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rfmcdonaldMark Simpson's post begins with David Bowie's 1972 performance of "Starman" on Top of the Pops.
The key moment, for Simpson, is at 1:02, "[t]he bit where Bowie languorously and yet somehow matilly drapes his arm round the golden Mick Ronson on the ‘family show’ that was Top of The Pops [. . .] a very calculated and inspiring gesture of defiance back in July 1972, not just a bit of slashy titillation (though it was that as well)."
I don't think that Simpson is wrong in identifying Bowie as a huge positive queer figure, perhaps even in highlighting that particular moment as key.
Would my readers agree with Simpson on his appraisal for the relative success of a queer Bowie in the United Kingdom versus the United States, I wonder?
The key moment, for Simpson, is at 1:02, "[t]he bit where Bowie languorously and yet somehow matilly drapes his arm round the golden Mick Ronson on the ‘family show’ that was Top of The Pops [. . .] a very calculated and inspiring gesture of defiance back in July 1972, not just a bit of slashy titillation (though it was that as well)."
I don't think that Simpson is wrong in identifying Bowie as a huge positive queer figure, perhaps even in highlighting that particular moment as key.
If you can’t in 2010, in Gay Pride week, at a time when the Conservative Prime Minister has gay celebs round for drinks at Number 10, quite understand why this caused a sensation, and why millions of dads went apopleptic about ‘that fackin’ pooftah!’, bear in mind that just five years previously any and all male-male sexual relations were still illegal in the UK. The very first Gay Pride march had only been held a few days before Bowie’s own parade through the nation’s living rooms. Truth is, this single appearance by Bowie on Top of the Pops, a show watched by most of the UK back then – and every single kid that didn’t sing in the choir – was more significant and influential than all the UK Pride marches put together.
Would my readers agree with Simpson on his appraisal for the relative success of a queer Bowie in the United Kingdom versus the United States, I wonder?
The UK is a funny little small island, with far too much media per head – which since it lost its Empire takes far too much interest in superficial, ‘effeminate’ things like music and fashion and gossip. And, crucially, we’re basically a secular country and have been, more or less, since Henry VIII nationalised the monasteries. The UK is a country where the defunct popular tradition of Music Hall (which Bowie drew heavily upon) is probably of much greater cultural importance today than any of that dogmatic Pauline asceticism that calls itself ‘Christianity’.
And America? Well, America isn’t any of these things.
This is why the seriously flirtatious personal style of metrosexuality, which at the very least throws a langorous arm around the neck of bi-responsiveness – and which is much more David Bowie’s love-child than mine – really took root in the UK at the end of the Twentieth Century, largely without the muscular Christian anti-metro/anti-fag backlash that happened in the US in the mid-to-late Noughties. In the UK, metrosexuality produced new kinds of ‘starmen’ such as David Beckham – football’s answer to David Bowie.
