Comentarios
9 years ago
Everything below is prefaced with this: I am a hardcore feminist. It's a craw in my side when straight people say shit like, "Oh no! That _____ from the '80's wasn't gay because:1. He was singing about a woman;2. He was married;3. He actually SAID he was straight; or4. Like, EVERYONE like that wore makeup in the '80's with like crazy outfits and stuff! There was punk and goth and Madonna and British bands--that's just how [they/we] DRESSED." Baby loves: WE WERE IN THE MF'ING CLOSET, OK?! The gays were performing on Dick Clarke's Rockin New Years Eve and shit IN DRAG, telling you that they were straight... THINK ABOUT THAT FOR A MOMENT, Boo! They were tellin you what: 1) they KNEW you wanted to hear lest you be uncomfortable; 2) what the record labels, etc. told them they HAD to say; and oftentimes 3) what they felt they had to say to remain physically safe. Even straight people who are altogether "pro-gay" in every OTHER aspect of theirs lives get touchy when you fuck with their sentimental remembrances of the crushes they had on gay men in the '80's. If a girl or a woman was "in love with," say, Morrissey back in the day, DO NOT try talking to her about how difficult it must have been back in the day for the Smiths to be honest about the narratives their music was telling BLAH blah blah... She doesn't want to hear that shit because she has her own, sacred memories about "William it was Really Nothing" or whatever, and those remain so sacred that they mustn't be disturbed now, retroactively and "looking back unfairly with a modern perspective" or whatever. But here's the thing: those "sacred" memories come at the expense of a ton of pain inflicted not only on the celebrities (who were suffered tremendously, one and all, in their efforts to appease), but also at the expense of all the other closeted gay men who ALSO formed sacred memories around those songs but who couldn't share their feelings back then--but DAMN SURE need the catharsis of telling them now--with the knowledge that we knew THEN that MF was "gay like me." So when you say shit like he's "not gay because it was a reference to women" you mean "the lead singer was a male lesbian," I feel you boo. Otherwise, this fits SQUARELY into the category of shit that was "not gay" in a that special '80's kinda way, which stuff is so facially ridiculous it defies common sense and logic: Frankie Goes to Hollywood; David Bowie and Mick fuckin' on the reg but, Yo Man! They're MARRIED (to Iman and Jerry Hall,Okay--they're the Naomi and Lindas of their day, yall!); Boy muthafuckin' George and Culture Club (EVERY white girl in my grade was "in love with" that dragon, and half the boys in my grade wanted to BE him, and WERE him for that one Halloween--and then they hurled the word "FAG!" in the very next breath with exactly 0 sense of self-awareness or irony); MJ (yeah: I went there, okay?! Boyfriend's career was one epic transformation into a white woman, and yall KNOW this--and I got NOTHING but love for my baby, but he wanted to be Madonna, not Janet); George Michael writing "MONOGAMY" on an Asian's leg in red lipstick (GAY!) and subsequently only booking supermodels for, like, ALL of his videos thereafter (so gay); Sylvester wasn't gay, OBV.; any number of synth bands, like Duran Duran and a zillion others whose name I can't recall because I had too much fun back then but who were ALL "butch queens up in drags first time at a ball" for like, the entire '80's and half of the '90's (fucking "Grunge Rock" ungayed THAT party); and then finally, but definitely not least, there's the classic, "We Don't Have to Take Our Clothes Off..." I mean, that is DEF not gay in any kinda way, right? A black femme queen (whom were he alive to tell us today may very well identify as transgender, not gay) singing to a girl that she needs to "show some class" and not "move too fast" with him, so could they please just "drink some cherry wine" and dance and go through one another's closets?? OH.MY.GOD.So not gay, okay?And for all I know these "Spin the record right round" people could have been straight--but that's not the point. Even if they were, people like them--and people like Bon Bon Bovi and Kiss and all those other hard rockers up in drags--owe their ability to be straight and up in drags to the gays who "started it" and made that "the look of the '80's. (I mean, HUGE shout outs to Freddy Mercury and especially David Bowie here, right?!) XOXOXOX