Factually! with Adam Conover - The Unsung Queer History of Pop Music with Barry Walters

Episode Date: August 12, 2026

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This is a headgum podcast. Hey there, welcome to Faxley. I'm Adam Kanover. Thank you so much for joining me on the show again. You know, queer people have always been with us, have always been a part of human society, and queer culture has always been a part of culture, and has always influenced the rest of culture, right?

I'll give you an example of this. Just last week, I watched The Matrix, one of my favorite movies ever. And when you watch that movie with 2026 eyes, it is so obviously a queer movie made by you. two trans women about the experience of being trans. There are scenes set in a gay dance club. The main characters are literally wearing sort of like kink-influenced outfits.

And yet, even though this movie was so influential on almost every action movie that came after it, on pop culture in every way, so few people, when they watched it the first time, clocked it as being related to queerness at all. So queer culture has profoundly influenced the rest of society. Now, nowhere more powerfully, actually, than in popular music. Now, today, queer artists and themes are central to pop music. Queerness is cool, and many queer artists are out and proud. But the state the obvious, that has not always been the case.

Because even though, again, gay, LGBTQ artists have always been with us, and queer themes have always been a part of our music and essential to its history. Well, today on the show, we're going to do our little bit to reverse. that trend and talk about the profoundly queer history of pop music in America. My guest today has written a fantastic new book that centers and celebrates the LGBTQ influences on music unlike any before it and has found gay and queer stories in places that most people don't expect to find them. Now, before we get to that interview, I want to remind you that if you want to support this show,

head to patreon.com slash Adam Conover to support all the conversations. We bring you week in, week out. You can join our online community, and you get every episode of the show ad-free, five bucks a month, patreon.com. slash Adam Conover. And now let's welcome today's guest. He's a longtime music writer and critic. His name is Barry Walters, and his new book is Mighty Real, a history of LGBTQ music, 1969 through 2000. I really love talking to Barry.

The stories he tells are incredible. The book is fascinating. I know you're going to love it. Let's get to this interview with Barry Walters. Barry, thank you so much for being on the show. It's great to be here, Adam. Well, this topic is very close to my heart. I love music.

I love queer culture. I know that they have been, there's such an important history of them together, but why has that story not been told sufficiently yet? Well, I guess it was, people have been asking me to write this book for decades. and the circumstances weren't right until a while back. And I started nine years ago, believe it or not.

Wow. And it finally came out this May. And in a nutshell, like, you know, how essential has the LGBT community been to popular music? Well, previous interviewers have said to me, is there any music that LGBT culture hasn't touched or is there actual straight music?

And then we went down a rabbit hole of trying to come up with the straightest music I could think of like Jimmy Buffett or whatever. I don't know, Jimmy Buffett wore some loud shirts, man. I feel like somewhere along the line there must have been some influence there. I hope not.

But anyway, I think it would be sort of sad a world without Elton John or David Bowie or people who clearly drew from queer culture like Prince and Madonna. You know, the list goes on and on. Yeah, and those are some examples that I think a lot of us know or a little more prominent in pop culture, especially over the last couple decades. But what are some of the more surprising? examples of how LGBTQ culture has influenced popular music or some of the earlier ones?

A lot of people by now might know that disco really originated in gay clubs because back in this, when Stonewall happened, the Stonewall riots, that happened on one of the few places where men could dance with men and gals could dance with gals. Or I should say, boys because the drinking age in New York City and New York State was 18 years old. And the cops would regularly arrest kids just for doing that, just for dancing. And things had to be, that law had to be thrown out. It finally was thrown out around late 1971. and disco really happened as a result of that.

Kids wanted to have, because rock music went through a period where people were sitting in lotus positions listening to it and dropping acid, right? That's sort of the hippie cliche. And dance music had to happen to give these kids something to dance to. So that's one thing you probably know.

And of course, David Bowie was very much inspired by what was going on in New York with Warhol and the Velvet Underground and the Warhol superstars. Many of them were trans people. And so the whole glam thing was really an. answer to that, the glitter rock and whatever. So a lot of things happened right in direct relationship to the feeling like gay people, we can't stay in the closet anymore. We've got to, like, come out and show our numbers. And some of that was just through dancing.

So dancing was an expression of coming out, because it's an exuberant thing to do to dance. It's to be, you're putting yourself on display when you dance. You're certainly not hiding anything. Right. Well, yeah. And the fact that they could finally do it legally was a cause for celebration. And also just dancing, I think, coming together and feeling like you're in a room with people of your own kind or either people who are sympathetic to you, who aren't going to

taught you, you're in a safe space, and the music is incredible. Back then, as is now, I think, still, the best clubs were gay clubs, and straight folks wanted to get into the gay clubs. And that's another way how just go kind of spread, because the straight clubs were, you know, the music was not, We had the best DJs. We made it so that we could feel free. And the whole world wanted a part of that. Wanted a part of that freedom. But I also know, look, when I was growing up

or becoming conscious in the 90s, when disco was mentioned, it was mentioned as A, a flash in the pants, something that was very brief. And B, as disco sucks, right, as a motto. And it wasn't until decades later that I realized, A, it was a lot more influential than that, but that B, that that was a homophobic response to an extent, wasn't it? Oh, for sure. A lot of it was caused by drive time shock DJs whose jobs were usurpeded by disco people who, knew the right records to play.

