IN A recent issue of Hot Press, Bill Graham suggested that George Michael “plugged a shuttlecock beneath his Bermuda shorts to arouse his female fans”. But George’s shuttlecock was also effective in further firing the fantasies of those gay male fans who have been creaming their own Bermuda shorts with lascivious longing ever since his early days when Wham, when George and Andrew Ridgely posed in a decidedly homo-friendly manner, under the watchful eye of manager Simon Napier-Bell.

It has, after all, been suggested that Napier-Bell first fell under the spell of Wham when he saw them on Top of the Pops and realised they probably were as appealing to young male fans as they were to girls. But if everyone knows that this has always been part of the agenda behind bands like Wham, they ain’t saying. Pop music “gives out signals to homosexual artists that it doesn’t want their homosexuality to be promoted in any sense”, said Holly Johnson, the former frontman with Frankie Goes To Hollywood recently. “That’s how it’s been since the beginning. They want an easy marketing job. They want to promote a heterosexual ideal. For example, George Michael and his record company want to appeal to young teenage girls with the dream of one day marrying George Michael. And a lot of homosexuals collude with the record companies in terms of perpetuating those myths about male sexuality and virility as the only ’acceptable’ way for a man to be.”

As a result, the homosexual preferences of rock ’n’ roll stars are frequently expressed in a cloaked, coded and oh-so-careful manner. In his newly-published book, Rock on the Wild Side: Gay Male Images in Popular Music of the Rock Era, Wayne Studer attempts to deconstruct some of these codes. Tellingly, as with the suppression of Boze Hadleigh’s book, The Vinyl Closet: Gays in the Music World, Studer reveals in his foreword that the absence of lyrics in this tome can be attributed to the fact that “of the many publishing companies that I contacted, requesting permission to quote lyrics, only two of them granted that permission”. So much for freedom of expression in rock!

Studer also feels it necessary to include “in a society such as ours that is both homophobic and litigious in the extreme” the following disclaimer, which of course also applies to the present article: “This book includes names and photographs of heterosexual, homosexual and bisexual people. The inclusion of any person’s name or photo in this book does not necessarily indicate that he or she is of any particular sexual orientation. By the same token, the mention of, reference to, or quotation from any song in this book is not to be construed as an implication that the songwriter(s), performer(s), and/or other person(s) associated with the song is homosexual or bisexual.”

Bitchy Drag Queen

There is about this book – as was the case with Hadleigh’s The Vinyl Closet and Vito Russo’s The Celluloid Closet – a sense of cultural desperation, with gays attempting to reappropriate any form of musical statement that could conceivably be described as theirs – at times almost chauvinistically so. This is particularly the case when, in his analysis of Paul Simon’s ‘Me and Julio Down by the Schoolyard’, Wayne Studer focuses on the “narrator’s assertion that he’s recently been observed doing something unappreciated by society at large” and that it was “against the law” and must therefore “point in the direction of homosexuality”.

On the other hand, Studer happily admits that at least one track in the book “all but required the songwriter’s acknowledgement of its homoerotic content,” explaining that “if Ray Davies hadn’t been so forthright in his public statements (and if the Kinks’ ‘official’ biographer, Jon Savage, hadn’t been so diligent in repeating them), I wouldn’t have noticed anything ‘gay’ about ‘See My Friends’ at all. Apparently, Davies once said the song was “about being a youth who is not sure of his sexuality” and said to his wife, Rasa, “if it wasn’t for you, I’d be queer.”

Overall, Studer’s tone is more humorous than chauvinistic. “Get ready for a good laugh,” he writes about Jimi Hendrix’s ‘Purple Haze’. “I’ve heard on good authority that some people believe that when Hendrix sings his famous line, ‘Scuse me while I kiss the sky he’s actually singing, ‘Scuse me while I kiss this guy’.” And yet, subversive as ever, Studer adds “now that you’ve had your laugh . . . on at least one live version of ‘Purple Haze’, recorded in 1969 (found on the four CD box-set Stages) Hendrix does unmistakably sing, “‘Scuse me while I kiss that guy’?!”

Like many gays, including Boze Hadleigh, Studer is also decidedly ambivalent about rock stars who play the queer card. Hadleigh, in his book, barely suppressed his sense of betrayal at the seeming volte-face on this issue by David Bowie, comparing his 1976 claim in Playboy that he and Angie met because they were both “going out with the same man” to the fact that he launched his 1983 World Tour by declaring to Time magazine that he’d “never been bi, let alone gay” and appeared on the cover of Rolling Stone alongside the headline: ‘David Bowie. Straight.’

