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Little Richard, Holly Johnson and Frank Ocean.
Pioneers … Little Richard, Holly Johnson of Frankie Goes to Hollywood and Frank Ocean. Composite: Redferns/Getty
Pioneers … Little Richard, Holly Johnson of Frankie Goes to Hollywood and Frank Ocean. Composite: Redferns/Getty

The industry closet: queer pop from Little Richard to Frank Ocean

This article is more than 7 years old

Gay and bisexual singers have pushed for progress since the 1920s. Has the tide finally turned, or do commercial pressures still persuade artists to pander to straight audiences?

There’s a moment in Frank Ocean’s music video for Nikes where it’s clear the naked flesh on display is female; breasts and buttocks proliferate in closeup, while the shots of male torsos are mostly fleeting, bathed in shadow.

In a sense, this mirrors Ocean’s public persona. Before the world heard his 2012 debut, Channel Orange, and the three songs on it featuring a man as the love interest, an unexpected Tumblr post explained that his first true love was male, not female. His statement didn’t state explicitly that he was gay (though the lines, “My mind would wander back to the women I had been with. The ones I cared for and thought I was in love with,” suggested as much). His new album, Blonde, meanwhile, has just the one song – Good Guy, about a failed hook-up in a gay bar – that uses the male pronoun. If Ocean is a perfect poster boy for the gender-fluid era, his videos suggest a commercial need to provide images that straight audiences can relate to.

Last summer, Years & Years frontman Olly Alexander pondered the same subject when promoting the trio’s album Communion. “I’d like to hear a gay artist express their sexuality in a really open way,” he said. “That’s something I’ve sort of tried to do a little bit on this album, but to be able to talk about sex is possibly new for gay artists, so I’d like to see that in the mainstream.” If anyone has the chance, it’s Alexander. But that “little bit” amounted to male pronouns in just two songs, something that Alexander called “a small triumph”. Why not go for the bigger triumph, over a whole album? Would his fanbase be only one in 10 – the traditionally quoted ratio of queer to straight – if he did?

In any case, talking about sex is hardly new for gay artists. They were doing the dirty in song almost 100 years ago, in 1920s Harlem, when blues singers such as Ma Rainey and Bessie Smith sang about same-sex affairs. Even gay men, less documented than the women, took advantage of a brief new social permissiveness following the first world war – George Hannah wrote and sang Freakish Man Blues in 1930. Away from the blues, there was the first gay pride anthem in 1920, Das Lila Lied (aka The Lavender Song), written by Berlin-based duo Spoliansky and Schwabach, through to the stars of the so-called Pansy Craze, popular in New York from 1930. From this came Gene – sometimes spelled Jean – Malin, whose 78rpm single I’d Rather Be Spanish Than Mannish predated Noël Coward’s none-more-camp delivery and innuendo. But the Pansy Craze was quickly snuffed out when 1929’s economic crash snowballed into the Great Depression, unleashing a new wave of religious bigotry and social repression.

Musician Little Richard peers out of a curtain circa 1957. Photograph: Michael Ochs Archives/ Getty Images

It’s said that the 20th century’s two most liberal decades were the 20s and the 70s; in between, McCarthyism unleashed a fresh era of homophobia, and the British establishment fought just as hard to discourage social tolerance and progress. If only Little Richard’s original lyric to Tutti Frutti – “Tutti Frutti, good booty / If it don’t fit, don’t force it / You can grease it, make it easy” – wasn’t censored by his producer, Britain would have enjoyed a top 30 ode to anal sex some 30 years before Frankie Goes to Hollywood’s Relax. Given it wasn’t until the Sexual Offences Act of 1967 that homosexuality – only for those aged over 21, and only in England and Wales – was decriminalised, and that the gay liberation movement didn’t get going until after the Stonewall riots of 1969, it’s not surprising that singers, actors or musicians didn’t want to advertise their same-sex feelings.

Yet even post-Stonewall, the decades of shame and secrecy were only effectively counteracted by David Bowie, a married father. Still, a few Bowie songs (The Width of a Circle; Queen Bitch; John, I’m Only Dancing) had gay subplots with male pronouns. The British singer who came out first (in the London Evening Standard in 1970), Dusty Springfield, never sang about her love for a woman in her closeted lifetime. Uncompromising gay singers such as Michael Cohen, who mined the pained confessional style of James Taylor, sold pitifully few records. Gay men sought disco, in a celebratory mood, rather than remind themselves of the closet they’d only recently vacated. Even then, gay men preferred female divas to express their feelings.

Finally, the Tom Robinson Band’s (Sing if You’re) Glad to be Gay was a top 20 hit in 1978. Though queer trailblazers Marc Almond and Boy George initially hesitated to say they were gay, and avoided male pronouns, Frankie’s Relax – the video’s leather-bar orgy was a first – and Bronski Beat’s Smalltown Boy – the video’s portrait of cruising and homophobia were firsts, too – were landmarks, gay lib in full flow.

However, this wave was almost immediately curtailed not by economics, but by a virus. As Aids cut a swath through the gay community, the Beastie Boys and Guns N’Roses ramped up the homophobia across several zillion-selling albums. If Aids hadn’t existed, we might have unleashed a horde of queer mainstream pop stars – though the irony was, Aids also helped the cause, by humanising the gay community, and unleashed declarations of support from mainstream straight performers. The likes of KD Lang, Melissa Etheridge and finally Michael Stipe came out, and the musical closet started emptying fast.

Come 2016, Will Young, Beth Ditto, Adam Lambert and Sam Smith, alongside Olly Alexander, are mainstream pop stars whose interviews, and sometimes their music videos, are unequivocal. Miley Cyrus has widely promoted polysexuality and support for transgender rights, and even hip-hop had shifted, with rappers such as Young Thug promoting androgyny, and queer rapper Mykki Blanco pushing himself toward the front, while trans hero – and reality TV star – Big Freedia featured in Beyoncé’s Formation video. If Eminem came out with yet another homophobic slight, the public reaction would now be more critical than tolerant.

Let’s not forget John Grant, the most male-pronoun-wielding singer of all, who recently sold out London’s Royal Albert Hall. Rostam Batmanglij, formerly of the chart-topping Vampire Weekend, is equally out. Country music, another traditionally homophobic genre, has numerous popular gay and lesbian artists working out of Nashville, from Brandy Clark to Shane McAnally. Following on from heavy metal kingpin Rob Halford, even death metal and grindcore have their openly queer figureheads. Of course I would be glad if Frank Ocean and Olly Alexander’s – and Sam Smith’s – next batch of songs focused on the “he” and not “you”, but perhaps actions speak louder than words. In other words, the love that dare not speak its name, as Oscar Wilde phrased it, doesn’t have to sing to make itself heard.

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