A Voice That Saved Lives: The Queer Influence of David Bowie

Editors’ note: The following is the written transcript of a speech originally delivered by the author at My Formative Queers on 16 November 2024.

No, David Bowie did not make me gay, but his influence was everywhere, and as a teenager questioning his own identity, I was able to find solace and salvation in the music he, his peers and the artists that followed them made. When Bowie appeared on the British music show Top Of The Pops in 1972 performing “Starman”, he could not have possibly known that he was about to change the world, but that’s exactly what he did. For when he stared down the camera, locked eyes with the audience watching at home, and pointed directly at them, he gave a generation of young queer people permission to be as outrageous and colourful as he was himself. But let’s take a step back.

The LGBTQ+ community has spent well over a century pioneering musical genres and producing some of the most lasting and important records of all time. Of course, there were queer writers and performers before wax cylinders and shellac discs, but the discovery, in the second half of the nineteenth century, of a method to record and preserve sound meant that music quickly became more accessible to a vastly wider audience.

Suddenly, LGBTQ+ musicians were no longer limited to the music hall stages or opera houses of the world’s major cities; now they could reach into the homes of every individual coming to terms with their own sexuality. Sitting in your room, scared and confused, hearing a voice on a record telling you that you were not alone, was like having a comforting hug from a friend. And those voices that came crackling through the horn, out of the speaker or over the radio would influence every generation of musicians – queer, straight or questioning – that followed.

The roles of LGBTQ+ people in the theatre, in the cinema, in photography and in classical music have been thoroughly examined, but the contributions of members of our community in the fields of pop, folk, punk, electronica and so on have been all but ignored, unless you happen to have been lucky enough to be one of the handful of artists to make the big time. It hasn’t helped that, until very recently, pop music has been seen as second-class, ephemeral and disposable; a victim of snobbery and of its own success. And that is simply not fair: queer musicians were there as jazz gestated. We were in the maternity ward during the birth of the blues, and in the first few decades of the twentieth century, many LGBTQ+ performers enjoyed a level of fame and a freedom that would not be seen again until the 1970s, when LGBTQ+ artists, composers and producers dominated the disco scene and a new wave of politically active queer musicians demanded to be heard.

The music promo film, which has been around in one form or another for as long as we have had talking pictures, was originally a cheap and convenient way for a new record to gain some traction when the artist was unable or unwilling to appear on live television or in the theatre. Starting with Max Fleischer’s Car-Tunes in the mid-1920s through to Scopitone film of the 1960s, these early forms of what would become the pop video were likewise disposable, and the video would not come into its own as an art form until the 1970s.

David Bowie was an early proponent of the pop music video, making his first pop promos in the late 1960s, before he became a worldwide icon, although on that particular night in 1972, he was performing live – or at least miming to a newly recorded backing track so it appeared as if he and his band were live. There he was, in make-up and a colourful catsuit, casually throwing his arm around the shoulder of his guitarist Mick Ronson, himself dressed from head to toe in gold lamé. Putting his hand on his hips, fluttering his eyelashes and telling us “we can sparkle”.

A lot has been said – and a lot written, some of it by me¹ – about Bowie’s sexuality and gender identity, and at different times he saw himself as gay, bisexual and straight. But whatever he was at that moment in time did not matter: the David Bowie singing “Starman” on Top of the Pops was “other”, an alien who threatened the heteronormative world. For most of his audience, though, he was simply exotic and exciting… and he scared their parents. I was only eight years old, but that last bit really mattered to me.

The people watching that Thursday evening included Boy George, Andy Bell and Holly Johnson, who just over a decade later would take Frankie Goes to Hollywood to number one in the charts no less than three times, the first British chart toppers led by two openly gay men.

It’s important to remember that Britain had only three television channels back in 1972; Top of the Pops was one of the most-watched programmes on television, with an audience of around 15 million a week. It’s also significant that the laws that had outlawed homosexuality for hundreds of years had only recently been overhauled. Sex between two consenting men – who both had to be over 21 – had been legal in England and Wales for less than five years. Sex between two men would remain illegal in Scotland until 1981, and in Northern Ireland until 1982.

In that same year that gay men in all parts of the UK were finally awarded legitimacy – assuming they were over 21, of course – Culture Club landed their first number one hit. The video for “Do You Really Want to Hurt Me” touches on queer sexuality, especially in the club scene where we see a representation of what we can assume to be a butch lesbian, but the band’s record company and management were at pains to tell the public that Boy George was not gay, just flamboyant – the New Wave Liberace.

The sad truth is that even though every music mogul worth his wage was fully aware of how important the Pink Pound was – and still is – in supporting the careers and record sales of their “gay- friendly” acts, for decades LGBTQ+ musicians saw their stories “straight-washed” or completely brushed under the carpet. In the 1960s and ‘70s, when the music industry on both sides of the Atlantic was controlled by LGBTQ+ people, few if any dared to come out for fear of losing their fan base and their career.

