Other punk bands were also exploring society’s attitude towards LGBT people and sexuality in general: Elton Motello’s ‘Jet Boy Jet Girl’, a song often confused with Plastic Bertrand’s ‘Ca Plane Pour Moi’ (both songs use exactly the same backing track) is about the violent fantasies of a 15-year-old boy whose sexual relationship (‘he gives me head’) with an older man comes to an end when the older man rejects the teenager for a girl. ‘Gay clubs were the one place, perhaps the only place, where we could go and meet,’ says Shelley. ‘It was very hard to go somewhere and not cause a fuss. But you could go in a gay club and no one would bat an eyelid about how you were dressed. They were used to the more flamboyant aspects of what punk was. And punk was more inclusive, there was room for girl bands that were actually saying something rather than standing there looking pretty.’
To label Jayne County an icon is to do her a massive disservice: she’s been part of the fabric of LGBT life in the United States since the late 1960s, but it’s for her outrageous stage antics and her punk anthem ‘Fuck Off’ that she will be forever venerated by punk fans. Born Wayne Rogers in a small rural community in Georgia with parents from a strict religious background, Wayne was in New York and took part in the Stonewall Riots. He shared a home with various members of Andy Warhol’s Factory and appeared on stage in Warhol’s Pork, played at legendary punk haunts CBGB’s and Max’s Kansas City and shared a management company, MainMan, with David Bowie. County later claimed that Bowie appropriated his image: ‘MainMan gave me money so I could create ideas so Bowie could steal them, whitewash them, and use them for himself to create a fake version of what I was trying to create,’ she told Gus Bernadicou of Punk Globe magazine in 2012. Shortly after issuing a 45 honouring Max’s 40th anniversary (accompanied by his then-band the Backstreet Boys) and an appearance in court for attacking another singer with a microphone stand, County moved to London.
His third 45 release, ‘Fuck Off’, catapulted Wayne County to punk superstardom. Although issued on a tiny label with next to no distribution, County and his new band the Electric Chairs became stars of the British punk scene and ‘must have played every fucking toilet in England’. County signed to Safari Records and ‘Fuck Off’ was reissued as part of the Blatantly Offenzive EP in 1978. Cross-dressing on stage since the early 1970s, by 1980 Wayne had become Jayne full-time. Although Jayne has taken female hormones and had some minor plastic surgery, according to her 1996 autobiography Man Enough To Be A Woman, she has never had a total sex change: ‘I’m used to my little friend by now, and quite honestly I’d rather save up the money for a facelift,’ she says. County is the embodiment of the whole punk ethos and, as such, is the godmother of Queercore.
Wayne County and the Electric Chairs Blatantly Offenzive EP, 1978
At the beginning of the 1980s, a similar scene emerged in America, where gay clubs that were struggling financially provided space for local punk bands. These bands fused punk and LGBT politics into a new musical movement. Queercore (also known as homocore) explores themes including prejudice, gender identity and the mainstream’s disapproval of the LGBT community. It was in this environment that bands like the Germs, the Dicks and Hüsker Dü, which included two gay men (Bob Mould and Grant Hart) in its three-man line-up, flourished. The Germs, led by the bisexual singer Darby Crash (born Jan Paul Beahm), had been banned from every club in Los Angeles because their shows would inevitably end in violence. Crash’s sad, short life ended when he intentionally overdosed on heroin, aged just 22, a day before John Lennon was assassinated. The Germs were a huge influence on Nirvana, and Crash’s bandmate Pat Smear would end up playing second guitar for Kurt Cobain’s group as well as playing with Dave Grohl’s post-Nirvana outfit Foo Fighters. ‘Being gay wasn’t shocking in the punk scene,’ according to hit producer and Big Black frontman Steve Albini.7
This aggressive, primal music counters the out-and-out homophobia from such acts as the Meat Shits, whose leader Robert Deathrage freely admits that he wrote music to upset ‘certain faggots in the music scene [who] succeeded in poisoning impressionable minds with their pro-gay/anti-sexist propaganda’.8 The Meat Shits demonstrated outright hostility and hatred towards the LGBT community; the message coming from The Angry Samoans was harder to decipher. Were they for real or was this all some pathetic joke from a couple of music critics old enough to know better? It’s hard to take any band seriously when their set list includes songs such as ‘They Saved Hitler’s Cock’ and ‘My Old Man’s A Fatso’, but the lyrics are peppered with so many references to gays, faggots and queers that you have to wonder if they are trying to overcompensate. The original lyrics to their infamous ‘Homo-Sexual’ (from their 1982 album Back From Samoa) included the line ‘Homosexual – I’m one too’ (changed on the released version to ‘Homosexual – we love you’). The lady doth protest too much, methinks, as Shakespeare might have put it, as The Angry Samoans’ original lead guitarist Bonze Blayk (born Kevin Eric Saunders) underwent gender reassignment and is now living as a lesbian. She officially changed her name to Bonze Anne Rose Blayk in August 2011.
