“When you’re a boy, other boys check you out.” – David Bowie, “Boys Keep Swinging,” 1979.
Picture: David Bowie (January 8, 1947 – January 10, 2016), London, 1969. Photo © Ray Stevenson.
David Robert Jones, better known as David Bowie, who was born seventy years ago today, was a British singer, songwriter, actor, and a cultural phenomenon for five decades. His music and personas—from “Space Oddity” to “Starman” and the androgynous Ziggy Stardust to plastic soul with “Fame” and “Young Americans” to the emergence of The Thin White Duke and electronic-Bowie and onto his collaboration with Queen on “Under Pressure” and his biggest commercial success with “Let’s Dance” and then his last albums “The Next Day” and “Blackstar”—expanded the boundaries of music, art, sex, pop, gender, beauty, and love. And his film work—most notably as Jareth in “Labyrinth” (1986)—cemented his place as a shape-shifting legend.
In 1972, as Ziggy Stardust’s rise began, Bowie came out as gay, though in 1976 he clarified that he was bisexual. In 1983, Bowie called his coming out “the biggest mistake I ever made” and noted he was “always a closet heterosexual.” In 2002, when asked if he still considered his coming out to have been a mistake, he explained that he didn’t think it was a mistake in Europe, “but it was a lot tougher in America. I had no problem with people knowing I was bisexual, but I had no inclination to hold any banners nor be a representative of any group.”
Regardless of how Bowie self-identified—and, importantly, he spent the last twenty-five years of his life married to second wife, Iman—his impact on queer culture was immeasurable. “Otherness,” Aaron Hicklin wrote, “was how Bowie was able to connect with the LGBT community over the years.” Bowie, The Magnetic Fields’ Stephen Merritt said, “is about the freedom to have any identity you want, not just gendered.” He “was an artist in the truest, most original sense. With his music, with his personas and with his life, he painted a vision for a future we’re only just now starting to inhabit. And it’s amazing.”
David Bowie died of liver cancer on January 10, 2016; he was sixty-nine. #lgbthistory #HavePrideInHistory #DavidBowie (at London, United Kingdom)
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