How the Homosexuals Saved Civilization - Cathy Crimmins [60]
Bubblegum Tunes, Big-Diva Dreams, and Boys, Boys, Boys
Top-twenty tunes with major radio airplay keep the music industry alive. And when it comes to insipid songs that stick in your head forever, gay men are there.
“I don’t know why, but we’ve always loved bubblegum music,” says my friend Frank, who was a DJ for years. “Even I’m embarrassed that gay friends in their forties are buying Clay Aiken’s albums and listening to Britney and Christina. I have one friend who actually likes Kelly Clarkson.”
Gay men have always had their fingers on the pulse of teenybopper desires. They’ve played a role in creating and then worshipping rock divas. But no one knows quite why some singers and groups have gay appeal and others don’t.
There is a long line of gay songwriters and performers who produced make-out and dance music for teenagers from the fifties on. Johnny Mathis, long closeted but now openly gay, was the symbol of the romantic crooner into the seventies. In the nostalgic Barry Levinson film Diner, Eddie Simmons asks the eternal question: Do his friends prefer to make out with their girlfriends to Mathis or Sinatra?
Barry Manilow, still closeted, was another sexually ambiguous seventies crooner with a huge gay and straight following. He got his start as Bette Midler’s accompanist at the gay baths in New York and San Francisco. His hits include the bubblegummy “Copacabana,” “Mandy,” and “I Can’t Smile Without You.”
And then there is the Australian Peter Allen, who has been immortalized by Hugh Jackman in the new musical The Boy from Oz. Just by virtue of having worked with Judy Garland and having been married briefly to her daughter, Liza Minnelli, Allen could qualify as the gayest pop star in history. His catchy hit “I Go to Rio” embodies the gay joie de vivre, yet it caused toe tapping in straight circles across America. His wonderfully campy torch song “Don’t Cry Out Loud” has become a standard for diva performance.
Elton John, long before he was out of the closet, and well before he became a Disney composer, produced beautiful love songs for heterosexuals (“Your Song”) and action tunes about lonely astronauts (“Rocket Man”). He has been the King of Pop since the 1970s; it was interesting to watch how his relationship with his personal diva, Princess Diana, created a macabre opportunity to rewrite his song (written with Bernie Taupin) “Candle in the Wind” for her funeral ceremony in 1997. The amazing amount of radio airplay provided to the funeral version of that song represents a watershed moment in which the straight world acknowledged the cathartic power of a good old-fashioned queer tune.
Last but not least in the hit parade come George Michael and Boy George, who rode the MTV airwaves as pop supremacists for a number of years in the 1980s. Both were gay and closeted; both became spectacularly undone for a while after their sexuality and drug habits were revealed. Boy George is now the consummate disc jockey, after recovering from the disaster of his Broadway debut in Taboo. Rosie O’Donnell supposedly couldn’t figure out why Taboo didn’t sell tickets, but I saw the show, and I don’t think matinee ladies are quite ready for a big song-and-dance number about casual sex set in a male urinal.
Top-40 music has always been driven by female pop divas in a tradition that goes back to Judy Garland, Rosemary Clooney, Peggy Lee, Aretha Franklin, Petula Clark, Leslie Gore, and Dusty Springfield. Gay men are the biggest supporters of past and present divas. Eventually, anyone who becomes a diva for gay audiences loses her last name, a phenomenon that has spread to influence the way heterosexual audiences refer to female singers. Divas are so big that they need no surnames—there are Tina, Cyndi, Belinda, Brittany, Christina, Bette, Barbra, and, of course, Madonna and Cher, who got rid of their last names before they even got into show business.
In the last ten years, the popular divas have acknowledged their gay followings as well as their gay influences. Cher, who made an