Likewise Studer. He praises tracks like ‘Queen Bitch’, ‘John, I’m Only Dancing’ and ‘Boys Keep Swinging’ and acknowledges that Bowie was “the first major rock star not only to say that he was gay or bisexual but also to employ an exaggeratedly gay and/or bisexual image”. However, he also heavily criticises the “relentlessly gloomy, depraved vision of homosexuality that emerges from the Bowie corpus,” specifically in songs such as ‘Cracked Actor’, which he describes as “the most unpleasant and exploitive of Bowie’s attempts to cash in on the ‘bisexual chic’ that he himself did so much to establish in rock music of the early ’70s.”

Studer also describes the song which gives this book its title, Lou Reed’s Walk on the Wild Side, as “the classic example of ‘bisexual chic’ and cynical commercial exploitation of gayness in rock.” Detailing how the song refers to those denizens of Andy Warhol movies, Joe Dallesandro and transvestites Holly Woodlawn and Jackie Curtis, Studer describes Reed’s “deep, dark voice” as one which “fairly drips with depravity [and] inflections that waver between those of a bitchy drag queen and a disinterested pimp.” However he goes on to attack Lou Reed himself. “He’s long forsaken the eerie look of Transformer (which, to be honest, more closely resembled the living dead from a Grade B movie than any gay people I know), staunchly asserted his heterosexuality both in songs and in interviews, and went on record saying he was finished with the faggot scene,” he says. “I suppose decadence can only go so far, commercially. I mean, once you’ve exploited the freaky image and it’s grown passé, it’s time to move on to something else to sell records, right?”

GAY ANTHEM

From an Irish perspective, it’s instructive that Wayne Studer describes U2’s ‘One’ as ‘one of the most moving ruminations on troubled family relationships’ he’s ever heard.

“When the AIDS-stricken narrator growls to his father in Bono’s harsh tenor, ‘Did I leave a bad taste in your mouth?’ and adds one of several scathing accusations, ‘You act like you never had love/And you want me to go without’, it’s not hard to visualise the kid of highly-charged emotional despair that AIDS can inspire,” he writes, adding: “But ‘One’ is by no means a work of despair. Rather, it evolves into an affirmation of love, as Bono proclaims that ‘we get to carry each other’. (Note ‘get’; it’s a privilege to help one person). By song’s end, he’s literally shrieking about ‘one love’ in a simultaneous cry of anguish and joy, a celebration of the oneness of humanity in the face of love and death.’

Whether Studer’s very specific reading of a song that’s open to a number of interpretations gives the whole story or not, he is certainly right in saying that Bono designated that the profits from the sales of the ‘One’ single should benefit AMFAR (the American Foundation of AIDS Research – though he questions the alleged “suppression” of the original video for the single. “The stark black and white video that was originally filmed featured the four members of U2 dressed alternatively in ‘regular’ clothes and in various degrees of drag, brazenly mixing stereotypical ‘male’ and ‘female’ looks,” he says. “When the band, their management, and executives at their record company viewed the completed video, they asked director, Anton Corbijn, to ‘tone down’ the drag imagery to a point where, ultimately it was eliminated altogether.’ Studer believes that there was “the fear that such a video would do irreparable harm to U2’s career – in much the same way, perhaps, that the drag video for ‘I Want To Break Free’ may have put the kibosh on Queen in the United States for the better part of a decade.

As that story illustrates, it will be interesting to see how the music industry responds to this book, particularly in terms of the coverage it gets in the media. Potentially, it is one of the most important socio-political, and musical studies published in the history of rock. And, for those who may prefer to shy away from the politics involved, it also is a fascinating read, often inspiring responses of the ‘I-never-knew-this-song-meant-that’ variety.

Such words surely would have slipped out of poor Elvis’ mouth were he confronted with the fact that one of his greatest ’50’s hits ‘Jailhouse Rock’ has since become a gay anthem for male prisoners. However, as Studer says, “given the jailhouse setting of this song, what else can one make of lyrics in which one convict says to another “you’re the cutest jailbird I ever did see”, and then asks him to “come on and do the jailhouse rock with me?” It’s a fair cop, guv . . .

Likewise, in relation to Beatles songs such as ‘You’ve Got To Hide Your Love Away’, ‘Baby You’re a Rich Man’, and ‘Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da’, while gay connotations have always been read into ‘Get Back’ with its reference to ‘Sweet Loretta Martin’ who “thought she was a woman” but found “she was another man”.

Other rock acts featured in Rock on the Wild Side: Gay Male Images in Popular Music of the Rock Era include The Animals, Billy Bragg, Bronski Beat, Garth Brooks, Disposable Heroes of Hiphoprisy, Genesis, Elton John, Little Richard, George Michael, Randy Newman, Police, Dory Previn, Prince, the Ramones, Neil Sedaka, Sex Pistols, Steely Dan, Rod Stewart, Velvet Underground and Frank Zappa.

As to why, you’ll have to buy the book to find out.