‘I’m sure gay rock will be the next thing. Now that gay is open they need their own music and their own bands to follow, just like everyone else. Why not?’
David Arden of Jet Records1
28 June 1969 – the date of the first night of direct action in the Stonewall Riots – is often referred to as the most important date in the modern LGBT movement. While it’s certainly true that the riots, a reaction to years of police oppression, were a catalyst for the start of the Gay Liberation movement, in truth the people were already massing, learning valuable lessons in how to protest effectively from the Civil Rights Movement, Women’s Lib, the anti-war protests of the mid-1960s and the civil unrest seen on the streets of Paris in May 1968.
Police raids on LGBT bars were commonplace in America in the 1950s and 1960s, and several other violent protests had already taken place: in Los Angeles in the spring of 1959 at the all-night coffee shop Cooper’s Donuts2 and in August 1966 at Gene Compton’s Cafeteria in San Francisco’s Tenderloin district. But when the New York City Police Department decided to raid the Mafia-run Stonewall Inn on Christopher Street, the members of Greenwich Village’s LGBT community that used the bar as its base decided they had had enough, and the violent demonstrations that erupted are now enshrined in history as the most important event in the fight for LGBT rights in the United States, if not the world.
Three important things happened after Stonewall. Firstly, there was a palpable change in attitude from LGBT activists. Polite requests for better treatment of LGBT people, such as the annual picket outside Philadelphia’s Independence Hall (organised by the Mattachine Society, an early gay rights organisation established in Los Angeles in 1950), were quickly replaced with more militant action from a politically aware community who had experienced the success (in media terms, anyway) of the mass demonstrations against nuclear weapons, the Vietnam War, police brutality and racism. Secondly, LGBT people became more visible: in Canada the first ‘legal’ gay wedding took place, between singer Michel Girouard and his accompanist Rejean Tremblay (same-sex marriage was not recognised, but Quebec’s Civil Code allowed for a legal partnership similar to marriage, regardless of sex), and le couple issued an album in celebration. LGBT characters were seen in the cinema and, in 1972 the hit Australian soap opera Number 96 – which regularly attracted around a fifth of all Aussie TV viewers – became one of the earliest prime-time TV shows to introduce a gay character, the lawyer Don Finlayson ‘in his natural surroundings and behaving just like an ordinary person’.3 Ellen DeGeneres may have grabbed the headlines when she came out on her self-titled sitcom, and there’s no doubt that she lowered the drawbridge and allowed Will and Grace, Queer Eye for the Straight Guy and so on to traverse the ramparts of Castle Primetime, but Number 96 beat her by a quarter of a century. Finally, just a week after the riots began, the Gay Liberation Front was formed by a politically active splinter group of the Mattachine Society in New York; on the first anniversary of the Stonewall Riots the world saw the first ever Gay Pride marches, held simultaneously in Chicago, Los Angeles and San Francisco. In October 1970, Aubrey Walter and Bob Mellor founded a British branch of the Gay Liberation Front; London saw its first Gay Pride march in 1972, the same year that Gay News, Britain’s first widely available LGBT newspaper, was founded. Other countries soon followed suit.
Alongside all of this political upheaval, LGBT music started to infiltrate the mainstream. In 1969, American singer Jewel Akens, who had a Top Three hit in 1965 with ‘The Birds And The Bees’, recorded ‘He’s Good For Me’ for the small West One label. Reissued in 1973 to cash in on the publicity David Bowie, Lou Reed and the rest of the new crop of LGBT acts were receiving, the disc was marketed in the pages of The Advocate as ‘the first gay rock single 45’.4 Jewel was married and insisted that he was not gay himself, but he took a co-composer credit on the 45 and followed up the release with the sexually ambiguous ‘What Would You Do’. Swedish singer Johnny Delgada’s ‘Vi är inte som andra vi’ (‘We Are Not Like The Others’) was an early (1970) attempt to write a ballad specifically for gay men. Also issued in Germany as ‘Wir Zwei, Wir Sind Nicht Wie Die Andern’ – both countries put the record out in a picture sleeve featuring two naked young men cuddling up to each other – it was an odd career move for the singer and composer better known in his home country as Johnny Bode who had begun his recording career in 1929. Sterilised while undergoing treatment in a psychiatric hospital, at one point Bode enlisted with the German army and apparently was sent to the Grini concentration camp – although he was known to be a pathological liar, so any of the above could be untrue.
London-born singer-songwriter Labi Siffre, who scored his first chart hit in 1971 with ‘It Must be Love’ (also a Top Five hit for Madness a decade or so later), met his partner Peter John Carver Lloyd in July 1964. The pair would remain together until Carver Lloyd’s death in 2013, having been a couple for 49 years. Labi Siffre was an anomaly: an openly gay, mixed-race singer whose work tackled homophobia and racism head-on and who had several UK chart hits, including four Top 30 singles. In 1998, ten years after he had his last chart single, his 1975 song ‘I Got The’ was sampled by Eminem for his international hit ‘My Name Is’; Siffre originally refused to allow his work to be sampled until certain lyrical changes were made. Siffre also wrote the anti-apartheid anthem ‘(Something Inside) So Strong’, which in 1987 provided him with a Top Five hit of his own and won an Ivor Novello award, presented annually for songwriting and composing and named in honour of the Cardiff-born gay composer. In recent years, Siffre has turned to other forms of writing, issuing three collections of his poetry and producing the play Deathwrite.