A lot of rock stations became disco stations at the height of Saturday night fever. And so a lot of rock people were displaced and also top 40 radio resented the fact that someone

else was telling them what the hot records were. Because before that the only records that sold were the records that were played on the radio. And with disco, that was another way for people to hear music directly without, like, you know, it wasn't mediated by a radio station or a TV station. It was a direct, and also a bad record.

if you played a bad record that people couldn't dance to, they would leave the floor. So there was built-in quality control and built-in community to that scene. And really, as soon as disco was considered passe, then Michael Jackson's career took off, Madonna's career took off, Prince's career took off, Duran Duran and all the whole new wave and synth pop thing, all that happened. So there was no time when people weren't dancing. It just was called different things. And I think the gay connection to it was somewhat lost for some people. They didn't realize unless they'd been to an actual Prince concert how queer the

presentation was. The fact that there was an actual lesbian couple in Prince's hottest, most popular band, The Revolution, who of course played on Purple Rain and appeared in the movie. So, you know, a lot of stuff. And it's the same thing happens to black culture, right? that something originates among a minority. The minority is the only one who is the only set of people who are making it, developing it. And then, you know, the white suburban kids come along and make it theirs. And then things move on to something else. And that happened with disco.

It just, you know, became named other things. And just to say on disco for one second, like, because again, it's a period that was a little bit before my time and that had sort of been purposefully buried a little bit in popular culture. Right. That's right. It's important. Have been driven underground. So, you know, when you say disco, I can imagine the type of music that you mean. But what was like the dividing line? Like, what was, you know, what exactly did the disco moment originate? Was it the idea of playing records for people to dance to? Is that like the sort of Big Bang moment? Well, there were disc attacks in the 60s,

but I think the Big Bang, where discothex became discos, was when DJs learned how to beat mix. And that really originated in the gay clubs too, where DJs were making continuous, streams of music matching the beats so that people would not have to be waiting around for the next record, right? Because that was typically what happened before, when discotects were happening before disco. So it was part of it, part of it was a technological, um, Well, the fact that there were two turntables in disc attacks, but it took the DJs to figure out how to make this music continuous, how to manipulate the records so that they could make it, you know, something where the energy would just build and build and build through the night and then, you know, maybe come down back again and build up again and come back again.

as opposed to just playing, oh, well, this record sounds good, or, oh, I'll take a request. No, that did not really happen in the disco world. And then we now, I mean, that continuous music thing, of course, techno and Dobstap and whatever you want to call, music that's played at raves and at stadiums, that's still with us today. Yeah, and that beat matching is the foundational technique of what we now call DJing, right?

Which is a huge part, like is a technique that transcends genre. So for that to be invented in queer spaces is really surprising. But then also, I find it fascinating that, you know, the backlash to disco was from rock music. And yet, even hard rock music has so much queer culture embedded within it. I think of, you know, you mentioned Andy Warhol. I think of the Velvet Underground. And I only learned about 10 years ago, after loving the Velvet Underground my whole life,

that Lou Reed was a queer man as well. I don't know how Audi was his entire life, right? But was he not? Right. Well, yes, he was working at a gay club out on Long Island while he was in high school. Now, at a time when, you could be arrested for going to a place like that.

So that's not a choice that a straight kid would make in Long Island in the 60s. He was, Lou Reed underwent shock therapy to shock the gayness out of him. Wow. And that is how he sees it. Some of his family, of course, you know, sees it other ways. but this is, he's alluded to that in his music. So, yeah, kill your sons. That's a Lou Reed song in which he discusses, you know,

killing their souls and essentially shocking the gay right out of them. And that was typical. I mean, it's hard to understand that this happened within my lifetime, but gay people, when they used to be sent off to insane asylums. Yes. What was then called a sane asylums and just drugged up and some of them even faced lobotomies.

