‘I have never and will never apologise for my sex life. Gay sex is natural, gay sex is good! Not everybody does it, but …’
George Michael1
The late 1970s was a time of political awakening on both sides of the pond. In Florida, former beauty pageant queen, singer and orange juice spokeswoman Anita Bryant was heading the political coalition Save Our Children, a right-wing Christian-led campaign to overturn local legislation that banned discrimination based on sexual orientation. Florida had long been vehemently opposed to LGBT rights: like the rest of America, during the 1950s and 1960s the city’s officials had been closing down bars and enacting laws to make homosexuality and cross-dressing illegal, and until 1975 the government were legally empowered to refuse employment to anyone thought to be homosexual. Established in 1956, the Florida Legislative Investigation Committee (known as the Johns Committee) hunted down LGBT people in state employment and universities across the state and in 1964 published Homosexuality and Citizenship in Florida, more commonly known as the ‘Purple Pamphlet’, a highly inflammatory document that portrayed homosexuals as predators and a threat to children: ‘many facets of homosexual practice as it exists in Florida today pose a threat to the health and moral well-being of a sizeable portion of our population, particularly our youth’.2
The title track to Conan Dunham’s first album, Tell Ol’ Anita, was a reaction to Bryant’s campaign as well as a document of his own life. ‘In 1977, I lost one of the greatest friends a guy could ever wish for,’ he said. ‘I stood by his bedside in a Sacramento hospital and watched day by day for over a month as he slowly slipped away. The doctors had no idea what caused his death. It wasn’t until 1985 that AIDS was discovered to be the culprit.’
Of course, Dunham wasn’t the first gay man to be affected by the politics of the time, although he would have been one of the many to indulge in a wry smile when Bryant lost a lucrative TV series on the back of the bad publicity she was acquiring.3 Political activism has been central to the LGBT experience, from securing the right to vote through to decriminalising homosexual acts; from acknowledging the sacrifices others have made through to railing against the police and state for the way our community has been marginalised. And just as ‘straight’ songwriters from Woody Guthrie and Bob Dylan to Bruce Springsteen, Steve Earle and beyond have written about the injustices faced by the poor working man, so have LGBT singers and songwriters harnessed their political beliefs to shine a light on the plight faced by their own community. Spurred on by Save Our Children, in June 1977 more than 130,000 people marched to demand equal rights for LGBT people in the United States. ‘Marchers waved protest signs attacking former singer Anita Bryant who led a campaign in Florida which saw the repeal earlier this month of a local law protecting the homosexual community. Homosexual leaders said the next step in their fight against discrimination would be to seek court injunctions ensuring equal job rights’. Peaceful demonstrations were also held in London, where around 1,000 turned out to march, and in Amsterdam 2,000 people marched through the city carrying banners that read ‘Against the American witch-hunt on homosexuals’. In San Francisco, according to police estimates, more than 100,000 took to the streets; the gay community received heavy support from predominantly heterosexual organisations, including union members and black groups: ‘The anger of that city’s large homosexual community was heightened last week by the slaying of a homosexual city gardener by a gang of youths who shouted “faggot” as they stabbed him repeatedly’. A Pride parade along New York’s Fifth Avenue attracted at least 25,000, and there were smaller demonstrations in cities including Los Angeles, Seattle and Denver.4
Then, in February 1978, something quite extraordinary happened: a song about the experiences of LGBT people made the British Top 20.