Suddenly, LGBT-themed songs, and LGBT performers, were everywhere. A reviewer in Gay News called Lou Reed’s ‘Make Up’, from his Bowie-produced album Transformer (which features the line ‘We’re coming out, out of our closets’), ‘the best Gay Lib song I have heard,’ going on to say that ‘Transformer is an essential record. The record sleeve, especially the reverse side, is remarkable too’.5 The back of the sleeve featured Reed’s roadie Ernie Thormahlen sporting a very visible erection: photographer Karl Stoecker would later reveal that this was, in fact, a plastic banana that Ernie had thrust down the front of his tight jeans.6 Reed’s international smash ‘Walk On the Wild Side’ provided a window onto the gender-bending antics of various members of Andy Warhol’s Factory, and in doing so opened up an exotic new world of possibilities, one where you could change your look, change your name and even change your sex if you wanted to. Formerly singer, guitarist and songwriter with the Velvet Underground (a huge influence on Bowie, who recorded a cover of Reed’s ‘I’m Waiting For my Man’ in 1967 with his band, former Joe Meek protégés the Riot Squad), as a teenager, Reed suffered a breakdown and was forced to undergo electroshock therapy; an experience he described in detail in the book Please Kill Me: ‘They put the thing down your throat so you don’t swallow your tongue, and they put electrodes on your head. That’s what was recommended in Rockland County to discourage homosexual feelings. The effect is that you lose your memory and become a vegetable.’7 He would also document the experience in his song ‘Kill Your Sons’.
Although it was widely assumed that Reed, like Bowie, was bisexual, in an incendiary 1973 interview he told writer Lester Bangs, ‘The notion that everybody’s bisexual is a very popular line right now, but I think its validity is limited. I could say something like if in any way my album helps people decide who or what they are, then I will feel I have accomplished something in my life. But I don’t feel that way at all …’ adding that in future he ‘may come out with a hardhat album. Come out with an anti-gay song, saying, “Get back in your closets, you fuckin’ queers!” That’ll really do it!’8 Tom Robinson remembers, ‘For those of us involved with Gay Liberation, this was disappointing at best and at worst, downright betrayal. Had a queer hero deceived us, or deceived himself? Or had Lou been a heterosexual impostor all along, only in it for the money?’9 After his death (on 27 October 2013), his sister Merrill Reed Weiner wrote:
It has been suggested that ECT was approved by my parents because Lou had confessed to homosexual urges. How simplistic. He was depressed, weird, anxious, and avoidant. My parents were many things, but homophobic they were not. In fact, they were blazing liberals. They were caught in a bewildering web of guilt, fear, and poor psychiatric care. Did they make a mistake in not challenging the doctor’s recommendation for ECT? Absolutely. I have no doubt they regretted it until the day they died.10
Glam rock gave men an excuse to wear make-up, don outrageous satin clothes and stick sequins on their faces. The glittery icons on Top of the Pops may have looked like dockers underneath the glitz, but this manufactured androgyny created a safe space to camp it up without necessarily getting beaten up. In its own way, glam rock (or glitter rock as it was referred to in the States) subversively blurred the fine line between straight and queer. The New York Dolls were not averse to using the new trend for gay rock to further their career; in fact they embraced it, donning street-gutter drag and glitter-rock make-up for the cover of their debut LP. Briefly managed by Malcolm McLaren, the Dolls’ look and sound owed a lot to both Lou Reed and shock-rocker Alice Cooper. Cooper, mostly because of the name and the make-up, was routinely being ‘outed’ by the press. Even before he (then leading the band of the same name) had even had a hit, when he/they were still signed to Frank Zappa’s Straight Records label, Cooper was talking about how ‘biologically, everyone is male and female … what’s the big deal? Why is everyone so uptight about sex?’11 In August 1974, in an incredible interview in Spec magazine, the former Vince Furnier revealed the truth:
‘I’m straight … but if I could have chosen my own sexuality, I think I might have chosen to be bisexual … I think in the future everyone will be bisexual. And everything would be so much simpler then – you’d just make love with anyone you liked, and it wouldn’t matter what sex they were, and maybe it also wouldn’t matter what color they were, or what age, or anything, except that you liked them … I actually prefer the concept of pansexuality, rather than bisexuality. The prefix “pan” means that you’re open to all kinds of sexual experiences, with all kinds of people. It means an end to restrictions, it means you could relate sexually to any human being, it means an end to unreal limits. I like that idea.12