There's a song on White Light, White Heat by the Velvet Underground called Lady Godiva's Operation. And that's really about a lobotomy on a trans person. So that's how serious he was being. But because a lot of straight people

love the Velvet Underground, they sort of took on fandom of that music without really knowing what it's about. In Sister Ray, it's essentially an orgy with trans

people at the center. Trans people and drugs shooting heroin and blowjobs going on. Right, there's a lot of, suck it out, my ding-dong comes up a lot in the Sister Ray, you know, 20-minute noise solo. That line re-emerges again and again. And I think that's really fascinating, again, because this is a, I don't know that we think of that kind of music as prototypically straight, but, you know, it's guitar rock, right? it's like proto-punk. Like this is not, if people were listing,

if you're asked the average person, hey, list which artists or which parts of rock music were more queer than others, that might not be one of the ones that they would list, right? Or the strain that came out of the Velvet Underground. Yet there it is, right, at the Big Bang moment.

Right, yes. And David Bowie was super inspired by the Velvet Underground. Yes. And so many people. We could do an entire segment just based on the queerness of the Velvet Underground. Yeah. Yeah, and like the song, I'll Be Your Mirror, that's about someone saying to someone, like, gay people had to be, we had to put their noses down and try to be invisible.

And Nico's singing, you know, look at me and because I can see you. And she's letting the side of Lou Reed who felt like he was being told by doctors, by his family, by his community, that he was subhuman. She's saying, I see you and I love you. That's the message of that song. And it's really targeted to gay people. Another anthem of the time would be all the young dudes by Motha Hoopal that David Bowie wrote for them and gave to them to prevent this band who he thought was good from breaking up. And that song was a big hit in England and it saved their careers.

And really, it's all the young dudes. You couldn't say all the young gay guys, because that wouldn't be played on the radio. But all the young dudes, yeah, the dudes are gay. The dudes love other dudes. And Bowie, like a lot of those early albums, Hunky Dory, Ziggy Stardust, Diamond Dogs. He's playing with language and playing with gender to bypass the censors just like gay people had to figure out ways of talking to each other and bypassing the people who would, you know, smash them to bits. Right. Or arrest them.

On Rebel Rebel, you know, there's a line about your mom's not sure if you're a boy or a girl. there, your hair's all right. That's almost certainly a gay person or a trans person at the center of that song. Ladies Stardust, he uses masculine nouns, but it's a lady. So what's going on there? Right. It's meant to, you know, it's meant to flip things because that's what we had to do. and he's really being authentic to gay culture playing it that way. You know, when we think about the 80s and, you know, Bowie, Prince, etc., I think of this as a time where androgyny in popular music was, that's what we often call it, right?

Yeah. Was a little bit more accepted, a little bit more out in the open, you know, there are even jokes about this. I remember, like, you know, the movie The Wedding Singer from the late 90s, making fun of like the boy George era, right, as being this sort of moment where there was, there was a lot more overt effeminacy. Was, did this come in waves like moments at which, you know, the queerness was a little bit more out in the open versus a little bit more in the closet or, or yeah, I'm curious.

Waves in different manifestations because the whole MTV era with with culture club and board, George and Madonna and Prince, all those people. They were the people, especially the English groups who dominated MTV's in its formulative years. They were the people that grew up on Bowie. Those were the Brits who saw Bowie on top of the pops being, you know, like putting his arm very suggestively around his guitar. McRonson, who is also extraordinarily beautiful, also very and very androgynous and point at the camera like, you know, I want you or this could be you, right? And a whole nation had to decide was this cool

or was this disgusting. And you know, there was a generational divide largely, but But the generation, I mean, Bowie became the biggest selling artist of 1973 in England in the wake of these appearances. So the kids were with it. And there were a whole slew of glam acts or groups that weren't all that effeminate or androgynous or however you want to put it that they put on the sequence and the glimax. and the glitter and the makeup. And so Culture Club, Duran Duran Spanda Ballet.

All them were very ins, I feel like that was the Bowie generation. Because they're my generation. All those people are more or less my age. We grew up on

that stuff. And so and also because of disco, disco made it possible for out gay people to be in the music industry. Because like in the 60s, it was typical for a record company to hire what they called a house hippie

who would sort of school the squares, right, on what was hip and what was not hip so they could, you know, sell truckloads of records to the cool kids. Well, during the disco era, there was what they called

homo promo, where they had to hire the gay promotion men because the straight guys were not going to go into the gay clubs. They were not going to know who the right DJs are. They're not going to know

who to remix the records. So, they had to hire the gay kids in order to show them what were the happening disco trends and the happening disco artists. And that carried over into the whole MTV era. Because, you know, gay people, when we do get the spotlight, we do want to put our best side forward. and, you know, we're sort of waiting for that time where someone's going to shine a light on us. And so the kids who grew up with Bowie, they knew how to present themselves. They knew how to make good videos. They knew how to be stars.

And then that fell out of fashion a bit in the 90s with the grunge era. and a lot of frankly a lot of the people who were hired in the record companies to do the homo promo or whatever they died they died of AIDS because there was no cure for HIV it was for many years it was pretty much a death sentence but right at that point that is when the women stepped in and there were people like Katie Lang, Melissa Etheridge, Tracy Chapman. And so there was the queer presence in popular music shifted to women. And straight women benefited from this. The whole Lilith Fair experience, that was a mirror of what happened at these festivals.