The song in question was ‘Glad to be Gay’, the highly charged coming out anthem issued by the Tom Robinson Band on their 1978 EP Rising Free. After years of oppression, LGBT people were angry, and they were no longer prepared to be quiet about it, as the demonstrations of the previous summer had proved. Robinson was an early supporter of Rock Against Racism, a campaign set up as a response to an increase in racial conflict and the growth of white nationalist groups such as the National Front in Britain. For the first time pop, rock, punk and reggae musicians were staging concerts with an anti-racist theme and providing a platform for LGBT artists who shared their political stance. Rock Against Racism was also seen as a direct reaction to the right-wing diatribe spewed by such bloated, dated stars as Eric Clapton. At a concert in Birmingham in August 1976 – two years after he had covered Bob Marley’s ‘I Shot The Sheriff’ – Clapton famously ranted from the stage: ‘stop Britain from becoming a black colony. Get the foreigners out. Get the wogs out. Get the coons out. Keep Britain white.’5
From a man who had spent a lifetime appropriating black culture, his support of Enoch Powell, who had warned of the dangers of immigration in 1968 with his infamous ‘Rivers Of Blood’ speech, was something of a slap in the face. Elvis Costello, also accused of racism after making drunken, ignorant remarks about James Brown and Ray Charles in 1979, apologised for his actions and worked with Rock Against Racism. Costello received death threats and the incident severely damaged his career in the United States. While recording his Station to Station album, David Bowie began to flirt with Nazi iconography and he was photographed – at London’s Victoria Station – seemingly giving a ‘heil Hitler’ salute. When he told Playboy that, because of the way he used an audience ‘Adolf Hitler was one of the first rock stars,’ and that he condoned fascism, he was lambasted by the Musician’s Union. He used an interview with Melody Maker in October 1977 to insist that he was not a fascist, that he was repelled by racism and that he had been ‘out of my mind, totally, completely crazed’ at the time.
Over the years, Clapton has been forced to downplay his outburst, and he has claimed that, like Costello, he, too, was drunk at the time, but he has stopped short of an outright apology. When he played, as a guest of Dire Straits, at a concert to mark Nelson Mandela’s birthday, organiser Jerry Dammers (of The Specials) offered him the chance to make a formal apology. ‘You must be fucking joking,’ Clapton told the anti-Apartheid activist.6
Press advert, 1978
Robinson’s gay hymn was preceded by an earlier, reggae-influenced song also called ‘Glad to be Gay’, issued to be sold at the 1975 Campaign for Homosexual Equality (CHE) conference in Sheffield, England. Only 300 copies of that disc were pressed: those copies not sold at the conference were later offered for sale through the pages of Gay News. ‘The idea that we would press up this little thing and sell it at the 1975 conference,’ Robinson explains. ‘It was just like a bit of optimistic Pollyanna really; it was describing the world as we’d like it to be rather than how it was’. Shortly after Robinson and his group, the three-piece, folk-influenced Café Society, were signed to Konk Records by owner and Kinks frontman Ray Davies:
In those days it was very hard to actually get a foothold in the music industry. I had perfectly clear ideas about what I wanted to do musically, even though my ideas were misguided in some cases while I was trying to find my feet. I was trying all kinds of stuff in lots of different genres and styles and hadn’t yet found my own voice. We did record a demo of “Glad To Be Gay” with Café Society – I wrote it when I was still in the band – but we never performed it live. The other guys in the band didn’t have a problem with me being gay, but they did have a problem with being perceived as gay themselves because they were both happily married and had kids on the way. So they didn’t want to be labelled with my thing when it wasn’t their thing, but we did sing the Gay Switchboard jingle in three-part harmony at the shows we did, so there wasn’t any kind of “closet-y” thing at all.
‘Glad To Be Gay’ was inspired by a series of police raids on gay pubs in London, specifically a raid on the Coleherne Arms in Old Brompton Road, Earl’s Court that Robinson was caught up in. In June 1976 members of the Chelsea police force were blamed for using violence against LGBT revellers after one man, Roy Lea, was accused of the spurious offence of ‘obstructing the footpath’.7 Police raids on gay pubs and clubs were commonplace and many of them were turning increasingly violent. ‘By the summer of 1976, the police in London were completely out of hand,’ Robinson reveals. ‘They were using the SUS laws – you could arrest anybody on suspicion of anything; if you had a suspicion that somebody might be about to commit a crime you could arrest them – and so black people in Notting Hill Gate and Brixton were being arrested for being black and in charge of a motor vehicle, stuff like that.’ The year before, Gay News had reported on a series of raids on gay pubs and clubs in London. In one, three coach-loads of police made a midnight raid on the recently opened Rod’s Club in Kings Road, Chelsea; the following night, a similar number of police – many of them in plain clothes – raided the Earl’s Court pub Bolton’s and searched drinkers and staff, ostensibly looking for drugs. Other popular LGBT drinking haunts, including Napoleons and Louise’s (both in the West End) had been raided, and agents provocateur were being employed to entrap gay men in the popular cottaging areas of Hampstead Heath and Clapham Common. These raids caused outrage, and prompted people to question whether the Metropolitan Police were involved in a witch-hunt against gay men.8
‘They were able to swan in and make easy arrests because they figured that gay men in that climate and at that time were very unlikely to contest an arrest in court,’ Tom recalls of those days. Paul Southwell, of the gay rock trio Handbag, remembers those days well. ‘I was there when it was raided,’ he recalls. ‘We used to stand outside while that was going on. It was a bloody nuisance, standing outside while the police went in and did whatever they were supposed to be doing – which was fuck all really!’
