THE POWER OF POSITIVE THINKING

Holly Johnson doesn’t need to be told that a Rolling Stone poll, conducted in 1988, showed that 75% of its readers do not consider homosexuality in their friends or co-workers as “acceptable.” That kind of prejudice among the readers of the world’s most famous rock magazine doesn’t surprise him. Indeed, in a recent article he wrote for Details magazine, he described pop as “the most homophobic of all the arts.”

He may be right. Boy George has described rock as ‘basically, a boy’s club’ in which male-to-male hero worship often can be ‘a sublimation and ‘legitimsation’ of homo-erotic desires’. But then maybe that’s why rock is homophobic, an art form feeding off the world’s most insidious, and powerful process of self denial.

In this central sense it may also be the most hypocritical of all the arts. That’s certainly how Holly Johnson sees things. In his book, The Vinyl Closet, Boze Hadleigh argues that a strong homosexual presence has existed in rock since the late ’50s in London, and in Philadelphia, where teen idols were shaped and packaged by gay management and covertly aimed as much at the gay market as they were at the market for teenage girls. From Cliff to Frankie Avalon and Fabian, many of these artists were also rumoured to be gay, though all, of course, denied it.

“Before I say anything about that,” Holly reflects, “let’s not forget that the book you mention, The Vinyl Closet, which looks at gays in the music world, never got a wide distribution. I recently read Queer in America, about the corridors of power in politics and in Hollywood and the author of that refers to the Boze Hadleigh book, which even I never read. That surely tells us something about power in the music industry.

“But he’s right to claim that the homosexual presence in rock has been there from the beginning. It’s the same in terms of pop culture, and in the arts in general. But it has always been a denied presence. What I mean, specifically, when I say ‘pop is the most homophobic of all the arts’ is that it gives out signals to homosexual artists that it doesn’t want their homosexuality to be promoted in any sense. 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 having a sexual encounter with, or marrying, George Michael. And a lot of homosexuals collude with the record companies in terms of perpetuating those myths about male sexuality and virility and the only ‘acceptable’ way for a man to be.”

The same, of course, applies to female sexuality. At this crucial level claims that rock ‘n’ roll has always been a liberating force in terms of sexual expression can be seen to be misleading. Holly fully agrees with Boze Hadleigh who suggests that, on the contrary, rock has been, and remains, a force operating in the name of sexual oppression, a political force sustaining sexual stereotypes to feed the market, if not the status quo and the State . . .

“Even when I signed to MCA, after the Blast album had been a number one album, they did a market research project on the album and there was a definite agenda written into that market research,” he recalls. “It concluded ‘we think that Holly Johnson should not ram his homosexuality down people’s throats. People may accept that he is gay but they prefer not to have to think or talk about it.’ Now that was obviously a brief written into that market research company’s minds.

“If that’s not sexual oppression, then what is? And that’s something that’s obviously taking place in the name of rock ‘n’ roll, or rather, what rock basically is these days, which is a market-led art form, where everything must yield to the needs of the market place. But in pop, another hypocrisy is the fact that the record companies don’t even employ many gay men. In all my years I’ve met very few gay men working in the record industry at that level and when you do meet them they’re rather closeted.

“Companies like Warner Brothers have never, ever signed an openly gay artist. Recently k.d lang came out of the closet but I’ve never known Warners to sign any openly gay artists or actively employ gay people. And they’re the people who have the power.”

Going back to Boy George’s assertion that male-to-male hero-worship often can be a sublimation of homo-erotic desires, Holly suggests that, for gays, this process can be brought more out into the open when stars declare their homosexuality. As a teenager, his movie idols were Montgomery Clift and James Dean, both of whom were homo or bisexual. Did that help him comes to terms with is own sexuality at the time?

“Overall, I had a great struggle with my sexuality,” he recalls. “But although, at 14, I knew people like Montgomery Clift were there and that I was attracted to them on many levels I’m not sure that helped me come to terms with homosexuality. Later on, in learning that Clift, for example, was gay, that did help but not when I was beginning to struggle with the question. If I had known then, it probably would have helped me more and the same applies today, I think, in terms of young people trying to come to terms with sexuality. That’s why I hope it is helpful, when someone like k.d lang, or myself declare our sexuality.”

That said, Holly’s ex-group, Frankie Goes To Hollywood, undoubtedly were damaged as a result of Holly and Paul Rutherford publicly declaring their homosexuality. When the group broke though, in 1984, their first hit single, ‘Relax’, was dubbed ‘the first love song ever written to an anus’ The line, ‘relax, if you want to come’, prompted U.S. Congressional wives to begin their attempts to censor rock lyrics.