The women's music, women's music festival was the really the biggest one. And that's where there was no one. You could, a straight woman could enter, but guys could not. It was only for women. And Lilith Fair, of course, was for guys and gals. but, you know, the women knew that this was specifically for them. Yeah. I never thought of the rise of sort of female queer music or lesbian music in the 80s and 90s

was a result of the AIDS epidemic in any way. Is there really a chronological connection there? Well, I mean, AIDS more or less started. The first article about AIDS in the New York Times was dated 1981. And they didn't even have really a name for it at first. And it went through some different changes. And the epidemic, it just grew and grew. It wasn't until the mid-90s when the doctors figured out,

well, if you take this pill with this pill, and, you know, do this and this, then it will combat AIDS. And you can live with HIV because there were some long-term survivors and some of my friends who were infected in the 80s are still around. But many did not survive. It's not, I wouldn't say that the suit said, hey, the gay guys are dying, we better get the gay women in here. But I think that, you know, what was happening in the underground with the women's music festivals, that eventually had to bubble up because that's always what happens in popular culture. things that are vital and exciting and people are motivated to see that ends up, you know, the kids, the suburban kids, everyone ends up listening to it.

But it was really all those people that I mentioned, maybe not Kitty Lang, but Melissa Etheridge and Tracy Chapman, they played those women's music festivals. first. And there's a great story I tell in my Melissa Etheridge chapter where Chris Blackwell of Island Records, he established Iron Island Records and he signed Bob Marley and produced the B-52s and a whole wealth of people. He was one of the heads of a record company who led by, like, he was culturally motivated. He was artistically motivated. When he saw Melissa Etheridge audition, it was at a lesbian club. And she recorded her first album. And he knew that it sounded, it didn't sound right. It wasn't, it wasn't, it was so compromised. it had no life in it.

And so he told her, I want the girl in the t-shirt and the jeans and the leather jacket. That was sort of his way of saying, I want the authentic lesbian to make this record. And she did. She did. And that record was something that gradually sold millions of copies. And, you know, she learned how to,

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Visit Cash.com slash legal slash podcast for full disclosures. We've been talking about the 80s quite a lot and deservedly so, but I want to go back a little bit earlier. Your book starts in 1969, is that right? What's the first artist who you cover in the book? It's the Velvet Underground. It is the Velvet Underground. I was thinking of last year, maybe two years ago,

I watched, there's a documentary about Little Richard that came out, about how he was, you know, one of the very first rock musicians and was a queer man. And it made me think about the sort of breadth of this story. and how important queer culture has been, even in times where, you know, we think of, oh, that didn't really exist yet or people weren't out yet or et cetera.

Right. And one of the things that it makes me wonder is, you know, a lot of times we go back and we look at those older artists and we say, oh, that was obviously a queer artist. It's so funny that people didn't really know, or that the mainstream public didn't really know. But when you describe,

you tell that story about Melissa Etheridge, or you tell that story about homo promo, it makes me think, well, hold on a second. Was it the case often that people really did know what they were seeing? That's right. But it was just, you know, they didn't quite say it, right? Oh, there's something a little different about this,

and I like that about it. And maybe they still have some discriminatory attitudes. But aesthetically, you know, they'll accept it more in their artists than they might in their friend or neighbor or loved one. Does that make sense? Yes. Well, I think a lot of, I talk about interpretation a lot in the book because gay people had to learn how to speak in code, really, and perform in code so that the right people knew that this was coming from queer culture, but our oppressors did not.

And that really, well, I intended to start the book at the beginning of recorded music. And then I realized that that was not something I could pull off in one, even in a large book like mine, I just couldn't do it. So I decided to start with 69 with the Stonewall Revolution, the Stonewall Revolution, the Stonewall. while Rebellion and the riots. But I do reference people like Little Richard. I mean, the original lyrics

to Tootie Frutie, which is considered one of the first real starting points of rock and roll, the original lyrics were very clearly about anal sex.

And the record company got someone else to come in and write lyrics. But the lyrics that are on the record, they're pretty nonsensical. But even the title

Tudy-Fruity, I mean, if you want to think about it, yeah, it's, yeah. I mean, Fruity is in the title of the song. That's right. And Little Richard was so intense. People did not know what

to call that. They didn't know what to, you know, what kind of name to put on that. And I'm sure there was a lot of racism, there was a lot of homophobia. And really, Pat Boone came in

and re-recorded that song and toned it down. And that sort of that story is sort of what happens with not just black culture, because we know it happens all the time. But white culture, I mean, straight culture as well.