It wasn’t just the police in Britain who were causing trouble: in Barcelona, during a demonstration sponsored by the Gay Liberation Front of Catalonia in June 1977, police fired rubber bullets into the crowd of 4,000 people.9 A series of protests in Australia during June and July 1978 saw over 70 people arrested and over 1,000 people join a protest ‘which organisers described as the biggest demonstration of its kind in Australia’.10 A further 110 were arrested after a demonstration in Sydney in August, during Australia’s Fourth National Homosexual Conference – several of those arrests coming after gay rights demonstrators clashed with anti-abortion supporters: ‘we are not spouting pretty opinions,’ one commentator wrote in the University of New South Wales’ student periodical Tharunka. ‘We are fighting for our right to exist. The arrests demonstrate that the “toleration” of dissent has ended, and we can expect to be blatantly jailed for our political activism.’11 Australian rock singer Carol Lloyd, formerly of rock band Railroad Gin and now recording with her own Carol Lloyd Band, was an out-and-proud lesbian whose career in music began with her band playing gay venues. She would spend the rest of her life fighting for respect and equality for LGBT people: ‘We are the police that protect our kids and keep our streets safe. We are the doctors and health care workers that deliver our babies and keep us healthy. Blue collar, white collar, we are all the same and we all have love and we all deserve respect.’12 Australia’s original rock chick, with three Number One singles and two Number One albums to her credit, Carol passed away after a long battle with pulmonary fibrosis on 13 February 2017.
In New York, a violent attack by police on a black gay bar on West 43rd Street left 12 men hospitalised. ‘About 10 cops came in, They had guns drawn and their clubs out. They told people to step away from the bar and they started throwing bar stools around,’ one of the men in the bar told Gay Community News. ‘They told everyone to stand facing the wall at the back of the bar and they just started beating people. They were shouting that two cops got jumped in Times Square and that we were to blame’.13 A few months before the attack, the offices of Boston’s Gay Community News had been destroyed in a suspected arson attack.
As if dealing with the police wasn’t enough of a headache, in January 1978, 20 fascist thugs from the National Front ‘went berserk’ and smashed up the Royal Vauxhall Tavern, one of London’s longest-established gay pubs – and one of the few still running today.14 These attacks helped to politicise LGBT people: a group calling itself the Earl’s Court Gay Alliance was set up to ‘protect the local gay community’15 and they would inspire LGBT people to become active and vocal members of the Anti-Nazi League, established by the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) in 1977 to oppose the rise of far-right groups in the United Kingdom.
Relations between Tom Robinson and Ray Davies quickly turned sour: Robinson was harangued by Davies on the Kinks’ 1977 song ‘Prince of the Punks’ and Robinson took to the pages of the music press to castigate Davies. The two would make up, but not until long after a legal battle saw Robinson released from his contract and Davies no longer receiving publishing royalties from Robinson’s compositions. ‘Although we didn’t end up having a terribly happy experience, if it hadn’t been for Ray Davies taking us under his wing and giving us a chance to make a record – without his help and without his patronage – I definitely wouldn’t have got in to the music industry,’ Tom admits today:
Even if it showed me things to avoid in the future, it still showed me what the terrain was like, so I do owe him a huge big debt of gratitude. Punk with its DIY ethic worked much better for musicians breaking through at that time. People like Elvis Costello, Ian Dury and the Blockheads, Graham Parker and the Rumour, Nick Lowe, lots of musicians of my generation took from the punk ethic the idea of taking charge of your career and how you were going to approach it, and punk rock came along at exactly the right time for us to be able to get away with calling the shots ourselves.
