Press advert for ‘I Was Born This Way’
Covered two years later on Motown’s main label by Carl Bean (and 35 years before Lady Gaga had a worldwide hit with the similarly titled and themed ‘Born This Way’), ‘I Was Born This Way’ (backed with ‘Liberation’) was Valentino’s first record and the only 45 issued (in both the US and the UK) on Gaiee records, set up by the song’s co-author, a heterosexual woman by the name of Bunny Jones – a former beauty salon owner who had a number of gay employees: ‘I named the label Gaiee because I wanted to give gay people a label they can call home,’ she told The Advocate’s Christopher Stone. ‘If they’re really talented I want to break my neck for them’.23 After the disc proved to be a hit on the dance floor, and after Bunny had sold a reported 15,000 copies from the back of her car, Motown bought the rights to her label and, more importantly her song.
Advertised as ‘the first gay disco single,’24 with its chorus ‘I’m happy, I’m carefree and I’m gay; I was born this way,’ the song was a hit in discos but failed to chart on either side of the Atlantic, and a proposed album failed to materialise. Reviewing the disc in February 1975, Billboard magazine’s Tom Moulton noted that ‘feelings on the disc are mixed, as some think it is offensive; others feel it is a great cut. Without a doubt it’s a strong disco record.’25 Born in Alabama in 1952, the man christened Charles Valentino Harris began his career as a dancer and actor, appearing on stage in Hair and on television in the crime drama Madigan. ‘It’s not a protest song,’ he told Gay News’ Jeff Grace. ‘It’s just music with a message. I’m not forcing anyone to turn gay and in the same way no one is trying to turn me straight.’26 As Charles Valentino, he is still acting today, appearing in the 2015 movie About Scout.
Gay rights activist and singer Carl Bean, formerly with gospel outfit the Alex Bradford Gospel Troupe, was singled out by Bunny and Berry as the man most likely to make the song a hit, and that’s exactly what he did in early 1978, and again when it was reissued in 1985 (and remixed the following year by Bruce Forrest and Shep Pettibone). An outspoken advocate of safe sex in the gay community, Carl is now an ordained minister: in 1982 he founded the Unity Fellowship of Christ Church in Los Angeles, an inclusive church that actively encourages LGBT members of the African American community. Motown also issued Thelma Houston’s ‘One Out Of Every Six’, taken from the soundtrack of the gay-themed film Norman … Is That You?, and the company would continue to have a number of high-profile disco hits, including Diana Ross’ parting shot to the label she had been with for two decades ‘I’m Coming Out’. Composed by Chic’s Nile Rodgers and Bernard Edwards and directly influenced by the LGBT scene, the song would become an anthem in LGBT clubs around the globe.
In Britain, discos popped up in every town and city. In a country where the economy was in freefall, where we were getting used to power cuts and three-day working weeks, disco offered people a place where they could – for a few hours at least – forget their troubles and just dance. ‘I remember the first time I ever went to my first grownup club,’ Jimmy Somerville told journalist Gregg Shapiro:
I wasn’t yet legally allowed to go to a club. I think they liked the look of me at the door. They took one look at me and thought, “What the fuck?” and they let me in. The club was split into two sections. The top part was general kind of chart music and down in the basement it was all disco. I got downstairs and the first thing I danced to was Donna Summer’s “A Love Trilogy”. As soon as I got on that dance floor I thought to myself, “There is no turning back! Who needs Toto? I’ve got disco”!27
What began as an underground musical movement among blacks, Latins and the LGBT community had become a corporate, antiseptic behemoth, packaged for the masses, fronted by the rictus grins of the Bee Gees and their ilk: even Frank Sinatra and Barry Manilow, who had played piano for Bette Midler at the Continental Baths (but who remained tight-lipped about his sexuality for decades) released disco records. Disco went from a joyful expression of freedom among otherwise-repressed communities to closeted gay white men making anodyne black music for straight audiences. No wonder then that there would be a massive backlash that saw piles of disco records set on fire and – at Disco Demolition Night (12 July 1979) – 50,000 people fill Comiskey Park in Chicago to see radio DJ Steve Dahl use dynamite to explode crates full of them. But the final nail in the coffin was just around the corner, and if the hedonism of Studio 54 and the other hyperdiscos could be compared to the revelry that filled the cabarets of early 1930s Berlin, then the AIDS crisis would prove to be as devastating as the fall of the Weiman Republic, bludgeoning the life out of the party.
