How the Homosexuals Saved Civilization - Cathy Crimmins [58]
It was the homo shot heard ’round the world.
Later Bowie would disavow those comments, saying that the interview with the magazine had been the worst decision in his life. He gave an interview to Playboy in 1976 declaring himself bisexual, and later realigned himself as heterosexual in a cover story in Rolling Stone. The homosexual rumors abound still, especially since his ex-wife wrote in her 1993 memoir Backstage Passes that she had once found Bowie and Mick Jagger in bed together. Most reliable sources say that this “tell-all” piece of trivia is false.
Yet, again, do we need the anatomical details here? Whatever his sexuality, Bowie is a major gay icon who has influenced straight rock and roll and has long been accepted by straight audiences. It’s ironic that Bowie seems to have traveled the exact opposite path of most queer rock artists. Instead of a journey from the closet out into the gay world, he started as gay and got straighter as the years went on. And yet, as a consequence of boldly outing himself, the proverbial closet door could never open up and swallow him, however heterosexual he wanted to be. He remained out there as a queer artist.
Thirty years ahead of his time, Bowie made being gay hip.
Whatever sexual confusions might have swirled around him during his long career, Bowie is frankly in debt to gay artists of the past. His background in mime helped him create his exotic characters, such as Ziggy Stardust and the Thin White Duke. And his love of cabaret compositions, among them the songs of the Parisian songwriter Jacques Brel, shows in his intricate lyrics and sophisticated song concepts. Perhaps that’s why his performance work seems so gay. In a 1998 Legends interview, Bowie acknowledged the gay influences on his music. In 1960s London, he said, “[a] lot of straight guys would go to the gay clubs because of the kind of music they played. They played much better music than most clubs had.”
In an early comment to the press, Bowie’s manager Defries said that he saw Bowie as “a Marlon Brando or a James Dean-type star. I see him more in that category of larger-scale untouchable.” It’s interesting that he would compare him to two of the world’s greatest sexually ambiguous movie-star icons.
Bowie = gay = hip. It’s surprising how, nowadays, so many straight performers will come right out and say it: They wish they were gay. Nirvana’s Kurt Cobain said it, and wrote about it in his diaries. Momus (aka Nicholas Currie), the British cult singer, gave an interview to the Scottish Gay Times in which he talked about how much he admires the gay sense of alienation, and how he regrets being straight. Momus referenced Bowie and other glam rockers as the greatest influences on his generation.
I went to boarding school and we were all into Glamrock and at twelve everybody at school was in bed with somebody else in the dorm: it was that big latency period. We were all listening to David Bowie and Lou Reed and Marc Bolan, and convinced we were gay ourselves, and that that was a good thing to be.
Bowie shows up as an influence in many contemporary rockers’ comments to the press. Not surprisingly, queer performers such as Marilyn Manson glorify him, yet other mainstream groups such as Radiohead also pay him homage. “I just admire David Bowie in the 70’s,” says Radiohead’s Ed O’Brien. “Sometimes he brought out two albums a year. He was on a mission. His albums were hit and miss sometimes, but he was brilliant because of that.”
With a career that has encompassed glamrock, punk, and R&B, and even movie acting roles, Bowie still has a firm hold on more than one generation of fans.