www.jonsavage.com/compilations

Trikont, 2006

‘Accept what is you and live the way you want to’.

Harrison Kennedy, Closet Queen (1972)

This compilation began fifteen ago, began when I was given a record by my friend Graham Willett: Kay Why by the Brothers Butch. It was a novelty single yet it contained enough reality – the penetratingly camp voices, the squeezed KY tube on the picture sleeve – to give an insight into the gay world at the time when it was recorded: 1967, the year that homosexuality was partially decriminalised in the UK. Kay Why was It unlike anything else I’d ever heard and it set me thinking: surely there was more of this out there.

Assisted by Kris Kirk, Peter Burton, Dave Godin and Mark England, I began to look for other gay-themed, gay-performed or gay-oriented records: partly for fun, partly for kitsch value, partly in anger at the way that the gay contribution to popular culture has always been erased, ignored, or mocked. I didn’t care about positive images or burdens of repres-entation: paint-stripping drag queens, sensitive singers of show tunes, trilling seventies soap stars, self-hating punk rockers – all were fair trade.

One possible result of that quest is contained in this CD. Despite our best attempts, it does not contain some of our ideal list. Among those missing in action are: Lee Sutton, Lou Reed, David Bowie, Larry Grayson and John Inman, Lewis Furey, the Dynamic Superiors, the Rolling Stones’ contract-breaking Cocksucker Blues, and expose items like The Gay Teenager – from 1968 album. These omissions are due to taste and/ or licensing difficulties, and do not necessarily indicate an aversion to being included in a gay-themed record.

Nor does this compilation aim to be a complete history of queer music. If you want to delve further, there are excellent releases like Tipping the Velvet (CD41 Records: British Music Hall songs about Masculine Women! Feminine Men! recorded during the 1920′s and the 1930′s) or Sissy Man Blues (Jass Records: jazz and blues tunes from the same period). J.D.Doyle’s excellent and constantly updated Queer Music Heritage site contains a great deal of original research on this topic.

There is, of course, the wider question of what constitutes a gay record: is it one that is recorded, consumed or aimed at gay people? In the lack of overtly homosexual material, many gay men and women have found something that related to their lives in heterosexually aimed music. (For an example of this, see Kris Kirk’s reaction to the Everly Brothers in his groundbreaking, 1983 article: What A Difference A Gay Makes: Confessions of a Gay Record Collector). As we you and they still do: emotion knows no boundaries.

To simplify matters, however, this compilation features records with an explicit or fairly implicit queer theme. It begins in the early sixties, when the repressive anti-homosexual campaigns of the 1950′s were finally being challenged by a small number of dedicated activists in Britain and America. That anger and confidence opened the closet door wide enough in those countries to make recording gay songs more attractive. About half of the CD comes from small, fly-by-night labels, mostly advertised in the homosexual publications of the day.

It was not until the early seventies — with the coming of Gay Liberation, the success of David Bowie, and the greater sexual tolerance that occurred when the sixties went mass – that the majors began to release more explicit gay material. At the same time, performers started to look outside of the ghetto, and some began to demand acceptance from society at large. Before then, records like Kay Why served as a secret code: having a copy meant that you were a member of the international sorority, as well as reinforcing the fact that you were not the only queer on the planet.

Step into the time machine: matrix set for the early sixties. You will step out into a world where to be a queer is to be the lowest of the low, subject to blackmail, verbal and physical abuse, constant police harassment. The liberation movements are still small: the preserve of a few dedicated individuals and small organisations. But the queers are not to be stopped: drag queens like Jose Sarris are the advance guard of a movement that will bear fruit, in 1978, with Sylvester: the first out and proud homosexual to have a major international hit.

Arranged in chronological order, these songs show how queer noises went from the closet into the charts.