As the 1980s progressed, British acts with queer members began to become more noticeable. We had already seen Freddie Mercury camping it up, and now the press were having a field day with the genderbending antics of Boy George, Marilyn, Pete Burns and the like; Soft Cell topped the charts with “Tainted Love” (1981) and Wham, led by George Michael, became a global phenomenon, but none of these artists were officially out. Although the press may have sniggered at seeing men in dresses on Top of the Pops, the LGBTQ+ stars of the day all stayed tight-lipped about their sexuality.

Frankie Goes to Hollywood’s “Relax”

It was not until Bronski Beat and Frankie Goes to Hollywood came along that we saw out gay men performing on television and racing up the pop charts. Frankie’s hit, “Relax” (1983), was a monster of a record, a queer anthem about gay sex with a video that featured S&M, leather fetishism, simulated watersports and goodness knows what else. It was dirty, raunchy and hot and it confounded people’s prejudices. I was working in a record store during the height of Frankie-mania, and it was fun for me trying to work out who of the many people buying their records knew that Holly and Paul were gay… and who, if anybody, cared.

“There were a lot of artists who were gay but not open about it,” says the video’s director, Bernard Rose. “Boy George, George Michael, Freddie Mercury, Elton John — these are people we now think have always been out, but they were not out in 1984. And they were all at the height of their fame. Frankie Goes to Hollywood were really the first ones who came out and said, ‘Well, yeah, we’re gay.’ And it caused a shockwave, but it also didn’t hurt them — it did the opposite.”²

Someone else who had been watching Bowie back in 1972 was a young Glasgow boy, Jimmy Somerville, then just shy of his 11th birthday. More than a decade later, and six months after Frankie Goes to Hollywood reached number one on the British charts, Somerville would lead the UK’s first – and still only – hit act comprised entirely of out gay men.

Jimmy Somerville in the music video for Bronski Beat’s “Smalltown Boy”

As exciting as seeing Frankie dominate the pop world was, nothing could prepare us for the arrival of Bronski Beat. “Smalltown Boy” (1984), with its gritty video and searing vocals, showed LGBTQ+ people in a different light, trading the hedonism and debauchery of “Relax” for the graphic realism of a gay bashing. Released as Britain was attempting to get its collective head around HIV and AIDS, it was a stark reminder of how society treated queer kids, how easy it was for them to become estranged from their families, isolated and alone.

Interestingly, the director for both “Relax” and “Smalltown Boy” was the same man. Now better known as a film director, with cult classics including Candyman (1992), ivans xtc (2000) and Mr Nice (2010), Bernard Rose says of “Smalltown Boy”: “It’s a piece of work that I’m still very proud of. It was much quieter in its impact than ‘Relax,’ but I think just as powerful in terms of the story it told. That was the good thing about it.”³ Rose would work with both Frankie Goes to Hollywood and Bronski Beat again, for the singles “Welcome to the Pleasuredome” (1984) and “Why?” (1984), respectively. 

David Bowie in the music video for “Ashes to Ashes”

Fittingly, Somerville would later cover Bowie’s “Ashes to Ashes” (1980), his chart-topping hit, which was accompanied by a video featuring Bowie as a Pierrot, accompanied by regulars from London’s Blitz, including Steve Strange – who featured in the video and would go on to front Visage.

For this young pop fan, those were exciting days. For the very first time, I was seeing people I could identify with on my television. These were not the camp stereotypes I had grown up with, the comedy homosexual forever the butt of the joke, but hard, angry, politically aware members of the LGBTQ+ community making the kind of music that I – and thousands like me – could dance to. Music that spoke to us and that would forever enrich our lives.

The pop video, and pop music in general, has come a long way since those heady days. Today we are used to artists being open about their own gender identity, and making progressive statements about gender identity in their videos. Today we have more out-LGBTQ+ singers, musicians and recording artists than ever before – Sam Smith, Orville Peck, Sia, Halsey, L‘il Nas X, and just look at the list of artists featured at 2024’s Melbourne Queer Film Festival, themed “Formative Sound and Vision”. But people in our community are still scapegoated, and in some areas it seems it is still acceptable to attack LGBTQ+ people simply for being themselves.

The rights that the queer community have won had to be fought for, and we could easily lose them if we do not continue to fight for freedom and equality for all LGBTQ+ people around the globe. Homophobic hate crimes in the UK almost tripled in the five years between 2015 and 2020, and trans people especially are currently being used as a political football. With Trump back in the White House, this will only increase. Even within our own community, there are factions and division. We need to stand as one against hate and intolerance; we should be celebrating our similarities, not highlighting our differences. 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.

Acknowledgements

The editors of this dossier wish to thank Darryl’s husband, Niall Milligan, for endorsing the publication of Darryl’s keynote address at the first My Formative Queers symposium in November 2024.

Endnotes