Yes. It takes something that's really wild and gay and rebellious and tones it down for the general public. But, you know, the people like boy George, culture club was played on, oh, they were played on all the adult contemporary stations. And you still hear culture club songs at the dentist's office, right? Right. Well, a lot of those songs were about Boy George's relationship with his drummer, and he kept that secret. But if you now know that, I mean, even do you really want to hurt me,

that's about a gay man saying, do you really want to oppress me? Do you really want to gay bash me? Right. Yeah. And you could also look, I mean, Elton John, there's someone who's super popular, right? And he wasn't writing the lyrics to his songs, but he wasn't in charge of the presentation. And with glam rock, it took on a kind of flamboyance. That's a word that straights off and lobby at gay people.

Well, they're flamboyant. Rather than saying they're a fag or whatever, they can say that, that's sort of code for gays. But I also want to, you know, we're going to talk, we keep on going backward. But I want to say the whole thing with grunge, Kurt Cobain was the kind of sensitive kid who would be a target for a bully. And he did not accept that.

He did not like it. He did not appreciate misogyny. And so on one of Nirvana's records, incesticides, there's a liner note that he wrote very clearly. He says, if you don't like gay people, women, people of color, don't go to our shows. don't buy our records, leave us the fuck alone. And that was a really old thing to say from a guy who was making millions and he was at that point really considered

the it guy in rock and roll. And so he took a stance. I don't know if you've heard about this, There was a legendary kiss between the bassist of Nirvana and the drummer and then the bassist and Kurt Cobain. They all kissed each other while at the goodbye that always wraps up, the Saturday in 8 and live. When everyone's hugging, they had kisses. And that, there used to be kiss-ins, one of the first. gay political groups, the gay activists' alliance,

they would stage his sins at networks that they felt were being homophobic. So Kurt Cobain, whether he knew it or not, he was doing exactly like we were doing, you know, a decade or two earlier. And I've also seen people speculate on the internet, and I want to be clear this is internet speculation. But people reading Kurt Cobain's letters and diaries that he wrote and finding queer themes in them about, you know, it's led people to speculate about his own sexuality or, you know, gender, et cetera. And I think it just shows how deep that, you know, that potential connection is.

But then you also saw in very, like, straight presenting rock groups, like the exact pre-grunge era, the sort of like glam rock era, I guess I would say like post David Bowie, like the straight groups that would present in ways that you would have to describe as flamboyant, right? Well, yes, and also queer. You get to some of the biggest groups. So Elvis Presley wore eyeliner and makeup and gyrated,

just like Little Richard. So right there, there's one. Then the Beatles, had a gay manager and they were very, if you've ever seen a press conference with the Beatles,

they're very campy. They are very clever. They're doing their little version of what Oscar Wilde was like. So they have a certain kind of camp aesthetic. The Rolling Stones, definitely. They, in one

of their early, well, they weren't calling them videos back then because they were shot on film, but the promo film for, have you seen your mother baby standing in the shadows? That's a reenactment of the Oscar Wild trial, and they're in drag in that as well. And then, you know, the way Jagger moved, the way Jagger dressed, wore makeup, also very influenced by queer culture.

And really the Beatles and the Rolling Stones and Elvis Presley, you can't get much like, I mean, I guess you can get straighter. I mentioned Jimmy Buffett. But really, straight people, they just think the Rolling Stones belongs to them and is a mirror of them. while they're also mirroring black culture, queer culture. Women as well, women who could move well. Jagger wanted a piece of all of that. And I think brought out the best of all of that.

So, you know, the gay influence on rock and roll, it's there in some of the most mainstream beloved acts. I think we've gone a little too long in this conversation without talking about the history of black music in America really explicitly because obviously you could write, and many books have been written about the deep, deep influence of black, I mean the history of popular music in America in many ways is the history of black music in America

when you look at all the different forms. But how did those two identities or those two cultures, you know, combine in the history of popular music? Well, you could see it in Prince, for sure. Yeah. Wendy and Lisa of the Revolution, they told me a really interesting moment that in the curbst in one of the posters that comes with the vinyl version of Purple Rain, there's a fantastic shot of the band.

And Prince walked over to, I forget, whose arm went around whose but he draped an arm he had wendy wrap her arm around Lisa or Lisa wrap her arm around Wendy and and they were a real life lesbian couple and he was very much he modeled himself for the revolution he was very much inspired by sly and the family stone And Sline the Family Stone had whites and blacks and women and men at a time when the country was still very divided. So Prince was sort of one-upping Sline the Family Stone. He's saying, my music is not just black. It's not just white.

It's not just male. It's not just female. Well, you know what? It's not just straight either. It's straight and gay. Straight and lesbian. So there's a perfect example there. I just watched a documentary shot in 1972 called Save the Children.

