Recommendations of the Editorial team
David Bowie: Coming-Out 1972-“I’m gay”
“He’s gay, He Says. Mmmmmmmmm”. Right in the second paragraph of the portrait that the British “Melody“Published on January 22, 1972, is pointed out to David Bowie’s sexual commitment. The subsequent“ Mmmmmmmmm ”by journalist Michael Watts seems almost a bit undecided. As if the author initially did not know what the “gay” could mean. Also for the music world.
Only towards the end of the melody-maker piece is David Bowie quoted with the words that should change pop music: “I’m gay, and always have bees, even when I was David Jones.” Jones is the birth name Bowies, and the singer wanted to say: Gay Has nothing to do with my image as a pop star gay I was before. But Watts recognizes the “sexual ambivalence” of the singer, which becomes clear in the course of the text, also as a “fascinating game” with “identities” – and with the image.
Smoked work on the image
In 1972 Bowie was the most prominent bisexual among the pop stars with this coming out. Countless did it. Today it is completely normal that musicians can no longer be categorized at first glance: man? Woman? hetero, homo? The music became freer.
In later interviews, Bowie always known to his bisexuality, but he took a distance from other occasions. Once he described his coming out the “biggest mistake I had ever made”. Today it is above all his biographers who accuse Bowie that bisexuality was a marketing mesh.
34 years after his article, in an interview from 2006, Melody-Maker author Watts is reminiscent of his meeting with Bowie. The singer, according to Watts, just worked on his image. But he would also have made an honest impression. And “Sometimes, even in pop, honesty pays off.”