The unbridled sexuality of the New York Dolls, Alice Cooper, Lou Reed and the like was more about androgyny (or, as Cooper put it, pansexuality) than about being gay or bisexual. In an interview with Ted Castle, David Johansen – the Dolls’ singer – said, ‘sexuality is a very personal thing … whatever you perceive as sexuality, that’s what it is. And it’s not for one person to say that they’re heterosexual or homosexual or bisexual, because none of those things are real. People are just sexual.’13 In 1974, during an unguarded moment backstage in Hamburg, teen heartthrob David Cassidy came out to the German monthly Du Und Ich. ‘I’ve nothing at all to hide,’ he told reporter Valentino Rhonheimer. ‘I have many friends, men friends who I sleep with – and I enjoy it. I don’t let anyone dictate to me who I shall sleep with, just as I don’t tell anyone who they should sleep with. I only know that I wouldn’t want to sing to audiences who didn’t like me just because I had slept with a man.’14 Gossip about his sexuality has followed Cassidy for all of his life, but in this instance he may have been simply kidding around: although he has gone on record on many occasions to say that he supports LGBT rights, in his 2007 autobiography he backtracked on his candid admission, saying, ‘I had some thoughts about homosexuality – I’m sure we all have some thoughts about it as we’re growing up, finding ourselves. So I was, at times, unsure. It was only when I was actually confronted with the situation that I realised … I’m really just not into it.’ The book is surprisingly frank about his sexual exploits and his close friendships with a number of LGBT celebrities and, as he wrote, what did it matter ‘if I slept with men, women, snakes or sheep’ anyway? One thing the book did reveal was that his father, the actor Jack Cassidy, was also bisexual, and that dad had enjoyed a long affair with Cole Porter.15
The inference was obvious: sexuality was fluid. Or at least it was so long as that fluidity helped sell records and gain column inches in the press. When the actor and singer Peter Straker appeared as a woman who is really a man (though it’s never made clear in the movie whether Jo is the son or the daughter of a West Indian High Commissioner, or if in fact they are trans) the issue of androgyny left the recording studio and the concert stage and became comedic fodder for the big screen. Straker had his first stab at pop stardom as part of the original London cast of Hair: The American Tribal Love-Rock Musical, which opened at the Shaftesbury Theatre on 27 September 1968 and ran for almost 2,000 performances.
The US and UK productions of Hair provided a training ground for a number of actors and musicians, and would also bring Richard O’Brien and Tim Curry together for the first time, five years before they would collaborate on The Rocky Horror Show. Born in Jamaica, Straker released a one-off single for Polydor (a version of the Jacques Brel song ‘Carousel’) and appeared in the aforementioned movie Girl Stroke Boy (as the girl/boy of the title) before signing to RCA, who issued his first album, Private Parts, in 1972. All of the songs on the album were written by gay songwriting duo Ken Howard and Alan Blaikley, who had written the British Number One single ‘Have I The Right’ for the Honeycombs; the pair based the songs on aspects of Peter’s own life, including the death of his father. ‘The album is very personal,’ he told Peter Holms and Denis Lemon of Gay Times. ‘I discussed everything with Ken and Alan. We tried to be explicit – as explicit as Jacques Brel.’16
The startling cover, featuring a naked Straker with a map of Hampstead Heath projected onto his body, made it fairly evident what audience RCA were looking for, and as the concept album dealt with issues including bisexuality, early sexual experiences and death, the company marketed Private Parts almost exclusively to a gay audience, with a number of ads for the album and subsequent singles in the gay press. Despite a well-received performance with full orchestra at the Queen Elizabeth Hall, Private Parts didn’t sell, and it would be five years before Straker got to record again.
A long-time friend and collaborator of Freddie Mercury, Straker’s next album, This One’s On Me, would be co-produced (and financed) by the Queen frontman and issued by the band’s label, EMI. Again the album, and its single ‘Ragtime Piano Joe’ bombed (although the single did make the Dutch Top 30), as did the follow-up, Changeling; moving to Elton John’s Rocket Records (Elton and Queen were both managed by John Reid at the time, and Reid and John were lovers for several years), Peter issued his fourth album Real Natural Man. Straker appeared in the video for Mercury’s ‘The Great Pretender’ single, sang backing vocals on his Barcelona album and is still performing today. A few years after Girl Stroke Boy bombed at the box office, comedian Red Foxx starred in the movie Norman … Is That You? (based on the play of the same name), which switches this around a little but intrinsically plays with the same idea. Thelma Houston, whose next single would be the huge international hit ‘Don’t Leave Me This Way’, recorded the song ‘One Out Of Every Six’ for the soundtrack. Howard and Blaikley’s next project was writing for a duo named Starbuck: their singles ‘Do You Like Boys’, ‘Wouldn’t You Like It’ and ‘Heartthrob’ were aimed squarely at gay record-buyers but, like the Straker recordings, failed to sell.
