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This article has some resemblance as this one by Alexis Petridis a few years back < https://www.theguardian.com/music/2012/feb/28/how-pop-lost-gay-edge >. I grew up in Britain through the 1960s, and it was well known that the Beatles' manager Brian Epstein was gay (not that that term was used then), and there would be snide comments from older people about the 'effeminate' pop stars of the day, with their long hair and, later on, flamboyant clothing. Rumours about Larry Parnes' predatory predilections for handsome young men seeped out, along with the more common stories about his appalling rip-off managerial style; he was popularly known as 'Parnes, Shillings and Pence'. If these tales were true, he really would have been a Der Stürmer stereotype; I can't vouch for their veracity. But the rest of the gay managers were unknown to us. Lambert, Napier-Bell... the average music fan had never heard of them, let alone knew that they were gay. I'd heard of Stigwood, but only recently learnt (via Ginger Baker's autobiography) that he was gay. These guys, along with their sexuality, were behind the scenes. As for the article's conclusion -- 'in an era when gay sexual expression was brutally suppressed, the men were able to express themselves through the most influential sex symbols of the day, creating a kind of erotic ventriloquism' -- that's not how it appeared at the time. Nobody of my generation thought that Mick Jagger was gay, whatever our parents' generation might have thought, or that his image was conjured up by some gay managerial svengali. If anything, we young lads were envious of the way he could get crowds of girls around him; the same went for the other popular music stars of the time. Likewise, I can't recall any openly gay person in the popular music scene at that time. The only man I can think of was Long John Baldry, and he wasn't publicly gay at the time; I don't think he either admitted it or was obliged to deny it publicly, although I suspect that it was known within the business. I can't recall when rumours started being heard that Dusty Springfield was gay, but I don't think it was in the 1960s, when she was first in the public eye. The whole scene appeared to be very straight. It wasn't until the early 1970s with David Bowie did real hints towards being gay, or at least a strong sense of ambiguity, become visible in the popular music world. It was different in the world of the theatre, including musical theatre, and to a lesser degree cinema, where gay men, often with little attempt at disguising their gayness, were fairly common. It's a paradoxical thing that drag acts and camp comedians were popular for decades in working-class entertainment at a time when there was no apparent evidence of anyone being gay in working-class circles. But that was an entirely different scene, nothing to do with the popular music scene, even though their songs would sometimes jostle for position in the 'hit parade' with songs by performers of our generation. Paul F _________________________________________________________ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
