David bowie made me gay book
Identifying and Identifying with the Thin Pale Duke: Darryl Bullock’s “David Bowie Made Me Gay: Years of LGBT Music”
Morgan Woolsey on Darryl Bullock’s “David Bowie Made Me Gay” and the difficulties identifying exactly what “gay music” is.
David Bowie Made Me Gay by Darryl W. Bullock. The Overlook Press, pages.
THE TITLE OF Darryl W. Bullock’s latest book, David Bowie Made Me Gay: Years of LGBT Music, raises a few questions. Is this a memoir, detailing the author’s coming to terms with his hold identity through the sexually protean Lean White Duke (or Ziggy Stardust or Major Tom or Aladdin Sane or, for the more cinematically minded gay babies of my generation, the Goblin King)? If so, how will this intimate and personal narrative intersect with the promised examination of a century of LGBT music? Spoiler alert: It won’t, really. Bowie is positioned at the beginning of the book both as an emblem of the monumental boomer music losses of (Prince, Maurice White, Glenn Frey, George Martin, Leonard Cohen, Pete Burns, and George Michael, to name a few), pointing out that,
For the past ten years or so, Darryl W. Bullock has been making hilarious and detailed entries in his blog,
The World&#;s Worst Records. His queer and British knack for witty put-downs combines easily with his real interest in preserving the memory of obscure tunes. Not only is it an excellently researched archive, he&#;s usually able to post recordings of the songs right there to play as one reads about them. In , he put these skills on display in output, authoring a biography of Florence Foster Jenkins to capitalize on the free of a film about the un-tuneful one, starring Meryl Streep. Now he&#;s returned with a second book of much grander ambition, David Bowie Made Me Gay: Years of LGBT Music.
Such a proposal could certainly fill a set of encyclopedias, and Bullock&#;s job clocks in at a swift pages. Surfing through any compendium like this, readers invariably hold themselves in suspense until they reach the treatment of their favorite LGBT musician—an unsatisfying prospect in this case where even the most substantive and pioneering figures seldom rate more than two p
‘David Bowie Made Me Gay: Years of LGBT Music’ by Darryl W. Bullock
Dear Darryl Bullock, please forgive any of us who initially take your book’s engaging title as a metaphor. This reader was prepared to ponder, through pages, this question: What does Bowie—androgynous, ambiguous, continually self-reinventing Bowie—represent to our culture?
But a few pages in, I realized that I was holding a memoir, not a metaphor, in my hands. If Darryl Bullock had been born at a different time, he might include titled his book “Cole Porter Made Me Gay” or “Leonard Bernstein &#;” or even “Sam Smith&#;” But he was born in the mid-sixties, and David Bowie is his guy. At times during the historical narrative, he pauses to pay Bowie touching tributes. Perhaps the most personal, and globally applicable, appears in Chapter 1: “Gay, linear or bisexual: whatever word Bowie chose to define his sexuality, this particular cat was out of the bag—or rather the closet. He’d said it, in print, and for thousands of young LGBT people across the world, life was suddenly a little less suffocating.”
Bullock has res
David Bowie Made Me Gay: Years of LGBT Music
Description
LGBT musicians hold shaped the development of music over the last century, with a sexually progressive soundtrack in the background of the same-sex attracted community's struggle for acceptance. With the advent of recording technology, LGBT messages were for the first time brought to the forefront of popular harmony. David Bowie Made Me Gay is the first book to cover the breadth of history of recorded music by and for the LGBT people and how those records influenced the evolution of the music we hear to Bowie Made Me Gay uncovers the lives of the people who made these records, and offers a lively canter through the scarcely documented history of LGBT music-makers. Darryl W. Bullock discusses how gay, lesbian, and bisexual performers influenced Jazz and Blues; examines the almost forgotten Pansy Craze in the years between the two World Wars (when many LGBT performers were fêted by royalty and Hollywood alike); chronicles the dark years after the depression when lgbtq+ life was driven profound u