‘“I made you a man. When your momma brought you home she brought a boy. If you hadda been a girl she would have named you Martha. You are a boy.” My daddy wanted seven boys, and that I was messing it up’
Little Richard26
Unlike the period following the 1914-1918 conflict, in the years immediately after the Second World War, LGBT performers were sent scurrying back into their respective closets. Post-war culture emphasised strong, virile men as being the providers for their families, with women encouraged to stay at home, cook hearty meals and raise the kids. Any kind of gender deviance was deemed criminal. Austerity, coming on the heels of the pre-war Great Depression, only helped further the ‘us and them’ mentality.
Where once difference had been embraced, during the post-war period people were actively encouraged to be suspicious of anything outside the accepted norm. Deviance was not to be entertained. In Britain, a series of high-profile court cases and a marked increase in the number of gay men prosecuted and imprisoned drove the country’s gay elite and ‘bright young things’ underground. In 1950s America, homosexuality was classified as a psychiatric disorder; homosexuals were categorised as sexual perverts and it was widely believed that homosexuality was a dangerous, contagious social disease that posed a threat to the family and to the security of the country. The FBI began to keep lists of people in the public eye and government office that they identified as homosexual, believing them to be weak and easily indoctrinated by the enemy. McCarthyism was putting what would seem to be the final nail in the coffin for the LGBT community. The Cold War, allied to the fear of the spread of communism and the near-certainty of an all-out nuclear war in the not-too-distant future, saw a new wave of conservatism masquerading as patriotism drive suspected commies and queers from Hollywood, from the radio and from the recording studio.
Yet in spite of this, an underground gay movement sprang up which gave birth to a new language: Polari, a type of slang which had been used in Britain for decades but that reached its apotheosis from the 1930s to the early 1970s in gay pubs, among theatre crowds and on merchant ships. New LGBT-friendly bars opened in cities around the world, there were new publications – such as the rash of pocket-sized physique magazines which legitimised the ownership of cheesecake portraits of virtually naked men – and a market for discs and magazines sold ‘under the counter’ and through specialist outlets. LGBT people created their own subterranean world, where risqué cabaret performers pushed boundaries (and ran the risk of arrest) and – just as during the years of prohibition – bars were run by a criminal class who cared not where their money came from as long as it came.
In the 1940s, Edythe D. Eyde was 25 years old and working as a secretary at the RKO film studios in Los Angeles. By her own account, she had a lot of time to herself in the office,1 and so twice a month Edythe ‘typed out five carbons and one original of Vice Versa,’ the world’s first lesbian newssheet. Subtitled ‘America’s Gayest Magazine,’ Vice Versa (whose first issue appeared in June 1947) was begun by Ms Eyde initially as a way of expanding her social circle: ‘I was by myself, and I wanted to be able to meet others like me. I couldn’t go down the street saying, “I’m looking for lesbian friends”.’ She published nine issues of Vice Versa before RKO was sold and she was forced her to change jobs. ‘I did eight copies at a time (and) I’d run it through twice, that made 16 copies. And after I was through I would just give it to my friends. I never sold it.’
In the 1950s, Edythe began writing for The Ladder, the first nationally available lesbian magazine, published by the Daughters of Bilitis, the first lesbian civil rights organisation in the United States. It was while she was writing for The Ladder that she adopted the name Lisa Ben (an anagram of ‘lesbian’); all nine issues of Vice Versa had been published anonymously. While working with the Daughters of Bilitis (and billed as ‘the first gay folk singer’) Lisa issued her first 45, her own composition, ‘Cruisin’ Down the Boulevard’ backed with a lesbian version of the standard ‘Frankie and Johnny’: ‘I started writing parodies to popular tunes in 1948,’ she told writer Kate Brandt.2
‘I listened to a lot of different artists,’ says queer singer-songwriter Blackberri, ‘I’m really eclectic when it comes to music, but my favourite vocalist of all time was Billie Holiday. I love her voice. She sings like Satchmo’s horn! Her voice has got that kind of feel to it, it’s just amazing’. Throughout her tempestuous career, Billie Holiday was openly bisexual and was rumoured to have dated many notable characters, including the actress and wit Tallulah Bankhead. Frank Sinatra called Billie ‘the greatest single musical influence on me,’ adding ‘I think anyone listening to Billie sing can’t help but learn something from her’.3 Etta James was a huge fan, as was Ray Charles, who performed with her at Carnegie Hall in 1959. Diana Ross portrayed her on the big screen in Lady Sings the Blues, a highly fictionalised version of her life.