Private Parts came out at a point where RCA, buoyed by the success of David Bowie and Lou Reed, would sign pretty much anything that could potentially be marketed to an LGBT audience. The company had a Filipino-born singer Junior (aka Antonio Morales), whose ‘Excuse Me For The Strange Things I Do’ (an English-language version of the Spanish hit ‘Perdóname’) was offered free to ‘all gay discos, clubs and bars’ to promote.17 Junior had been a member of Spain’s biggest pop band, Los Brincos, and his single, co-written by out-gay manager and songwriter Simon Napier-Bell (who, during his long career in the music industry has managed Marc Bolan, the Yardbirds, Boney M, Sinitta, Wham! and many others) had provided him with a huge hit in Brazil and in other South American territories, but British fame eluded him.
Brought up in the West Country, Steve Swindells moved to London in 1973, when he was 21. Then a member of Bristol-based rock band Squidd, the out-gay Swindells persuaded the band to play at one of the earliest fundraising benefits for the Gay Liberation Front at Fulham Town Hall. Approached by Mark Edwards (‘a posh, gay hippy from Dorset with a pretentious beard’),18 who had produced Curved Air’s Air Conditioning album and who had worked with Howard and Blaikley (on the 1968 singles ‘The Tide is Turning’ and ‘Uh!’ by The Barrier), he was quickly signed as a solo artist to RCA, releasing the album Messages the following year. Pictured on the cover as a leather boy, a judge, a piano player and in full drag, and with songs about Earl’s Court (London’s gay ghetto), the album was unlikely to find mainstream acceptance.
A second album was recorded but remained unreleased until 2009. Splitting from Edwards, who he branded ‘a junkie, an alcoholic and a psychopath’, Swindells joined the UK chart-toppers Pilot before becoming the keyboard player for the Hawklords, a band formed by former Hawkwind members Robert Calvert, Dave Brock and Simon King. Since then he has written for Who vocalist Roger Daltrey (he contributed the song ‘Bitter and Twisted’ to the soundtrack of McVicar), formed the short-lived band DanMingo with Culture Club drummer Jon Moss and tried his hand at DJ-ing and club promotion, as well as becoming a regular contributor to gay magazine Attitude.
In their desperation to sign anyone who would appeal to this emerging new market, RCA offered out-gay actor Peter Wyngarde a contract, and the resulting eponymous album is one of the single most peculiar things you are ever likely to hear. Central to the album is a song called ‘Rape’, which manages to incorporate huge gobs of racism and sexism and so offended Alan McGee (the owner of Creation Records and manager of Oasis) that he refused to reissue the album. Peter Wyngarde is also notable for ‘Hippie And The Skinhead’, the tale of young Billy, a ‘queer, pilly, sexy hippy’ who ‘one night went to troll the “Dilly”’ (the use of Polari echoing its appearance in the Tornados’ ‘Do You Come Here Often’) and picked up a skinhead called Ken. It was only when the two of them engaged in their rough sex games that Ken discovered that Billy was actually a woman. Billy, apparently was a cross-dressing bisexual, or quite possibly transgender; Ken it would seem, was a latent homosexual. Wyngarde’s career – up until that point he had been one of the biggest stars on British TV thanks to his starring roles in Department S and Jason King – was all but over after he was arrested for importuning in a bus station in Gloucester. Although he would later appear (behind a gold mask) as General Klytus in the movie Flash Gordon, the former lover of actor Alan Bates would never fully recover from the ignominy.
The company also bankrolled brothers Clive and Peter Sarstedt and Junior’s manager Simon Napier-Bell, who together produced the album Fresh Out Of Borstal by the band Fresh. Coming just a year after Peter Sarstedt had enjoyed the huge hit ‘Where Do You Go To, My Lovely’, Fresh Out Of Borstal is a bizarre semi-documentary of life in an all-male remand home and one of the songs, ‘And The Boys Lazed On the Verandah’ (covered by pop singer Lou Christie in 1971) made very explicit references to gay sex. Fresh made a second album, Fresh Today, but their odd skinhead/glam sound failed to ignite much interest. Clive, who was originally managed by Joe Meek, changed his name to Robin Sarstedt and had a solo hit in 1976 with ‘My Resistance Is Low’.
With a career that spans five decades and worldwide sales in excess of 300 million units, Elton John – the man Bowie called ‘the Liberace, the token queen of rock’19 – is the most successful out-gay musician of all time. His re-recording of ‘Candle In the Wind’, released as a tribute to Diana, Princess of Wales, is the world’s best-selling single; he has had seven consecutive Number One US albums and 58 Billboard Top 40 singles, including nine Number One hits. In Britain, as of December 2016, he had clocked up seven Number One albums and 69 Top 40 singles, including seven Number Ones. In 1998 he was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II, making the man born Reg Dwight Sir Elton John.
In 1976, at the height of his fame and on the eve of the release of his latest album Blue Moves, John gave a candid interview to Cliff Jahr of Rolling Stone magazine (sadly, Jahr died of AIDS in August 1991). He talked openly about going to New York gay disco 12 West, about his adventures with John Waters’ leading lady Divine at another gay club, Crisco Disco, and that he believed, ‘There’s nothing wrong with going to bed with somebody of your own sex. I think everybody’s bisexual to a certain degree. I don’t think it’s just me. It’s not a bad thing to be. I think you’re bisexual. I think everybody is.’20 John was lonely; he was tired of the constant cycle of touring and recording and he wanted someone to settle down with. ‘But … as soon as someone tries to get to know me I turn off. I’m afraid of getting hurt. I was hurt so much as a kid. I’m afraid of plunging into something that’s going to fuck me up. Christ, I wish I had somebody to share all this with.’
