Barry Walters > Quotes

“Signing her Best of Dolly Parton poster, which suggests Lil Abner’s backwoods bombshell Daisy Mae Yokum, she chuckled, “I kinda look like a drag queen here, don’t I?”
― Barry Walters, Mighty Real: A History of LGBTQ Music, 1969-2000

“He should forget this artsyfartsy homo stuff,” Nick Tosches of Rolling Stone advised in his 1973 review.”
― Barry Walters, Mighty Real: A History of LGBTQ Music, 1969-2000

“1972’s The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars achieves far greater coherence. It’s the defining Bowie album because it’s the most fictional.”
― Barry Walters, Mighty Real: A History of LGBTQ Music, 1969-2000

“As all this was happening, “I Was Born This Way” experienced a second wave of popularity in New York when crucial club-music figures Shep Pettibone, Bruce Forest, Boyd Jarvis, and Timmy Regisford remixed the track. Bean’s social work needed funding, so the singer stipulated a one-thousand-dollar fee for every East Coast gig to promote its mid-1980s rerelease.”
― Barry Walters, Mighty Real: A History of LGBTQ Music, 1969-2000

“Even today, Newton-John’s about-face serves as a lesson: Sometimes the figures you first dismiss as hopelessly dull can become the most subversive of all.”
― Barry Walters, Mighty Real: A History of LGBTQ Music, 1969-2000

“Moe & Joe’s act isn’t blackface, but gayface, as done from the outside as a joke. Winner of Best Country Video at the American Video Awards, the clip ends with a symbolic gay bashing from fiddler Roy Acuff, who strikes the drag incarnation of Moe & Joe with his bow, forcing them off the Grand Ole Opry stage.”
― Barry Walters, Mighty Real: A History of LGBTQ Music, 1969-2000

“What became known as the New Romantic movement wasn’t a reaction against punk, as many have deemed it. Instead, like punk, it followed Bowie’s lead to present identity as a theatrical construct with which to express oneself, shock others, overcome shyness, escape reality, and redefine gender.”
― Barry Walters, Mighty Real: A History of LGBTQ Music, 1969-2000

“A song has to take on character, shape, body, and influence people to an extent that they use it for their own devices,” Bowie explained. “It must affect them not just as a song, but as a lifestyle.”
― Barry Walters, Mighty Real: A History of LGBTQ Music, 1969-2000

“ABBA’s North American label issued “The Visitors” as a 1982 single, but again, another gay remix service, Hot Tracks, supplied the superior club version.”
― Barry Walters, Mighty Real: A History of LGBTQ Music, 1969-2000

“Formerly Blitz’s cloakroom attendant and briefly a singer with Bow Wow Wow, Boy George pushed androgyny even further than the futurists. With plucked eyebrows, glaring makeup, brightly braided hair, big hats, and baggy smocks, George O’Dowd of Culture Club ventured beyond both drag and gender while suggesting Hasidim. This distinctive result stood on the outside of everything conventional, even ordinary gays. And he wasn’t putting on a costume: George dressed this way offstage and on.”
― Barry Walters, Mighty Real: A History of LGBTQ Music, 1969-2000

“Like Elton’s 1974 hit “The Bitch Is Back,” which set a precedent for the b-word’s popularity in pop but bypasses its usual misogyny (because the singer calls himself a bitch and owns it), Sister George isn’t remotely PC. Its lesbians live cruel, mutually destructive lives, and the song goes even further to suggest—as did many other LGBTQ movies of the era—that if you act on queer passions, you’ll wind up dead.”
― Barry Walters, Mighty Real: A History of LGBTQ Music, 1969-2000

“Their largely extended, club-conscious, and, therefore, more-physical mixes brought the gay experience of disco right into the music itself, which now moved like our bodies on the dancefloor. In a disco remix, string and horn crescendos grow more palatial, boosted bass-guitar runs reverberate even at low volume, and extended drum breaks—disco’s orgasmic release—send dancers into fits of fist-pumping and ass-shaking.”
― Barry Walters, Mighty Real: A History of LGBTQ Music, 1969-2000