Billie and Tallulah first met in the 1930s, a period when Bankhead could often be found slumming it in Harlem. After suffering a difficult and abusive childhood (she spent long periods in care and had was the victim of an attempted rape when she was just 11) in 1929, Holiday, who was born in Philadelphia in 1915, moved to Harlem, where she worked as a teenage prostitute. Imprisoned for soliciting when she was still only 14, once out of jail the girl born Eleanora Harris began singing, adopting the stage name Billie Holiday from actress Billie Dove and the musician Clarence Holiday, her biological father. By 1931 she was singing professionally, and in 1933 she made her recording debut as vocalist for the Benny Goodman Orchestra’s ‘Riffin’ The Scotch’. She shone at the Café Society in New York, where she introduced one of her best-known songs, ‘Strange Fruit’, a stinging depiction of a lynching. In the early years of her career she often crossed paths with Bessie Smith, and Holiday cited the Empress of the Blues as a major influence.
It seems that Holiday and Bankhead were more than just friends, and by 1946 they had become lovers: ‘It was Billie’s deep feeling and originality which moved me from the first time I heard her,’ Bankhead revealed.4 By this time, Holiday had become a major – albeit troubled – star, recording such classics as ‘God Bless The Child’ (a million-seller in 1941), ‘That Ole Devil Called Love’ and the haunting ‘Strange Fruit’. Working with the best jazz musicians of the day, including Lester Young, Teddy Wilson, Count Basie and Artie Shaw, Holiday was earning more than a thousand dollars a week (according to a 1947 news report she made $250,000 in the three years up to 1947),5 but she spent a great deal financially supporting her mother and most of what was left went on heroin. Bankhead often attended Holiday’s shows, and on several occasions she attempted to sort out her messy life: after Holiday was busted for opium possession, it was Bankhead who posted bail, and it was she who paid for a psychiatrist when Holiday threatened suicide. After Holiday was sent to the Alderson Federal Prison Camp in West Virginia, Bankhead pleaded with FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover (himself rumoured to be gay, although there has never been any real evidence to back up the often-repeated stories about him being a transvestite) that she be spared jail: ‘Miss Holiday is a very great artist. She doesn’t need to be confined within prison walls. What she needs is understanding, medical help and the warmth of a loving home’.6 In early 1959, Holiday was arrested again, this time along with her manager John Levy, for the illegal possession of narcotics. Her attorney, Jake Ehrlich, successfully argued that the hearing be delayed so that Lady Day could fulfil a series of live dates already arranged for cities including Seattle, Vancouver and Portland.7
By 1952, when Bankhead issued her autobiography Tallulah, things had soured between the two women. The book, published at a time when Bankhead was becoming something of a television celebrity and was desperately trying to clean up her act, hardly mentioned Holiday at all, yet when Holiday was featured in a TV special in October 1953, Bankhead was just one of the many celebrities (including Louis Armstrong, Artie Shaw and Count Basie) queuing up to sing her praises.8 Three years later, Holiday issued her own autobiography (like Tallulah’s, ghost-written); Bankhead was furious with Holiday over ‘unkind’ mentions of her in Lady Sings the Blues, and threatened to sue. Bankhead called Lee Barker at Doubleday, Holiday’s publisher, and warned him ‘If you publish that stuff about me in the Billie Holiday book, I’ll sue you for every goddam [sic] cent that Doubleday can make.’9
Billie Holiday’s life ended ignominiously in New York in 1959; she was just 44. She died handcuffed to a bed in the Metropolitan Hospital, having been arrested on yet another narcotics charge while she lay dying. Legend has it that she only had 70¢ in the bank, but an hour before she died she gave a nurse a roll of $50 bills wrapped tight in Scotch tape that she had kept secreted in her vagina, which she asked her to give to Bill Dufty, the journalist friend who had ghost-written her autobiography and who had been present at the hospital throughout her stay. For many years, Dufty kept the location of Holiday’s stash a secret, initially claiming that a nurse had found it taped to her leg. Bankhead sent a wreath of red roses for the casket, which was buried in an unmarked grave next to her mother’s: the coffin was exhumed in 1960 and reburied with a headstone which read ‘Billie Holiday, known as Lady Day. Born April 7 1915, Died July 15 1959’. Bankhead, who never publicly described herself as being bisexual (she did, however, describe herself as ‘ambisextrous’ and ‘as pure as the driven slush’), died in New York in 1968.
Sister Rosetta Tharpe has been hailed as the ‘woman who invented Rock ’n’ Roll’; her extraordinary electric guitar-led, gospel-influenced performances were a massive influence on Elvis and any number of early Rock ’n’ Rollers. Little Richard called her his favourite singer: in 1947 she heard Little Richard singing and invited him to join her on stage at the Macon City Auditorium. That show was Little Richard’s first public performance. When Rosetta decided to pay him, her generosity inspired him to become a performer. Johnny Cash was a fan; Bob Dylan still is.
Rosetta Tharpe (she adapted her stage name from her first husband’s surname, Thorp) was born on 20 March 1915 in Arkansas and began playing guitar and singing when she was just four years old. By the age of six she had joined her mother, Katie Bell Nubin, on stage and was performing in a travelling evangelical troupe before the pair moved to Chicago and became featured performers at the Church of God in Christ, with little Rosetta standing on a table so that the congregation could see her. In Chicago she became immersed in jazz and blues.