The backlash wasn’t immediate. ‘Sorry Seems to Be the Hardest Word’, his next single was still a sizeable hit, and Blue Moves made the US Top Three. However, it came at a time when he was ready to make changes, splitting with long-term writing partner Bernie Taupin, dismissing members of his band and coming off the road for a period. Was it the change in direction, or were tastes simply changing? For whatever reason, his career in America hit a major trough after the interview, and Blue Moves would be his last Top 10 album in the States until 1992’s The One.
John would dominate the pop charts in the 1970s, but it was his close friend Rod Stewart who, in 1976, became the first major star have an international hit with an unambiguously gay-themed song. ‘The Killing of Georgie’ tells the tale of a young man who is kicked out of his family home for being gay. He moves to New York and finds love, only to die at the hands of a gang, the victim of a mugging gone wrong. Stewart’s song was based on a true story: ‘George was a friend of mine,’ he told Keith Howes of Gay News.21 ‘I’d forgotten all about him until I moved to America. America just encourages you to write more radical things because it’s all killing and death and robbery and violence. I’m surrounded by gay people so there were no objections.’ It was the most overly romantic song on an album scarred by misogyny (on one song, ‘Ball Trap’, Stewart tells his girl that he would ‘rather see you dead with a rope ‘round your neck’); in the same interview, Stewart admitted to going to bed with a pre-op transsexual in Melbourne and to being sexually attracted to the model and singer Amanda Lear, widely believed at the time to be transsexual.
Chris Robison, a former member of Steam and Elephant’s Memory (a band who had played on John and Yoko’s Sometime In New York City and Yoko’s Approximately Infinite Universe and had issued their own self-titled album on the Beatles’ Apple label), issued his first album Many Hand Band in 1972 and, although he was not signed to a major (Robison issued the album on his own Gipsy Frog label; it has since been reissued by Chapter Music), he was the first musician to issue a gay-themed rock album. ‘The lead track was “I’m Looking For A Boy Tonight,”’ says Tom Robinson. ‘It was just a quite crude, country-picking song, not particularly interesting musically, but it was blatant, out there and without precedent as far as I know. Then there was Steven Grossman, who made one album called Caravan Tonight. It was standard kind of wimpy acoustic singer-songwritery love songs, except that they were about his boyfriends. That was pretty courageous for the time.’
Brooklyn-born Steven Grossman’s Caravan Tonight (1974) was the first album dealing with openly gay themes and subject-matter to be released on a major label, Mercury, and came out within months of Jobriath, the eponymous album from the Bowie clone born Bruce Wayne Campbell in Philadelphia in 1946. Often credited as the first openly gay man to be signed to a major company (Elektra), there can be no denying that his Jobriath has a gay aesthetic, but when Jobriath introduced himself to the world with the head-turning announcement, ‘I am the true fairy of rock,’ no one took him seriously. This was Bowie-lite, music swathed in the pomp of glam rock but with a staged, unnatural feel and sexually ambiguous lyrics. Grossman’s words made it very obvious who he was attracted to. Jobriath sang about three-legged aliens, movie stars and the history of Rock ’n’ Roll; only one song, ‘Blow Away’, used the ‘G’ word. Critics accused him of being ‘the ultimate in hype, [an] unscrupulous plagiarist who just happens to have had a great deal of promotion’.22
Performing in gay clubs such as The Firehouse, in coffee shops and at open mic nights in folk clubs including Gertie’s Folk City in New York, in 1973 Grossman answered an advert in The Village Voice for ‘a singer-songwriter who writes about the “gay experience”’.23 His tender, heartfelt songs were heavily influenced by the big singer-songwriters of the day: if you ignore the fact that he’s clearly singing about men having emotional issues with other men, you could just as easily be listening to songs written by Joni Mitchell or Cat Stevens. This ‘meek and gentle man’ had ‘both the innocence of a child and the pain of one who has been through it all and has somehow emerged reasonably unscathed’.24
Coming out at a time when Bowie, Cooper, Reed and the Dolls were wilfully blurring the lines between masculine and feminine, and promoting casual sex with just about anybody you fancied the look of, Caravan Tonight’s songs about looking for love and wanting acceptance sounded dated, but the album pulled in excellent reviews. ‘I don’t know Bowie’s material because I politically disagree with his whole trip,’ Grossman told an interviewer in 1974 ‘It’s all right to encourage role reversal by dressing the way he does, and by wearing make-up, if that’s what he’s doing: if he’s using it as a gimmick, though, I think it is a gimmick that perpetuates a certain stereotype of gay people, that disallows the possibility that you can be gay and be whatever you want to be.’25 Jobriath, on the other hand, milked it for all it was worth – or at least his manager did.
