Tag Archives: David Bowie
The Bowie Effect, Part Four
Part Three: https://philloz3000.wordpress.com/2021/03/21/the-bowie-effect-part-three/
When last we encountered our fifteen-year-old, bisexual hero, he was slogging over a muddy field with two of his buddies undergoing a bizarre rite of boyhood, chugging down a bottle of Mad Dog 20/20 on the way to The Rocky Horror Picture Show.
It was Saturday night, but I was definitely not feeling alright. Technically, it was illegal for the guy at the 7-Eleven to sell fortified wine to high school sophomores, but I suspect he was attempting to teach us a lesson about drinking really, really cheap fruity wine that was 20 percent alcohol by volume. Lesson learned: Pay more than $3 for a 20 ounce bottle of anything, even in 1982.
In any case, things were neither Hunky nor Dory, but in those days a single evening could feel like a life-changing adventure. I was with two of my best friends at the time, one of whom we will call Pete, and the other we will call Todd Flamer. So called because of his flaming red hair and chiseled features, which made him look like Archie Andrews from Riverdale … yet he had the soul of a Reggie Mantle.
Which is really saying he was kind of an evil prick. It was something that was going to become a significant barrier between us in the near future, because we were very competitive – usually over the same girls, and sometimes, to be honest, the same boys. He wasn’t exactly queer, though – more like a sinister, gaslighting sociopath, which would crop up as a serious issue later.
This evening, despite our nauseating fortified wine detour, we trekked our way across Edinburg on foot, as we always did in those days – having no transportation whatsoever except for the occasional borrowed bike – toward the student union of the local university. It was Halloween of 1982 and we were set to meet the girls whom we had asked to join us at the movie: My lovely, lovely friend Diana, and *her* friend, whom we will call Giselle.
Ostensibly, Giselle was to be Todd’s date and Diana mine, although things had not been quite so formally worked out beforehand; I had blown two previous date attempts with Diana. First, an escorted date to see the Tom Cruise film TAPS on Christmas of 1981; I had no follow-through, mainly because I had no transportation or resources of my own. Second, a tentative date to see Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan during the summer of 1982 was scuttled by the fact that my parents shipped me off to my grandparents’ house in San Benito for the summer, where I pined away stewing in my bisexual teenage juices while listening to Queen, Rush and David Bowie, as well as John Williams’ The Empire Strikes Back score and The Rocky Horror Picture Show soundtrack.
As far as the competition between Todd and I for the affections of the beauteous Diana were concerned, it was like King Kong Vs. Godzilla in this bitch. If you are too young to remember the Cold War, think Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World and you’ll get the picture.
We were a bit weary and cold by the time we got to the student union cafe, but none the worse for wear, except perhaps for Pete, who was our designated pack animal that evening, carrying all the accoutrement necessary to properly perform The Rocky Horror Picture Show ritual. In other words, we brought enough toast for everyone.
We soon located our lovely evening companions. I sat closer to Diana than Giselle, and Todd sat closer to Giselle then Diana, but tensions were high as we awaited the pregame ceremonies, which usually included virgin* shaming and often some kind of competition, such as a costume contest. Though dressed as elegantly as my shitloads of no money could afford, I was not in costume so I could not impress her with my ability to look good in a golden Speedo, which is really too bad, because I looked really good in a golden Speedo back then.
I knew I had limited time and had to move fast, because Todd was extremely aggressive when it came to the opposite sex. Or the same sex, for that matter. He had a way of bamboozling you with bullshit until you felt intimidated. That said, the only thing I could really do fast was talk, and I was blessed/cursed with the OCD need to monologue, so I began to do just that, pulling out all the stops, laying on all the charm, until God said, “Let There Be Lips, And There Were, And They Were Good.”
Whatever happened to Fay Wray?
I lucked out, because we started dating soon afterward. I don’t know if she was impressed by my mastery of the time warp, or perhaps my ability to catalog the plot holes in any given episode of Star Trek, or perhaps my ability to recognize any 1960s Japanese kaiju on sight. Or maybe she liked the way I kissed her impulsively in the back of the university library that one night when her old boyfriend was stalking us. That’s right, dangerous love! The best kind!
And I never had to worry about being bisexual ever again.
Oh, wait, no, I did, And it was another very gay story involving costumes, makeup and … well, just costumes and makeup at first. Right now though, Daddy needs a little drink.
Maybe a BIG little drink. Bottoms up!
