Once in a rainbow moon, a book comes along that exceeds all the expectations you've ever had for any books. This is one of those, a remarkable elucidation of the history of LGBT popular music in the 20th and 21st centuries. One of the factors that makes it remarkable is that it deals with music for which publicity and sales tended to be suppressed. As one of half a dozen volunteer programmers for an LGBT community radio program in 1979-81 in Vancouver, Canada, I got in with people who were dedic

Once in a rainbow moon, a book comes along that exceeds all the expectations you've ever had for any books. This is one of those, a remarkable elucidation of the history of LGBT popular music in the 20th and 21st centuries. One of the factors that makes it remarkable is that it deals with music for which publicity and sales tended to be suppressed. As one of half a dozen volunteer programmers for an LGBT community radio program in 1979-81 in Vancouver, Canada, I got in with people who were dedicated to collecting and playing LGBT music that was otherwise going unheard. Our most played disc was 'Caravan Tonight,' a 1974 recording on Mercury Records by Steven Grossman from New York. The gorgeous title track about an older guy sewing up the ripped pants of his soon-to-be-wandering younger boyfriend seemed like something everyone should want to hear - but bias had long since damped out its major-label release and its sales were minimal. Grossman gets a substantial write-up in Bullock's book, and his ups and downs as an artist are placed into a well described historical context.This book begins at the beginning of the 20th century, and features an almost academically detailed, but highly readable, chronicle of the career of, as writer Al Rose put it, "epileptic, alcoholic, homosexual Negro genius" Tony Jackson, a role model for his more famous friend Jelly Roll Morton. Unlikely that you would recognize Jackson's name, but you should, and you will, forever, after if you read his story in this book. The story then bridges to Bessie Smith and Ma Rainey, and the classic 1920's black lesbian blues tracks we loved to play on our show, like Ma's 'Prove it On Me Blues' ("They say I do it, ain't nobody caught me..."). And onwards and upwards through the 20th century, featuring the two main categories of LGBT artists -- the flamboyantly famous and never-quite-out, like Cole Porter, Liberace, Little Richard and Canada's own Jackie Shane, and the plain-spokenly out and much ignored, like a whole bunch of people who made great music you've probably never heard about, most notably Blackberri.'Women's music,' like the extraordinary 'The Changer and the Changed' by Cris Williamson (1975), is thoroughly covered. These records at least got distribution during their early years, thanks to a network of women's bookstores across North America: when I bought my copy in 1977, the woman at the counter berated me for effectively stealing it from a woman by using my privileged male university student money. It was never easy to get LGBT music, other than the closety mainstream stuff. I'm afraid we were a little purist on our show about people like David Bowie, who provided many dreamers with much fantasy about being openly gay, but couldn't bring themselves actually to sing the word. The mainstream artist who first did that in a sympathetic way - rampant heterosexual Rod Stewart in his 'The Killing of Georgie,' 1976 - gets full credit in Bullock's book. Luckily, Bullock, a full-out Bowie enthusiast, is unencumbered by purism that seemed so important to us at the time, and writes in long-time cringers like Freddie Mercury and Dan Hartman with full gusto. I think we can upgrade them to full LGBT heroes now, even if they had to be outed by AIDS.The range of Bullock's research is beyond impressive. He does a great job with the UK, the U.S., and Australia. He gets into Europe, covers LGBT efforts in Kenya, and looks into Russia. In Canada, he catches Michel Girouard and Réjean Tremblay, whose 1972 civil partnership was unknown to me, and also devotes considerable space to genius singer-songwriter Ferron (comparisons to Yeats are often made with her lyrics), from Vancouver. Tragically, he misses mah man Lewis Furey, whose song 'Hustler's Tango,' about a gay hustler working the streets of Montreal, was a radio hit locally in 1975, and whose lipstick-smeared album cover caught my eye and yielded my collection an astonishing classic that has also fascinated other LGBT musicians, like Tom Robinson.The other serious omission this book has from the 70s is the first disco hit ever to acknowledge same-sex relationships directly, Theo Vaness's "As Long As It's Love" (1979), which blew the Village People's macho pussyfooting out of the water. In North America, this hit from the Dutch music scene ( https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Shoes; Theo was actually Theo van Es from Zoeterwoude) was mostly just known to gay club DJs, but it made many eager liberationists like me run out and buy our own 12-inch 45 singles.Towards the end of the book, as we catch up to modern times, the LGBT music scene starts to get crowded, and Bullock's text becomes ever more telegraphic and cross-linked, since he just can't give everyone their full page any more. The brilliant comic duo Romanovsky and Phillips are reduced to an epithet, albeit complimentary, and lists run into lists as Bullock's paragraphing structure collapses - something I suspect was due to bad editing, not to any deficiency of his writing. Still, it can all be followed, though it would be something if Bullock were able to expand this book into the three-volume set it inherently wants to be. He may need a new editor, though: knuckle-rap anyone who can leave a sentence with a misplaced modifier like "Infamous for stalking the streets of New York with the words 'fuck off' written on her forehead, Lou Reed was an early fan..." The 'stalker' was Anohni of Antony and the Johnsons, not Lou as the sentence would have you read. There are a number of these infelicities. I only mention this because some other reviewers have criticized the book for its editorial imperfections, and I think these need to be isolated as a dross that doesn't besmirch the gold of the rest of the book in any way.May our beautiful, battered, banished and buried music all emerge to share its place in the sun next to the glittering images of Bowie, Mercury and Elton John. We owe tremendous gratitude to Darryl Bullock for this masterwork.