On 8 May 1982 at the St Vincent’s Hospital in Manhattan, George Harris, better known as Hibiscus and one of the founding members of queer performance troupe the Cockettes, died from what was reported as ‘a growing threat to the health of gay men: Kaposi’s sarcoma and pneumocystis carinii pneumonia. Kaposi’s sarcoma is not well understood by medical scientists, but one of the most frightening aspects of the disease is the swiftness with which it kills its victims.’28 Gay men, sex workers and intravenous drug users had been dying of this mysterious disease in increasing numbers ever since, in 1969, 16-year-old Robert Rayford became the earliest North American victim (Rayford’s death wasn’t confirmed as being AIDS-related until 1987).29
Hibiscus was the first in a long line of musicians to die from the as-yet-unnamed disease. One of his closest friends, Jim Fouratt, an early member of the Gay Liberation Front, a participant in the Stonewall Riots and the former co-owner of New York’s mammoth Danceteria nightclub, visited Hibiscus in hospital shortly before he died. ‘No one wants to acknowledge that there is an epidemic in the gay community,’ he told the Gay Community News. ‘It seems that it’s only when someone famous dies that people care’. Wearing glitter in his beard 35 years before it became ‘a thing’, Hibiscus left the Cockettes to set up gay cabaret act the Angels of Light before, in 1981, touring the US and Europe with glitter rock act Hibiscus and the Screaming Violets, which featured his sisters Jayne Anne, Eloise and Mary Lou and their brother Fred’ Hibiscus was once famously photographed inserting a flower into the barrel of a rifle held by a soldier at an anti-war protest in Washington DC. Three days after Hibiscus died, The New York Times ran one of the first articles on the ‘new homosexual disorder’.30 They reported that ‘the cause of the disorder is unknown’ and that it had ‘now afflicted at least 335 people, of whom it has killed 136’. Health practitioners briefly referred to the disease as GRID (gay-related immune deficiency) before, in July 1982 they gave it a new name: acquired immunodeficiency syndrome, or AIDS.
Studio 54 reopened in September 1981, with original business partners Steve Rubell and Ian Schrager initially contracted as consultants, but the heady days were over. Rubell, closeted for most of his life, died from AIDS-related complications in 1989. Although he would continue to enjoy hits on the dance charts, Sylvester would never have another mainstream hit after 1979. He died from complications arising from the HIV virus in 1988, leaving all future royalties from his work to San Francisco-based HIV/AIDS charities. His influence can still be seen today: Jimmy Somerville had a Top Five hit in Britain in 1990 with his cover of ‘Mighty Real’, and the fierce drag persona adopted by RuPaul (who later recorded with Elton John) echoes Sylvester’s own outrageous performances. Patrick Cowley died in San Francisco on 12 November 1982, another early victim of AIDS; he was just 32 years old. After his success with the Village People, Jacques Morali continued to write and produce, co-authoring Eartha Kitt’s hit ‘Where is My Man’ among others, before he too died from AIDS in 1991. When Donna Summer, disco’s reigning queen, was widely quoted as saying that ‘AIDS has been sent by God to punish homosexuals’ she was forced to send a letter to leading gay rights group ACT UP to try to explain the ‘terrible misunderstanding’.31 Three years later, on 29 September 1992, Summer’s former collaborator Paul Jabara, the actor and songwriter who had supported her on tour, duetted with her and wrote her h
its ‘Last Dance’ and ‘Enough is Enough’ (and who also wrote ‘It’s Raining Men’ for the Weather Girls) died at the age of 44 from AIDS-related complications after a long illness. The pioneering DJ Walter Gibbons, who spent much of his short life in turmoil trying to reconcile his fervent religious beliefs with his sexuality, died from AIDS-related complications in September 1994, aged just 40.