“Like Leslie’s similarly beloved mix of Jimmy Ruffin’s “Hold on (To My Love),” Rodriguez’s ABBA transformation only appeared on Disconet, a gay-owned subscription remix service. The ordinary consumer couldn’t walk into a store and buy it; you could only hear it at gay clubs like the Saint, where it remained in weekly rotation for years. This forced a twelve-inch release in the UK of the unchanged LP cut, which preserved the exclusivity of Rodriguez’s revision. ABBA’s”
― Barry Walters, Mighty Real: A History of LGBTQ Music, 1969-2000

“Bean flew back home with nearly thirty thousand dollars in a brown paper bag. This grew MAP into a fifty-person agency serving thousands of AIDS patients, often otherwise neglected, and funded Dignity House, a West Los Angeles AIDS shelter. One Easter, Bean’s patients asked him if they could have a worship service because they didn’t feel comfortable attending their usual churches looking unwell. This led to Bean founding the Unity Fellowship Church, the first expressly for LGBTQ African Americans.”
― Barry Walters, Mighty Real: A History of LGBTQ Music, 1969-2000

“Being venturesomely aspirational broadened the appeal of “Vogue” and its video. Like Nile Rodgers and Diana Ross with “I’m Coming Out,” Pettibone and Madonna took a scene rooted in Black trans experience and rendered its ambitions universally.”
― Barry Walters, Mighty Real: A History of LGBTQ Music, 1969-2000

“Produced by her Danceteria DJ boyfriend Mark Kamins, her 1982 Sire debut single, “Everybody,” aped the sound of Prelude, West End, and other NYC dance labels that pumped out twelve-inch singles flaunting funk hooks, tough vocals, and slithery studio tricks that propelled disco into the ’80s. Madonna wasn’t yet at the level of Prelude peers like former Harlette Sharon Redd, who died of AIDS in 1992, or France Joli, who sang so stirringly that nobody cared she was a white Canuck teen. But neither was Madonna as coarse as Loose Joints’ WBLS-approved “Is It All Over My Face?,” an eruditely crude 1980 West End jam by Arthur Russell, who became an indie demigod decades after he, too, died of AIDS in 1992. The way Madonna careens into “Everybody” lines like “find a groove and let yourself go!” sells her self-written liberation song. Nothing”
― Barry Walters, Mighty Real: A History of LGBTQ Music, 1969-2000

“For the first time in history, a gay club DJ made a pop hit happen—the song even earned a Grammy nod.”
― Barry Walters, Mighty Real: A History of LGBTQ Music, 1969-2000

“Despite flukes like David Cole and Robert Clivillés’s hit 1988 remix of Natalie Cole’s “Pink Cadillac,” a Bruce Springsteen cover, house hadn’t become mainstream in the US the way it was in Europe. Radio—even R&B stations—feared its proximity to disco, a closeness that “Vogue” confirms through horn blasts that Pettibone based off his remix of the Salsoul Orchestra’s “Chicago Bus Stop.” Had Madonna not recorded the greatest dance-craze song since Chic’s “Le Freak,” this wouldn’t have changed.”
― Barry Walters, Mighty Real: A History of LGBTQ Music, 1969-2000

“The following September, Rolling Stone published another prescient Aletti essay, “Discotheque Rock ’72: Paaaaarty!” He wrote that “the hardcore dance crowd—blacks, Latins, gays” now packing dance clubs were already becoming not only “a rapidly spreading social phenomenon” but also “a strong influence on the music people listen to and buy.”
― Barry Walters, Mighty Real: A History of LGBTQ Music, 1969-2000

“That’s why in 1986 I came out in The Village Voice—to properly discuss those very songs. I remember gasping when I saw the photo that accompanied my Please review. It was by Robert Mapplethorpe, which literally illustrated my point: Gay pop acts back then disclosed their sexuality through their music and its presentation, not through press statements. Still, it was huge that Tennant made it official.”
― Barry Walters, Mighty Real: A History of LGBTQ Music, 1969-2000

“I was captivated by the back cover of 1967’s Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, which showed John Lennon with his hands stuffed into the waist of his satin trousers. My mother told me it was bad to touch yourself down there, so I thought John was doing something naughty. I knew I shouldn’t look, but the album’s lyrics were printed right on top of him, even on his crotch, where I really wasn’t supposed to stare. But this was the Beatles. How bad could just looking be? The fact that I fixated on this image yet felt guilty about it was my first clue that I wasn’t like other boys.”
― Barry Walters, Mighty Real: A History of LGBTQ Music, 1969-2000