Bruce Campbell’s mother left the family home when she became pregnant with another man’s child. They later reconciled, and when Bruce went AWOL from the army he became Jobriath Salisbury, adopting his mother’s maiden name as his new surname. The musician and keen amateur painter reinvented himself as an actor, appearing in the Los Angeles production of Hair, before joining the band Pidgeon who signed to Decca and released their only album in 1969. The album was nothing special, but Jobriath was proving to be an accomplished piano player and a decent songwriter. Jerry Brandt, manager of Chubby Checker and Carly Simon, heard Jobriath’s demo (Clive Davis, then head of Columbia, famously dismissed the singer as ‘mad, unstructured and destructive’) and decided to track him down. Finding him living and working as a houseboy-cum-male prostitute in Los Angeles, he signed him to an exclusive contract. One of the first things Brandt did was secure a spot for his new protégé on the PBS television series Vibrations.26
Recording at the fabled Electric Lady Studios in Greenwich Village (with a backing choir that included Vicki Sue Robinson – who had a huge disco hit with ‘Turn the Beat Around’ – and actor Richard Gere), Jobriath (now using the surname Boone) and Brandt took any and all of the press they could get in an effort to break into the public consciousness. It didn’t matter to them that the media thought he was a joke, so long as people bought the records and came to the shows. Sadly, they didn’t. ‘Elektra Records signed another new weirdo for $300,000 down,’ wrote King Features’ syndicated columnist Jack O’Brian. ‘Jobriath, who swung right off boasting he’s a “true fairy” and insists “the energy force today comes from homosexuals and Puerto Ricans”’.27 Brandt, a man with a habit of referring to himself in the third person, was an unashamed huckster intent on promoting Jobriath as bigger than Bowie. In an interview conducted with the pair of them, Jobriath said, ‘Asking me if I’m homosexual is like asking James Brown if he’s black. There’s a lot of people who are running around, putting make-up on and stuff just because it’s chic; I just want to say that I’m no pretender.’ A huge promotional push in the UK prior to Christmas 1973 – including ads on the side of London buses, adverts in the mainstream media and posters in record stores – did nothing to break him in Britain. A promised four-night stint at the Paris Opera House, featuring Jobriath ‘performing his own music backed by a rock band, 12 dancers and $200,000 worth of sets he designed himself’ and ending with him recreating the death scene from King Kong28 failed to materialise. The records were not selling, the tickets were not selling and there was no money to make it happen. An appearance on the late-night TV show Midnight Special, hosted by a clearly confused Gladys Knight, did nothing to help bolster his already-flagging career. ‘I recall that The Old Grey Whistle Test played a clip from the Midnight Special show that he did, performing “Rock of Ages”,’ says fan Andy Partridge of English rock band XTC. ‘He’s in a segmented clear space helmet; he presses a button on the top and it opens down like a flower, or a Terry’s chocolate orange! I really liked the song and I thought the band looked great, a bit like The Impossibles, a US cartoon pop group from the 1960s that I liked. It was all very choreographed but no more than the Beatles or Bowie and a host of others.’
Jobriath c. 1974
Critics were, naturally, divided: ‘This is a very good album – an excellent first effort’;29 ‘the record contains very little out of the realm of the ho-hum’.30 ‘Every track on the first Jobriath album is a classic,’ says Partridge.
They’re show tunes from Saturn! I remember being aware of a ruffle of negativity and scorn, in the music papers when his first album came out. Stuff about a sort of an American Bowie clone, but his first album became one of my favourite albums and I played it constantly. I could see why he got hackles rising in the macho denim 1970s. Songs like “Blow Away” with the lines “It’s very gay … to blow away” must have tipped a few over. Anyway, I really loved the first album and had to pick up the second one after my conversion, so I had them both. The inky music press in the UK seemed to have a down on him, probably more for encroaching on home hero Bowie’s territory than anything else – a protective jealousy maybe? Perhaps he wasn’t “rock” enough for them, a bit too “show tunes”? That was fine by me, as I love show tunes, and nothing about his cosmic camp bothered me. Hey, it’s show business; if my mum can love Liberace, why can’t I love Jobriath?
‘It’s gay time and I think the world is ready for a true fairy,’ Brandt told the press. ‘My fairy is a writer, a composer, and arranger, a singer, a dancer …’ the money that Elektra advanced Brandt was gone in three weeks.31 Both Morrissey and Marc Almond have named him as an influence, but his first album sold next to nothing; the follow-up Creatures of the Street, ostensibly compiled from leftovers from the sessions for Jobriath, sold even less. Sessions for a third album had to be aborted: Jobriath’s increasing drug intake made it impossible to get much sense out of him.
