Straight and narrow: how pop lost its gay edge
From the blues to the Beatles, from the Who to Nirvana, the biggest acts in pop have been hugely shaped by gay culture. Why has that spirit now disappeared?
Alexis Petridis
guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 28 February 2012 21.30 GMT
Brian Epstein
New job opportunities ... Beatles' manager Brian Epstein. Photograph: David Magnus/Rex Features
Nicky Wire laughs. "I'm not sure where we got the slogan from," he says, of the T-shirt the Manic Street Preachers produced in 1993 bearing the striking legend: "All rock'n'roll is homosexual." Wire, the band's bass-player and lyricist, goes on. "I'm sure it's slightly nicked. I remember Richey [Edwards, the band's late guitarist] talking about self-love being such an essential part of rock'n'roll. That seemed to be his twist. It fitted into a lot of what we believed in: narcissism, nihilism, self-love, self-delusion. All those things made for thrilling rock'n'roll."
To the artist Jeremy Deller, the slogan was "just the most offensive, brilliant thing you could put on a T-shirt regardless of whether it was true". Deller has borrowed it for the title of a discussion that takes place tonight as part of his new show, Joy in People, at London's Hayward gallery. "It's as much about pop's ability to provoke as it is about homosexuality in rock and pop," he says, although you could argue that those two things are linked.
As the critic Jon Savage points out, even rock'n'roll's very roots, the blues, contained a weird gay subculture. The genre was home to songs such as George Hannah's Freakish Man Blues, Luis Russell's The New Call of the Freaks, and Kokomo Arnold's Sissy Man Blues. "I woke up this morning with my pork grindin' business in my hand," offers Arnold, adding, "Lord, if you can't send me no woman, please send me some sissy man."
In Britain, rock's relationship with gay culture really began with the rise of the gay rock manager: first Larry Parnes, with his "stable of stars" (Billy Fury, Tommy Steele, Georgie Fame, Marty Wilde) then Brian Epstein (the Beatles), Simon Napier-Bell (the Yardbirds), Kit Lambert (the Who). Napier-Bell, who started out as a musician and went on to be Wham!'s manager, explains the job's attraction: "At a time when being gay was illegal, and the only way to live as an out gay man was to work in the theatre or as a hairdresser, pop management offered a new opportunity. So a lot of gays started to dabble in it."
And then there were the managers who, while not necessarily gay themselves, simply saw the promotional value of playing the gay card, encouraging campness and flamboyance in their charges: Andrew Loog Oldham, who was fascinated with gay culture, is credited with encouraging such qualities in the Stones. Ken Pitt did a similar thing with David Bowie, introducing the singer to the work of the Velvet Underground and the dancer Lindsay Kemp, whose troupe Bowie ended up joining.
Why the bands were drawn to gay managers is a moot point. The Who's Pete Townshend has claimed there was a confusion in sexual identity in the early 1960s. "The first manifestation of it was kids who were born in 1945 deciding they want to enter manhood using a different set of semiotics," he told Savage last year, in an interview for Mojo. On the mod scene from which the Who sprung, he explained, "it was seen to be incredibly cool – you had to be brave to be a rent boy".
Napier-Bell thinks the reasons were more prosaic. "All the young guys in those days could see that gay men were a lot more interesting than straight men. They had nicer cars, more disposable income, flats that young guys could only dream of having, and no family to hold them back. Most kids aspired to have such a life – but of course, without the gay sex."
Whatever the cause, the effect on the bands was dramatic. For one thing, Napier-Bell claims such managers encouraged their bands to be more confrontational, stoking the surly, anti-establishment attitude that was to become a definitive part of rock's makeup. "Faced with the absurdity of being a criminal just because your dick faced the wrong way," he says, "gays didn't have much respect for other aspects of the law, drugs included. And groups were encouraged to do outrageous things to publicise themselves."
The new breed of managers, he says, also created a new masculine archetype for musicians. "Andrew [Loog Oldham] was going through a very camp phase – he slung his fur coat around his shoulders and waved his hands a lot. Jagger never used those mannerisms before Andrew took them on. It was Mick falling in love with Andrew's campness."