And it's all black lineup, all black, filmmakers, all black, editors, the whole thing's black. I don't, you know, maybe there's one white person on the screen during the entire hour and a half. Well, a lot of black culture back then, there was a flamboyance to it that was, there was a proximity between blacks and gays. Because both of them, they couldn't live in the rich white suburbs, right? They were pushed together next to each other in the cities. And glam, I mean, David Bowie's vision of glam, it's soon transmogrified into this kind of glamorous R&B.

that also was a forerunner of disco. His album Young Americans is a perfect example of that. And on that album, there's Luther Vandross, years before he became a black superstar. Luther Vandross sings back up on that album and, in fact, came up with the sort of the hook that drives the chorus of that song, Young Americans. And Luther Vandross was secretly gay. Not not, I mean, he was gay. Musicians, the people he worked with knew he was gay.

He did not hide from them, but he did feel like he had to hide from his audience. And what effect did that have on him to be in the closet in that way? Well, I think it eventually killed him because he fixated like Michael Jackson in a certain sense, that Michael Jackson was very much fixated on his presentation. Like, was he too black? Was he to this? Was he to that? Michael Jackson tried to come up with an image that defied all sorts of parameters.

And Luther Vandross, he went on crash diets. He starved himself. And because people were saying, well, you know, you appeal mostly to a black audience. If you lost some weight, maybe you could cross over. and bring the whites to you, like Marvin Gay or any number of black entertainers who eventually crossed over to a black, to a white audience. And so Luther went on these crash diets, but then he had no love in his life. He felt like he could not, he had to hide constantly. So food became his friend, like it does for many people.

It becomes an addiction. So he dieted and then he gained it back. And he dieted and he gained it back and he contracted diabetes. He had a stroke that took away his vocal power. And then he eventually died of diabetes. So you can't say that he died. because he was gay, but there's a pretty direct line between his unhappiness and his overeating and under-eating, and that resulted in his death.

Yeah. It's such a sad story, and the story of, you know, how queer communities and queer culture has been repressed and oppressed in American society for the past few centuries is. a sad one. The same thing is true of black communities in many parts of the country, in all parts of the country for most of American history.

I'm curious if you have any theory as to why communities that are under that kind of oppressive pressure produce such wonderful art. Like, are those two things linked in some way, you know?

Well, that's been a big debate, do you have to suffer for art? Yes, I don't think you have to suffer for art, and yet I have to notice that, you know, look at the wonderful art that folks produce, right? Well, I mean, let's, let's, Stevie Wonder isn't in my book, but Stevie Wonder, he could not see. So his other senses really became, like many people who are blind, his other senses became heightened. And he spent his time with music because that was his way of getting past

being both black and blind. Right? And he became an extraordinary musician. People who are told, no, you can't play sports, no, you can't go to the prom. No, you can't mix with. us. No, we won't be your friends. Well, those people often turn to art and they have time on their hands because they're told they can't do these other things. So I do think there is a

connection between oppression, whether it's racial, sexual, gender. gender, whatever it is. If you're told you have to go hide, well, then what do you do in the shadows? You develop something, a way, a means of expressing yourself. Yeah. That will endear you to other people and allow, or at least allow you to communicate. And so I do think that that gay people got the message that they must hide. And I do think, you know, that the saddest stories in my book involve, they all involve people who were queer and black.

Whitney Houston, Luther Vandross, and I have to include George Michael in there. Even if you say he wasn't gay, well, he was certainly somewhere on the LGBTQ spectrum in terms of his presentation. He was treated as if he were gay whether or not you believe the allegations about him. So I also think that Michael Jackson, he was a victim of homophobia too, because people were always saying something about a character whose voice was higher than the norm and whose features were, I mean, his way of expressing himself was very childlike and very, they certainly weren't masculine. So he sharpened his ability to get past all those things. Yeah. It also makes me think how strange, you know, mainstream American culture, straight white American culture.

What a strange relationship we have with these qualities. Because I also think part of the reason that great art comes out of those communities is that the straight white community is start. of difference, right? That we repress, we say everybody has to be the same, everybody has to act the same, everybody has to say the same things, and that's how you get

boring music, that's how you get Pat Boone, right? That's how you get like sort of boring old standards that don't have any life in them. And then when one of these artists who's gay or black or from another community

finds a way to express their difference in a little hidden way, right that everyone else's ears perk up they're like oh what is that something new something different something strange something oh I like that and art is where it can come out and sort of be non-threatening

I know it's just a song on the radio no big deal and then so I think that's wonderful but then what ends up happening is you know straight white culture will will appropriate it or you know spread it but but not actually offer

any liberation or care to the people who created it in the first place, which is like why these stories that you're telling are so tragic, I think, because these are the folks who influenced popular culture the most. And yet, you know, as you're talking about all the incredible music that came out in the 80s, that was also the height of the AIDS crisis where Americans were refusing to do anything about this disease. It was, people died of neglect despite the fact that their music was making everyone dance.