To Be Continued …
* In this instance, “virgin” meaning a Rocky Horror newbie; when asked by the MC where the virgins were, I held my hand above Diana’s head.
Footnote 1. Mick Rock: https://philloz3000.wordpress.com/2021/03/24/the-bowie-effect-footnote-1-mick-rock/
Please feel free to comment below and ask any questions you wish.
The Bowie Effect, Part Three
Marlon Brando …
Part Two: https://philloz3000.wordpress.com/2021/03/19/the-bowie-effect-part-two/
Flash forward to Halloween of 1982, Edinburg, Texas, all fucking Stranger Things-style, I guess, where we rode everywhere on our bicycles avoiding random jumping pedophiles and weird middle-of-the-woods monsters. I am 15 years old and extremely eager to prove my hopefully Mr. Spockian hipster nerd cred – and also tease my totally queer queerocity – to a young woman I admired and liked very, very much, one of my oldest friends in the world: Diana, a goddess named for a goddess.
In those days, as was the fashion of the time, nerds like us were ostracized and herded into special little weekend camps and activity groups where we played chess, or perhaps Dungeons & Dragons, or perhaps rehearsed little impromptu theater sketches to perform at UIL tournaments, because they didn’t know what the fuck else to do with us as freshmen in a high school in the middle of Cowfucker/Culture Clash, Texas. Also there was orchestra and choir and Fellowship of Christian Athletes and, oh, I don’t know, Mu Alpha Theta math club? At least half of these people were queer as could be, we just couldn’t talk about it or admit it to ourselves or each other. So instead we talked about Star Trek and Radio Shack and Marvel Comics and shit like that.
I would always try to talk about David Bowie or some other queer gab, but that would quickly get shut down out of fear or disgust or whatever. Fucking churchies. It’s really telling that so many homos, lesbians, transgenders, non-binaries, aces and bisexuals emerged from the Southern Baptist and Roman Catholic churches. That’s right, I can admit your incredibly stupid and hateful bullshit attempts at making us conform only made us MORE GAY.
In any case, after encountering the previously mentioned Rocky Horror Picture Show – in particular the glorious sense of abandonment of Calvinist mores and rejection of heteronormative restrictions on my behavior – I finally broke my RHPS virgin cherry in the fall of 1981, at the Citrus Theater in downtown Edinburg. Having primed myself with plenty of perusal of the (borrowed) soundtrack album and The Rocky Horror Picture Show Book – which detailed some important aspects of fandom – as well as having been coached in expected performative behavior by a very good friend of mine, David Mark Alvirez (RIP), I had an incredible (and liberating) time.
By the following year (it was 9th grade for me), I was fully immersed in whatever avenues were available for people like me in such a backwards environment. This included the local artistic community, being a theater kid, being a Star Trek nerd, spending your Saturday afternoon at the library playing Dungeons and Dragons with a beautiful girl who happens to be the smartest one in school, and … what was this, this amazing girl is talking to me and she’s not making fun of my love of Frank Herbert’s Dune? Holy cow, she is!
Somehow it occurred to me that I – fascinated with a brilliant, beautiful, heteronormative woman from a conservative immigrant family – could best impress her by showing her what a COMPLETE queer expert I was by inviting her to the annual Halloween exhibition of The Rocky Horror Picture Show at the local university’s student union cafe.
And expert I was. By late 1982, I knew all about the genesis, theatrical fulfillment and film adaptation of The Rocky Horror Show. I knew all about Tim Curry (at least as much as I could find in those pre-Internet days) and I knew a lot of things about the culture of B monster movies and sci-fi films. What other people didn’t know generally was that I also knew that Rocky Horror was quite possibly the first audience participation film AND the first queer musical studio release, which spoke to the performative queer in me in a very profound way.
By the late 1970s, I knew a lot about Rocky Horror. But things really took off after a sequence filmed at the 8th Street Playhouse in New York was included as a set piece in the 1980 movie Fame, which helped kick-start a national trend of midnight movie showings and Halloween celebrations across the nation, on college campuses and in dilapidated old movie palaces-cum-art theaters everywhere. Very quickly I located a copy of the aforementioned The Rocky Horror Picture Show Book. And for some reason it was astounding to me that savage goddess and pioneer shadowcaster Dori Hartley was the star performer as Frank N Furter. To me, it was the fulfillment of Bisexual Androgyny Utopia! Oh My Fucking Queer Goddess, I have come home!