“I certainly remember being attacked by a woman who had set up a group that was lobbying against sexual explicitness in rock songs and saw ‘Relax’, as a hymn to promiscuity,” Holly remembers. “But then, hasn’t there always been that redneck, or religious fundamentalist element in America? America is rife with that kind of narrow-mindedness. And gays really have become the new ‘niggers’ over there. That applies as much to society as a whole as it does to people in the music industry.”

However, it has been suggested that as far back as 1984 Frankie Goes To Hollywood were advised to play down the homosexual aspects of their music, and their act, so as to appeal to teenage girls. Didn’t gay activists in America suggest, at the time, that Holly and Paul acceded to these pressures?

“If that attitude existed in the record company, or anywhere else, it didn’t really filter down to the group,” says Holly. “And I, in particular, would never have entertained that idea if it was put before me, even then. But you must remember that, during the Frankie Goes to Hollywood period my stance on homosexuality always was ‘here I am, I’m a gay man and that influences my work and the images we present but, strictly speaking it’s incidental to my individuality in a way’. And back then, I always felt I wasn’t really a political animal and I wasn’t particularly campaigning for Gay Rights, I just wanted to say ‘I’m gay, next question’. But the media would never leave it at that and let me assimilate homosexuality into the culture in that sense.

“Yet the older I get the more political I become and the more strongly I feel about how gay people are marginalised. While I was with Frankie Goes To Hollywood I certainly didn’t want to be perceived as a Jimmy Somerville type figure, a definite right-on, badge-wearing, banner-waving gay man. Not that I wanted to criticise him, though he probably would have been happier had I had a more activist approach at the time.”

After Frankie Goes to Hollywood split, Holly’s hits included the singles ‘Love Train’ and ‘Americanos’ and the album Blast. Then, as now, he was managed by his lover, the Austrian art-collector, Wolfgang Kuhle. But if his career as a solo artist was heading into high gear the brakes were suddenly, and rather savagely, applied in his personal life when he discovered he was HIV positive. As he wrote in the article in Details:

“Fear of the terrible truth haunted me. I had heard grim stories of AIDS patients whose homes had been burned to the ground. I had seen the ugly reality of the disease. In an industry where being openly homosexual hinders success in America, the largest marketplace in the world, what record company would invest in a singer with HIV?”

In his forthcoming autobiography Holly Johnson also writes about his response to being diagnosed as HIV positive, a moment he describes as ‘the beginning of an odyssey of self-discovery’.

“A couple of strange bumps started to appear on my skin in odd places, around the summer of 1991. I had a biopsy done on one on my stomach by a skin specialist at a private hospital. I didn’t hear from the doctor for a few weeks and when he phoned he wouldn’t give me any information. Instead he referred me to another doctor at the same hospital, making an appointment for the same evening. I put the phone down and knew that there was something very wrong . . .

“He informed me in a gentle way that the biopsy results showed that the lumps on my skin were Kaposi’s sarcoma, a cancer commonly associated with gay men who had AIDS, which, of course, I knew. He urged me to have a HIV test and a T-cell count. He talked about the drugs I could take and also the safe sex measures that I had been practising for years anyway. After about half an hour I told him I wanted to leave . . .

“I remember thinking: ‘How is Wolfgang Kuhle, my partner, going to cope? The fears of the last eight years have all come true at once’. I rang a taxi from the hospital lobby and waited numbly. I looked out of the window into the night at the Chelsea bridge, thinking, ‘Should I just throw myself off it into the cold grey Thames and be done with it?’”

At that point Holly Johnson also had the additional grief of wondering how the media would react, as well as those right-wing fundamentalists who use the sick argument that God is paying people who develop HIV back for their days of promiscuity and for being gay. In Details he wrote that he had only a brief period (1983-1984) of unprotected sexual promiscuity, between 1983 and ’84.

“That is true but this is not to say I didn’t have sex before then,” he explains. “I did, but I only really became involved in the London gay scene in that period and I was attached to a peer group that acted in a particular way and I indulged in that lifestyle. Apart from all that I’ve had a nine, nearly ten-year monogamous relationship with Wolfgang. I met him in April ‘84 and was at the end of that other period. Not that the other form of lifestyle was easy for me to break away from, it wasn’t. But it was a decision I made at the time, partly because I fell in love with Wolfgang.”

It was in 1984 that Holly Johnson also watched another male friend, “James”, become one of the first 30 people in Britain to die of AIDS. Not that Holly, or many people knew exactly what was happening at the time. “No one talked about the disease, all we knew was that he was bloody ill and treatment was non-existent,” he recalls. He also describes James, who was once a ‘tall, attractive, muscular gay man’ as later being ‘reduced in six months to the image of a Belsen victim’.