Not everyone loved her; ‘she fluctuates between a Mammy shout and very sad blues crooning,’ wrote one critic, noting, however, that ‘she’s receiving a hearty welcome’.10 She recorded her first sides for Decca in 1938: one of the songs laid down at that session, ‘Rock Me’, was a gospel/blues crossover that became the first ever gospel hit. Churchgoers were shocked at the mix of spirituality and secularism; she sounds like Bessie Smith or Ma Rainey but her message is one of redemption in the Lord, not of sex and drugs and pre-rock ’n’ roll. Moving on to perform in Broadway’s Cotton Club and Harlem’s famous Savoy Ballroom, she was a sensation, but embracing secular music hurt her standing in the church, and although she tried to split from her management and return to pure gospel, Tharpe’s handlers saw that there was money to be made: she had signed to a seven-year contract and she was going to continue recording the songs they wanted her to sing. The boogie-inflected ‘Strange Things Happening Every Day’ is proto rock ’n’ roll and predates Jackie Brenston’s ‘Rocket ‘88’ (often cited as the first true rock ’n’ roll record) by seven years. When (in 1947) she showcased her electric guitar playing prowess on a re-recording of her early hit ‘That’s All’, she paved the way for a generation of male guitarists including Chuck Berry and Carl Perkins.
Throughout the 1940s, she performed with fellow Church of God in Christ singer Marie Knight, and while the two women were touring, Marie’s two children died in a house fire in New Jersey. They were close; it has been suggested that they were lovers and, in 1948, Tharpe bought a house for the pair of them (and Tharpe’s mother) in Richmond, Virginia to live in when they were between engagements. However, they split acrimoniously in 1949, with Tharpe taking out notices in newspapers to announce that Knight was no longer associated with her act.11 Tharpe played several times in Britain: in 1958 a young drummer by the name of Richard Starkey saw her play at Liverpool jazz cellar The Cavern.12 When she came back to England in 1964 with B. B. King to appear in a TV special for Granada (recorded in a disused railway station), Britain’s nascent blues scene sat up and took notice. Although Gospel’s first superstar was not out to the public during her lifetime, it has been posthumously claimed that she was much less guarded in her private life and was either lesbian or bisexual, with promoter Allan Bloom claiming to have walked in on Tharpe having sex with other women during the ‘honeymoon tour’ which followed her third wedding.13 Sister Rosetta Tharpe died in October 1973, survived by her third husband, who she had married in front of 25,000 people in Washington’s Griffith Stadium in 1951. Her old friend Marie Knight fixed Rosetta’s hair and make-up for her final journey.
Sister Rosetta Tharpe was hardly the first artist to decide to stay in the closet – although in reality most had little choice in the matter. Władziu Valentino Liberace (known to his family and friends as Lee) made his first recordings in 1946, and as outlandish as he was, he resolutely refused to answer any questions about his sexuality. Revered as one of the world’s greatest entertainers, his enormous success – and ostentatious wealth – relied on his position as America’s non-threatening, asexual ‘mama’s boy’, and his low-brow popularisation of high-brow music would never have happened if his audience – including the 35 million that regularly tuned in to watch him on TV – had seen him as anything other than sexless. In the process of exploiting his own poor upbringing, he filled his devoted audience with the belief that anyone could make it big. He was the embodiment of the American Dream. Elvis was a fan: until Elvis displaced him, Liberace was the best-loved star in America, and when they met, Elvis made sure to get Lee’s autograph for his mother. Associating himself with Elvis was a smart move: the King of Rock may have alluded to homosexuality on his worldwide hit ‘Jailhouse Rock’, but no one seriously questioned his heterosexuality. Recorded in April 1957, the song’s homoerotic lyrics are not exactly guarded, especially in the third verse when one male prisoner opines to another to ‘come on and do the Jailhouse Rock with me’: for decades the word ‘rock’ had been used in songs as code for sex.
