The
folks over at Blender.com decided to join the festivities by posting
what they feel are the gayest moments in music. Here’s their list!
t.A.T.u Leads Mass Make-Out Session
In
2001, Russian ad exec Ivan Shapovalov noticed an untapped musical
niche: underage girls who pretend they’re gay and the men who love
them! So he created t.A.T.u, a hottie duo who completed every song by
eating each other’s face off. For the 2003 MTV Movie Awards, Julia
Volkova, 17, and Lena Katina, 18, performed "All the Things She Said"
with an army of paired-off horny babes who, on cue, played
tongue-hockey for the cameras. Cynical, yet titillating!
Scissor Sisters Make Gay Concept Album
Released
in July 2004, Scissor Sisters’ jubilant self-titled debut is a Sgt.
Pepper’s Homo Arts Club Band set in the queerest New York. The songs
concern gay sex, gay drugs and getting mom drunk so you can tell her
you’re gay. Jake Shears rhymes "hit of acid" with "your moneymaker’s
flaccid" and announces "I left my heart in San Francisco/It’s in some
motherfuckin’ disco." For those slow on the gay uptake, the sleeve
reprises the poster for the Judy Garland movie The Wizard of Oz.
Madonna Preys on the Young
Some
girls only do it for the attention, as evidenced by the 2003 VMAs, a
ceremony that will be remembered exclusively for the choreographed
lip-lock between cross-dressing "groom" Madonna and her snow-white
"brides" Britney Spears and Christina Aguilera. The producer’s
career-threatening decision to cut away and capture ex-Britney boy toy
Justin Timberlake’s stone-faced reaction, left poor Aguilera with half
the face time and a fraction of the press. To be fair, Britney did seem
to put a bit more enthusiasm into it.
The RuPaul Show Premieres on VH1
On
Oct. 12, 1996, Saturday night TV took a definitive turn for the queer
when everyone’s favorite singing drag queen, RuPaul Charles-nearly
seven feet tall in heels-debuted her, er, his weekly late-night talk
show with fellow plus-size cross-dresser Dennis Rodman as guest. The
ab-fab gabfest remained on the air for over 100 episodes, officially
bringing trannies into the mainstream. "If the show makes money,"
RuPaul said, "they don’t care what you’re wearing."
Little Richard Writes Two "Tutti Frutti's"
The
song originally went "Tutti Frutti, good booty/If it don’t fit, don’t
force it/You can grease it, make it easy." But with 15 minutes left in
a 1955 recording session, songwriter Dorothy LaBostrie was brought in
to sanitize and hetero-fy the lyrics. Though he outed himself as an
"old homosexual" in 1979, Little Richard now insists his flamboyance
was a ploy. "I had to be Alice or white folks wouldn’t let me play
their clubs," he said. "Girls fell in love with me anyway."
Pet Shop Boys Pay the Rent
From
the Pet Shop Boys’ 1987 album Actually, "Rent"-a tale of a boy and his
sugar daddy-snuck the notion of male prostitution onto the radio ("I
love you, you pay my rent"). A Top 10 hit in Britain, the allusions in
"Rent" were too purple for U.S. release. "People always thought it was
about that rent-boy arrangement," singer Neil Tennant said. "But in my
head it’s about a politician’s mistress." To compound the "definitely
not gayness", they later recorded it with Liza Minnelli.
Franz Ferdinand Lust After "Michael"
Ask
anyone who’s seen ’70s heavy-leather footage: Gay dudes know how to get
down. These Scottish fops clearly got the memo, tapping gay discos for
inspiration on their horn-dog single "Michael." "You’re the boy with
all the leather hips," Alex Kapranos moans. "Sticky hair, sticky hips,
stubble on my sticky lips." It’s a glitter-bomb smuggled inside a sleek
new-wave Trojan horse. So, is there more than skinny ties and stovepipe
pants in Kapranos’s closet? "It’s called an imagination," he tells
Blender.