It's sad and I don't know, the beauty of this is so bound up in the tragedy in a way that makes them impossible to not see right next to each other. Right, right. Well, I do think that many of the most beloved stars do give credit. Paul McCartney, for example, will tell you, hey, I learn how to sing by listening to Little Richard. And he's still around to say that and he still gives credit. And the Beatles very famously loved their gay manager, Brian Epstein. But, you know, Brian Epstein, he died. of an overdose of of pain killers and sleeping,

no, not pain killers, sleeping pills. Back that when sleeping pills were much more dangerous than they are now. And he was very concerned with having that secret. He didn't feel like he could have a partner. The Beatles essentially became his, you know, his everything. And that's why he was so good with his job. When I saw Madonna's Truth or Dare video, she has very obvious gay kids in the movie. And there was a famous kiss in that movie that was probably the first time a lot, that a lot, that a lot of

lot of people saw two guys kissing. And in San Francisco, where I still live, people were cheering that kiss. But I'm sure that that kiss got a lot of booze and heckling in other parts of the country. But Madonna, I mean, she's on her new album. There's a song called Dancateria, and she name checks her gay best friend, Martin Burgoyne, who designed one of her early record sleeves and who died of AIDS. And the fact that he was taken from her when they were both in their 20s, that did deep, I think that made her art a little more serious. And it also made her, it encouraged her.

it encouraged her and she did this. She made it very clear that her art came from queer culture. Do you think that if we look at the pop music today or popular culture today, are things any better? Because on the one hand, you know, we have artists like Chapel Rhone, for example. I'm also thinking of there's the new revival of cats on Broadway where they're making the, you know, it's explicitly a ballroom performance, right? Which, oh my God, they made sense of the musical cats, right?

Suddenly, it makes a lot more sense. Oh, yes, of course, it was queer the entire time, right? We have so many of these, you know, artists coming out in the open, and yet we're also in this moment of newfound repression of queer culture on the part of, you know, the people who are running our country. and a new prudishness that seems to be making its way through American society. Do you think that we've exercised any of these old demons, or do you think that queer artists are still in the same predicament they always were?

I think things are better. Certainly the fact that Chapel Rhone, the record that cracked her, that made her mainstream was a song, Good Luck, Babe, where she's saying to her girlfriend, yeah, you're pretending to be straight or you've got to have a guy on your arm while you have me, I can't handle that anymore.

Good luck with that. The fact that that could be a number one song, or not a number one song, but it was a really huge song. Yeah, and Pink Pony Club as well. Yes, Pink Pony Club. It's about a drag club. and the fact that she can say, make it pretty clear and kids, you know, parents dress their little girls and pink pony outfits, it's pretty obvious now where those songs are coming from.

So I do think that is, but on the other hand, we, the other thing you know about Chalperon is that she, she, is very, she's traumatized by fans of hers who want too much of her. And I do think that that is particularly, it is traumatizing for a queer person who gets the message, you're substandard, you're not, you know, you have to hide who you are. Suddenly she's in the spotlight and now people are like, yeah, I want a piece of you. that is really hard for queer people. So that's the other side to it. And so it is showing, yeah, she can be in the spotlight,

but it's going to, you know, she really has to work hard on her mental health more than probably a straight kid could or would need to. So right there, I think that's a good. illustration. That we do, we are getting in. The gatekeepers are letting us in, but it is still probably harder for us than it is for the average white guy in a rock band who's got a gang surrounding him and supporting him. Yeah. It's just her alone. Is there something more that, you know, music listeners as a community of the music industry, you know, could be doing, Or let me put it this way, is there a takeaway that you hope that people will take from your book when they, you know, listen to the radio next or listen to Spotify, for example?

Sure. Well, plenty of the artists in my book are still getting plenty of Spotify exposure or also they're influenced by, the people in my book. So many of the current pop acts are reflections of Madonna or Grace Jones or Whitney Houston

or and as well a lot of the female rock acts now they were allowed in because people like Melissa

Etheridge and Katie Lang and Tracy Chapman open the doors for them. So I think if there is more awareness, hopefully that's a good thing. Hopefully that it won't the awareness won't be like that we'll end up

in a concentration camp like, you know, many if the culture war it gets any worse, that's a possibility. And I do think that many gay people, yeah, we're frightened that our rights will be taken away, that our marriages will be taken away, that our safety will be taken away. Through my marriage, I have a non-binary, a non-binary stepdaughter, and she has a trans partner. Well, I was

with, you know, if everyone that I know loves Luna and Luna is trans. Luna is so charismatic, so lovable. I think if the world was exposed to people like Luna,

the whole transphobia about making a big deal about who goes in what bathroom would get you know, dissolved. But I do worry for my stepdaughter and I do worry for Luna. I worry for their safety. We were at a mall and someone started screaming because they claimed there was a penis in the ladies,