Leaving Café Society, and Ray Davies, behind him Robinson formed the Tom Robinson Band (TRB):
I wasn’t particularly keen for us to be identified as a ‘gay’ band because we weren’t! I was the only one who was gay and we supported gay rights, all four of us, but we also supported racial equality and feminism. There were far bigger issues than just law reform for gay men at that time. It was all part of a bigger struggle: you either live in a fair and free society or you don’t, so it was part of a political awakening that came through being gay and realising that you were seen as the scum of the earth by the authorities, and then sitting round with other people who had a common cause and who were also seen as the scum of the earth by the authorities. I formed TRB without any members: I went out and started performing as the Tom Robinson Band with musicians from other bands … and the eventual permanent members joined one by one. They were coming into a band that already existed and … it was part and parcel of the deal: if you want to be in my band you’re going to be singing “Glad To Be Gay”!
Signing with EMI was a much happier experience for Tom than his earlier encounter with Konk: ‘EMI gave us a big hand in how it was packaged, what the album sleeve looked like, which songs went on the record and all the rest of it. That was a very different experience from being complete beginners like when we were starting out with Café Society’.
Then, on 17 November 1978, Dan White murdered Harvey Milk.
Just seconds earlier White, a former member of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, had used his police-issue revolver to kill Mayor George Moscone. Frustrated by Moscone’s refusal to reappoint him to his seat on the Board (White had resigned on 10 November citing financial pressure), he took his gun into City Hall and, avoiding metal detectors by sneaking into the building through a first floor window, proceeded to hunt down Moscone and demand his reinstatement. During the ensuing heated argument, White pulled out his gun and shot Moscone several times. He then went to find Harvey Milk. Milk and White had clashed several times in the preceding 12 months, and Milk had lobbied against White’s reappointment to the Board. Finding Milk near to White’s old office, he ushered him inside, closed the door and opened fire.
Known as the ‘Mayor of Castro Street’, the popular and charismatic Milk had been the first openly gay person to be elected to public office in California. At the time of his election, it was estimated that as much as a sixth of San Francisco’s 660,000 population was LGBT,16 and the city’s 130 recognised gay bars had a turnover of $14 million a year.17 Milk, a vocal advocate for LGBT rights, had strong support within the city; it’s no wonder then that Anita Bryant saw San Francisco as a modern-day Sodom and Gomorrah.18
The assassinations, the vigils held in Harvey Milk’s honour, and White’s subsequent trial all made headlines around the world. Milk had feared that his high profile would make him a target to assassins: a year earlier he had recorded a message for his supporters to be released after his death:
I know that when a person is assassinated after they have achieved victory there are several tendencies, One is to go crazy in the streets, angry and frustrated, and the other is to have a big show and splash, a great service. Naturally I want neither. I cannot prevent anybody from getting angry, or mad or frustrated. I can only hope they’ll turn that anger and frustration and madness into something positive, so that hundreds will step forward, so that gay doctors come out, the gay lawyers, gay judges, gay bankers, gay architects. I hope that every professional gay would just say “enough”, come forward and tell everybody, wear a sign, let the world know. Maybe that will help. These are my strong requests, knowing that it could happen, hoping it doesn’t … and if it does I think I’ve already achieved something. I think it’s been worth it.19
During the Pride march in London in 1980, a number of arrests were made, and ten men faced charges for varying misdemeanours including obstruction and minor assault. One man was charged with possessing an offensive weapon: a rusty prop meat cleaver that he wore as part of his headdress. But police oppression and attacks from right-wing hate groups were not the only issues facing the LGBT community. Britons were starting to become aware of a new disease that was decimating the LGBT community in the US and, on 4 July 1982 Terrence Higgins became one of the first people known to die of an AIDS-related illness in the UK. Very quickly, AIDS education became the number one priority within the international LGBT community. Governments, when they did respond to the growing epidemics, did so with scare tactics. The LGBT community, especially the younger members, needed someone (or something) more relatable.