By the early 1970s, following the rise of David Bowie, the influence of gay culture on rock music had become so pronounced that you could find Ian Hunter of Mott the Hoople grumbling, in his Diary of a Rock'n'Roll Star, about bands "who were hard-driving and straight" turning "poovy" to fit in. A decade later, the charts were full of gay rock and pop. In 1984, the biggest band of the year was Frankie Goes to Hollywood, the hot new pop act was Bronski Beat, the Smiths (whose frontman projected a deeply ambiguous sexuality) dominated indie music, and there was a plethora of explicitly gay-themed disco and hi-NRG hits, Divine's You Think You're a Man among them.
At the dawn of the 1990s, the biggest band in the world were Nirvana, who certainly weren't homosexual, but whose frontman was given to wearing a dress and writing lyrics suggesting "everyone is gay" (All Apologies). When Savage met Cobain in 1993, the singer said Nirvana had "the most pro-gay stance by a commercially successful rock band" and suggested that one of the effects of their success might be a loosening of attitudes in the US rock scene. "It's getting better now that alternative music is finally getting accepted," said Cobain.
It all rather poses the question: what happened? Twenty years on, rock seems more rigidly heterosexual than at any point in its history. Gay acts from Antony Hegarty to Rufus Wainwright to Perfume Genius exist on the commercial margins; and, while Lady Gaga's gay-friendly, high-camp dominates the pop charts, the really big rock stars are "straight in the widest sense", as Savage puts it. "I think the crucial point about contemporary pop culture," he adds, "is that people are scared to be different because they'll be called gay. How has that happened? It's a reversal of everything that made British rock music great."
One theory is that Cobain couldn't have been more wrong. You could argue that the mainstream success of putatively "alternative" rock in mid-1990s Britain actually saw a narrowing of attitudes, not merely because it coincided with the rise of lad culture, but because – in the wake of Oasis's stratospheric success – indie bands realised they could achieve hitherto-unimaginable commercial success if they toned their sexuality down to appeal to a mass market. We still live in a post-Britpop era, where rock music is prosaic and "honest" rather than glamorous and imaginative.
Savage thinks rock's ongoing prosaicness is symptomatic of a wider cultural shift. "There's a current mode of solipsism, where you don't want to be challenged, you just want to have your own life reflected back at you. It's down to the way the internet has grown up, the whole apparent democratisation of the idea of skill – that skill and experience don't matter and that you're as good as anyone else. There's the disastrous impact of reality shows, the whole impulse to be famous, the idea that fame is the way to go."
Wire echoes this notion: "It's like that Ballardian idea that ultimately everyone will be the star of their own movie. And if you are, you don't need to live through other people like rock stars. Your ego's being fed by yourself."
Most depressing of all, there might be a wider implication, in terms of the decline in tolerance of homosexuality among teenagers. A 2009 survey found that eight in 10 UK secondary-school teachers reported hearing such homophobic insults as "poof", "dyke", "queer" and "faggot"; while 90% had witnessed children being subjected to homophobic bullying.
But there is another way of looking at it, says Napier-Bell, who thinks the lack of gay influence on rock music is a sign of increasing tolerance. "There's not much gay influence to be seen in the music business these days because gays are accepted, nobody cares. Young people are so aware of all things gay that there's nothing new for them to take from it. Gays have gone normal. It's all rather boring."
On that last point at least, Savage agrees. Without the influence of gay culture, he says, rock music is somehow lacking. "What do you want to do? Do you want to open everything up or close everything down? When you open everything up, you get a surge of excitement. When you close everything down, it's just business as usual." He lets out an exasperated sigh. "It's all so dreary."
• All Rock'n'Roll is Homosexual, an evening hosted by Alexis Petridis with Jon Savage and Nicky Wire, is at the Queen Elizabeth Hall, London SE1, tonight. Details:
southbankcentre.co.uk/deller