In 1956 an article in the British newspaper the Daily Mirror (by columnist William Connor, writing under the pen name Cassandra) described Liberace as ‘the summit of sex – the pinnacle of masculine, feminine, and neuter. Everything that he, she, and it can ever want … a deadly, winking, sniggering, snuggling, chromium-plated, scent-impregnated, luminous, quivering, giggling, fruit-flavoured, mincing, ice-covered heap of mother love’. Liberace, at the time the highest-paid entertainer in the world, sent a tongue-in-cheek telegram to the Daily Mirror that read: ‘what you said hurt me very much. I cried all the way to the bank,’ although he would later sue the newspaper for libel, testifying in a London court that he was not homosexual and that he had never taken part in homosexual acts. During a six-hour address to the court, Liberace stated that ‘on my word of God, on my mother’s health, which is so dear to me, this article only means one thing, that I am a homosexual and that is why I am in this court. “Fruit-flavoured, masculine, feminine and neuter” – all this points to one horrible fact which has damaged me in my career and my reputation, has made me the subject of ridicule and caused me great embarrassment.’14
‘“Are you a homosexual?” Liberace was asked by [his representative, Gilbert] Beyfus. “No, sir.” Said the pianist, looking straight at the bewigged judge, Sir Cyril Salmon. “Have you ever indulged in homosexual practices,” the attorney asked. “No, sir, never in my life.” “What are your feelings about it?” “My feelings are the same as anyone else’s. I am against the practice because it offends convention and offends society,” the pianist said.’15
Lee testified that, at a performance in Sheffield ‘there were cries from the audience of “queer” and such things as “go home, queer”,’ which upset him ‘very much, and it upset the audience too.’16 He won the suit, perjuring himself in the process, and the £8,000 damages he received led Liberace to repeat his new ‘I cried all the way to the bank’ catchphrase to reporters.
The Daily Mirror was not the only publication prepared to take a pop: the headline in the July 1957 issue of the US magazine Confidential trumpeted ‘Liberace’s Theme Song Should Be “Mad About the Boy”!’ Once again, Liberace sued, this time filing a $20 million libel suit and telling George Putnam, a reporter for Los Angeles broadcaster KTTV that ‘It’s real heartbreak to see your life’s work destroyed so viciously by a magazine in an article of this kind. It’s a lie. It’s trash.’ He eventually settled for $40,000.
Lee kept up the pretence to the end: even after his former chauffeur and lover Scott Thorson filed a $113 million lawsuit against him (in the first same-sex palimony case in the US), he denied any kind of homosexual involvement. In December 1986, less than two months before he died, Liberace settled the case for $95,000. The week after his death (on 4 February 1987) the Daily Mirror made a half-hearted attempt to recover the money from his estate, running the headline ‘Any Chance of a Refund’.17 ‘He was a huge influence on me,’ Elton John admitted in 2013. ‘He wasn’t publicly out – but he didn’t give a flying monkey about what he was wearing; he just went for it. That, of course, influenced me. My thing was to leap on the piano, do handstands and wear clothes that would draw attention to me because that’s the focus for two and half hours. Liberace gave me that idea.’18
Cassandra’s accusation would not have come as a surprise to the average newspaper reader, as Britain saw a major crackdown on homosexual activity in the post-war years. Home Secretary Sir David Maxwell Fyfe promised there would be ‘a new drive against male vice’ that would ‘rid England of this plague’. In 1947, distinguished army officer Lord Colwyn of the Gordon Highlanders was court-martialled after pleading guilty to ‘five charges of gross impropriety … in which Italian men were involved during Lord Colwyn’s overseas service’.19 Arrests for importuning were common and high-profile cases made sensational headlines. By the end of 1954, there were 1,069 men in prison in England and Wales for homosexual acts, and undercover police officers would pose as gay men soliciting in places including public lavatories (known as cottages) and cruising grounds in municipal parks in an effort to add to that number.
In 1953, rumours started to circulate that a prominent ‘27 year-old bachelor peer’ had been up to no good. Soon after, Lord Montagu of Beaulieu fled the country, first to France and then to America, from where he knew he could not be extradited. Choosing to return and face his accusers, in December that year the bisexual Montagu was acquitted of committing a serious sexual offence against a 14-year-old boy. Montagu was adamant it was a set-up: he had accused the boy of theft but the police, aware of his position in society and sexual predilections, were after him. Three weeks later, the police came for him again. The media had been tipped off and were on the doorstep waiting when they arrived. Montagu, along with landowner Michael Pitt-Rivers and Daily Mail correspondent Peter Wildeblood, was charged with ‘conspiracy to incite certain male persons to commit serious offences with male persons’ (two young airmen, Edward McNally and John Reynolds). This was the first time that such a charge had been used since the trial of Oscar Wilde almost 60 years earlier. Montagu was the only one of the three men to protest his innocence. ‘Because I was,’ he told the Evening Standard in 2007. ‘It was guilt by association’.20
The result of this sensational trial would see a peer of the realm jailed for a year (his co-defendants were incarcerated for 18 months apiece): more importantly, it presaged a change in attitudes towards homosexuality in Britain. Partly as a result of the case, in September 1957 the Committee on Homosexual Offences and Prostitution issued a report recommending changes in the law. Better known as the Wolfenden Report (after the chairman of the committee, Lord John Frederick Wolfenden), the report recommended that ‘homosexual behaviour between consenting adults in private should no longer be a criminal offence’. It would take a further decade, but the Wolfenden Report eventually led to the passage of the Sexual Offences Act 1967, which decriminalised homosexual acts in private between two men over the age of 21 (the act applied to England and Wales only). Subsequent acts would reduce the age of consent to 18 then, in 2001, to 16 when, for the first time in British history, regardless of gender, the age of consent was the same for both heterosexual and homosexual acts.
