My Formative Queers: Stories of the Music Videos that Made Us Queer

The special dossier is edited by Patrick Kelly and Stuart Richards. It features a collection of stories of formative encounters with music videos in relation to queer identity.

My Formative Queers is an ongoing project that shares stories of the music videos that made us queer. Our queer storytellers have shared foundational memories of music videos and described how these works were instrumental to their burgeoning queer identities, future lives and practices, and developing senses of belonging within LGBTQIA+ communities. The dossier highlights the impact of the music video form, particularly on queer viewers, and we propose greater recognition of these short music-driven films as art forms in their own right.

The project began in early 2024, when Cerise Howard approached Patrick Kelly and Stayci Taylor with an idea to do with queerness and music videos, and together we planned a symposium event at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image (ACMI) during the 2024 Melbourne Queer Film Festival. We have since delivered a subsequent standalone event at Howler Melbourne in September 2025, and are exploring the potential for future events in 2026 and beyond. After sharing his story at ACMI, Stuart Richards joined the project team as co-editor of this special dossier (together with Kelly). 

Of the 17 stories delivered at these events, we are pleased to feature 12 essays in this dossier that explore music videos made between 1976 and 2011. While there emerges a strong emphasis on music videos made in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Australia, we have been pleased to also feature perspectives from Turkey and Nepal at our live events, and we call for more stories that contribute to better understandings of the diversity of queer experiences with music videos from around the world. The entries herein were all first delivered as speeches at these events and, while some are unedited and still feature the hallmarks of live oration, others have been further developed into more scholarly, peer-reviewed essays.

Importantly, the entire project was inspired by Darryl W. Bullock’s book David Bowie Made Me Gay: 100 Years of LGBT Music,¹ and we were thrilled when Darryl travelled from the UK as an MQFF guest and featured as our keynote speaker at ACMI. That day, Darryl said: “Music, that great leveller, has always brought us together: it breaks down barriers and flattens prejudice. So, let’s turn up the volume and dance.”² We were so sad to later learn of Darryl’s death in December 2024, but we are so thankful to have met him that day and to have experienced his kindness, cleverness, wit, and humour. We are also thankful to Darryl’s husband Niall, who granted permission for his keynote address to be published herein. Darryl expressed his thanks for the opportunity to hear all the stories shared that day and, while acknowledging the heaviness of the subject matter, he also remarked that he had laughed his tits off all afternoon. With a great deal of queer gratitude, this dossier is dedicated to the memory of Darryl W. Bullock.

Music video memories of queer contexts, aesthetics, technologies, belonging and becoming

Using memory as a key device, several of the essays in this dossier employ an autoethnographic approach, “a practice that offers a means of interrogating what being may involve as we live through particular contextualised experiences”,³ to better understand the significance of music videos in the formation of queer identities, weaving intimate autobiographical details with political sensibility. Writers explore how their experiences of discovering these music videos spoke to their emerging identities. Watching these music videos in private spaces of the bedroom or in shared living spaces acted as interventions in their immediate environment. Autoethnographic methodologies allow these authors to dig into specific, personal examples of how the visualisations of music can impact upon a young life. As Tinonee Pym and Rob Cover attest, such use of memory becomes future-oriented, as we explore how these “pivotal moments” informed future directions for our lives.⁴ Angie Black explores her relationship to singer Grace Jones by drawing a link between her burgeoning queer identity in the 1980s and the queer aesthetics of Jones’ performance style. The video clip of “Slave to the Rhythm”⁵ is an example of remix culture, which shaped her own development as an artist. Likewise, Sam Elkin writes of his discovery of k.d. lang whilst watching rage whilst waiting to watch Ugly Kid Joe. Howard explores the subversive potential of gender play in 1980s glam rock with particular attention paid to Aerosmith’s “Dude (Looks Like a Lady)”.⁶ Sometimes, this queerness can come in unexpected ways, such as how Christos Tsiolkas writes on how he was affected by the way Bon Scott looks at the camera in AC/DC’s “It’s a Long Way to the Top (If You Wanna Rock ‘n’ Roll)”. Carol D’Cruz explores how Madonna’s “Justify My Love”⁷ was instrumental in understanding how “entangled making sense of my queer becoming is with making sense of all other types of identity”. Bullock’s work in this area was key in identifying the power of a pop star to have a positive impact on fans.

These personal essays speak to how music videos draw on existing queer culture. Likewise, these autoethnographic accounts speak to how young viewers discover broader queer iconography through the consumption of these texts. This dossier is also a study of how artists use camp and queer screen aesthetics and, in turn, how these aesthetics resonated with young queer viewers. In his essay on Skunk Anansie’s “Secretly”,⁸ Richards writes how the video’s aesthetics and narrative evoke Gregg Araki’s films from the New Queer Cinema wave of the early 1990s, particularly in terms of how they rework Hollywood genres and explore youth and delinquency. Likewise, Kelly’s analysis of the Spice Girls’ “Say You’ll Be There”⁹ draws on B-movie films, such as Faster Pussy Cat, Kill! Kill!¹⁰ and Barbarella.¹¹ Rohan Spong explores how the music video format was integral to Kylie Minogue’s image development, particularly in terms of the video clip for “What Do I Have To Do?”,¹² which deploys camp sensibilities and drag aesthetics to shed the “suburban spectre of Charlene-as-Minogue”. Connor Mulvaney examines how Nicki Minaj’s clip for “Super Bass”¹³ uses camp to subvert hip hop norms and reach a wider audience. Such studies position music videos within the wider fields of queer screen studies and advocate for the format to be seen as works of art in their own right. 

