Barry Walters > Quotes

“If that can be achieved, anything’s possible. On Motown—the African American musical ambassador to all races—Bean announces that he’s a Black gay man who believes in God. In doing so, he unites secular and religious worlds kept apart via selective misapplications of biblical passages. Even today, church remains the institution in which communities self-segregate the most. Nevertheless, Bean’s version of “I Was Born This Way” became both Motown’s gayest and most gospel hit.”
― Barry Walters, Mighty Real: A History of LGBTQ Music, 1969-2000

“In 1971, Bunny Jones opened, in East Harlem, what Billboard believed was the first major US recording studio owned and operated by a Black woman. As the proprietor of several Harlem hair salons, she wanted to help her gay employees. “I began to feel that gays are more suppressed than Blacks, Chicanos, or other minorities,” she explained. “You hear of great designers or famous hairdressers, and that’s about as far as society will let gays go.”
― Barry Walters, Mighty Real: A History of LGBTQ Music, 1969-2000

“Through its many girl groups and the grace that etiquette instructor Maxine Powell nurtured in Motown’s men and women, classic Motown stresses inclusivity as it projects youthful upward mobility born of faith in both Blackness and femininity. The label polished every element of its disciplined acts, from the meticulousness of their coiffed hair to the mirror shine of their shoes, just short of dulling their edge.”
― 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

“Meanwhile, Robinson’s suave 1975 solo album, A Quiet Storm, helped inspire a new R&B radio format started by a pioneering gay DJ. Originating in 1976 on Howard University’s WHUR, Melvin Lindsey’s late-night show, The Quiet Storm, focused on amorous soul and jazz ballads sometimes sourced from the Washington, DC, jock’s own collection. Lindsey’s support breathed new life into seasoned soul and even older jazz, such as Nancy Wilson’s silky yet stropped “Guess Who I Saw Today” from 1960.”
― 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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“Another surprising thing happened with that album. A risqué disco number, “Love Machine,” was released as the lead single, sold 4.5 million copies internationally, which made it the biggest Miracles single ever, and helped the album go platinum.”
― Barry Walters, Mighty Real: A History of LGBTQ Music, 1969-2000

“I remember the first time I saw Bowie’s name in print, because it was the first time I encountered the word bisexual—I was eleven and just learning what sex was. If this guy with blazing hair and luminous outfits was bisexual, bisexual had to be good.”
― Barry Walters, Mighty Real: A History of LGBTQ Music, 1969-2000

“The mainstream did just that when Labelle caught its eye with the help of Larry LeGaspi, the queer costumer for Kiss, Parliament-Funkadelic, and many others. LeGaspi formulated an Afro-futuristic look for the threesome that mixed feathers, studs, tiny mirrors like those on a disco ball, and synthetic silvery spacesuits.”
― Barry Walters, Mighty Real: A History of LGBTQ Music, 1969-2000

“Mart Crowley used that contrast in his pioneering play and movie about pre-Stonewall self-loathing, The Boys in the Band, by setting a comic-relief dance routine to Martha and the Vandellas’ musically jubilant but lyrically conflicted 1963 hit “Heat Wave,” on which Martha Reeves testifies of love’s burn.”
― Barry Walters, Mighty Real: A History of LGBTQ Music, 1969-2000

“Sometimes a song’s context makes it gay for us via visual cues, the performer’s persona, or the queer spaces where we hear it.”
― Barry Walters, Mighty Real: A History of LGBTQ Music, 1969-2000

“Suffragette City” ranked among the relevant songs spun during fundraising dances held at the Firehouse, the Gay Activists Alliance’s SoHo headquarters in New York City. Even its sleeve advised “TO BE PLAYED AT MAXIMUM VOLUME.”
― Barry Walters, Mighty Real: A History of LGBTQ Music, 1969-2000

“Nyro’s Eli and the Thirteenth Confession features the first recognizably lesbian or gay love song released by a major label in the rock era: “Emmie.”
― Barry Walters, Mighty Real: A History of LGBTQ Music, 1969-2000

“On 1970s daytime TV, intrepidly gay comics like Paul Lynde (who battled alcoholism) or Charles Nelson Reilly (who survived the 1944 Hartford circus fire that killed 167 people) defined what it meant to be recognizably gay, and that meant having a pithy comeback for any innuendo-packed game show question volleyed in their direction.”
― Barry Walters, Mighty Real: A History of LGBTQ Music, 1969-2000