Steven Grossman, on the other hand, was the critics’ darling. Stephen Holden of Rolling Stone hailed Caravan Tonight as ‘one of the most auspicious singer-songwriter debuts of the ‘70s,’ and praised his ‘poignant but not self-pitying’ songs.32 The New York Times music critic John Rockwell noted, ‘Homosexuality in Grossman’s case has nothing to do with glitter or trendiness: these are real efforts to compose love songs and set down personal impressions from a homosexual perspective’.33 Reviewer Bill Adler called it ‘a record of huge historical import’ and said that it would ‘most likely serve as a lavender flag of hope to other gay artists,’34 but, like Jobriath, despite having the clout of a major company behind it, the album sold poorly. Mike Gormley, head of publicity at Mercury at the time, told Adam Block of The Advocate that the album sold ‘5,000 to 6,000. 50,000 would have been acceptable, 100,000 would have made us very happy; but 6,000 just wasn’t in the ballpark.’35 Mercury didn’t know how to market him: there was no major gay press at the time outside The Advocate, which published a lone advert for the album, and no radio stations would play Grossman’s songs, even though a promotional single featuring the title track coupled with ‘Christopher’s Blues’ was issued specifically for airplay. Despite his having cost them $30,000 to sign in the first place, Mercury quietly dropped the talented Grossman.
Actress and model Twiggy recorded a cover version of ‘Caravan Tonight’ for her first solo album, Twiggy, released internationally by (ironically) Mercury in 1976, but Grossman quickly disappeared into obscurity. After attempting to shop around some new songs to an indifferent industry, he moved to San Francisco and became an accountant, putting his songwriting days behind him. In 1979 he was the victim of a gay bashing and lost an eye. Having split from his long-term partner, Grossman – whose early life had been scarred by familial abuse – entered a downward spiral of depression, drugs and unprotected casual sex.
As Steven Grossman was hitting rock bottom, Jobriath was attempting to reinvent himself. Bottled off the stage at the Nassau Coliseum, Jobriath had been dropped by Elektra while he was still under contract to Brandt, who in turn derided him as ‘a fucking alcoholic asshole’.36 He auditioned for the role of the transgendered character Leon Shermer in the film Dog Day Afternoon, but shortly after he failed to win that he and Brandt finally called it a day; Brandt opened a nightclub, the Erotic Circus, which Jobriath was convinced he had funded using his money.
Jobriath Boone became the louche pianist Cole Berlin, writing a musical Sunday Brunch, residing at the famous Chelsea Hotel and playing at various venues in New York; he would also appear under the name Bryce Campbell and wrote the score to a musical adaptation of Moliere’s The Misanthrope. He gave a rather disturbing interview to Omega One magazine in 1979 in which he exhibited all the symptoms of someone suffering from multiple personality disorder, and dismissed his time as Jobriath as ‘retarded. His music is confused, eclectic and debauched. It seems like a long time ago.’37
Around the same time, another young man was starting to make a name for himself on New York’s LGBT circuit: Tom Wilson Weinberg began singing his original, queer-themed songs in coffee houses and at Gay Pride events in the late 1970s, issuing his debut album Gay Name Game (as Tom Wilson) in 1979 and a second, All-American Boy in 1982. Gay Name Game, an album of sensitive, predominantly acoustic songs with out-and-proud lyrics (à la Steven Grossman), featured a song called ‘Lesbian Seagull’, later recorded by Engelbert Humperdinck for the soundtrack of the 1996 movie Beavis and Butt-head Do America.
In July 1983, the New York Police Department sent three officers to break in to the pyramid room on top of the Chelsea Hotel. According to press reports ‘the stench was so foul that they all vomited. The man inside – a man with several names – had been dead and forgotten for over a week.’38 Jobriath had died from an AIDS-related illness, one of the earliest of a long line of gay musicians lost to the disease. Jim Campbell, Jobriath’s father, destroyed most of his son’s personal effects, including his diaries and most of the material related to his musical career. He was buried as Bruce Wayne Campbell, Private, US Army. Nine years later, Morrissey, unaware of his hero’s death, attempted to track Jobriath down in the hope that he could persuade him to join him on tour.
By 1986, Grossman had cleaned up his act and was performing sporadically again: he had a new partner and things were really looking up; however, the new man in his life was soon diagnosed HIV-positive and, sadly, Steven tested positive too. Steven Grossman died in 1991, aged just 39. Two months earlier, his friend, the singer-songwriter Judith Casselberry, had persuaded him to record some of his recent songs. Twenty years after his death, a second album made up of recordings from those sessions, Something In The Moonlight, was issued by Significant Other Records. In 2002, gay singer Mark Weigle released a cover of Grossman’s song ‘Out’, featuring him duetting with Grossman on the track.