1: Jose At The Black Cat (excerpt) (circa 1960)

‘Hello hello everybody’, Jose chirrups; ‘I’m glad to see you here’. That’s the last welcoming thing to come out of her mouth, as the resident drag act at San Francisco’s Black Cat Club – one of the most famous gay bars of the era – abuses her audience: in particular the ‘leather-jacketed girls’ roaring up and down Market Street on their Vespas. Jose Sarris was one of the most visible drag queens of the period, running for public office in San Francisco during 1961. His visibility and courage were recognised in the 1985 Before Stonewall documentary, which features the Black Cat anthem, Word Is Out.

2: Rod McKuen, Eros (1961)

‘I have to walk at night and be with many’, McKuen begins and, although he chats about ‘a woman or a special friend’, his gay audience would have recognised this as a true description of cruising. Always emotive but, beneath the warm, brutally honest, McKuen had already issued the definitive Beatnik exploitation record (Beatsville, now on CD including The Beat Generation) before making Eros in 1961. (For details of McKuen’s fascinating and productive career, please go to his excellent, official website at www.mckuen.com)

3: Mr. Jean Fredericks, Nobody Loves A Fairy When She’s Forty (excerpt) (early 60′s)

A clapped out piano heralds this live recording from ‘a West End (London) camp sight’, wherein Mr. Fredericks delineates that perennial queer fear: losing your youth. Pictured in full, terrifying flow on the cover of this EP, Mr. Fredericks was one of the better known London drag acts of the period. Looking ‘like a cross between Florence Foster Jenkins and Anna Russell’, he eschewed, according to a 1973, the ‘hectic aggression’ of his competitors in favour of high wire operatics. Look for: the 1964 album, Recitals Are A Drag.

4: Byrd E.Bath and Rodney Dangerfield, Florence of Arabia
5: B.Bubba, I’d Rather Fight Than Swish (both early 60′s)

These two songs were released on the infamous Camp Label, out of Los Angeles, in the early sixties. Florence of Arabia” was first issued on the anonymous album, The Queen Is In The Closet: there was no ambiguity about the target market with a sleeve that depicted a beringed, hairy forearm dropping a hanky as well as several hairpins. Humorous and on occasion angry, this ten track record is worth finding or downloading. It was very popular at the time and offers a genuine insight into the metropolitan gay life of the period.

Fully exploring the camp possibilities of David Lean’s famous 1962 epic, Florence of Arabia features cod middle-eastern music and – a regular camp trope this – a butch voice with bitch interjections. Contriving to rhyme Arabia with ‘get a load of her’, it could also apply to an obsessive dune cruiser: the spider waiting for a passing fly. Florence was later released as a 45 in the series that also included Leather Jacket Lovers, Rough Trade, Stanley the Manly Transvestite and our next selection, I’d Rather Fight Than Swish.

Adorned on its original issue with a great picture sleeve of a leather jacketed type, this epic promotes the straight-acting point of view. ‘When I see a queen/ I get downright mean’, intones the butch: ‘cos I am tough, rough, rough and hot stuff’. Naturally this cannot go unchallenged, and the bitch backing singers take every opportunity to point out his lapse in etiquette: ‘oh get him’, etc. They get their full revenge on the flip: same backing track, but different vocals, this time from the bitch point of view – I’d Rather Swish Than Fight.

6: The Kinks, See My Friend (1965)

The Kinks were the queerest of the 60′s beat groups: Ray Davies was ever prone to purse his lips and wag his finger, while outrageous fashion-plate brother Dave’s recounts his experiments with bisexuality in his memoir Kink. This top ten 45 was outstanding on two counts: in its pioneering use of Indian drones and its lyrical theme, which, as Ray Davies admitted in 1965, concerned ‘a person in this business who is quite normal and good-looking, but girls have given him such a rotten time that he becomes a sort of queer’.

7: The Tornados, Do You Come Here Often (1966)

The flip side of the last record that the Tornados ever released with Joe Meek, this extraordinary record acts as a kind of hidden track. For over two minutes, the listener is regaled with a flouncy, organ-drenched instrumental, before two voices finally come in. These hard-edged London queens bicker, snigger, cruise, part on acid terms. Although Meek felt that it was a major victory to place such a realistic slice of gay life on a major label 45, it did not help to arrest his decline into mania, murder and suicide early the following year.