Boy George Finds His Muse
When
transvestite Boy George enlisted drummer Jon Moss into Culture Club, he
found more than a collaborator: He got a lover and a muse, too! Moss
inspired George’s "lovey-dovey songs," including the breakthrough 1983
hit "Do You really Want to Hurt Me" Their affair, however, was a
disaster. Moss was, for all intents and purposes, straight; and they
had vicious, often violent, fights. "Our love," George later said,
"however diseased, was the creative force behind Culture Club."
Cher Makes the Gay-est Video Ever!
The
1989 video for "If I Could Turn Back Time" looked like something
dreamed up by a committee of aging gym bunnies: Cher sings, straddling
a vast cannon, surrounded by eager young sailors in full naval whites,
wearing an outfit that exposes her tattooed ass. A horrified MTV
refused to show it before 9 P.M. Cher recently claimed to be baffled by
how she became a gay icon; maybe she also thinks we’ll believe that’s
her real hair, too.
Village People Create a Classic
Blender saved a classic for last. According to their website: Y.M.C.A."
is a cute, clean song about a dirty subject. A NO. 2 pop giant in 1978,
it’s been played at millions of ball games, thousands of bar mitzvahs,
and sung in public by Secretary of State Colin Powell. Which is pretty
odd and unexpected history for a song about men showering together.
OK,
nothing in the song is expressly gay. But in the ’70s, long before Will
& Grace aired on prime-time TV, sex songs were written in code:
"Afternoon Delight," which is as filthy as any Prince track, sounded
like a soap commercial. So when the Village People directed a confused
"young man" to a private place where "you can have a good time" and
"hang out with all the boys" the subtext was clear: buggery.
Jacques
Morali, the bossy, insecure French producer who devised the idea of a
costumed group of macho archetypes, noticed a YMCA in the Chelsea area
of New York and asked the band, in broken English, "What is YMCA?"
Morali was gay, and the songs he wrote for the Village People coyly
refer to Fire Island, San Francisco and other elements of queer
culture. With their muscles, mustaches and leather pants, the Village
People were the gayest act American had ever seen until B2K. And
"Y.M.C.A.," written in 20 minutes, was even more cartoonishly exuberant
("There’s no need!/To!/Be!/Unhappy!") than other disco hits of the era.
If this traffic cop pulled you over, you really might not mind.
A
few months after its release, American Bandstand host Dick Clark booked
the Village People on a TV variety show he hosted. "The YMCA people
called and threatened to sue us if we played the song," Clark tells
Blender. "They were very, very uptight about it."
"The Y
wasn’t sure what it thought about the song," Ken Gladish, national
executive director of the YMCA of the U.S.A., admits. "There was a lot
of controversy."
The Young Men’s Christian Association was
founded in 1844 by religious leaders to isolate men from female
temptation and encourage Bible study. Over the years, ironically, the
male-only enclaves became known as safe meeting places for closeted
gays.
One Y pamphlet from 1909 warned against the presence of "lisping" men.
In
1964, President Lyndon Johnson’s chief of staff was arrested for having
sex with a man in the restroom of a Y two blocks from the White House.
Today,
the Y no longer objects to the song, and plays it at official Y events.
(Gladish even admits to having done the "Y.M.C.A." dance. "Come on, are
you kidding?") Whether through repetition or the mainstreaming of gay
culture, the song seems to have lost its power to shock.
"It’s
a party staple," says Eric Culter, president of M&M Entertainment
in Boca Raton, Florida, which produces 150 bar mitzvahs and corporate
events a year. "Eighty percent of the parties have to have it. It’s a
song everybody can dance to."
At banquet halls across America,
Aunt Sylvia and Grandpa Barney dance happily to a song about men
meeting men in secret. The song has nearly become a national anthem -
like the "Star Spangled Banner," but with real spangles. Colin Powell
once sang a revised version of the song Indonesia, ("President Bush, he
said to me, ’Colin, I need you to run the Department of State’") at the
ASEAN Forum, an annual security meeting for foreign ministers. Though
the event was off-limits to reporters, a videotape appeared on CNN -
like 50 cent, Powell had been bootlegged.
When Blender asked
if the secretary of state is a big Village People fan, a spokesman
sighed uncomfortably and said, "This is not something that should have
been made public." It was good to see that Jacques Morali’s gaytastic
march could still make someone uncomfortable.