When Cole Porter wrote the song ‘Farming’ for his 1941 Broadway production Let’s Face It, he became the first person to use the word ‘gay’ to mean homosexual in a popular song: ‘George’s bull is beautiful but he’s gay’. The word had been used liberally before (by Bing Crosby in his 1929 hit ‘Gay Love’, for example), but this was the first time it had been used in a pejorative sense; Bing’s love had been fun, happy and heady – although at no point does the song mention the gender of the object of Mr. Crosby’s affection. ‘Farming’ used the ‘G’ word as a way of emasculating the bull in question.
The Broadway musical is as central to LGBT culture as our culture is central to the existence of the Broadway musical: heterosexual audiences may laugh at the endless references to nancy boys, the swishy dance numbers and the effete leading men, but without out (and LGBT-friendly) writers, composers, costume designers, choreographers, directors and – naturally – actors, the Broadway musical as we know it would simply not exist. This is abundantly clear today, when the biggest shows include The Lion King (music by Elton John), Hairspray (by out-gay film director John Waters), Falsettos (a musical about the AIDS crisis) and Wicked (seriously, how could a show with its roots in The Wizard of Oz not have been crafted to appeal to both lesbians and gay men? There’s a reason that gay men are often referred to as ‘friends of Dorothy’, you know), but it has always been the case. Porter was married but gay (and would write the outrageous ‘Tom, Dick or Harry’ for the 1948 production of Kiss Me, Kate which includes the repeated line ‘A Dick! A Dick! A Dick! A Dick!’), as was Leonard Bernstein, composer of the huge international hit West Side Story, and his lyricist Stephen Sondheim, probably the greatest composer of the Broadway musical still living today. Then you have Noël Coward, Lionel Bart, lyricist Lorenz Hart (co-writer, with Richard Rodgers, of The Boys from Syracuse and Pal Joey; repressing his homosexuality drove the rough trade-loving Hart into the alcoholism that ultimately killed him), John Kander and his lyricist Fred Ebb (Cabaret, Funny Lady, Kiss of the Spider Woman), and Ivor Novello. Yet although musicals were dominated by LGBT artists – so much so that Broadway earned the nickname ‘The Gay White Way’ – it wasn’t until the 1959 show The Nervous Set and its central song ‘The Ballad of the Sad Young Men’ that America got to see gay men portrayed on stage as anything but bright, fey and fun young things. A few years later, Hair: The American Tribal Love-Rock Musical proved a useful training ground for a number of LGBT artists (Jobriath, Joan Armatrading, Peter Straker and Valentino among them) and included a scene where two men kiss, but Broadway would have to wait until Earl Wilson Jr’s 1976 musical Let My People Come, which debuted in 1974, and explicitly tackled LGBT issues in the song ‘I’m Gay’.
Although he wasn’t out at the time, Johnny Mathis recorded several songs with an underlying gay theme, including ‘The Best Of Everything’, ‘All The Sad Young Men’, and ‘A Time For Us’. When he first signed to Columbia in 1956, being black and gay and out was simply not an option: Johnnie Ray already filled two of those spots for the company; Mathis chose not to hide his sexuality but to not discuss it at all. His non-threatening image and yearning ballads meant that he could appeal to both men and women, to both straight and LGBT audiences. Johnny Mathis was Liberace-safe. After he revealed that he was gay, in an interview with Us magazine in 1982, he received death threats. ‘A few people in the Southern states didn’t like it,’ he told Britain’s Sunday Express. ‘I was in no real danger but when you’re young it’s difficult to get over. It doesn’t bother me at all now, and it’s not even a big deal any more which is wonderful, but I learned to isolate myself from negative things.’21
Born on 10 January 1927 as the second child of farmers Elmer and Hazel Ray, Johnnie Ray’s career was anything but conventional. In 1951, shortly before Ray was signed to Okeh records, he was arrested in Detroit for accosting and soliciting an undercover vice squad officer in the restroom of the Stone Theatre, a burlesque house. He pleaded guilty and, offered the choice between 30 days in the slammer or a $25 fine, he wisely paid up and was released. The incident failed to make the news locally, but would continue to haunt him.