in the ladies room. How they knew that, I don't know. But it was an example of, yeah, I mean, this, they were, I thought someone. had been punched out or that someone had thrown like a cup of coffee in someone's face. That's how crazy this person was screaming. And if that kind of thing can happen in San Francisco, it's got to be happening all around. And those, that kind of overreaction, that doesn't come out of nowhere. People are overreacting because politics. because political and religious leaders are saying,

it's okay to do that. In fact, you should be doing it. Yeah. Well, that would be a good spot to end, except I want to ask you about one more genre of music, if that's okay with you, Barry. Sure. You mentioned Tracy Chapman,

and I'm reminded about how, you know, fast car a year or two ago, you know, was covered by that country singer. I forget his name, but, you know, white male country singer. Made it a big hit. They performed it together at the Grammys, I believe, and it was sort of a career resurgence for Tracy Chapman.

That makes me think about country music and about how country music is the genre of, you know, we think of this as the right-wing sort of religious genre, or that's the music that, you know, a lot of right-wingerers prefer, right? But I know you also write about the queer influence on country music, and I just want you to tell us a little bit of that story to blow their minds before we let you go. Sure.

Yeah. the first album to really be explicitly about gay life, that was an album by a country band that came out of rural Seattle, Lavender Country. And the guy behind it, he was more country than most country people. Like he grew up listening to Hank Williams and milk cows and herded the pigs or did all the country, all the real downhome farm things. And that was the only kind of music that he knew. And he formed this band, Lavender Country.

And it was a very overtly queer group. and they made the record themselves, they distributed it, they did everything they could, but it disappeared for decades until the internet, someone put it on a compilation, and that ended up, there's a song on it, crying these cock-sucking tears. And the lyric about that is he's saying, hey guys I'm not going to suck any of you off who are oppressing us who you know or are keeping us in the shows

I'm sort of going on a sex strike because a lot of there are straight guys out there who like being blown by a gay guy yeah they would never say that they are gay and he's saying fuck you all I'm not going to put out for you guys anymore. And that song was played on the radio by a feminist DJ because she knew what a clever lyric that was because he's basically calling out the same kind of people who were oppressing women. So she played this song

and her license was her FCC license was taken away. Wow. Yeah. Yeah. And in fact, I was invited to be on a public radio show, a hugely popular show in New York. And I mentioned that song and they said, I'm afraid we can't play it because we're a public broadcast. had our, we would lose our license if we played that song. I can say those words on a podcast because podcasters have different rules about profanity

than, than broadcasters do. But, yeah. And so this, this album, it's really clever and it's really hardcore. Like all the country, so-called country acts that are. popular today. You can put this record against it and against theirs, this country record

is Lavender Country is so much more country than anything that's being played on a Nashville country station. It's just about like queer love. I love that so much. I'm so glad we ended with that. And

it goes to show that queer people and queer culture cannot be stopped, right? wherever it is, wherever it may be, that it is everywhere and that it can't be held back and woe to those who try. Barry, thank you so much for being here. Hold up the book for us because I don't have my copy in the studio. I've got it right here.

I'm going to give a close-up on it so you can see the full title. A History of LGBTQ Music, 1969 to 2000. and it's got a quote here from Rolling Stones top critic. And on the back, there's blurbs by Tignitaro, Neil Tenon of the Pet Shop Boys, Jake Shears, Lisa Coleman from Prince's band, Melissa Etheridge. And I have to say that straight guys, they have been giving my book some of the most supportive reviews.

some of the most supportive interviews. I don't know what your sexuality is, but I feel loved. I feel embraced. I feel accepted, not just accepted, but yeah, embraced. So thank you, Adam, for having me on your show. Barry, I love you.

Thank you for being on the show, and I love you for writing about this. And it's just such an important topic to me, and I'm grateful to it. You have spent the hour with us, and I can't wait to read the book. Once again, it's called Mighty. Real, a history of LGBTQ music.

Of course, you can get a copy at our special bookshop, factuallypod.com slash books. Barry, are you anywhere else on the internet that people can find you? Oh, yeah. You just have to say, search for Barry Walters Mighty Real and you'll find me, but I also

have a website, Barry Walters writer.com and Barry Walters' writer is also my Instagram handle. Barry, thank you so much for being here. It's been such a pleasure. Yeah, it's been a pleasure on this side. Thank you.

That was a HeadGum podcast. What's up, everybody? I'm Kyle Mooney. And what's up, everybody? I'm Beck-Ben. And, man, ooh, we got something to tell you. Yeah, we definitely do. Yes, it's a brand new podcast on HeadGum. That's right. And it's called What's Our Podcast. Yep. And that's because we don't have a single idea what our podcast you'd be about.

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