Queercore began with punk legends the Dicks – led by out-gay singer Gary Floyd. Formed in Austin, Texas in 1980 by Gary, Buxf Parrott, Pat Deason and Glen Taylor, the band’s first single ‘Dicks Hate The Police’ was released that year and created quite a stir, not only for the sentiment but for the gigs the band played which would often see Floyd wearing make-up and looking not unlike Divine. Born in 1952 in Arkansas but raised in Palestine, Texas where his family moved when he was four years old, Floyd was drafted in 1972 but avoided being sent to Vietnam by registering as a conscientious objector. Instead he spent two years working as a janitor in a mental hospital and, after his ‘discharge’, he moved to Austin. Floyd caused quite a stir; he could often be seen around town, usually accompanied by his close friend Randy ‘Biscuit’ Turner (leader of Texas punk band Big Boys), looking like extras from a John Waters or Derek Jarman movie. ‘Being queer has never been a big deal to me,’ he said. ‘If people don’t like it, they can fuck off!’9 Texas didn’t know what to make of them, but Jello Biafra, leader of incendiary punk band the Dead Kennedys, was enthralled: Biafra told Raoul Hernandez of the Austin Chronicle that the first time he saw Floyd perform, he was amazed to discover ‘a 300-pound communist drag queen who can sing like Janis Joplin’.10 In the song ‘Ode’, from their 2004 album Complete Discography, the queercore band Limp Wrist paid homage to Randy Turner and Gary Floyd, along with many of the other pioneering gay punks in the hardcore scene who had paved the way.
In 1983, Floyd left Texas for San Francisco. Taking on new members Tim Carroll, Sebastian Fuchs, and Lynn Perko (formerly of all-women band The Wrecks), a second version of Dicks began to play together and record. Their album Kill From The Heart was released in 1983 on SST Records, followed by These People in 1985 on Biafra’s Alternative Tentacles label. The group disbanded in 1986, and Floyd embarked on a new project with Dicks drummer Lynn Perko, the more blues-influenced Sister Double Happiness, who released several albums for SST and Sub Pop, before Floyd struck out on his own with a new group Black Kali Ma. In 2007, he formed the short-lived country band Gary Floyd and The Buddha Brothers, reflecting his new-found spirituality. He now records solo and occasionally plays with the original Dicks.