Called the ‘father of rock and roll’ by Tony Bennett, legend has it that before he was three years old, Ray was already playing the piano; however, an accident at 13, when he fell and suffered a concussion, severely affected his heath: crippling headaches and depression followed until his hearing was tested the following year. Damage from that accident had resulted in Johnnie losing around half of his hearing, and he wore a hearing aid for the rest of his life (Morrissey chose to parody this, appearing on British TV show Top of the Pops wearing an old-fashioned hearing aid of the type Ray used). Destined for the stage, his career included a short stint as a straight man in a comedy act when he was just 19 years old before he got his big break at the Flame Show Bar, a ‘black and tan’ night club in Detroit with a mixed-race clientele. Ray fit right in, and he soon came to the attention of a talent scout named Danny Keasler. ‘I want you to hear a singer who’s terrific,’ he is reputed to have told his bosses at Columbia. ‘He’s a boy who sounds like a girl!’22
He recorded his first single, the self-penned ‘Whisky and Gin’, on 28 May 1951. Within months he had scored his first million-seller, ‘Cry’, and captured the hearts of screaming bobbysoxers. And almost immediately the stories about his sexuality began to spread.
Known affectionately as the Nabob of Sob or the Prince of Wails, Ray had more than twenty hits during the 1950s. At the highest point of his career he made well over a million dollars a year, sold out shows around the world, and appeared in movies including There’s No Business Like Show Business with Ethel Merman, Donald O’Connor and Marilyn Monroe. He was often mobbed by his adoring fans: during his Australian tour of 1954 it was reported that he earned around £30 a minute from his shows and that ‘he also had three tuxedos and several ties and shirts ripped to pieces by emotional fans’.23 On a previous visit to Brisbane, ‘Ray had a new 15 guinea drape coat ripped up the back, his shirt torn and the tassels ripped off his shoes’.24 In May 1955, he was knocked unconscious by a mob of screaming fans as he arrived at his Edinburgh hotel.
In the spring of 1952, Ray married Marilyn Morrison. She was aware of Ray’s homosexuality but told a friend of his that she would ‘straighten it out’. The couple separated before the end of the year and divorced in January 1954. Sixteen months later, he announced his engagement to Silvia Drew, one of his backing singers. In 1959 Ray was arrested by the Detroit vice squad on a charge of soliciting an undercover police officer at the Brass Rail theatre bar, one of the city’s gay bars (there were three Brass Rails in Detroit at the time: he appears to have been arrested at the one on Adams St. across from Grand Circus Park). Released after another night in the cells on a $500 bond, this time Ray hired an attorney and fought the charges. ‘I can only say that the whole thing is a complete misunderstanding,’ he told reporters. ‘I have witnesses to testify to the validity of anything I say at my trial’.25
‘I was sitting at the bar signing autographs when this man came up and asked me to autograph his handkerchief, which I did. Then we talked and had some drinks. All of us were going over to the Statler [hotel] for a nightcap and I asked him if he wanted to join us guys. The fellow said he did, and walked out with us.’
Ray had been the victim of police entrapment, an all-to-frequent device used to arrest gay men – and the jury felt he had been coerced, taking less than an hour to find him not guilty. Still, the damage had been done: Ray’s career hit a downward slide, and although he kept working, he did not have another chart hit after 1959. Years of heavy drinking eventually took their toll, and he died of liver failure in February 1990.
The Brass Rail, where Johnnie Ray fell victim to police entrapment
If Ray was the ‘father of rock and roll’, then either Little Richard or Esquerita can lay claim to being the mother. Esquerita (born Eskew Reeder Jr or Steven Quincy Reeder in 1935 in Greenville, South Carolina) was an early rock ’n’ roller who inspired the camp approach of Little Richard, although they seem to have influenced each other equally; Little Richard may have ‘borrowed’ some of his style from the more flamboyant Esquerita, but the latter man did not begin his recording career until long after Little Richard first made it big. A self-taught pianist, Eskew Jr spent his early years playing piano in church before, in his late teens, dropping out of high school and moving to New York to join the gospel group the Heavenly Echoes around the time that they released their 1955 single ‘Didn’t It Rain’/‘Your God is My God Too’.
Inspired by the ‘dirty blues’ of Ma Rainey and Lucille Bogan, Eskew left the Heavenly Echoes and began playing his own, raucous music for just about anyone who would put him on a stage. Discovered playing in a bar by Paul Peek, Gene Vincent’s rhythm guitarist, he was signed to Capitol Records (Vincent’s label) and recorded his first session for the company in May 1958. His debut album, Esquerita! featured Elvis’ backing vocalists the Jordanaires.
Over the next decade, he would record for a variety of labels and with a number of up-and-coming players, including Big Joe Turner and Allen Toussaint. In 1963, he recorded an unreleased session for Berry Gordy’s Motown label and the following year played with Jimi Hendrix on Little Richard’s Greatest Hits, an album that consisted of re-recordings of Little Richard’s biggest songs for his new label, VeeJay. Sadly, and not through lack of trying, Esquerita never really made the grade as a solo artist. Changing his name to The Magnificent Malochi, he signed with Brunswick Records in 1968, releasing the one-off 45 ‘As Time Goes By’/‘Mama, Your Daddy’s Come Home’ which featured famed New Orleans keyboardist Dr. John on organ. Reissues of his classic 1950s material followed, but if they made any money, none of it filtered down to the artist himself.
