Music | Bohemian Radio

I essentially came out of the womb with jazz hands.

*He’d like to come and meet us, but he thinks he’d blow our minds.*

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 …