ABSTRACT

This chapter examines the relationship between rock and gay identity, taking the reader through rock’s first quarter century, stopping at the point in the early 1980s where MTV was beginning to introduce American audiences to a new wave of British musicians such as Soft Cell and Pete Shelley. If the Gay Revolution never took hold in rock, that said as much about gay lib as it did about music. The Stones’ gay manager, Andrew Loog Oldham, pushed the bad-boy image, fueled by sexual ambiguity. Gay men could identify with the raptures women were allowed to indulge. The women could even impersonate and give voice to male fantasies, while remaining straight themselves. While disco was busily announcing a society of “insiders” appropriating the emblems of success, the punk scene emerged as a society of “outsiders” attacking those emblems.