Developing technologies are key to how youth encounter queer screen culture, and the music video is no different. Changing screen technologies, from older technologies such as VHS and smaller portable televisions to contemporary devices, such as streaming platforms and mobile devices, have made queer screen culture more accessible to young people beyond traditional and public modes of delivery, including the fraught environment of the family living room.¹⁴ These modes of distribution and access bypass several barriers, allowing queer youth to encounter representations that might otherwise be censored or unavailable. Importantly, the portability and privacy of personal screens also create safer, more intimate conditions for exploring queer art and culture. Such histories may seem nostalgic and foreign in the social media age, where access to screen culture is ubiquitous. D’Cruz explores the VHS release of the music video for “Justify My Love” and highlights the role of bootlegging as a means to watch it. Richards writes on how, by having a television in his bedroom, he was able to watch queer content late at night in isolation, from Queer as Folk¹⁵ on SBS to music video clips on rage.¹⁶ Bidjara, Wakka Wakka and Gubbi Gubbi man Davey Thompson speaks to the act of rewatching Kylie Minogue’s “Slow”¹⁷ repeatedly so as to focus on one of the male sunbathers reclining next to Minogue. More recently, Mulvaney recounts how his adoration of Nicky Minaj relied upon internet access to engage with other queer fans. How these writers accessed these music video clips was shaped by the social affordances of the technology of the day.

Consumer technologies enable young queers to become active fans who do something with music videos beyond simply watching them. Fandom practices foster our senses of enrichment and connection through mutual adoration of artistry with like-minded others. Emily Gray shares how friendships and romances can blossom over a mutual love for an artist like Madonna. By dressing up in the style of such musical idols or devising our own choreography to their music and enlisting our peers as back-up dancers, we form bonds over shared interests and invite others to see us or to better understand who we truly are. Mulvaney demonstrates how Nicki Minaj inspired him to explore online fan communities and connect with his fellow Minaj fans or “Barbs” by uploading his thoughts to platforms like Tumblr and Twitter (now X). In doing so, he highlights the significance of social media platforms in enabling young queer folks to explore their queer identities and connect with like-minded people in a way that is less possible in the schoolyard and other physical spaces.

Further, the dossier illuminates how music videos often inspire young fans to experiment with creative practices of performance and filmmaking themselves. New meanings are created when fans remix, re-perform or remediate video clips, and new friendships, communities and networks spring from our collective enjoyment of musical acts and the creative film works they release. Kelly traces how the music videos for Spice Girls’ “Say You’ll Be There” and drag parody Pauline Pantsdown’s “I Don’t Like It¹⁸ inspired his childhood performances at primary school talent shows, reflecting on how integral music videos were to him later becoming a filmmaker. Black credits Grace Jones’ “Slave to the Rhythm” for “sparking my interest in filmmaking as a means of self-expression and pushing against societal binaries of gender and sexuality”. These reflections demonstrate how music videos (texts often ignored when tracking influential cultural artefacts) motivate early forays into being creative with video and audio, highlighting the music video form as one that offers emerging video practitioners an important space for identity development and creative experimentation. 

A Virtual Hug for Queer Viewers

The essays herein offer insight into the video-viewing behaviours and motivations of queer youth. As we continue to reflect on broader understandings of why we watch video,¹⁹ the essays in this dossier illuminate how we watch video to find enrichment, to connect with peers over shared interests, to understand what is happening in the current cultural zeitgeist, to fill some time, and/or to regulate our moods. We offer stories of killing time on the weekend and of cheering oneself up during challenging times; of growing closer to others over a mutual love of a particular artist; of feeling enriched by recognising queer representation, queer aesthetics, and queer practices. 

Ultimately, by using memory to analyse the formative nature of music videos toward our queer senses of self, this dossier demonstrates how these spectacular, rhythmic artworks served to enrich our lives at times when we needed enrichment. Of David Bowie’s “outrageous and colourful” performance of his song “Starman”²⁰ on BBC’s Top of the Pops²¹ in 1972, Bullock has suggested it “saved lives. It gave people a virtual hug, and told them that things would get better; that someone out there understood them, and things would get better for them”. Our authors, and the accounts of their formative queers, are here to share exactly how things can get better; why the music video form is more important than traditionally thought; and that it is so vital that, to quote Darryl again, we “turn up the volume and dance”.

Endnotes