment and I went out and I got a job as a bartender-slash-go-go boy. I would get in around three in the morning and E. J. used to come over and take pictures of me while I was sleeping! We were partners for eight years.’

  And he still had not reached his twentieth birthday.

  Now living in Palm Springs, California and working as an account executive for a lighting company, Condon’s past life as an outrageously out-gay musician had been consigned to the briefest of footnotes until he was rediscovered by the independent Australian label Chapter Music. Founded by Ben O’Connor and Guy Blackman (himself a musician with several albums to his name), Chapter included Smokey on the 2012 compilation Strong Love: Songs of Gay Liberation 1972–1981 (which also included tracks by Blackberri and Lavender Country) before, in 2015, they compiled all of his available recordings on the album How Far Will You Go. Blackman explains:

  Everything Chapter Music does is a labour of love. The Strong Love compilation sold reasonably well but not in huge numbers, and didn’t quite get the critical
response we were hoping for. Maybe we were year or two too early? When the Lavender Country album was reissued a couple of years later people seemed just that little bit more ready to recognise pioneering queer voices. We always wanted to do a full Smokey reissue, as John was one of the wildest and most fascinating artists on Strong Love: we even named the album after his song. The five singles, plus all of the unreleased tracks that Smokey’s partner/producer E. J. sent through, were incredible and we knew that there was an amazing story behind the music. How Far Will You Go? is one of the Chapter releases I’m proudest of having helped to make happen.’20

  ‘I had always wanted to sing,’ Condon explains, ‘Ever since I was three years old. But I never considered myself a gay artist. I sang and did things that came naturally to me, whether that was in the way I dressed and or in my lyrics. The labels came when I hit Hollywood.’ When no record company would touch them, Condon and his manager/band mate/lover Emmons started their own label – the provocatively-named S&M Records, whose logo featured a muscled forearm decorated with studded leather and bearing an ‘S&M’ tattoo. Song titles included ‘Piss Slave’, ‘Leather’, and ‘How Far Will You Go …?’ ‘I came to Los Angeles in 1971 and I think we recorded “Leather” later that year.’ Condon remembers:

  E. J. asked me what I wanted to do and I said, “Well, I want to sing” and he asked me “Can you sing?” I said, “I don’t know!” so we went in to the studio he had been working in. E. J.’s deal was to get a gig at a recording studio only if he got free studio time; he always wanted to be a producer and I always wanted to make music. He said, “what do you want to sing” and I said, “I don’t know”, so he said, “well, sing about something you know about” so that’s why I wrote “Leather” and why I wrote “Miss Ray”. He had been working with a guy named Gordon Alexander, who had a contract with Columbia, so I went in and I recorded “Leather” with Gordon’s band. “Leather” was going to be the B-side because we thought that “Miss Ray”, a song I wrote about this drag queen that I had lived with in Baltimore, was the A-side. We went in and we did them basically in one take.

  It was a time when everybody was handing out cassettes, and saying “listen to my demo”. The record people would just throw these cassettes into a big basket and they wouldn’t listen to them. E. J. knew about this pressing plant down the street, a really funky place where they pressed Mexican records – it was like an auto shop actually – and so he said, “Let’s press up a hundred records and give them out”. I think it cost us about $45. We just started giving them out and it started to take off, and before I knew it a guy named Nickey Beat (Nickey Alexander) who was a drummer who went on to play in several other bands after my group came up to me and told me that we had a gig booked: “Oh, we’re going to play at Rodney’s club on Friday”! I didn’t even have a group at that point and he had set up everything!

  Condon and Emmons quickly pulled together a live band, which they dubbed Smokey after John’s childhood nickname (not to be confused with the British pop band Smokie, who styled themselves Smokey until a certain Mr Robinson threatened to sue). ‘Nickey drove a limo for a hire company,’ Condon remembers, ‘So I rolled up to Rodney’s in this limo! We had maybe six songs practised, and we played and that’s how it started. And it just kept going after that. It was very strange.’

  The band landed a regular spot at the English Disco on the Sunset Strip, run by the legendary music industry publicist Rodney Bingenheimer, and although the line-up changed constantly, musicians who came and went into Smokey’s orbit included Randy Rhoads, Adrian Belew (King Crimson), James Williamson and a teenage Joan Jett, who at one point ran Smokey’s fan club. Joan wanted to play with Smokey, but Condon felt she was too young. Later she would join all-girl rock band The Runaways before fronting her own successful band, Joan Jett and the Blackhearts. Joan is an enigma in rock ’n’ roll: despite many attempts to out her over the years, she has steadfastly refused to discuss her sex life.

  ‘The thing that made it happen was Rodney,’ Condon admits. ‘Rodney had a radio show and he played my songs, and he was at every show I played whether it was at his club or any other club. Rodney was always there; he was a big contributor.’ Like all of their recordings Smokey’s first 45 was laid down in spare studio time. Featuring Williamson on guitar, the semi-autobiographical song tells the tale of a young man who moves from Baltimore to the big city in search of a new life. Pressed in small quantities as and when funds allowed, by 1976 the 45 had started to gain some notoriety, with reviews in fanzines and healthy sales via the Tower Records store on Sunset Strip. ‘I think they ordered 500 copies, so we had to get them pressed. We went in every week to see how they were selling. I did an in-store signing at Tower and there was a busload of Japanese girls who went nuts over me!’