To Be Continued …
Part Four: https://philloz3000.wordpress.com/2021/03/23/the-bowie-effect-part-four/
The Bowie Effect, Part Two
Part One: https://philloz3000.wordpress.com/2021/03/17/the-bowie-effect-part-one/
To be perfectly honest, queer moments in the 1970s were few and far between for a little kid, even for a dedicated queerhound like myself. Too much of the era had to do with Vietnam and Watergate and inflation and third world proxy wars, but then there was also Stonewall fallout and Harvey Milk. But I’m getting ahead of myself.
True, I had my moments. The queer possibilities of pop music were extraordinary. It would be a while until I really discovered people like Patti Smith and Iggy Pop and Lou Reed and especially Klaus Nomi, but Queen was right there from 1974 onwards. As well as lovely, lovely David. He didn’t get a lot of radio play on my local station in Brownsville Texas, but he popped up well enough and often enough between The 1980 Floor Show and The Man Who Fell To Earth.
I didn’t catch him much, but I do remember his appearance on Cher’s variety show on CBS, which included a lovely duet, and his ritual humiliation at the Grammys, in which Aretha Franklin declared, upon receiving the award from Dame David, that she could “even kiss David Bowie.” You bitch!
More than that, there were other things. I couldn’t deny the bisexual appeal of Lee Majors as Colonel Steve Austin in The Six Million Dollar Man, but I was really in love with Lindsay Wagner as Jaime Sommers in The Bionic Woman. I mean, come on, I’m bi. I dig everybody.
And then there was Tim Curry.
Now, I was quite unaware of The Rocky Horror Show when it first popped up in the West End. And I certainly was not aware of the 1975 feature film at the time of its debut, although I was fully immersed in its immediate predecessor, Brian De Palma’s 1974 glam rock musical adaptation of Faust (as well as Phantom of the Opera), Phantom of the Paradise.
That said, as I grew older and immersed myself in the world of science fiction fandom, I slowly began to become exposed to the nebulous pop cultural pervasiveness of the B-movie, exploitation cinema mélange that Richard O’Brien had exploited to concoct The Rocky Horror Show, as well as references to the 1975 film adaptation, usually via random photographs crudely reproduced on newsprint in Famous Monsters of Filmland magazine, or arcane advertisements proclaiming the phrase “Don’t Dream It, Be It” in the classified section of various film and science fiction magazines.
Then I discovered THIS:
WHAT IS THIS? WHAT THE FUCK WAS HAPPENING??
To Be Continued …
Part Three: https://philloz3000.wordpress.com/2021/03/21/the-bowie-effect-part-three/
The Bowie Effect, Part One
I essentially came out of the womb with jazz hands.
That’s the answer to the question of when I knew I was queer. I’ve been queer ever since I could remember. Even when I was a very young boy, I knew I was attracted to both men and women, as well as people who didn’t seem to settle down into either category. But what did I know about gender binaries when I was 4 years old?
I do know I was about five or six years old the first time I saw David Bowie on television. It was on The Midnight Special, a late night music program on the NBC television network. One Friday evening TMS carried a special broadcast of the 1980 Floor Show, a special program put on by David Bowie and most of the Spiders from Mars at the Marquee Club in London, a curiosity since the show was never broadcast in the UK.
I’ve heard others discuss the first time they saw David, most often their reaction to the first performance of Starman on UK television in 1972. Seeing David campily drape his arm over Mick Ronson’s broad shoulders while singing “Let the children boogie” informed a generation of sexually confused young Brits that there was life in outer space for bisexuals.
It was not the first of David I had heard. In 1969 he had a minor chart hit with the song Space Oddity, which deftly skewered the anxious machismo of the 1960s space race. There had also been another minor hit from David’s 1971 Hunky Dory LP In which he discussed the kind of Changes he was going through, changes that would end up having an outsized impact on the entire world. I heard both songs on my little white radio shaped like a ball on a keychain they used to sell at Radio Shack.
However, it was on that night in 1973 that I was watching NBC with my grandmother, a conservative Mexican-American woman whose favorite film star was John Wayne and still carried a grudge against the Germans over World War II thirty years after the fact. As surprised and amazed as I was to discover David’s unearthly, androgynous visage, my grandmother simply smiled in appreciation and said “Oh, what a handsome man!”
To Be Continued …
Part Two: https://philloz3000.wordpress.com/2021/03/19/the-bowie-effect-part-two/
Bohemian Radio 