“That man was an air steward who flew regularly to New York and San Francisco and, in a sense he was a role model for me, a man who was a successful human being, doing the work he wanted to do and happy at that,” he says. “Most of the gay people I knew in Liverpool, where I grew up, were like me, on the dole and struggling. This man wasn’t struggling and he seemed to be really grabbing life by the balls, so to speak. So to then watch him deteriorate physically was really distressing. But there really wasn’t much information. I remember visiting him in hospital and at home and the word AIDS just wasn’t spoken at all.”

Despite this experience Holly Johnson did decide not to have an AIDS test until 1991. Was that because he didn’t really want to know his HIV status for sure?

“Probably, yeah,” he says, contemplatively. “People don’t want to face the truth about certain possibilities in life and that’s one of them, maybe the major one these days. I certainly would say I was in a state of denial for many years, right up to 1991. And maybe that’s part of the reason why, when the possibility finally hit me that night as I looked at the Thames, I did feel like killing myself, at least for a moment. But although it was a long process of conscious denial, don’t think I’d never considered the idea. Many, many, many times I did. It had been a sense of torment for years, before I actually had the test.

“Because friends did die,” he adds “and people closer and closer to me suddenly were gone, so it did move in on me. And I was aware for quite a few years that I might be affected by the virus. So, although it came as a shock it didn’t come as much of a shock as if I hadn’t seriously considered that the potential for the situation was there.”

Holly Johnson suggests that coming to terms with being HIV positive wasn’t made any easier by what he describes as the arrogance of some doctors who have risen high in the echelons of the National Health Service and the burgeoning AIDS industry.

“Part of the problem with my treatment was the result of the fact that I’m a well known person. So an over-compensation was made by some doctors, not to treat me in any special way,” he elaborates. “But I also think that people with AIDS are marginalised by health workers. It’s very hard to put across the way you are actually treated in the health industry, I’d need to go through nearly every situation as it occurred to let people know what it’s like and how I felt about it as it happened. That’s what I hope to do with the autobiography.”

Did Holly Johnson ever encounter doctors exhibiting a form of moral superiority, being condescending towards him because of the nature of his ailment or of his sexuality?

“I have had that sense, from some, yes” he recalls. “And others keep an emotional distance from you and tend to treat you not as an individual but as a statistic. That can feel pretty disheartening, when you know they’re not relating to you, as a human being. None of this makes coming to terms with being HIV positive any easier to deal with. So I can understand why people reading this might say ‘why should I have the test, if that’s what I have to look forward to?’ But, at the same time, the more people encounter this kind of response from people on the National Health and complain about it, the better it will be for others that follow. Keeping quiet about all this is really not a way forward. If people, living with AIDS, don’t make public all this stuff, it perpetuates the kind of ignorance that breeds AIDS. There are negative aspects to the treatment you get and being HIV positive is not a very pleasant experience but we must talk about these things and try to make it easier to deal with, for everyone concerned.”

At precisely the same time Holly Johnson learned that he was HIV positive the tabloids were filled with sometimes lurid descriptions of the deterioration of Freddie Mercury, who was dying from what later was revealed to be an AIDS-related illness. This didn’t help Holly come to terms with his own condition. Indeed he admits that he started having “hellish fantasies” of front-page photos of me, pale and emaciated, like those pictures of Rock Hudson, Liberace, Nureyev and Freddie Mercury.”

“What had gone before me, as far as the media and AIDS was concerned, was Hudson initially and then Liberace being dug up after his death and being tested for AIDS,” he explains. “And then Ian Charlston, the actor, emaciated on the cover of the Sun, and bad pictures of Freddie Mercury. The whole media phenomenon around Freddie Mercury did unfold within a matter of days of my diagnosis, which was particularly upsetting. It was October, November 1991.

“And it was quite depressing for me to see the way people reacted to Freddie’s death, and the period just before his death. All those media events were very negative for people with AIDS and gay people in general, because they were enforced intrusions into those people’s lives. Especially in the situation with Liberace.”

In April of this year The Sun made another of its infamous enforced intrusions into the life of a celebrity when it broke Holly Johnson’s HIV positive story with an article headlined “I Was Part Of A Huge Explosion Of Gay Promiscuity, Says Holly’. Johnson himself had chosen, through his publicist Regine Moylet, to give the story to Alan Jackson, of The Sunday Times. However, two days before Jackson’s story was scheduled to appear, Piers Morgan of The Sun somehow got his hands on two pages of quotes and presented his story in typically tabloid style. Tellingly enough, both papers are owned by Rupert Murdoch. Another of The Sun’s sensitive headlines at the time was ‘When Will They Learn That Sodomy Kills?’

“It makes me terribly sad that such a widely-read newspaper will employ people with that kind of homophobic attitude, such as Garry Bushell,” he says. “And a lot of the tabloids are guilty of that. Recently a musical based on the Eurovision Song Contest got slated for merely the fact that it had a gay sense of humour and there was a gay relationship described in the musical. That’s so typical of British tabloid journalism and the big question is, is that reflecting, or feeding the feelings of working class people who read those papers. I personally think it’s feeding, rather than reflecting. Behaviour is learned, as is racism and homophobia, and tabloid newspapers surely add to that process.”