8: The Brothers Butch, Kay Why? (1967)

‘Oh George, isn’t it nice having a group backing us?’
‘You always were greedy, Clarence’.
The bickering continues on this paean to that essential accessory of gay life. With its endless double, no single, entrendres around the topic of KY Jelly, Kay Why defines relentlessness: ‘won’t you come again and meet me outside the tube like we used to do?’ Featuring plodding beat group instrumentation and Beatle-like ‘ooh’s, this single illustrates a new confidence alongside the standard insults like ‘why don’t you shut… your face?’

9: Teddy & Darrel, These Boots (1967)

Another great bitch and butch double-act from these Sunset Strip regulars on this signature tune from the You Silly Savage album, promoted as ‘the gayest sound in the world’. As ever, the bitch has the best lines – ‘it’s out the door with me, sweetheart, I’ve had enough’ – while the butch squirms helplessly. Other highlights among the album’s ‘fantastic, freaky, campy interpretations of our biggest hits’ include Paul Revere’s Hungry, Strangers in the Night, and Hold On, I’m Coming. Come on, you know what they sound like.

10: Zebedy, The Man I Love (1969)

‘I was born in the frustration of yesterday, live the freedom of today, and await the promise of tomorrow’, proclaimed Zebedy (Colt) on his album sleeve. Show tunes were, and remain, a staple gay aesthetic, and Zebedy’s mellow, baritone voice eschews campery but teases out the queerness in songs like Love For Sale and Billy Strayhorn’s Lush Life. Colt was an apt pseudonym for Edward Earle, a Broadway actor and director: just how apt was shown a few years later, when he starred in the 1975 porn movie The Story of Johanna.

11: Curt Boettcher, Astral Cowboy (1969)

Boettcher is best known as the auteur of one of the greatest psychedelic records of all time: the Millenium’s 1968 Begin Here. Already a studio veteran in his early twenties – with credits including the Association’s fantastic Along Comes Mary and Pandora’s Golden Heebie Jeebies – he laid down several tracks in 1969 for an unreleased album. Spacemen and cowboys are two favourite queer metaphor-fantasies (see David Bowie, Jobriath, and Brokeback Mountain) and the shimmering Astral Cowboy combines both to great affect.

12: Harrison Kennedy, Closet Queen (1972)

‘Closet queen you’re all right, you know what I mean’, sings Harrison Kennedy, ‘closet queen come into the light, where you can be seen’. This melodic slice of pop soul was released on his solo album Hypnotic Music – a brave attempt to vary the Holland Dozier Holland formulae of Kennedy’s parent group, Chairman of the Board. The lyrics are unusually sympathetic for the period: ‘you spent years hiding and I know why/ Majority Joe don’t dig it, no he can’t see your side/ But Gay is nothing but good, if it don’t kill steal or lie’. Right on!

13: Polly Perkins, Coochy Coo (1973)

After several 45′s and a spell as the commere of famed sixties Brit TV pop show Ready Steady Go, Perkins was already out and proud by the time that she released 1973′s Liberated Woman. The raunchy Coochy Coo was the lead off single and, it was claimed, banned by the BBC. Perhaps someone read her sleevenote admonition: ‘liberation for women means society crumbling, marriage ruined, children left to get on with their own scenes, men losing their hold on the purse strings and bedclothes, women fancying other women’.

14: Michael Cohen, Bitterfeast (1973)

Trailed by Folkways as featuring ‘songs sensitively and honestly dealing with the experiences of being gay’, the thoughtful What Did You Expect? was the second of three albums released by this forgotten singer/ songwriter. There are very few biographical details, but from the album’s liner notes it appears that Cohen was from Queens and worked as a New York cab driver. Based on a poem by Leonard Cohen, Bitterfeast passes through anger and guilt, and finally looks forward to the day when Cohen M. will ‘never be to blame’.