During the 1970s and early 1980s, he did what he needed to do to get by, often playing in dives in New York for little money; at one point he wound up in prison. Esquerita died of AIDS in October 1986 in Harlem, and was buried in a pauper’s grave. In 2012, Norton Records issued a new Esquerita album, Sinner Man: The Lost Session.
‘Little’ Richard Penniman freely admitted that Esquerita influenced his wild style of piano playing, and he also told interviewers that the first time he clapped eyes on Eskew’s exotic look he was blown away. Little Richard told Charles White, author of the excellent biography The Life And Times Of Little Richard: The Quasar of Rock, that he had met Reeder at the Greyhound bus station in his home town of Macon around 1951:
One night I was sitting there and Esquerita came in. He was with a lady preacher by the name of Sister Rosa, whose line was selling blessed bread. She said it was blessed, but it was nothing but regular old bread that you buy at the store. Esquerita played piano for her and they had a little guy singing with them by the name of Shorty. So Esquerita and me went up to my house and he got on the piano and he played “One Mint Julep” way high up in the treble. It sounded so pretty. The bass was fantastic. He had the biggest hands of anybody I’d ever seen … I said, “Hey, how do you do that?” And he says, “I’ll teach you”. And that’s when I really started playing.26
Little Richard, a man who has clearly struggled to define his sexuality but has at times been happy to admit to being gay, began recording that same year and was a huge influence on another genderfluid icon, David Bowie. When asked who or what made him first want to sing, Bowie said:
Little Richard. If it hadn’t have been for him, I probably wouldn’t have gone into music. When I was nine and first saw Little Richard in a film that played around town—I think it was probably Girl Can’t Help It—seeing those four saxophonists onstage, it was like, “I want to be in that band!” And for a couple of years that was my ambition, to be in a band playing saxophone behind Little Richard. That’s why I got a saxophone.
Bowie told Vanity Fair in 1998 that his most treasured possession was ‘a photograph held together by cellophane tape of Little Richard that I bought in 1958,’ and he admitted, ‘when I heard Little Richard, I mean, it just set my world on fire’. Bowie later said that, after his father bought him a copy of Little Richard’s ‘Tutti Frutti’ that ‘I had heard God’. ‘Tutti Frutti’ was originally about anal sex between two men, but the original lyrics – ‘Tutti Frutti, good booty/If it don’t fit, don’t force it/You can grease it, make it easy’ – were cleaned up for mass consumption by songwriter Dorothy LaBostrie.
As the man who (in his early years) performed in drag as Princess Lavonne once said, ‘Elvis may be the King of Rock and Roll, but I am the Queen.’ He told filmmaker John Waters (for a 1987 Playboy interview), ‘I love gay people. I believe I was the founder of gay. I’m the one who started to be so bold tellin’ the world! I was wearing make-up and eyelashes when no men were wearing that. I was very beautiful; I had hair hanging everywhere. If you let anybody know you was gay, you was in trouble; so when I came out I didn’t care what nobody thought. A lot of people were scared to be with me.’
Along with Buddy Holly (with whom Little Richard once claimed to have enjoyed a threesome), Carl Perkins and Elvis, Little Richard was one of the biggest influences on the Beatles. The flamboyant legend’s dress sense and wild, powerful voice are credited by Rolling Stone Keith Richards for making ‘the world change from monochrome to Technicolor’.27 But his difficulty in reconciling his deeply felt religious beliefs (at the height of his fame, Little Richard gave everything up to go in to the church) with his homosexuality has caused him to vacillate between being out and diving back in to the closet. ‘I used to be a flaming homosexual from Macon, Georgia, until God changed me,’ he declared from the pulpit of a New York church.28
Jazz, with its casual attitude to drink, drugs and sex, provided a number of gay and bisexual musicians with cover, yet on the whole the post-war jazz scene was fiercely homophobic, in startling contrast to its early years. One of the few out-gay musicians of the time was pianist and composer Billy Strayhorn, who teamed with Duke Ellington and wrote hits such as ‘Lush Life’ and ‘Take the “A” Train’. Ellington didn’t care about colour or sexuality, he was only interested in musicianship, and Strayhorn was incredibly loyal to the man whose support enabled him to live his life openly, even if it meant Ellington receiving the credit for much of Strayhorn’s work. As one of his friends said: ‘The most amazing thing of all about Billy Strayhorn to me was that he had the strength to make an extraordinary decision – that is, the decision not to hide the fact that he was homosexual. And he did this in the 1940s, when nobody but nobody did that.’29 For almost a decade, Strayhorn lived openly with his partner, pianist Aaron Bridgers. The couple were introduced by Ellington’s son, Mercer,30 and only split after Bridgers decided to move permanently to Paris. They would remain friends for the rest of Strayhorn’s life. The last piece Bridgers wrote and recorded, 1999’s ‘Phil’, was dedicated to Strayhorn.