When the London Gay and Lesbian Youth Video Project required some original music for an educational documentary they were working on, they pressed a young Scotsman by the name of Jimmy Somerville into service. The film, Framed Youth, went on to win the British Film Institute’s Grierson Award for Best Documentary in 1983, and Jimmy and his friends Steve Bronski and Larry Steinbachek (who sadly passed away in December 2016), then all sharing a squat in the London borough of Brixton, went on to form electronic trio Bronski Beat. In the film Jimmy (credited as Jimi) tells his coming out story; his mother understood but he had not yet plucked up the courage to tell his father. It could almost be the plot of a song …
Somerville, Bronski and Steinbachek were openly gay and insistent that their music would reflect this. Signing a recording contract with PolyGram subsidiary London Records after only nine gigs, the band’s debut single ‘Smalltown Boy’, the tale of a gay teenager leaving his family and fleeing his hometown for the big city, was a huge hit, peaking at Number Three in the UK Singles Chart, going to Number One in Italy, Belgium, and the Netherlands and making the US Top 50. Accompanied by a hard-hitting video, this was the first time that the reality of being a young gay man in Thatcher’s Britain had been laid bare to the mainstream audience, an audience that would soon be asked to vote to re-elect a government with a strong anti-LGBT stance. ‘I’m really aware of the impact that [‘Smalltown Boy’] still has today on a younger generation and what it means to people and how it can tap into people. It’s a very emotional and evocative plea, a cry from the heart. It’s honest and raw and it still has the power to move people. That’s special and I’m very proud to have been a part of Bronski Beat and to have created that.’20 If anyone had any questions about the band’s political leanings, then debut album Age of Consent made it pretty clear on which side of the fence they stood on: the record’s inner sleeve (removed from the US release) featured a list of the different international ages of consent for gay sex. Two months after the album came out, Bronski Beat headlined Pits and Perverts, a fundraising gig held in support of striking miners, organised by Lesbians and Gays Support the Miners (and immortalised in the hit movie Pride). The following year, trade unions brought their banners to London’s 1985 Pride march, and at the Labour Party Conference a motion to support equal rights for gay men and lesbians was only carried because of the votes cast by the National Union of Mineworkers and their allies.
On leaving Bronski Beat, Somerville formed the Communards with multi-instrumentalist Richard Coles, who Somerville had met when both were members of the London Gay and Lesbian Youth Video Project and who had appeared on a number of Bronski Beat recordings. Somerville, along with Tom Robinson, Billy Bragg and Paul Weller, helped form Red Wedge, a musical collective that supported the Labour Party and tried to encourage first-time voters to use the power of the ballot box to fight injustice: five years later, musicians in America would form the similarly left-leaning Rock the Vote. ‘We supplied the camp element,’ Somerville told Q magazine. ‘We particularly wanted to do it in order to provide Red Wedge’s gay visibility. Labour in those days still had a very cloth-cap mentality and we wanted to help change that. We were very out and proud then.’ Mixing Somerville’s love of disco with their political ideals, the Communards recorded just one album, Red, and had several hit singles before splitting, and although nothing was said at the time, Coles later revealed that he had caused the schism. Coles had always struggled with his sexuality, attempting suicide in his teens, and he did not take well to fame – indulging in all of the excesses that come with stardom. In a moment of madness, he told Somerville that he was HIV-positive; he wasn’t, and to compound the deceit their close friend, gay rights activist Mark Ashton (whose life is portrayed in the film Pride) had recently died of the disease. The pair would not speak again for years. Lost, Coles turned to religion, cleaned up his act and is now an ordained minister in the Church of England, and a vocal advocate for LGBT reform in the church. He is also married, to David Oldham, an Anglican priest.21 As well as enjoying a successful solo career, Somerville has remained politically active, supporting equal rights, and is a fierce critic of government plans to dismantle the welfare state.
Publicity photo, c. 1975