David Bowie Made Me Gay - Darryl W Bullock

 

The subtitle "100 years of LGBT music" describes the story told here - tales of various musicians who were not strictly heterosexual throughout the last century. This obviously and certainly does not try to be all encompassing but it does its best to give an idea of the LGBT community's influence on modern music.

It begins by introducing Tony Jackson, an influential New Orleans pianist and songwriter who mentored Jelly Roll Morton and pretty much anyone else who came in contact with him. From there we move to the more well known Ma Rainey and Bessie Smith (and some contemporaries) and eventually to the likes of Sister Rosetta Tharpe and Liberace.

Bullock apparently tries to be thorough and talks about various record labels dedicated to "risque" and "camp" songs along with a number of nearly-unknown actors who dabbled in music - I suppose these recordings are important in the evolution of LGBT music, but the characters are not that compelling. Although once we get to the 60's and the likes of Joe Meek, things start to pick up again.

Naturally, Wendy Carlos' Switched On Bach gets a chapter - deservedly - and mentions that George Harrison put out an electronic album in 1969, which I knew nothing about! The glam rock scene is also a indisputable topic, although oddly, when talking about Lou Reed, Bullock declines to mention his long affair with the transsexual Rachel and infers that Lou was always straight.

There's a section on lesbian musicians and female-run labels, festivals and more that I was not aware of at all, despite their apparent success. Chapters follow on country and disco, which are not big interests for me (although “These Cocksucking Tears” does sound intriguing!). Funnily enough, Joan Jett and James Williamson played with one singer - apparently country-ish, who I never heard of - who was big at Rodney’s English Disco!

The early punk and new wave scenes were famous for embracing all sexualities (until the macho hard core reared its ugly head) as well as the New Romantics and various permutations (Boy George, Visage, et al) who were well dressed fodder for the scene. There was plenty of blandness - and the rare good tunes - in 80's popular music, and also plenty of varying sexuality. Bullock makes Frankie Goes to Hollywood sound much more subversive than I ever thought they were - I might have to give them a listen, although I'm sure there was nothing there to interest me at the time (nah, still isn't interesting musically in the least, although certainly, blatantly gay). And who knew that Dead or Alive named an album after a Shangri-Las song?! (Although Bullock doesn't acknowledge the steal - or homage - for some reason.)

We move on to "homo hop" - another genre that I did not know existed as I have yet to hear a subdivision of rap that I care for - which has to be even more difficult to exist in than gay country, since rap is known for its homophobia and misogyny. For the same reason, I had no idea that reggae was so backwards concerning gays. Of course, repressive countries are known for their homophobia and Bullock briefly mentions some brave musicians in China, Russia, Africa and other countries.

Nice to see Phranc mentioned in the section on modern female singer-songwriters and, as the book comes to a close, Bullock seems to try to shoe-horn in as many people as he can, as he also talks about the resurgence of some of the artists.

100 years is a long time to try to cover but Bullock does his best to give an overview of this timeline and has certainly enlightened me to artists and scenes that I knew nothing about and had never even heard of. I doubt that anyone will care for all of the music talked about herein, but the book does inform and teaches how music would not have evolved into what it is today without the input from a wide variety of "minorities".