How the Homosexuals Saved Civilization - Cathy Crimmins [56]
The sexiest love song in the world is Rodgers and Hart’s “Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered.” In the show Pal Joey, it’s sung by a woman of the world who’s fallen head over heels with a scoundrel, a man she knows is probably not even faithful to her. The lyrics, created by Lorenz Hart, a tormented, closeted gay man, carry a palpable sense of longing I’ve seldom seen expressed, and include sultry lines alluding to wild nights: “Vexed again/Perplexed again/Thank God I can be oversexed again.” The singer admits that her man is not much for conversation, “but horizontally speaking, he’s at his very best . . .” There’s a refreshingly wicked gayness to that line.
Shades of Gay: Early Rock and Queerdom
Yes, we’ve all heard that Brian Epstein, the Beatles’ manager, was gay. Blah, blah, blah. And we’ve also heard the rumors that Epstein and John Lennon were lovers on a 1963 vacation trip to Spain. (There’s even a movie based on that conjecture, The Hours and the Times.) Blah, blah again. Did Lennon write “You’ve Got to Hide Your Love Away” for Epstein? Does it matter? The Rolling Stones’ first manager was gay, too, so it would be tempting to say that there was a gay mafia in early rock, but that would be stretching things a bit too far.
Some of the queer context of early rock and roll is impossible to pin down. Rock was always, after all, sexually omnivorous. And the early look was androgynous. Unisex was in. It’s hard to remember how shocking it was to see young men with long hair in 1963. And certainly someone like Brian Epstein, who painstakingly created the Beatles’ look of matching suits and mod haircuts, can be credited with spoon-feeding a gay fashion sense to the heterosexual masses. But so did Rudi Gernreich, the gay inventor of the topless bathing suit.
Gayness in the early rock music scene was difficult to distinguish from the general joy of sexual perversity in the 1960s. The art world, with David Hockney, Robert Rauschen berg, and Andy Warhol, was far ahead of the music world in developing and honing its gay sensibility.
In looking at the reactions of a largely straight American audience, there was one major factor going on during the rock-and-roll revolution: denial. Americans were fairly oblivious to gayness as a whole—even some closeted gay people, it seems. Times were different then, as older folks like to say. But they really were.
America had to ignore the influences of rock music. It stood for everything un-American: sex, drugs, and a healthy disrespect for authority. Similarly, kids went crazy for the campy, gayish stage antics of Mick Jagger of the Rolling Stones and Ray Davies of the Kinks. They were subversive; they were “queer,” even if they were straight. Most of the action in any rock concert concentrated on the mouth and the crotch. In fact, by the Lenny Bruce rule, all male rock stars were essentially homosexual, even if they slept with women.
Pete Townsend of The Who caused a stir when he was “outed” as a bisexual. Yet gender-bending and homosexual motifs had always been a significant part of his songwriting. “I’ve written eleven songs with ‘boy’ in the title,” Townsend once said in stage patter, talking to an audience during a solo show. One of them, “Rough Boys,” has explicit gay vibes: “Rough boys/Don’t walk away/I wanna buy you leather.” He told Playboy magazine that he had agreed in an interview that it was a song about gay boys, and that the press had then jumped to dub him bisexual, even though he had never said he was. Again, does it matter? “Rough Boys” is a great rock song with a gay sensibility.