I decided to do a response to the
Gay Icons exhibit at the National Portrait Gallery which was, in the end,
somewhat predictable, both in terms of the people asked to choose and the icons
they selected. I haven’t seen the exhibition or all the portraits included and
neither have I, for my own list, agonised over what constitutes a ‘gay icon’.
My reasoning is that since I'm gay, anyone who is an icon to me is a gay icon.
Simple. Some of my choices are there at the National but I’m certain my reasons
are more interesting than whatever possessed Elton John to include Graham
Taylor, for instance. Looking back at these choices I realise that what unites
them is not that they make me proud to be gay particularly, and not all of them
are gay, but that if I wasn’t gay I might not be able to understand or admire
them as much as I do, and in every case that would be a sad, sad thing.
Quentin Crisp
His laziness and utter lack of
materialism are more revolutionary now than ever. ‘I can’t afford to be gay’
would be an alien concept to him. His absolute resolution and clarity about his
own homosexuality was such that, in all innocence, it took some time for him to
truly grasp that he was an aberration in the world. Hence my favourite part of
the filmed version of The Naked Civil Servant is when his mother’s friend
enquires, ‘You’re not one of those who doesn’t love women are you?’ and Quentin
replies, ‘Well that’s just it, I don’t think anybody does’. Aside from
anything, having seen a generation documented in art who either killed
themselves or vanished into loveless heterosexual lives/lies, followed shortly
by a generation that died as punishment for sexual liberation, it’s just nice
to see a gay man who was honest to goodness old.
Joe Dallesandro
Poster-boy for the National
exhibition and significant in all sorts of ways. While poor Lou Reed was sent upstate
by his parents in an attempt to have his homosexuality fried out of him, the
impossibly beautiful, effortlessly masculine and heterosexual Joe took his
place on the throne of New York’s sexual underbelly as number one object of
desire. Muse to Reed, Gerard Malanga, Paul Morrissey and Warhol himself, his
passivity in terms of the ruthless gaze he was forever under was in itself
utterly seductive. After several years fucking around for cash and/or art with
people of many genders he eventually professed that, in terms of cock, he
eventually just got a taste for it, and that kind of sexual liberation put his
kaftan-and-marijuana peers right back into their dressing-up boxes.
Victoria Wood
‘I remember very well the fact
that Joyce Grenfell was standing on the stage on her own. I loved the fact she
was peopling the stage with nothing but words. She was an inspiration, not just
because she was good but because it put the idea in my head of a woman standing
on stage on her own and that was a very powerful image’
‘What do you think are the main
themes of Othello, Sarah?’
‘Erm, I don’t think it’s got one
really, it’s just various people talking … and sometimes they do things in
brackets’
‘I saw you today, well I just saw
your blazer
and it went through my heart like
the beam of a lazer
and I thought that today you
would turn round and see me but you didn’t’
‘Oh God, oh God, there’s no
piano! Barbara where are my tissues?’
‘Look, I love Blue Peter but even
I can’t make a piano out of a box of tissues’
‘I have wasted years behaving
in a way I thought was ‘proper’
and it’s hard to do
no-one cared, no-one knew’
‘Hormones, they’re those things
you don’t know you’ve got till you run out of them’
‘Like split peas?’
‘Well yes, except if you run out
of split peas you don’t go red and grow a moustache’
‘I wouldn’t bank on it’
Her written output of the last
twenty odd years has surpassed and outlived even polari as the true lingua
franca of the British queen. Her work covers the same ground as Alan Bennett
and Morrissey and like them she shares a wry, self-aware and vaguely tragic
outlook that outside of the North is called camp. You only have to post a
one-liner on Facebook to watch the gay, tickled and word-perfect hordes come
following: ‘Her ears are in the wrong place for a polo neck …’ ‘He died whilst
falling under a bus …’ ‘Grey eggs, is that an Arab custom..?’ ‘Suede-effect
pochette packed to the drawstring with handy-sized oddments …’ ‘Are they to
have porridge ..?’ Ad infinitum, but never ad nauseum.
Bob Mould
‘Band seeks bassist into Hüsker
Dü and Peter, Paul & Mary’. When Kim Deal answered this advert, The
Pixies, the second most important band ever to come out of America, were born.
Hüsker Dü have been relegated to a lesser status in musical history but New Day
Rising remains a key artefact of 80s punk/indie/hardcore. At the band’s helm
was Bob Mould, the quiet, unassuming but committed axeman/songwriter with an
addictive personality and fruitfully depressed creative streak. After Hüsker Dü
fell apart, his new band Sugar managed to ride the tail of what was by then
called grunge, but really was the new American antidote to heavy metal that Bob
Mould had helped create. Beaster and Copper Blue are classics of the period,
while his later album Workbook is, in my humble opinion, one of the best solo
albums recorded. Bob is gay, out, never bleats too much about it but was a key
player in a world where I, as a naïve teenager, never thought gay men could be.
A few years ago he contributed ‘If I Can’t Change Your Mind’ to an album
supporting gay marriage in the States. The song was already written and
recorded with Sugar but the title and lyrics became extra-poignant in their new
context:
‘And all throughout the years
I never strayed from you my dear
But you suspect I'm somewhere
else
You're feeling sorry for yourself
Leaving with a broken heart
I love you even still
If I can't change your mind
Then no one will’
Judy Garland and Sylvia Ray
Rivera
Arnie Kantrowitz once described
first hearing ‘Somewhere Over The Rainbow’ as ‘Like hearing the national anthem
of a country of which I didn’t yet know I was a citizen’. So no Kylie, no Dusty
and no Barbra in the official line up ... but no Judy? Come off it. ‘Art’,
wrote Toni Morrison, ‘makes another thing possible’, and Judy’s death was every
bit as artful as her life, which is to say, lonely, hard work and with little
satisfaction. What could be more gay? What her death made possible, in a
majestically camp and karmic way, was a partial galvanisation of queeny
hysteria into the window-smashing rage of the Stonewall riots.
Okay it’s partly an urban myth
but it’s beautiful and it’s ours. Sylvia Ray Rivera, New York street
transvestite and one of the original and most committed of the Stonewall Bar
rioters, commented that on hearing of Judy’s demise, ‘I decided to become
completely hysterical’. There are centuries of queer wit and insight in that
phrase: ‘I decided to become completely hysterical’. Most importantly, there is
agency, the agency of the fag in heels who isn’t going to take it any more. The
days of rioting that followed Judy’s death turned New York City upside down for
gay people. The link with her death is poetic license of the sort that might
never occur to any kind of person but one who can readily translate the loss of
a lonely old chanteuse into political revolt and burning dustbins in Greenwich
Village.