When Grossman passed through San Francisco, he would often share a stage with Blackberri, a gay black singer-songwriter who first appeared on the local scene around the time that Caravan Tonight came out. Born Charles Timothy Ashmore in Buffalo, New York, he grew up in Baltimore, Maryland and was discharged from the navy in 1966 for being gay: ‘I was placed under investigation because one of my shipmates turned me in. They put a tail on me, and when they thought they had enough evidence, they arrested me, went through my personal belongings and found incriminating letters and other things.’39
Moving to Arizona, Blackberri began singing with a local three-piece blues outfit. ‘I started doing out-music in Arizona. I was in a rock band in Tucson called Gunther Quint and I started writing songs for the band. The first song I wrote was called ‘Frenchie’, about some boy I’d had a one-night stand with and then he kicked me out. All the guys in the band were straight, but I was out and they supported me and some times they defended me. When people would say: “well, why are you playing with that gay man?” they’d tell them: “he’s a good musician, that’s why”!’ He adopted the name Blackberri when living as part of a feminist collective; the whole household decided to take names that were not gender-specific. (He has since legally changed his name to Blackberri.) After the band broke up:
I went solo and I started playing coffee houses, and I was writing queer songs then. I was writing songs about boys I had fallen in love with. I moved to San Francisco in 1974. I was with this band called Breeze: we had people like the flute player Mindy Canter, bassist Kirk Leonard and Alan Miller on first guitar. Alan was my housemate but then he went back east and we got another blues guitar player called Reiner who just played his ass off. We became boyfriends: I was his first. We weren’t making as much music as we thought we would, so I started playing on the streets during the daytime – that’s how I got money because I wasn’t working. I was busking. People were giving me money and saying: “why are you playing on the streets? You’re so good you should be playing in clubs.” So that’s when I started doing auditions, and every time I did an audition I got the gig, and that got me in to the coffee house circuit and I started to get a following.
In 1975, he and Grossman shared a stage at San Francisco’s KQED radio station’s first gay music concert Two Song Makers, and over the years he has played with Carlos Santana, Bo Diddley, Holly Near and many others:
A lot of people have told me that if I hadn’t done the gay thing then I would have been really famous; but that was never my thing. I always wanted to be me, and if anything happened then it had to be on my terms, not somebody else’s. I didn’t write to please other people, I pretty much wrote to please myself. If people liked it then good – and that’s what happened: a lot of people liked it. Not all of my songs are about being out, but when I played those songs people were pleasantly surprised and I never got any really negative comments.
One of his songs, ‘It’s Okay’, had already been covered by San Francisco gay men’s musical collective Buena Vista, but the first time that an audience outside a coffee shop or Pride event got to hear Blackberri’s voice was on the 1979 Folkways album Walls to Roses: Songs of Changing Men, the first anthology of ‘men’s music’. ‘Somebody contacted me. I guess my name was thrown about when they were looking for people for the album. They also wanted colour, as everybody else on these was white! I was it: I was the colour!’
The 1981 release Blackberri and Friends: Finally was paid for by ‘a donation from a man who told me later on he didn’t really want the money back. Then we borrowed some money to distribute it.’ That album included his controversial song ‘Eat the Rich’ – a sentiment picked up years later by heavy rock acts Krokus, Motorhead and Aerosmith.40 Issued on his own Bea B. Queen label (someone had once said he was more B. B. Queen than B. B. King), he says that he is ‘incredibly proud of Finally: it’s still getting airplay. When I’ve gotten reviews they have always been about my musicianship and never about me being queer. There was mention of that, but the musicianship was what was most appreciated. I always thought that my music was the lubricant for the lyrics: my lyrics are kind of out there and hard, but if the music is good then people can accept what I’m saying.’
Blackberri quickly became a staple of Pride days and LGBT music festivals, becoming firm friends with other musicians such as Patrick Haggerty of Lavender Country along the way. He was the only male artist invited to perform at Boston’s I Am Your Sister Conference in 1990, attended by over 1,000 women from all over the world, but the arrival of AIDS put paid to any plans for a follow-up to Finally, as his focus shifted from music to community support. Blackberri has been involved with a number of causes over the years in both in the LGBT and African American communities, working with anti-eviction charities, in HIV education and more recently with the Black Lives Matter movement. ‘I had lost so many friends. I used to go on the road every year in the spring and then in the fall and when I was going across the country I’d see these holes in my audience and in the community. We lost a lot of people; I lost people who booked me, I lost people in my audience, I lost people who I stayed with when I travelled, so my whole life kind of changed.’ His song ‘When Will The Ignorance End’ was chosen as the theme for the first National Third World Lesbian and Gay Conference, and in 2002 he was honoured at the San Francisco Candlelight Vigil with a Lifetime Achievement AIDS Hero Award. His music can be heard in several films and documentaries, including the award-winning Channel 4 film Looking For Langston, about the gay black US poet Langston Hughes.
In the 1990s, Blackberri discovered Lucumì, a religion also known as Santeria, a Spanish word that means the worship of saints.
What brought me to the religion was a friend of mine in New York had an altar in his house and I asked him who this was for and he told me: “that’s Yemayá, the patron saint of gay men”. I’d found a religion that embraced gay men … I became a priest in Lucumì [he was initiated in Cuba in 2000]. The Orishas [spirits or saints] … believe whatever you do is your private thing, it doesn’t concern anybody else and as long as you’re right with them then it’s cool … my spirituality and my sexuality complement each other; it’s not a conflict at all.