  Life was fun but it wasn’t easy; Condon and Emmons were barely scraping by. ‘Elton had my records on his jukebox. We did a TV show called Tomorrow with Tom Snyder (filmed at Bingenheimer’s club in 1974): I was wearing a dress and I had on green eye shadow and Beatle boots and at that time my hair was down to my waist, I was in the DJ booth doing the cancan and they were interviewing Rodney and talking about how David Bowie is really big and he said, “Yeah, Bowie is big but my number one artist is Smokey” and the camera panned to me doing the cancan!’ Ironically, it was Bowie who suggested to Bingenheimer that he open a nightclub: the pair had met when Bingenheimer was an intern at Mercury, Bowie’s first American label, and remained friends. ‘We had a ball. I sang all 18 voices on “Dance The Night Away”, we were the first people to use a harmoniser [a piece of studio equipment usually used to process vocals]which has just come in from Europe … can you imagine standing in front of nine black dudes singing “Piss Slave”? It was hysterical! These were Jehovah’s Witnesses! And we did that in one take! They were really fun times.’

  For a time, Condon and Emmons were managed by Dan Bourgoise, who also managed the career of Del Shannon. Condon was enjoying life, rubbing shoulders with stars and partying with David Geffen at Linda Ronstadt’s beach house, but things were not right. The reaction he was getting from live appearances, coupled with healthy record sales and a bulging contact book, should have guaranteed him a contract with a major company, but it didn’t happen:

  There were several thousand people there at my last gig, at a club called Osko’s [the club that was used in the movie Thank God It’s Friday]. I had to have three bodyguards; people were just clamouring to touch me and feel me – it blew my fucking mind, yet I was going home to a garage with nothing in it but a motorcycle and a bed,’ he explains. ‘I couldn’t understand it … New Wave was just starting to hit, and big-hair bands like Mötley Crüe, so I don’t know if that was the reason it didn’t happen for us – by then I had cut my hair and what I was doing was more punk.’

  ‘I got called a fag by record executives: “we like his music but he’s gay” and all that kind of shit. I played for Seymour Stein before he signed the Talking Heads and Madonna, but nobody would take a chance. I couldn’t understand it. I put my heart and soul into this music and we went from these hole in the wall studios to the best in the world, the Record Plant. In the studio next to me was Fleetwood Mac or Quincy Jones or Bad Company, and it was just weird, because they would all come in and listen to my music and ask, “What label are you on?” And I’d tell them, “I’m not on a label”. We kept releasing more and more singles in the hope that somebody would pick it up. I watched people plagiarise me and copy my ideas – it was hard … I thought, “Fuck this industry. I’ve given this everything I had. If you want to copy something and if you want to steal something from me, here, steal this!” We recorded ‘Piss Slave’ and with that I walked away from it – I’d had enough. It had been ten years, I’d been living in a garage in Hollywood, all I had was my motorcycle and the clothes on my back. I didn’t even have running water. I was tired, really tired and I had to pick myself up and move on.’

  In Britain, Paul Southwell, leader of gay tr
io Handbag, was having similar issues: ‘I think at that time there was a gay mafia in the music business, and they weren’t ready for it. A lot of the record companies wouldn’t touch us; it was very disappointing. The music industry was still run by gay men in the 1970s; there were a lot of influential gay people in the music industry and they wouldn’t touch a gay act. That was the problem; they didn’t want to be dragged out of the closet’.21

  As innovative as it had been in the 1960s, by the mid-1970s, Motown had become a much more conservative conglomerate, with head Berry Gordy more concerned in pursuing his dreams of making it big in Hollywood than with pushing boundaries with his record releases. Yet surprisingly others within the Motown set-up were still interested in making changes. In 1975, the company issued a pair of genre-defining discs that announced to listeners that even though Hitsville USA may have moved from Detroit to Los Angeles, they still had their finger on the pulse. The Miracles grabbed most of the intention, when the track ‘Ain’t Nobody Straight In L.A.’ (from the platinum-selling album City of Angels) issued in September 1975 caused controversy not just for addressing the subject but for insisting that ‘homosexuality is a part of society,’ but first off the block was a young gay man calling himself Valentino and his song, ‘I Was Born This Way’. Billy Griffin, lead singer with the (now Smokey Robinson-free) Miracles, was happy that their record was proving such a hit in the discos. ‘When I came to Los Angeles to live,’ he told Gay Times ‘I was exposed to homosexuality. I didn’t give it another thought. I’ve male friends who are very close to me but I’ve never thought about having a homosexual relationship with them. At least not at present.’ He admitted too that he was flattered by the attention the group were receiving from their gay audience: ‘Oh yes, It’s nice to talk to them. They come up and ask me to go to bed with them all the time. I’ve become a bit of a gay hero. It’s cool. It makes me feel good.’22