Any society that starts by putting itself in contradistinction to an aristocracy is about reinvention. It is about not being what you were told you were.
the embodiment of that redefinition is rock and roll. Birthed by a red neck teenage bus driver and a moneyhead blues brother, one became King, the other the Einstein of music.
I mention this because on worrying on some thoughts about the oddly limited amount of out gay men and women in rock, I wonder if part of the reason is that many people get into rock in order “to be who they say they are”,
No longer are these budding stars, the tormented teen, the nerd, the whey, the fag, the loser, now they are the star” now they are something. And having gone so far into self-invention, in breaking with their past, it may be necessary to break with the limitations of their uni-sexuality. Viz: as Mike Stipe or Elton John put it, they won’t be defined by their sexuality. When Stipe budded himself a pan-sexualists, he was bridling at a “gay rock star Stipes” label: at going from one straight jacket to another.
Essentially, Poly Styrene got it right: it is a question of personal identity. Do we break the mirror when we see the reflection, if we don’t like the reflection we see, if we don’t like who we are defined as, how can we embrace what we are when we want to remake, remodel ourselves into something else?
Being homosexual is, at the very least, a matter of self-awareness, when we are changing the self, how can we when we are saddled by the aware?