How gay were 1970s rock stars?

The death of David Johansen of the glam rock New York Dolls revives an old question.

From the sizable obituary of David Johansen in the New York Times:

David Johansen, the singer and songwriter who was at the vanguard of glam rock and punk as the frontman of the New York Dolls, died yesterday at his home on Staten Island. He was 75. …

Mr. Johansen … achieved his greatest commercial success in the late 1980s and early ’90s with his pompadoured lounge-lizard alter ego, Buster Poindexter. But his 1970s heyday with the New York Dolls, a band of lipstick-smeared men in love with trashy riffs and tough women, had the most cultural impact, inspiring numerous punk, heavy metal and alternative musicians.

The New York Dolls were favorites of highbrow critics during the glam rock era of the early 1970s. They were five guys from places like Staten Island dressed up in scarves, leopard-print cigarette pants, and high heels that they’d stolen from their moms’ closets:

They made a huge, chaotic racket:

The fact that they weren’t very musically adept was extolled by New York writers for reasons, reasons that later became famous and/or tedious when one of the Dolls’ various managers, Malcolm McClaren, went home to Britain and became the Idea Man behind the Sex Pistols, who were more or less the New York Dolls with short hair and slightly butcher clothes.

As with the Sex Pistols’ shambolic 1978 tour of the American hinterland, few Americans at the time got the Dolls’ joke. One of their record company’s executives summed up their brief drug-scuttled history in 1975:

In the end, they rode on real rather than symbolic subway trains to specific rather than universal places, played for an audience of intellectuals or kids even farther out than they were; and when they eventually met the youth of the country, that youth seemed more confused than captivated by them.

I never saw the New York Dolls, but I did see Johansen’s solo act, the David Johansen Band, open for Tom Petty at the Santa Monica civic auditorium in June 1978. I can recall some catchy songs like “Funky But Chic” (“My momma thinks I look pretty fruity, but in jeans I feel rotten”'), but their three guitar attack was at least one too many for being an opening act. I don’t know what it’s like now, but in the 1970s, opening acts seldom were afforded enough time to do a proper sound check with the analog sound systems of the era, so they always sounded muddy and messy. (Whether that was due to the exigencies of the touring schedule, or whether headliners sabotaged their second-billed bands because they didn’t want to be upstaged, I can’t say. I can remember seeing in 1982 U2 open for the J. Geils Band. The veteran headliners who were finally getting their big tour probably should have sabotaged Bono’s sound check.)

The NYT continues:

The New York Dolls were notorious for transgressive behavior; they were especially notorious for cross-dressing. “Before going onstage, the Dolls pass around a Max Factor lipstick the way some bands pass around a joint,” Ed McCormack wrote in Rolling Stone in 1972.

“We used to wear some really outrageous clothes,” Mr. Johansen said in the prologue to the 1987 music video for Buster Poindexter’s hit song “Hot Hot Hot.” “These heavy mental [sic] bands in L.A. don’t have the market cornered on wearing their mothers’ clothes.” …

After [high school] graduation, Mr. Johansen fell in with the New York City hipster scenes centered on Andy Warhol’s Factory, the nightclub Max’s Kansas City and Charles Ludlam’s Ridiculous Theater Company. …

He employed those lessons at maximum volume when he joined the New York Dolls. “Musically, we wanted to bring back stuff with that Little Richard punch to it,” he told The New York Times in 2006.

Musically, glam rock (such as T-Rex’s “(Bang the Gong) Get It On”) tended to be a revival of 1950s rock ‘n’ roll.

(The first sign of the 1950s revival may have been how delighted the hippie audience at 1969’s Woodstock festival was by Sha-Na-Na.)

The connection between 1950s R ‘n’ R and 1970s decadent glam rock was more than just musical. Many of the stars of the 1950s, most obviously Little Richard, were pretty glam themselves.

But all this raises a couple of questions.

Seeing Johansen prance and pose in 1978, I’d assumed he was gay.

But was he?

And, in general, what proportion of rock stars, besides Little Richard, Elton John, and Freddie Mercury, were as flaming as they acted on stage?

In general, there seems to be a positive correlation between musical ability and enthusiasm and male homosexuality (although a negative correlation between talent and female homosexuality). Thus, in Britain, the term “musical” (As in: “Is he ‘musical?’”) is a euphemism for gay.

So what percentage of 1970s male rocks stars who sported long hair, high heels, tight shiny clothes, eye shadow, and the like were long-term gay?

I’m going to put the paywall here. Below it, I’ve 1,000 words more to answer these two questions pretty thoroughly and point out a fairly little-known theory.