As had been the case with the British punk scene, queercore also offered space for all-woman and woman-led bands. Canadian group Lesbians on Ecstasy (who took their inspiration from the feminist music of the 1970s and mixed queercore with electronic music to create their own unique sound) and Washington’s openly lesbian band Team Dresch, led by fanzine editor and DIY record label head Donna Dresch. San Francisco’s outspoken lesbian collective Tribe 8 kept a tattered rainbow flag flying for early 1980s feminists, were signed by Biafra to Alternative Tentacles and joined the Women’s Music circuit. Singer Lynn (sometimes Lynnee) Breedlove outraged some of the older members of the band’s audience with her on-stage antics, frequently performing shirtless and wearing a st
rap-on dildo. Breedlove now tours the States solo, performing spoken word and stand-up comedy, and runs Homobiles, an LGBT non-profit ride sharing service in San Francisco. Queercore kept on through the 1990s, with Pansy Division (the four-piece formed in 1991, consisted entirely of out-gay musicians and toured regularly with punk/alt-rock band Green Day), Scott Free (who, over the years, has embraced punk, hip hop, dance and even musicals), Chris Cochrane’s Suck Pretty and Extra Fancy taking the lead. Once again, Jello Biafra provided a home for Pansy Division, but in 1996 Extra Fancy became one of the few queercore bands to ever sign to a major, when Atlantic picked up their album Sinnerman. The marriage would be short-lived: Atlantic dropped them just weeks after releasing the album, unable or unwilling (according to frontman Brian Grillo the company reneged on its ‘commitment to breaking barriers’)11 to break the band into the big time. ‘I cannot write songs pretending that I’m singing to a woman,’ said Grillo, ‘Because I like guys and I like having sex with guys’.12
Advertisement for Boy George’s guest-starring turn in the A-Team episode ‘Cowboy George’, 1986
CHAPTER 16
The 1980s: Small Town Boys
‘We’ve never said anything about our sex lives to the newspapers or to magazines, and we don’t intend to’
Neil Tennant1
After getting sacked from his job looking after the cloakroom at the Blitz Club, things were looking pretty dire for George Alan O’Dowd. His band, In Praise of Lemmings, was going nowhere and neither was he – until, that is, the former supermarket shelf-stacker came to the attention of former Sex Pistols manager Malcolm McLaren. McLaren was in the process of forming a new band, Bow Wow Wow, which consisted mainly of an Adam-less Adam and the Ants. McLaren had visualised a new pop character by the name of Lieutenant Lush being part of that set up, and it was as Lush that George joined the former Ants and their 14-year-old singer Annabella Lwin for a short while.
But George (born in London on 14 June 1961) was never cut out to be someone’s backing singer: from his earliest days, lip-synching along to his mother’s Shirley Bassey records, he knew that he was going to be a star. Through friends he met first bassist Mikey Craig and then drummer Jon Moss, and the idea of forming a band of his own started to take shape. Moss had been in punk group London (managed by Simon Napier-Bell) before becoming sticksman in the Damned for a few months in late 1977 and early 1978, after original drummer Rat Scabies walked out following sessions for their second album Music For Pleasure. After the Damned he had briefly played in Adam and the Ants – before they were poached by McLaren to become the backline of Bow Wow Wow.
Choosing the name Culture Club as it reflected the different ethnic backgrounds of the four members, although their first two 45s barely touched the UK singles chart the third, ‘Do You Really Want to Hurt Me’ went to Number One in most European territories and Number Two in the US, New Zealand and several others. The song’s success was propelled by an appearance on Top of the Pops equally as incendiary as Bowie’s infamous ‘Starman’ performance had been a decade earlier. Although the group’s debut was as an eleventh-hour replacement for Shakin’ Stevens, Culture Club would quickly achieve international superstar status, and Boy George himself would become a cultural icon. The band’s Top of the Pops performance generated tabloid headlines that focused on George’s androgynous look and his sexual ambiguity. No one then knew that George and Jon were involved in their own tempestuous relationship.
The timing was perfect. Not only was Britain ready for a new breed of pop star after the glamour-less punk and new wave years, but in America a new station, Music Television, or MTV, had recently started broadcasting and was desperate for film clips to fill its 24/7 music policy. British bands were old hands at making music videos; these short film clips had been a staple since the mid-1960s, and soon a second British Invasion took a grip, with Culture Club, Duran Duran, Adam Ant, Eurythmics, Ultravox and many more clogging up the US charts. Referred to as a ‘gender-bender’ in the press on both sides of the pond, George’s refusal to discuss his sexuality made him seem more a delightful eccentric than a threat to the nation’s youth. When he famously revealed that he would ‘rather have a cup of tea than go to bed with someone,’2 there was little reason to disbelieve him. Soon shops were filled with Boy George rag dolls, his face was on a thousand magazine covers and his records were hits everywhere. George’s fame was at its zenith when, in February 1986, he appeared as a guest star on the hit US action-drama The A-Team. There was no stopping him. He was, as Rolling Stone put it, ‘the harmless, lovable windup doll of pop, a cartoon-like fantasy figure who could sing like a white Smokey Robinson and trade glib one-liners with Joan Rivers and Johnny Carson. He was the pop star whom everyone from your grandmother to your little sister could like.’3
