A Walk on the Queer Side

How music by gay artists influenced and (on occasion) dominated pop history

Before unpacking this particular throughline, let’s be clear why I am using the term “queer” instead of a bunch of initials strung together. There are so many gender variants, sexual expressions and orientations that I worry about leaving someone out. So, for now, “queer” fits the bill, especially since it remains transgressive for the straight community.

After all, for a lot of the queer presence in pop music, straight people totally missed the memo unless the expression of sexual identity or gender variants was so overt it was like a 2-by-4 to the head. From Little Richard to sissy bounce, we’ve been around. Not all of the music was above ground. Blues singer Charles R. Brown sang “Stanley,” a queer prison love song. Brown was out and proud. He even toured with Bonnie Raitt in the early 90s. But those kinds of songs were not on his usual set list.

Little Richard: a frequency queer fans could relate to, even if they couldn’t say it out loud

According to queermusicheritage.com, there is a subculture of gay men who cover girl group songs from the 60s, including the despicable “He Hit Me (And It Felt Like a Kiss).” Done by a queer male artist now, this could be seen as a playful deconstruction of the stereotypical gay man as needy and “feminine.” Or is it a joyous shout-out to sub-dom play? Clearly, the sexual fetish world isn’t limited to queerdom, but it does find a lot of expression there. For lesbians, there’s an entire subset of “wrong bathroom” tunes for the bois (male drag, to keep it simple) among us.

I’m going to stick to the rock ‘n’ roll era, which parallels very nicely with the stirrings of queer liberation. The Mattachine Society and Daughters of Bilitis, two early queer organizations, were formed in the 1950s. This was right around the time that jump blues was giving birth to what came to be known as rock ‘n’ roll (the sexual term that comes from blues). One of the ways that police harassment of the queer community expressed itself was raiding bars where people could meet to drink and dance together. Bars in New York explicitly prohibited same-sex dancing, which is part of what led to the riots at Stonewall. As more white kids started listening to Little Richard and Chuck Berry, that same fear of dancing—which leads to you know what—spread to white parents.