Holly’s advice to people who are ‘still fucking and sucking and shooting their way up to oblivion in the backs of cars, night-clubs, toilets or apartments is: Open your eyes, Safe sex information is available’. This single, simple message cannot be repeated often enough, he argues. In direct language, if you’re going to fuck make sure you use a condom.

“That was the whole point of that article I wrote,” he says. “And I don’t care if the response of people is ‘oh, I know all that, I practice safe sex’. I was saying that for years. And the message needs to be repeated more than ever now that we’ve got people like Virginia Bottomley trying to pretend that the potential of the epidemic is not there. It is there.

“I spoke to a doctor a couple of days ago and he told me that a 21-year-old woman is dying in his ward and they’re trying to explain to her four-year-old child – who is also HIV positive – what’s going on. That girl must have been infected at the age of 15. Then you get people like Virginia Bottomley taking funding away from the Terence Higgins Trust and other organisations. It’s ridiculously unrealistic, and dangerous.”

Holly also believes that as a result of homophobia, young gay teenagers are not targeted in the right way, in relation to AIDS information.

“There are gay teenagers in every school in Britain, and in Ireland, I’m sure” he says. “But they are not being targeted the way they should be. Here, it’s partly because of Clause 28 and the idea that homosexuality might be promoted as a valid alternative. But the idea that ‘it won’t happen to me’, whether you are 14 or 40, is both false and lethal.”

This, of course, brings us back to how people can be helped if their heroes, such as Holly Johnson, go public about being HIV positive. Holly himself admits that he has been inspired by people like the film-maker Derek Jarman, who have gone public on the subject. Does he feel there is a responsibility to do so?

“That’s a difficult debate,” he replies. “I personally believe there is a responsibility. But I think the responsibility to yourself is probably most important and some people just can’t cope with being open about their sexuality. It’s as difficult a question as the concept of ‘Outing’. I am pro-outing when there’s a situation that is extremely hypocritical, like where there’s a politician who’s propagating one set of values and living another. But the HIV question is more personal and maybe, unless the person is doing damage to other people because of being HIV, then the decision should be left to the individual concerned.”

Holly pauses for a moment to reflect further on the question.

“But I hate the way people are hounded by the tabloids here to discover their HIV positive status. It’s like the new witch-hunt of the 1990s, where they put photographers outside well known clinics and knock on people’s doors and say, ‘we’ve heard you’re very ill. Are you?’

“Kenny Everett is a good example of that. He was forced, by the papers, to come out about his HIV status. They did post a photographer outside the West London Clinic, and outside his house and said ‘we’re going to publish anyway’, as far as I know. That’s why, although I knew my story would come out in the end, I desperately didn’t want it to be another negative event.”

How will this story manifest itself in Holly’s music on, say, the next album? Has he written songs about the experience of, as he says, learning to live positively with being HIV positive – or about the subject at all?

“Writing the book I’ve just written was my way of coping, my way of re-evaluating my life and so I’m not quite sure how it will affect the music, or the lyrics I write. It’s a difficult issue to talk about in a song, though, of course I just might do that.”

So what is the state of play in relation to Holly Johnson’s forthcoming recordings?

“I have no relationship with either a record company, or a publishing company at the moment,” he says. “Since I’ve finished the book I have started to write and work on my music again and I’m trying to enjoy making music again, rather than think in terms of its commercial potential or even in terms of making an album. That’s why I call this whole experience an odyssey of self-discovery, or re-discovery.”

In the meantime Holly Johnson can content himself with the renewed chart success of ‘Relax’ and of Bang . . . The Best of Frankie Goes to Hollywood. However he is not actively promoting either the single or the album and probably wouldn’t have mentioned this aspect of the tale had I not raised the question. So how does he respond to hearing music he created nearly a decade ago? Does he recognise the young man who sang those songs during what was, perhaps, a more innocent time of his life?

“It’s nice that people are responding to the old material in that way, sending it into the charts again” he says. “But then again it just shows me that those were great records to begin with. But listening to some of the songs again, after all these years, for the reasons you mention, does draw forth a very emotional response from me. In a way I feel fairly separate from the person that sang on these records but something like Ferry Across the Mersey still moves me. It’s the saddest of those songs, in a sense, because it’s a song of longing. That’s why it tugs on my heartstrings.

“Not purely because of the Liverpool connection, but moreso because of a nostalgia for the person I was. It’s that, rather than a nostalgia for the place I lived in. But I know now that I can never again be the young man I was then, in any way, really. And I’ve just got to learn to live with that. And learn to live positively with being HIV positive.”