There can be little doubt that, if Ellington had not protected Strayhorn, he would not have been able to enjoy as active and open a sex life as he did. Being out of the limelight helped: there’s no way that someone with a profile as high as Miles Davis could have come out as bisexual during his lifetime (he was outed posthumously by comedian Richard Pryor).31 Likewise, much has been made in recent years of singer and pianist Nina Simone’s bisexuality, although for most of her career she was married to a psychologically and physically abusive ex-policeman, Andrew Stroud.32 Vibraphone player Gary Burton turned professional before he had finished his teens (his first recordings were issued in 1960, when he was still only 17) but it took two marriages and a whole lot of soul searching before he was finally comfortable enough to come out publicly, which he did in 1994 after having been in a gay relationship for a number of years. ‘I have been asked what it’s like being white in a field of music that’s considered African-American,’ he told Francis Davis of The New York Times. ‘I think it would be equally valid to ask me what it’s like being gay and playing a form of music that’s seen as macho. It’s interesting that the subject never seems to come up’.33 Burton married his long-time partner, Jonathan Chong, in 2013. Band leader and pianist Billy Tipton, whose performing career began in the 1930s, spent his entire adult life hiding a secret from his audience – and from the women he shared his home with. Billy had been born a woman, Dorothy Lucille Tipton. Tipton went to great lengths to pass as male, binding his breasts and telling female partners that his genitals had been damaged in an accident. The Billy Tipton Trio recorded two albums of jazz standards in 1957, but it wasn’t until he passed away (in January 1989 at the age of 74) that his common law wife and adopted sons discovered that he had been leading a double life. ‘No one knew,’ said Kitty Oakes, the woman Tipton claimed to have married in 1960. Although the couple had separated some 10 years earlier, Oakes refused to talk about their life together, saying that Tipton died with the secret and that should be respected. ‘The real story about Billy Tipton doesn’t have anything to do with gender,’ she added. ‘He was a fantastic, almost marvellous, and generous person.’34
Would it surprise anyone to know that George Cory and Douglass Cross, the men who wrote the music and lyrics to ‘(I Left My Heart In) San Francisco’ were a gay couple? Written in 1953 for the singer Claramae Turner, the song became a worldwide smash and multi-million-selling hit when it was recorded by Tony Bennett in 1962. The men met during the Second World War and spent the rest of their lives together. Friends of Billie Holiday (according to Bennett, who is a huge Holiday fan), the couple also knew Bennett’s pianist Ralph Sharon, who brought the song, originally called ‘When I Return To San Francisco’, to the singer. The pair composed the song in a moment of homesickness, having moved to New York to try to make it in Tin Pan Alley. In 1969, ‘I Left My Heart In San Francisco’ was named the city’s official song. Douglas Cross died in 1975, and Cory – broken-hearted after losing his partner of 30 years – committed suicide three years later … a short time after he had returned to live in San Francisco.
For many decades, LGBT people have identified with the autobiographical songs and tragic life of French chanteuse Édith Piaf, one of the many women seduced by Marlene Dietrich according to her daughter Maria’s biography – and Maria Riva Dietrich was no fan, referring to Piaf as a ‘guttersnipe’ in a 2003 interview with CNN’s Larry King. However Piaf, whose singing career began in the smokey jazz and cabaret clubs of the Pigalle and Champs-Élysées is better known for her tempestuous relationships with men, some (including the actor-singer Yves Montand) bisexual themselves, than for having a string of girlfriends. Although ‘the little sparrow’ moved freely through Paris’ LGBT underworld and Piaf was no stranger in the Pigalle’s lesbian bars, if she was indeed bisexual then she kept quiet about it. Dietrich, incidentally, was Piaf’s matron of honour when she married Jacques Pills in 1952.
When Lesley Gore hit the big time in 1963, the same year that Piaf died, she was still just 17 – the perfect age for the protagonist in her first million-seller ‘It’s My Party’. Less than a year later she scored big with ‘You Don’t Own Me’, a fantastic proto-feminist disc that was denied the Number One spot in the US by the Beatles and ‘I Want to Hold Your Hand’. The singer, who was born Lesley Sue Goldstein in Brooklyn on 2 May, 1946, realised that she was a lesbian when she was in her 20s, and although there was no public announcement, it wasn’t exactly a secret either. ‘I just never found it was necessary because I really never kept my life private,’ Lesley admitted. ‘Those who knew me, those who worked with me were well aware’.35 As well as maintaining a recording and composing career – she co-wrote several songs for the soundtrack of the hit 1980 film Fame – she also acted (she appeared in two episodes of the Batman series in 1967, and in several episodes of the TV soap All My Children) and from 2004 hosted the PBS television series In the Life, which focused on LGBT issues. Lesley, who died in 2015, spent the last 33 years of her life in a committed relationship with jewellery designer Lois Sasson.