How the Homosexuals Saved Civilization - Cathy Crimmins [54]
Add to this the strangeness of Will being played by a straight man, Eric McCormack, and we have completed the cultural circle. In the three decades after World War II, the perfect man was virile and “straight,” and played by a homosexual. In the last decade, that man is sensitive and “gay,” played by a heterosexual.
Chapter 9
Music: Play That Funky Music, Gay Boy!
It was fascinating, from the sixties onwards, to see how of ten gays and their lifestyle had cropped up in the history of
British music business. . . . In one form or another, the in
fluence of gays on the British [music] industry has been on
a par with the influence of blacks and black music on the
American industry.
—from a webpage about the British music industry in the early 1970s
Tutti Frutti, aw rootie,
A-wop-bop-a-loo-bop-a-lop-bam-boom
—“Tutti Frutti,” by Little Richard
Disco music was for dancing, disco was for having a good
time, and gay people, who had been prevented from danc ing together in virtually all the bars across the United
States until the very late years of the 1960s (or in some
cases in the 1970s), embraced it and were liberated by it.
—from an Internet essay: “Disco Music Is Gay Music”
Rock and roll was invented by blacks and homosexuals in the 1950s, and then the two cultures converged once again in the late 1960s to bring disco to American dance floors.
Conservative commentators and fundamentalist preachers in the 1950s and 1960s protested that rock and roll was all about sex. They were right. The very name—rock and roll—was slang for sexual intercourse. Rock and roll liberated, once and forever, the pelvis from the rest of the body. Rock and roll is high-speed, raucous narcissism. Rock and roll is an exuberant marginal art form that started out black and gay, and within a few years had become the number-one obsession of heterosexual teenagers all over the world.
For me, there were two seminal moments in gay/straight rock and roll history: September 9, 1956, when television censors ordered that Elvis’s moving hips were not to be seen on The Ed Sullivan Show, and January 1956, when Pat Boone recorded Little Richard’s provocative tune, “Tutti Frutti.”
Pat Boone was the antithesis of Elvis. Pat wore nice sports jackets and white buck shoes, and his hips did not move. And compared to Pat Boone, Little Richard was the Antichrist. Could they have chosen anyone straighter or whiter to record “Tutti Frutti,” Little Richard’s flamboyant ode to sex? Little Richard wore pancake makeup and lipstick. He called himself “The king of rock and roll—and the queen, too!” America wasn’t ready for his queerness, but they loved his music.
If we trace the gay influence on rock music in America, all roads lead to Little Richard, who had an enormous influence on Jerry Lee Lewis, Elvis, the Beatles, and even the Rolling Stones. He’s the queer godfather of flamboyant rock and roll.
“His image was an immaculate conception,” wrote Rolling Stone magazine about Little Richard, “a fantasy born of years in traveling medicine shows, drag-queen revues, churches and clubs. . . . But in Fifties America, this made for a terrible mess. He was black and gay, talented and loud. . . .”
The Boone cover of “Tutti Frutti” is a heterosexual anthem to nothingness, almost a case study in what happens when you rob a vital art form of its most original ingredients. With the bland Boone behind the microphone, the rewritten song rose to the top of the charts almost immediately. It was an instant crossover, a complete gay-to-straight conversion.
To look at the history of popular music is to see that constant gay-straight-gay cycle that seems to run through all entertainment forms. Gay men have always had an enormous influence on the music straight people love. I’ve found it peculiar to discover a gay presence in music forms I considered hopelessly