How the Homosexuals Saved Civilization - Cathy Crimmins [62]
The tradition of gay men molding the sexual and musical tastes of adolescent girls is one thing that makes our country great. Who knows “cute boys” better—gay men or teenage girls? Many of the editors of teen celebrity magazines are openly gay guys. And now that homophobia is dissipating, adolescent gay boys can come out and say that they have crushes on boy bands, too.
Heavy Metal Was Gay, Dude!
At first glance, the world of heavy-metal rock in the 1980s seems to ooze with testosterone. It was a world for bad boys who worshipped the devil and tried to eat flying bats. They rode motorcycles, brandished chains, and liked their chicks tough. Their guitars seemed like phallic extensions of their leather-clad, beer-swilling selves. The bands had tough names such as T. Rex, Black Sabbath, Guns N’ Roses, Motorhead, and Shotgun Messiah. They had legions of teenage male fans who looked up to these bands as macho role models.
Yet these heavy-metal musicians also sported eyeshadow and eyeliner. Kenneth Quinnell, a Florida political science professor, catalogs the effeminacy of what he calls “hair metal” in his humorous web essay “Heavy Metal is Gay”:
Long teased hair filled with hairspray. Tight pants made of black leather or spandex. No shirt or a black leather vest and no shirt. Thigh-high boots. Studded belts. Make-up. If that description doesn’t describe a gay look, then it surely describes a heterosexual transvestite look.
Quinnell doesn’t stop at looks—he scrutinizes content, too, jesting that the bands are named after either phallic imagery (Tool, Prong, Mr. Big) or girls (Alice Cooper, Lizzie Borden, Twisted Sister). He mentions suspiciously homoerotic songs, such as “Falling in Love (Is Hard on the Knees)” (Aerosmith) or “Just a Gigolo” (David Lee Roth). Finally, he rests his very funny case while analyzing the performance of heavy-metal bands. Their vocals: “Big-haired queens prancing around on stage, singing cheesy pop love songs in voices that often reach high notes worthy of Mariah Carey or Whitney Houston.” Their choreography: “Could these guys act more gay—wiggling around on stage, dancing in ways that straight men don’t dance?” Concludes Quinnell, “Is it a coincidence that the head-banging motion just happens to be the same motion as providing oral sex to a guy?”
Quinnell was surprised by the furor his light, funny essay set off on his webzine, which is called “T. Rex’s Guide to Life,” in homage to the heavy-metal band T. Rex. He received scores of letters hurling nasty epithets his way: “gay sicko,” “rapist serial killer,” “she-man.” It seems that some rabidly heterosexual fans of heavy metal don’t like to think about even a hint of homosexual influence in their favorite rock music genre.
Quinnell, thirty-one, is a married father who teaches at Tal lahassee Community College. “I’ve been a fan of heavy metal as long as I can remember and am actually a big fan of most of the bands I’m making fun of,” he told me. “I am straight, but am always bothered by homophobia. I think, at times, the homophobia associated with heavy metal is little more than a front masking a latent or closeted homosexuality. Other times it is real homophobia, as the responses to my essay have shown.”
Although Quinnell floated his essay as a joke, there are others who have identified the homo undercurrent in heavy-metal music in a more serious fashion. As early as 1972, the self-styled dean of rock critics, Robert Christgau, wrote openly in Newsday about the gay influences in heavy rock:
It’s curious that the American “English hard-rock” bands are also the only American bands with an explicit connection to homosexuality—Alice Cooper through Alice’s since-abandoned transvestitism, not to mention his assumed name, and the Velvets through the Warhol superstars. In England such connections are commonplace, from Mick Jagger’s androgynousness and Ray Davies’s camping all the way to David Bowie . . .
Now that we are twenty years beyond the heyday of glamrock and heavy metal, it’s easier to see the