15: Jobriath I’m A Man (1973)

After David Bowie, the deluge. While the New York Dolls rampaged through America (and for their queer image, view Bob Gruen and Nadya Beck’s great DVD, All Dolled Up), Jobriath – real name: Bruce Campbell – was the first openly gay performer to receive a major marketing push. After he signed to Elektra for a rumoured $500,000, manager/ Svengali Jerry Brandt cooked up an autumn 1973 campaign that included a huge Times Square billboard of Jobriath as a butt-up, nude, smashed marble statue. His nearest thing to a breakthrough single, I’m A Man covers all the contemporary bases: pierrots, space boys, twenties’ film stars, show-tune glam rock.

16: Chris Robison, Lookin’ For A Boy (1973)

After a rock apprenticeship that included Steam (Na Na Hey Hey Kiss Him Goodbye), Elephant’s Memory and John Lennon, Chris Robison decided to be open about his sexuality: ‘to write songs that were me’. The resulting album, Chris Robison and the Many Hand Band, was an ahead-of-its-time gay classic and Lookin for A Boy was its most upfront song: it was very popular in the New York clubs of the time. The line about ‘the other boys in the band asked me to take full responsibility for this song and its lyrical content’ is a joke: Robison played everything on the track by himself.

17: Peter Grudzien, White Trash Hillbilly Trick (1974)

You can hardly believe that this deep, country voice is singing those words, but it and he is. Inspired by Johnny Cash and Bob Dylan, Peter Grudzien has made it his life’s work to play ‘overtly gay country music’. The Cash-inflected White Trash Hillbilly Trick is the stand-out on his self-released 1974 album, The Unicorn. Grudzien was there when the Stonewall Tavern was raided on the 27th of June 1969, and The Unicorn is an empassioned plea for a gay nirvana that might just be as illusory as that mythical beast.

18: Valentino, I Was Born This Way (1975)

Released at the beginning of 1975, this justly famous single made huge waves, in England at least, as the first, unequivocally gay-proud disco hit. The single was written and first released by Bunny Jones: as she observed at the time, ‘I began to feel that gays are more suppressed than blacks, Chicanos or other minorities’. Valentino – real name Charles Harris – worked the song hard but was amazed to find resistance to its pro-gay message in the US: ‘when people get to that one word, they stop dancing’. However it’s enduring appeal was signalled by the better known Carl Bean version two years later.

19: The Miracles, Ain’t Nobody Straight In L.A. (1975)

1975 was a peak year for Motown and homosexuality, what with the label’s licensing of I Was Born This Way, the album by the Dynamic Superiors, and this crisp, Latin-tinged ode to ‘freedom of expression’ from the Smokey-less Miracles. Part of a concept album devoted to the City of The Angels, Ain’t Nobody Straight In L.A. affirms that ‘homosexuality is a part of society’. Sometimes the seventies look like a golden age: 0ne wonders how the Miracles’ message of tolerance would go down today, even if a major R&B act were to record it.

20: The Ramones 53rd And 3rd (1976)

Punk’s gender politics were deeply ambiguous. One of its most frequently repeated perplexes was the strong women and the hopeless boy. Prostitution haunted Punk like a shadow: not only because some of its participants had actually worked as hustlers or rent boys, but because its implied passivity suited the style’s abject masculine ethos. This Dee Dee Ramone song – from the group’s classic first album – lays out with total authority the hustler’s conflicting emotions: desperation, guilt, and finally murderous rage.

21: The Twinkeyz, Aliens In Our Midst (1977)

The spaceboys are back again, with this fantastically chunky and catchy slice of psych/ punk from Sacramento, California. The lyrics cover the outsider state with humour and grace, while the second verse is totally inspirational: ‘this friend of mine was five years old/ He dressed up in his sisters clothes/ And his dad he got so mad/ He whipped him with a rubber hose/ But he grew up OK/ And made his way to Junior High/ And as things would have it fell in love/ And gave his ring to another guy’.

