“You could say the greatest gay pop star of the 90s was the nightclub Trade,” says Flynn. The gay male figure, now too threatening to be marketable, vanished from pop and into underground spaces or behind DJ decks. The underground sound they had ushered into the mainstream gave way to something safer, straighter. Stock, Aitken and Waterman, the songwriting trio who wrote for Divine and were responsible for such 80s gay anthems as Dead or Alive’s You Spin Me Round (Like a Record), started writing for Kylie Minogue and Jason Donovan (a man so heterosexual he sued a magazine for claiming he was gay). Aids swung the zeitgeist towards comforting heteronormativity, and so followed the rise of blokey Britpop bands such as Oasis and Blur. The already fragmented figure of the gay male was further shattered by the epidemic. Photograph: Jean-Claude Coutausse/AFP/Getty Images Cultural traits for so long naively read as communicators of pop glamour suddenly took on a sinister association. Prominent members of the disco, Blitz Club and synth-pop movements succumbed to the disease – Sylvester died in 1988, Freddie Mercury in 1991, Leigh Bowery in 1994. “It’s not surprising that so many pop stars chose to stay in the closet.” This was perhaps when the missing link between queer nightclub pop aesthetics and the act of gay sex finally clicked into place. “They exposed people, hounded them out of their jobs and drove others to suicide,” he tells me.
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Author Matthew Todd details this period extensively in his book Straight Jacket: How to Be Gay and Happy. “It’s similar to the way British groups like the Rolling Stones and the Animals borrowed heavily from black R&B music and put it in a white package that the masses could enjoy.” Still, these signifiers weren’t yet widely understood in terms of queerness – in the 80s, cultural gayness was a novel concept.Īs hysteria around Aids spread, everything changed. Gay author and writer Jeremy Helligar is among those who disagree. “New romanticism wasn’t a monoculture, it was a culture based on taste rather than sexuality.” “It wasn’t like Spandau were co-opting a gay culture,” argues Paul Flynn. The ambiguous coding of 80s pop suspended the figure of the gay male in an in-between space. Musicologist Louis Niebur has said that audiences of the time considered “electronic sound queer, other or European, as opposed to the electric guitar, which the male sound” – and yet adherents included straight male acts such as Spandau Ballet and Duran Duran. Similarly, the new romantic artists based their sound around synth-pop. “There was Boy George, Pete Burns – who was married, but who is what you would now call queer – Morrissey singing about ‘handsome devils’, Pet Shop Boys with their slightly more opaque readings of sexuality, Marc Almond from Soft Cell, George Michael, who was closeted even though everyone in the industry knew he was gay.”
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“You had a backcloth of pop music that was absolutely full of gay people, even megastars like Freddie Mercury and Elton John, but most of them were living some sort of closeted existence,” Flynn says. It took at least a decade for the era to be recognised as a golden age of gay pop, because it didn’t make itself explicit at the time. “Of course, it would transpire many years later that there were more gay artists than the public were led to believe.” “At the time we were just three gay guys who started a band – we didn’t feel like part of any particular movement,” says Steve Bronski. (The number for the London Gay Switchboard was etched into the runout groove.) A remastered version of their debut album Age of Consent arrived this month. Synth-pop group Bronski Beat’s debut single, Smalltown Boy, about a gay man leaving his homophobic home town, charted globally in 1984. “There were stars in the 80s who were completely transparent about their sexuality from the start, and whose gayness was absolutely integral to their music.”
Come the 80s though, acts such as Bronski Beat and Frankie Goes to Hollywood became “the gay heroes of the decade”, says Paul Flynn, author of Good As You: 30 Years of Gay Britain.
Queer male pop artists were previously few and far between: Little Richard’s lyrics about anal sex were cut from Tutti Frutti, and it only took Bowie’s arm draped over the shoulder of Mick Ronson on Top of the Pops in 1972 to send middle England reeling. The winds of the gay liberation movement had been blowing strong for a decade: queer black men such as Sylvester had been at the heart of disco and the children of Bowie were coming of age just as MTV, a new medium that valued the high-energy visuals of queer nightclubs, was launched. The 80s was a perfect storm of male queerness for many reasons.