Carlos Dengler was a founding member of Interpol, playing in the band until 2010. He is currently pursuing a career as an actor and working on a memoir.

Dengler is also one of many artists whose lives were changed by David Bowie. Following Bowie's death earlier this week, Dengler reflects on the ways in which the Thin White Duke impacted him, from his first encounter with the "Boys Keep Swinging" music video as a young boy up through his decision to leave Interpol and beyond.

When I was a 10-year-old boy, surviving the cultural wilderness of inland Queens in the '80s, I happened to alight on a public access channel one night broadcasting a music video wherein a thin white duke swaggered, hand on hip, facing the camera. Then, through a haughty, haunting series of drag vignettes, he violently removed his wig with one hand as the other smeared his lipstick across one cheek of his gaunt, chiseled, frozen mien. It was the music video for the song "Boys Keep Swinging."

My childhood TV set was my oracle; when I turned its plastic dial between 13 positions I was like an urchin at a nickelodeon playing with the genie, dropping coins, demanding needed answers to puzzling traumas. The dispatches I received—episodes of "Three’s Company," "What’s Happening," "Inspector Gadget," "Star Trek"—were communiques from safer, sunnier worlds than my own and the answers were beautiful. But no world nor alien that Scotty ever beamed into my childhood living room was more strangely, glacially beautiful than the figure on that public access channel that evening smearing his makeup.

This galactic crooner offered me a vision of abject androgyny and robotic distance that resonated with the loneliness of being a gentle misfit in a dangerous neighborhood full of macho Latino gangs whose members donned goose feather puffy jackets and listened to Run-D.M.C. Here was an option the cable-TV-less outpost of Queens in the '80s simply hadn’t gotten around to until that moment, that evening, when I was permitted to gaze into the land of cosmetic freedom, where not only could a man wear lipstick, but he could smudge it, too, seemingly in protest.

Unlike other, more angry heavy-metal examples, this was a vision of masculine glamour with a bizarre fourth dimension, tailored from worlds I would discover later on in undergrad, the worlds of Dadaism, French Symbolism, German Expressionism, et al. The dispatch had hit its mark; a brutally other, intergalactic denizen had written the constitution to my future goth and post-goth experiments.