22: Dead Fingers Talk, Nobody Loves You When You’re Old And Gay (1978)

Back to punk gloom and misery with this rockin’ restatement of the theme so eloquently stated earlier by Mr. Jean Fredericks. Dead Fingers Talk were sincere believers in the Punk ethic – other songs on their one album, Storm the Reality Studios, tackle the mass media, street survival, and the like – but this Bobo Phoenix song represents gay life as a dog-eat-dog nightmare. There is an element of truth in that, and at the end, Phoenix admits his complicity: ‘you’ll only find love is you’ve got the money to pay/ My place or yours’.

23: Black Randy And The Metro Squad, Trouble At The Cup (1978)

No such worries from Black Randy, chief prankster of the LA punk scene. Reacting against the previous glam generation, the members of this small but vociferous subculture found themselves unable to confront their sexuality – the denial most notably embodied by Germs’ singer Darby Crash – but Black Randy (real name: John ‘Jackie’ Morris) simply did not care. This hustler armageddon – ‘schools and factories make me sick/ I’d rather stand here and sell my dick’ – is named after a notorious pick-up joint on Hollywood Boulevard.

24: Sylvester, You Make Me Feel (Mighty Real) (1978)

In 1978, Disco was everywhere, with gender-fuck artists like Grace Jones and full blown gay acts like the cartoonish Village People, whose Y.M.C.A spent six months on the charts. Sylvester – real name Sylvester ‘Dooni’ James – needed no Svengali in order to present himself as the most outrageous and compelling gay performer to date. With synthesiser added by Patrick Cowley, Mighty Real is both funky and spacey: the lyrics describe the activity – dancing, cruising, and then> – that the music is designed to soundtrack. An international hit and a real triumph both for the artist and his gay fans.

A BRIEF NOTE ON CAMPING

‘All around, straights were getting their mirror image flung back at them in high heels and nail polish’.

‘The Fabulous Mr. Jean Fredericks’, Follow-Up, 1973

‘Well I must be off.’
‘Yes, you’re not looking so good’.
‘Cheerio. I’ll see you down the ‘Dilly.’
‘Not if I see you first, you won’t’.

Joe Meek for the Tornados, “Do You Come Here Often” 1966

The more alert among you will notice the incidence of bitching on this record. Whether it be the perpetual, always one-sided dialectic between butch and bitch or just sheer bad-tempered bickering, the acid exchanges between the gay men on this record – ‘ooh, get him!’, ‘shut your face’ etc – cut through the backing tracks like an ornate cake knife through margarine. They also have the ring of authenticity. They tell it like it was and is, not how it should be.

In fact, this bickering was and is the most important component of the camping which, as Richard Dyer writes, is ‘the only style, language and culture that is distinctively and unambiguously gay male’. In its social mode, camp privileges a caustic wit, best expressed by the quick-fire verbal retort, partly as a form of aggression, partly as a form of self-mockery, partly as a form of self-defence. It’s an insider code that completely baffles the heterosexual majority, as it’s meant to. (Why are they being so horrible to each other? Because it’s good sport, and good practice for when you really need it.)

Like the Negro ‘dirty dozens’ – the ritualised insults of the 20′s and 30′s that have become embedded in Rap – this campery represents a complicated response to an explicitly hostile world. Its poisoned psychological arrows can help to control and neutralise the threat of homophobic violence: many bullies are right to fear the queen’s forked tongue. Camping provides a kind of bulwark from which the gay man can sally forth into the world at large: it freezes the simplistic typecasting of homosexuals as effeminate, internalises it, and then throws it back in the face of the straight world as a kind of revenge.

However, this corrosive dialogue reveals a deep seam of outcast aggression. Camping’s downside is that, unless employed with a light touch and a sure understanding of the game’s rules, its ritualised viciousness can reinforce the hostility of the wider society. Peter Burton remembers that when he was entering the gay scene in the mid sixties, nothing ‘was more daunting as an encounter with some acid tongued bitch whose tongue was so sharp it was likely to cut your throat. These queens, with the savage wit of the self-protective, could be truly alarming to those of us of a slower cast of mind’.

