ABSTRACT
There was, it seems, a moment last summer when the only pop stars left in Madame Tus-saud's were David Bowie and Boy George. "Gender bending" had got its final accolade; Britain's peculiar contribution to Western pop music was preserved, appropriately, in wax. The 1984 was a playful pop year. It began with Annie Lennox's appearance on the US Grammy Awards Show, not with her usual close-cropped unisex look but in full drag, as a convincing Elvis Presley. In 1978 Angela McRobbie and the author wrote an article titled "Rock and Sexuality" for Screen Education. Their aim was to counter the common assumption that rock 'n' roll somehow liberated sexual expression. Since David Bowie and early 1970s glam rock, the aesthetics of British popular music have changed. Pop stars became valuable for their plasticity and so their sexuality too became a matter of artifice and play, self-invention and self-deceit.
