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.

First, was the lead singer of the New York Dolls gay?

The NYT’s obituary reports:

In addition to Ms. Hennessey, his stepdaughter, Mr. Johansen is survived by his wife, Mara Hennessey, a visual artist he married in 2013, who produced and designed many of his live shows .... He was previously married to the actress and publicist Cyrinda Foxe from 1977 to 1978 (she left him for Steven Tyler, the lead singer of Aerosmith) and to the photographer Kate Simon from 1983 to 2011.

Getting married to a woman in 1978, 1983, and 2013 seems pretty straight to me.

And how many famous rock stars have been gay?

An acid test for counting long-term sexual orientation of 1970s celebrities is how many of them died of AIDS. High proportions of choreographers, fashion designers, and male figure skaters died of AIDS. What about rock stars?

If I ask Google, here’s what I get:

Freddie Mercury, singer and keyboardist of Queen, remains a huge star, especially outside of the U.S. He was also an extraordinarily virtuosic singer (The Who’s Roger Daltrey’s pick as the most gifted of his peers), and I wonder whether he would have been as popular without being, arguably, the finest vocalist of his era.

After that the pickings get pretty slim.

Easy-E of NWA was a rapper, not a rocker.

Klaus Nomi was some kind of alt-opera countertenor, not a rock star.

Creedence Clearwater’s Tom Fogerty, older brother of the band’s talent John Fogerty, got HIV from a blood transfusion: he had six kids.

Robbin Crosby, who had been married to a Playboy Playmate, of hair metal band Ratt, was a heroin junkie who likely caught HIV from a needle.

Ricky Wilson was a gay guitarist in the new wave band B-52s (I saw them open for Talking Heads in 1999), the brother of one of the gal singers. Not insignificant, but not exactly a rock legend either.

Ray Gillen was a minor metal vocalist who was briefly the lead singer for post-Ozzie Osbourne Black Sabbath. I don’t see much about how he got HIV. He had one child.

Dan Hartman was a gay keyboardist in the Edgar Winter Group who was much in demand as a singer, performer, producer, and songwriter. He had lots of musical talent, but was not a major star. (By the way, gay men seem more likely to play keyboards than electric guitar.)

Jermaine Stewart was a gay black pop singer in the Michael Jackson vein.

António Variações was a gay hairdresser turned pop singer who was big in Portugal.

Arthur Russell was a gay avant-garde cellist who got into disco in the downtown New York dance club scene.

Esquerita was, apparently, an African-American boyfriend of Little Richard in the 1950s from whom the future legend borrowed some of his shtick.

David Wojnarowicz was a gay New York visual artist, not a musician. He seems to be on this list because U2 used one of his pictures for a 45 cover.

Rock Hudson was a gay movie star. He was not a rock star.

Jobriath was an American keyboardist and actor who received a huge promotional push in the early 1970s as the first openly gay rockstar. But nobody much liked his music and he vanished. I never heard of him until today.

Renato Russo was the bisexual or gay lead singer of a pop rock band that was big in Brazil. Being big in Brazil sounds pretty legit, but, then again, Brazilian music almost never is heard in America. Like many Americans, when somebody praises Brazilian pop to me, I enthusiastically say I love “The Girl from Ipanema.” When asked if I would therefore like to listen to any Brazilian music from the last 60 years, I explain that, no, “The Girl from Ipanema” has satisfied my longing to hear Brazilian pop for this lifetime. I’m not being snarky about “The Girl from Ipanema.” It’s great, but Brazilian pop is weirdly orthogonal to English-language rock music.

Billy Lyall was a minor gay Scottish keyboardist and singer who was in the Bay City Rollers and the Alan Parsons Project.

Alan Murphy was a gay British studio guitarist who worked with Kate Bush and Mike and the Mechanics.

Howard Greenfield was a gay Brill Building pop composer who wrote big hits with Neil Sedaka (“Breaking Up Is Hard to Do”) and the Captain and Tennille (“Love Will Keep Us Together”).

Paul Giovanni was a New York theater director who’d briefly been in a rock band when young.

John Sex was a New York cabaret singer, not a rock star.

Andy Fraser was a mixed-race British bassist for Free. He was the main composer of their classic 1970 hard rocker “All Right Now:”

Fraser had been married and had two children, but said he was gay shortly before his death of AIDS at 62 in 2015.

So, out of 22 names suggested by Google when asked about rock stars who died of AIDS, we’ve got famous Freddie Mercury as a gay superstar, and then a couple of good sidemen, the B-52s guitarist and the guy in Free who came up with that one great rock song. Maybe the Brazilian guy?

By the way, Johansen’s first wife Cyrinda Foxe seems to have had a type:

By 1970s rock star standards, Johansen, who resembled a more square-jawed Mick Jagger, was more ruggedly masculine-looking than his ex-wife’s second husband Steven Tyler or her boyfriend David Bowie.

My impression is that the 1970s were the peak era for a particular type of rock star: the skinny, high-cheekboned, not very masculine but highly heterosexual pretty boy, around whom you do not want to trust your girlfriend … even if he doesn’t set off your threat alarms.

The evolutionary biologist John Maynard Smith may have coined the term kleptogamy (although he used a more pungent term) as a description for an alternative mating strategy seen sometimes in the animal world of less imposingly masculine males not challenging other males in traditional head-butting (or the like) contests of strength. Instead they appeal to females without triggering normal males’ instincts as a threat who needs to be physically confronted.

Perhaps.