“When an initially rejected twelve-inch remix by DJ John Luongo of the post-Motown Jacksons’ first self-composed single, “Shake Your Body (Down to the Ground),” was accidentally released in Canada, the group’s most disco cut grew into an international smash that laid the stylistic foundation for Michael’s adult career.”
― Barry Walters, Mighty Real: A History of LGBTQ Music, 1969-2000

“I remember walking down the street, and this guy, very preppy—with the tennis sweater around his neck, probably just coming out—called out to me,” the singer said. “What he said to me on that corner of Santa Monica and La Peer was so real and heartfelt that, when he left, shaking my hand and hugging me, I cried for about two blocks. ‘You don’t know what you did for all those guys and especially for me,’ he said. ‘I can be okay and do things.’ I had to stop and recognize, ‘Carl, this is not just show business. What you’re doing is going to have a profound effect upon the era.”
― Barry Walters, Mighty Real: A History of LGBTQ Music, 1969-2000

“It echoed how glam’s Roxy Music had earlier showcased stunning women on its seductive album covers as an emblem of its frontman Bryan Ferry, who looked like a leading man but moved as a femme fatale. “Freedom!”
― Barry Walters, Mighty Real: A History of LGBTQ Music, 1969-2000

“As announced by “Hand in Glove,” the Smiths honored backsides—a gay-male orientation in the most literal sense—and so did its gay-led US label, Sire, which often improved its North American releases of overseas albums by adding UK singles, such as “This Charming Man” to The Smiths. As”
― Barry Walters, Mighty Real: A History of LGBTQ Music, 1969-2000

“Thanks to Miles Davis’s former guitarist Reggie Lucas, most of Madonna sits between Prelude’s polish and West End’s enthusiasm. Its producer, Lucas, had been creating R&B-flavored club music so graceful and gay-adored—like Stephanie Mills’s 1980 hit “Never Knew Love Like This Before”—that it circumvented radio’s disco backlash. But when Lucas digressed from Madonna’s demos, the singer asked Funhouse DJ John “Jellybean” Benitez to remix several Lucas cuts and to produce from scratch her first pop hit, “Holiday.”
― Barry Walters, Mighty Real: A History of LGBTQ Music, 1969-2000

“For the LP sleeve and promotion of 1978’s Macho Man, other members were assembled, and soon each of the six took on a costume-based persona derived from the blue-collar archetypes made gay in Greenwich Village—Rose the “Indian,” Willis the cop, Alex Briley the G.I., David Hodo the construction worker, Glenn Hughes the biker, and Randy Jones the Marlboro Manly cowboy. Once more, the lyrics scream “gay” without using the word, particularly on “I Am What I Am,” a rousing pride anthem. “To love is not a sin/I did not choose the way I am!” Willis, who is heterosexual, bawls much like Carl Bean. But the title track—the act’s long-lasting pop breakthrough—sends conflicting signals. Straight people can hear it as a straightforward glorification of machismo, whereas gay men know it honors their own performative masculinity—a butch outfit and studly stance to attract sexual attention from other guys.”
― Barry Walters, Mighty Real: A History of LGBTQ Music, 1969-2000

“Over the course of several years, Billboard’s club music charts underwent multiple name changes that downplayed the word “Disco,” starting with its March 27, 1982, issue and ending in its September 19, 1987, issue, when the word dropped out of its “Dance” music chart titles entirely. Therefore, “Disco” in these listings refers to songs that entered Billboard’s Disco chart before March 27, 1982, and “Dance” refers to what followed.”
― Barry Walters, Mighty Real: A History of LGBTQ Music, 1969-2000

“Even Jim’s—a gay joint in my hometown—had nights when instead of Donna Summer’s “Last Dance” signaling closing time, you’d hear Flipper’s festively repellent “Sexbomb.” All this meant that artists who otherwise would’ve been isolated now had platforms on which to counter the far right that would soon become energized by Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher.”
― Barry Walters, Mighty Real: A History of LGBTQ Music, 1969-2000

“Our aim was to bring down Margaret Thatcher by doing covers of ’70s disco classics,” Coles remembers only half-jokingly.”
― Barry Walters, Mighty Real: A History of LGBTQ Music, 1969-2000