How the Homosexuals Saved Civilization - Cathy Crimmins [61]
“I did ‘Strong Enough’ specifically for my gay fans,” Cher told a music reporter, referring to her 1999 hit single. “I did a gay version on the spot, because I thought this would be such a cool thing to do. My gay fans have been so loyal and so great, at times when other fans weren’t there. Gay fans usually love you when you’re in the dumps, in the toilet, they’re still there for you. I have a very Judy Garland feeling.”
Madonna is another pop superstar who brought a particularly gay sensibility to the pop scene. As divas go, she’s at the top of the heap. After she announced her Re-Invention tour in the winter of 2004, nearly every gay man I know rushed to get tickets. The bad movies Madonna makes—The Next Best Thing and the remake of Swept Away—do nothing to dim her gay fans’ ardor. In several interviews, Madonna has praised her Michigan high-school ballet teacher, who helped her appreciate the finer things in life and brought her out to gay dance clubs. “I feel like I’m always working with gay men,” she told Don Shewey. “For some reason that’s who I have the most camaraderie with. I don’t really know why. I think, on the one hand, I feel their persecution. They are looked at as outsiders, so I relate to that.”
Madonna introduced the gay dance the “Vogue” to straight audiences. Her huge hits such as “Like a Virgin” and “Material Girl” were on the lips of gay men, prepubescent girls, and straight couples everywhere during the 1980s and early 1990s. Madonna’s bubblegum music is culturally important, but less important than her stance, molded by gay men and infused with a shallow awesomeness that is irresistible.
The MTV Music Video Awards in September 2003 presented an ideal moment that captured Madonna’s appeal for gay and straight audiences. In honor of the twentieth anniversary of Madonna’s first appearance on the MTV awards, Britney Spears and Christina Aguilera popped out of a wedding cake and writhed around in slutty wedding dresses while singing “Like a Virgin.” Madonna herself then emerged dressed as a groom and tongue-kissed both of them. What a feast for gay and straight men alike! Gay men got to see Madonna pass the torch, as it were, to Christina and Britney, junior divas, while heterosexual guys could just groove on their number-one fantasy, lesbian sex, on prime-time television.
Another gay-inspired pop-music institution is the boy band. From the Beatles to the Monkees and on to Menudo and New Kids on the Block, very young all-male bands have always had a certain homoeroticism about them. Jonathan Mur ray, openly gay cocreator of MTV’s The Real World, who later went on to become executive producer of Making the Band, told The Advocate in 2000, “I think I had a crush on Davy Jones. But I kept that to myself.”
“One of the contradictions of the boy-band business is that it employs a large number of gay men—singers, managers, stylists—to create a product aimed at small girls,” wrote Caroline Sullivan in Britain’s The Guardian in 1999. “Most bands got their early experience playing gay clubs, whose contribution is so significant that the biggest groups, such as Five, still do Saturday-night PAs at the GAY disco in London’s Charing Cross Road.”
In 1999, Stephen Gately, a singer in the wildly popular British group Boyzone, announced that he was gay and had a steady boyfriend. The confession did not affect the band’s sales in Britain, but some say it harmed the possibility of success in the United States. Other pop-music critics familiar with cultural differences say that none of the current crop of Brit boy bands has crossed over because their songs do not fit the patterns of the simpler tunes by the Backstreet Boys, ’N Sync, or 98 Degrees.
The American boy bands have long realized their sexual appeal to gay fans. As early as 2000, the Backstreet Boys appeared in a picture layout in the gay youth magazine XY. Justin Tim berlake, now solo but formerly of ’N Sync, gave an interview to Out magazine and has