Dance music would continue, and the blueprint laid down by people like Cowley and Gibbons would lead to Hi-NRG, a harder dance music dominated by LGBT musicians and producers that, in turn, would be a direct influence on the Stock, Aitken & Waterman (SAW) Hit Factory sound. Dominating the UK singles charts for the second half of the 1980s, SAW’s first entry was ‘You Think You’re a Man’, a Top 20 hit for Divine in August 1984. Producer Ian Levine was a huge influence on the sounds being played in discos in the 1980s and 1990s: the self-confessed Northern Soul nut pioneered American-style mixing in British clubs and was the first resident DJ at London’s gay super-club Heaven, the first British gay nightclub to seriously rival those of New York, which opened for business in December 1979. ‘It became the biggest gay club in Europe virtually overnight,’ Levine told dmcworld magazine in 2008. ‘The first record I played was Dan Hartman’s “Relight My Fire”.’
After Heaven, Levine helped found Hi-NRG label Record Shack in 1983. Record Shack’s first release, Miquel Brown’s ‘So Many Men, So Little Time’, sold two million copies and topped the Billboard chart, and while Levine was at Record Shack the label sold 12 million records and had had major hits in almost every country in the world. He went on to work with Bronski Beat, Erasure and the Pet Shop Boys. Hartman, who scored a huge hit with ‘Instant Replay’ was gay but never came out. Sadly, the disco superstar died of an AIDS-related brain tumour in 1994. ‘Dan was an elemental force of nature,’ says his friend Tom Robinson. ‘He was happy to come in and write with me and have songs that reflected the emotional truth of the time. It’s such a tragedy that he died when he did and in the way that he did, but Dan Hartman was a real hero, gone but not forgotten.’ Ian Levine suffered a crippling stroke in 2014 but is still working today and has been instrumental in helping the BBC restore or recreate many of its missing Doctor Who episodes.
Disco and Hi-NRG would spawn house, Chicago house (helped along by Frankie Knuckles, who relocated to Chicago club The Warehouse), acid house (Heaven’s Mark Moore, one of the first UK DJs to play Chicago house in London, had Britain’s first acid-flavoured Number One with ‘Theme From S-Express’), techno, EDM (Electronic Dance Music), Italo house and Eurodisco – flashy, trashy and ridiculously catchy keyboard-led pop influenced heavily by Bobby O, Giorgio Moroder and the Eurovision Song Contest. The influence of Eurodisco was soon felt in America, where Moroder provided Blondie with their biggest US chart hit (‘Call Me’), and Laura Brannigan would also hit Number One with a cover of the Italian pop hit ‘Gloria’.
Perhaps the most celebratory of all gay dance acts – at least until the Scissor Sisters came along – was Sweden’s Army of Lovers. Formed in 1987, the three members of Army of Lovers had all previously worked together in the group Barbie. Songwriter, philosopher and author Alexander Bard, singer and actor Jean-Pierre Barda and model and singer Camilla Henemark (aka La Camilla) clocked up more than 20 hits across Europe including the Number One hit ‘Crucified’. The band’s über-camp look, over-the-top videos and infectious beats kept the flag flying for gay disco during the early 1990s, and although they disbanded in 1996 after five albums together, they have reunited on several occasions over the last two decades. In 2013 they attempted to have their song ‘Rockin’ the Ride’ chosen as Sweden’s entry for the world’s annual celebration of global campery, the Eurovision Song Contest.
Poster advertising GLF fundraiser, 1970
CHAPTER 14
The 1970s: Political and Pink
‘I have never and will never apologise for my sex life. Gay sex is natural, gay sex is good! Not everybody does it, but …’
George Michael1
The late 1970s was a time of political awakening on both sides of the pond. In Florida, former beauty pageant queen, singer and orange juice spokeswoman Anita Bryant was heading the political coalition Save Our Children, a right-wing Christian-led campaign to overturn local legislation that banned discrimination based on sexual orientation. Florida had long been vehemently opposed to LGBT rights: like the rest of America, during the 1950s and 1960s the city’s officials had been closing down bars and enacting laws to make homosexuality and cross-dressing illegal, and until 1975 the government were legally empowered to refuse employment to anyone thought to be homosexual. Established in 1956, the Florida Legislative Investigation Committee (known as the Johns Committee) hunted down LGBT people in state employment and universities across the state and in 1964 published Homosexuality and Citizenship in Florida, more commonly known as the ‘Purple Pamphlet’, a highly inflammatory document that portrayed homosexuals as predators and a threat to children: ‘many facets of homosexual practice as it exists in Florida today pose a threat to the health and moral well-being of a sizeable portion of our population, particularly our youth’.2
The title track to Conan Dunham’s first album, Tell Ol’ Anita, was a reaction to Bryant’s campaign as well as a document of his own life. ‘In 1977, I lost one of the greatest friends a guy could ever wish for,’ he said. ‘I stood by his bedside in a Sacramento hospital and watched day by day for over a month as he slowly slipped away. The doctors had no idea what caused his death. It wasn’t until 1985 that AIDS was discovered to be the culprit.’