The 1980s were all about success and excess. Acquisition and avarice, it was all good and nowhere was the glamour and the greed celebrated more than on high-camp television blockbusters Dallas, Dynasty and Falcon Crest. But the early 1980s were also terrifying: gay men were dying from AIDS and no one outside of the LGBT community seemed to care. It wasn’t until Hollywood A-lister Rock Hudson became ill that the rest of the world began to show an interest. By the start of 1985, more than 5,500 people had died from the disease in the US but the government had done nothing to try to tackle the crisis. When Hudson, in Paris seeking treatment, collapsed at the Ritz Hotel, his publicist turned to Rock’s old friend Nancy Reagan, then America’s First Lady, for help in getting the ailing star admitted to a military hospital. She refused. Her husband, whose economic policy had virtually crippled the country, put the blame squarely on sexual promiscuity, telling Philadelphia’s College of Physicians that ‘all the vaccines and medications in the world won’t change one basic truth: that prevention is better than cure. Let’s be honest with ourselves. AIDS information cannot be what some call “value neutral” After all, when it comes to preventing AIDS, don’t medicine and morality teach the same lessons?’4
Hudson’s predicament was compounded on 31 July, when Channel 7 News reporter Harold Greene suggested that it was ‘possible that Rock Hudson transmitted AIDS to actress Linda Evans during love scenes’ on Dynasty. The show’s producer, Aaron Spelling, was incandescent. ‘All that can be said about Rock Hudson has been said, yet they go on and on. We’re just not going to become part of this witch-hunt. It’s taken all this time for gays to come out of the closet. And now this is driving them back into the closet.’5
The ignorance was, perhaps, understandable – and Hudson’s star status made him fair game for the media, yet his death in October that year shocked America and finally focused attention on HIV and AIDS. ‘All at once the disease was linked with someone everybody knew and accepted as practically a member of the family,’ People magazine wrote two months after his death:
Almost overnight, stimulated by massive media coverage, the US came to a consensus: AIDS was a grave danger to the national health, and something had to be done about it — fast. Since Hudson made his announcement, more than $1.8 million in private contributions (more than double the amount collected in 1984) has been raised to support AIDS research and to care for AIDS victims (5,523 reported in 1985 alone). A few days after Hudson died, at 59, on Oct. 2, 1985, Congress set aside $221 million to develop a cure for AIDS.6
Although the pop charts were reflecting a shift in attitude towards LGBT performers, the world of entertainment had not changed that much, and AIDS was now becoming an issue in the UK too. The government would finally take action in 1987 with its ‘Don’t Die of Ignorance’ campaign, but as late as 1985 it was still acceptable for British comedians to demand that gay performers be ‘banned from the entertainment business’ and for AIDS to be the stick that the establishment beat us with. In an outspoken interview with the Sunday People, Bernard Manning described Rock Hudson as ‘evil’ for passing the disease on to ‘his pansy partners like he was distributing death pills’ and made disparaging comments about performers including
John Inman, Larry Grayson, Leonard Sachs, Kenny Everett, Peter Wyngarde and Boy George.7
Not only was the HIV/AIDS propaganda being spread by the government incredibly homophobic, but in 1986, reacting to a Daily Mail story about the book Jenny Lives With Eric And Martin, available in a school library run by the Labour-controlled Inner London Education Authority, the powers that be claimed that ‘there is no place in any school in any circumstances for teaching which advocates homosexual behaviour, which presents it as the “norm”, or which encourages homosexual experimentation by pupils’.8 During the 1987 election campaign, the Conservative Party distributed posters claiming that the Labour Party wanted similar books to be read in schools (according to Jill Knight of the Conservative pressure group The Monday Club) ‘to little children as young as five and six,’ which contained ‘brightly coloured pictures’ that ‘showed all about homosexuality and how it was done,’ and ‘explicitly described homosexual intercourse and, indeed, glorified it, encouraging youngsters to believe that it was better than any other sexual way of life’.9 A year later the government enacted Section 28 (also known as Clause 28), stating that a local authority ‘shall not intentionally promote homosexuality or publish material with the intention of promoting homosexuality’ nor could it ‘promote the teaching in any maintained school of the acceptability of homosexuality as a pretended family relationship’. The knives were out.
David Bowie Made Me Gay Page 27