Internalised homophobia fuels the twisted expression of an outcast’s low self-esteem: instead of fighting the oppressors, why not fight those nearest to hand? Donald Webster Cory’s groundbreaking 1951 survey,
The Homosexual In America
, clearly identified poor self-esteem as one of the greatest threats to gay men’s mental health – infecting every aspect of life – but it was difficult, given society’s attitudes, to break the cycle of prejudice and self-hatred. Small wonder that, listened to objectively, some of these songs present gay life as a nitroglycerene nightmare.

The mental and emotional effects of living life outside the law and outside the pale were many and vicious. ‘Hey, you’ve got to hide your love away,’ John Lennon sang in one of the Beatles’ most poignant songs, and, for almost every adult gay man born before the mid 1940′s, the strain of having to do so was psychologically disastrous. In far too many cases, the result was alcoholism, drug addiction, compulsive cruising, crippling guilt, an inability to form lasting emotional relationships — a monstrous waste of lives that spawned the anger of the gay liberation movements.

Many of these records – particularly those from the early 60′s – are simultaneously sad, eerie, funny, and true. You can still hear their vivid vituperation in the gay hardcore dance records of the 21st century. By the same token, they are time-locked, a bulletin from a pivotal point in homosexual history: that moment when an oppressed minority began to claim its rightful place in society. But they also offer a warning: despite all the gains that have been made in the last forty years, gay men and women are still routinely demonised and victimised.

A survey conducted by a British TV company in 2006 revealed that, for all the talk of the Pink Pound and civil ceremonies, 40% of the respondents had been the victim of physical or verbal abuse. In 1959, the gay magazine ‘One’ ran an editorial bemoaning the fate of gay teenagers: forty-five years later, in the early 21st century, they remain the most vulnerable group of all to bullying and prejudice. The cycle of hatred and self-hatred still continues and is stoked by the poisonous homophobia spouted by fundamentalists of all hues.

This CD tells a story of hard-won freedoms that remain all too fragile.

(Adapted from Joe Meek and the 12th of August 1966, Black Clock Issue 4, Cal Arts www.blackclock.org)

Selected Reading List

Peter Burton: Parallel Lives (GMP 1985)
David Carter: Stonewall: The Riots that Sparked the Gay Revolution (St Martin’s Press 2004)
Shaun Cole: Don We Now Our Gay Apparel: Gay Men’s Dress in the Twentieth Century (Berg
Richard Dyer: The Culture of Queers (Routledge 2001)
Joshua Gamson: The Fabulous Sylvester: the Legend, the Music, the Seventies in San Francisco (Henry Holt 2005)
John Gill: Queer Noises: Male and Female Homosexuality in 20th Century Music (Cassell 1995)
Anthony Grey: Quest for Justice: Towards Homosexual Emancipation (Sinclair Stevenson 1992)
Stephen Jeffery-Poulter: Peers, Queers and Commons: The Struggle for Gay Law Reform from 1950 To the Present (Routledge 1991)
Kris Kirk: A Boy Called Mary: Kris Kirk’s Greatest Hits (Millivres Books 1999)
Simon Napier-Bell: You Don’t Have To Say You Love Me (Nomis 1982)
John Repsch: The Legendary Joe Meek (Woodford House 1989)
Richard Smith: Seduced and Abandoned: Essays on Gay Men and Popular Music (Cassell 1995)
Andrew Sullivan: The End of Gay Culture (The New Republic, 24 October 2005)

Also recommended: Butt – that ‘Fantastic Magazine for Homosexuals’: buttmagazine@xs4all.nl

Acknowledgements:
For inspiration, information and practical assistance, many thanks to Vince Aletti, Peter Burton, Andrew Corbin, J.D.Doyle, Mark England, Kris Kirk, Paul Major, David Moreton, Alex Needham, Liz Naylor, Chris Robison, Richard Smith, Robin Turner and Jonny Trunk. Plus let us not forget Beate Dorsch, who did all the hard work of licensing and clearances. Thanks again!

This CD is dedicated to Graham Willett: 1931-2002

Posted on September 19, 2008 at 4:24 am