Of course, Dunham wasn’t the first gay man to be affected by the politics of the time, although he would have been one of the many to indulge in a wry smile when Bryant lost a lucrative TV series on the back of the bad publicity she was acquiring.3 Political activism has been central to the LGBT experience, from securing the right to vote through to decriminalising homosexual acts; from acknowledging the sacrifices others have made through to railing against the police and state for the way our community has been marginalised. And just as ‘straight’ songwriters from Woody Guthrie and Bob Dylan to Bruce Springsteen, Steve Earle and beyond have written about the injustices faced by the poor working man, so have LGBT singers and songwriters harnessed their political beliefs to shine a light on the plight faced by their own community. Spurred on by Save Our Children, in June 1977 more than 130,000 people marched to demand equal rights for LGBT people in the United States. ‘Marchers waved protest signs attacking former singer Anita Bryant who led a campaign in Florida which saw the repeal earlier this month of a local law protecting the homosexual community. Homosexual leaders said the next step in their fight against discrimination would be to seek court injunctions ensuring equal job rights’. Peaceful demonstrations were also held in London, where around 1,000 turned out to march, and in Amsterdam 2,000 people marched through the city carrying banners that read ‘Against the American witch-hunt on homosexuals’. In San Francisco, according to police estimates, more than 100,000 took to the streets; the gay community received heavy support from predominantly heterosexual organisations, including union members and black groups: ‘The anger of that city’s large homosexual community was heightened last week by the slaying of a homosexual city gardener by a gang of youths who shouted “faggot” as they stabbed him repeatedly’. A Pride parade along New York’s Fifth Avenue attracted at least 25,000, and there were smaller demonstrations in cities including Los Angeles, Seattle and Denver.4
Then, in February 1978, something quite extraordinary happened: a song about the experiences of LGBT people made the British Top 20.
The song in question was ‘Glad to be Gay’, the highly charged coming out anthem issued by the Tom Robinson Band on their 1978 EP Rising Free. After years of oppression, LGBT people were angry, and they were no longer prepared to be quiet about it, as the demonstrations of the previous summer had proved. Robinson was an early supporter of Rock Against Racism, a campaign set up as a response to
an increase in racial conflict and the growth of white nationalist groups such as the National Front in Britain. For the first time pop, rock, punk and reggae musicians were staging concerts with an anti-racist theme and providing a platform for LGBT artists who shared their political stance. Rock Against Racism was also seen as a direct reaction to the right-wing diatribe spewed by such bloated, dated stars as Eric Clapton. At a concert in Birmingham in August 1976 – two years after he had covered Bob Marley’s ‘I Shot The Sheriff’ – Clapton famously ranted from the stage: ‘stop Britain from becoming a black colony. Get the foreigners out. Get the wogs out. Get the coons out. Keep Britain white.’5
From a man who had spent a lifetime appropriating black culture, his support of Enoch Powell, who had warned of the dangers of immigration in 1968 with his infamous ‘Rivers Of Blood’ speech, was something of a slap in the face. Elvis Costello, also accused of racism after making drunken, ignorant remarks about James Brown and Ray Charles in 1979, apologised for his actions and worked with Rock Against Racism. Costello received death threats and the incident severely damaged his career in the United States. While recording his Station to Station album, David Bowie began to flirt with Nazi iconography and he was photographed – at London’s Victoria Station – seemingly giving a ‘heil Hitler’ salute. When he told Playboy that, because of the way he used an audience ‘Adolf Hitler was one of the first rock stars,’ and that he condoned fascism, he was lambasted by the Musician’s Union. He used an interview with Melody Maker in October 1977 to insist that he was not a fascist, that he was repelled by racism and that he had been ‘out of my mind, totally, completely crazed’ at the time.
David Bowie Made Me Gay Page 24