“the queerest band of the British Invasion, I couldn’t get enough of the Beatles. I didn’t have a conventional crush on them, like my sister, who is twelve years older and was the ideal age for a Beatlemaniac. Instead, like many gay kids, I saw in them who I could become: a gender-noncompliant gent who could frolic with other fellows and win worldwide approval.”
― Barry Walters, Mighty Real: A History of LGBTQ Music, 1969-2000

“Unless I’ve identified someone as gay, their inclusion here shouldn’t be considered conclusive evidence of their sexuality: Ambiguity is built into queerness.”
― Barry Walters, Mighty Real: A History of LGBTQ Music, 1969-2000

“Griffin’s colorful observations of his new home inspired the album’s concept, including his likely false impression that fully half of his acquaintances there were just like us. So he wrote about his new friends in one of the most literal and merry LGBTQ-themed songs of its era, “Ain’t Nobody Straight in L.A.” Chockablock with cha-cha rhythms, Spanish guitars, bilingual lyrics, and flutes, it’s unmissably Latino and gay—like a penis-shaped piñata filled with rainbow glitter exploding over the group. While Griffin chirps flabbergasting lines like “homosexuality is a part of society” and “bisexuals on a loving spree” in a Smokey-like falsetto, the arrangement’s extravagance conveys queer culture’s lack of inhibition.”
― Barry Walters, Mighty Real: A History of LGBTQ Music, 1969-2000

“Soon to become one of the decade’s most televised groups, the Supremes gave suffering a dignified dance beat and trancelike simplicity while focusing on the elation of having loved, not the heartache of being dumped. That’s the Motown way: rising above the pain that makes pleasure more satisfying.”
― Barry Walters, Mighty Real: A History of LGBTQ Music, 1969-2000

“exhilaration to loneliness. “Planet Earth is blue/And there’s nothing I can do,” he sang. Even as a child, I struggled to accept things as they were. I didn’t know I was gay, just “special.” That isolated me in ways typical of my LGBTQ generation. So before I could name what I was, Bowie represented it.”
― Barry Walters, Mighty Real: A History of LGBTQ Music, 1969-2000

“Disco’s earliest platinum album, 1974’s Nightbirds, proved how big a record could get if overlapping LGBTQ and Black audiences got behind it. Labelle’s ferocity finds flattering compliment in producer Allen Toussaint’s New Orleans funk, which grounds Hendryx’s inclusive rock ’n’ soul as the Meters’ propulsive accompaniment sprinkles gumbo spice in disco’s melting pot.”
― Barry Walters, Mighty Real: A History of LGBTQ Music, 1969-2000

“To get around this, LGBTQ musicians have made an art out of saying what can’t overtly be said, just as LGBTQ listeners have learned to hear what others can’t.”
― Barry Walters, Mighty Real: A History of LGBTQ Music, 1969-2000

“The closet and disclosure aren’t binary. Neither are heterosexuality and homosexuality.”
― Barry Walters, Mighty Real: A History of LGBTQ Music, 1969-2000

“Remarkably, Midler and some of her musicians got their breaks in a bathhouse designed to give men a safe space for spontaneous trysts. Opened in 1968 by bisexual entrepreneur Steve Ostrow, the Continental Baths—a sex club in the basement of the Ansonia, a residential hotel on Manhattan’s Upper West Side—facilitated gay liberation in New York by making it far easier to have man-on-man intercourse. Bathhouses, like the Continental and the Everard Baths, offered refuge from the condemning eyes of the outside world as well as an immersive, nonstop sensual experience in which physical pleasures could overlap endlessly, like one record segued into another through a seamless DJ mix. Bathhouses were like discos of the flesh—often sordid, but still oases.”
― Barry Walters, Mighty Real: A History of LGBTQ Music, 1969-2000

“The Dynamic Superiors also specialized in plush harmonies and prominent falsetto vocals. The difference was that Tony Washington, the leader of this Washington, DC, quintet, was unquestionably gay.”
― Barry Walters, Mighty Real: A History of LGBTQ Music, 1969-2000

“Following the Kinks’ chaotic 1965 US tour—during which Ray punched, in the face, an official from the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists who called the group “fairies”—the American Federation of Musicians refused the band permits at the peak of its popularity.”
― Barry Walters, Mighty Real: A History of LGBTQ Music, 1969-2000