Gay interest was surely aroused by the preview of Shame (the single and video), combining the talents of Gary Barlow and Robbie Williams for the first time since the latter went defiantly solo 15 years ago. Since then to his recent marriage, Robbie has pursued an unevenly successful career, teasing us with ambiguous messages as to his queer credentials.
Now we have a song of reconciliation and a video with clear visual references to Brokeback Mountain and Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. Barlow and Williams dance holding token females in a bar whilst gazing longingly into each others’ eyes. They both strip to the waist (showing some evident gym work), race joyfully to the top of a mountain ridge with a lake far below it, and then turn their faces back to the sun just as you think they will join hands and jump.
The end of this romantic sequence is perhaps symbolic of what Barlow has admitted may be only an eighteen month joint venture with the band, with Robbie likely to resume his lone career after that. What deserves deeper examination is the gay factor in all this, and how it helps us to decode the hidden meaning of the song’s chorus, “What a shame we never listened…” Read the rest of this entry »
Lee Alexander McQueen, aged only 40 and found dead by his own hand on the eve of his idolized mother’s funeral, was a gay fashion designer of undisputed genius. He combined Savile Row craftsmanship with rare imaginative style, from rippling visions of Kate Moss to the intersexual video posturings of Lady Gaga. His last act inevitably stirs memories of the shooting of Gianni Versace in 1997. Self-described as the “pink sheep” of his Lewisham-born family, McQueen was always confidently out and gay, as reflected in his bizarre and spectacular shows. It is significant though that he once compared his creations to armour, giving protection to the wearer, hinting at an inner vulnerability which had its own unerring cut and motif. Read the rest of this entry »
Best known as a gay activist, writer, artist and filmmaker, Derek Jarman’s physical end in 1994 followed an heroic and well-documented struggle with AIDS. A last act was to make a film whose completely blue screen and soundtrack commentary was a brave testament to having gone blind. He lies over Romney Marsh in one of England’s most beautiful sheep-frequented chuchyards, in the towering presence of a two thousand year-old yew tree.
Derek Jarman
Jarman was a gay renaissance man, cheekily canonised by the Sisters Of Perpetual Indulgence in a shoreline ceremony before his clapboard cottage and lovingly created sculpture garden, where he managed to grow a profusion of bright flowers and herbs in the nuclear terrain of Dungeness. His journals similarly captured the vibrancy of gay life and gay politics against the backdrop of a Thatcherite Britain.
The rebel in Jarman was closely shadowed by a late 1940s, early 1950s upbringing, travelling to rather grand places as the career of his RAF father Lance dictated. This ambivalence showed itself in Jarman’s appetite for lying across Charing Cross Road protesting with Jimmy Somerville with members of Outrage!, his attraction to cruising and all the liberating elements of the thriving London scene, and a private reticence at betraying the values of his parents’ privileged world. In paint, celluloid and intimate writings Jarman wrestled with his vision of a new gay Jerusalem.
It was Jarman who took the homoerotic story of the martyrdom of St. Sebastian, a young man pierced with arrows, featured in such gay literature as Yukio Mishima’s Confessions Of A Mask, to make the film Sebastiane in 1976. Not only was the dialogue in Latin, giving it a certain stylistic campness, but as a way of looking positively at gay sex, it was a pioneering British production. Read the rest of this entry »
Mothership Blog columnist John Hartley talks about Stephen Gately’s remarkable life and sad death
Stephen Gately
Once again, as a result of ever speedier communication, the world reels from the untimely death of a celebrity. As James Dean for his generation, and more recently Princess Diana for ours, Gately’s exit reminds us of the brevity of life and our own mortality, with the sad spectacle of someone good-looking and youthful, with the world at their feet, being torn rudely from life.
What makes it more grotesque in this case is that Stephen was found by a handsome Bulgarian guy who had apparently spent the night with Gately’s civil partner, cold and dead “in a preying mantis position” by his sofa, in a sunbathed luxury island villa that many gay men would consider a blissful dream.
Much will be written on the undoubted talent of the former Boyzone star who had a successful solo career, and then performed creditably on the West End stage. Moreover, his courage in coming out (like Will Young) and keeping his fanbase intact, secured him an affectionate place in gay history. Read the rest of this entry »
Questions and answers are flying around after Stephen Gately’s death.
Here’s what we know:
Stephen Gately was only 33, in the prime of his life, and as far as we’re aware, in good health.
It is far from normal for a fit 33 year old man to die sleeping on the sofa.
The night before he and his civil partner Andy Cowles had gone to Palma’s Black Cat gay club and had met a bulgarian guy there. The bulgarian guy (Georgi Dochev) had returned with them to their apartment.
Now the plot thickens.
Georgi and Cowles retired to the bedroom together, while Gately remained on the sofa. The following day, at 1pm, Dochev left the bedroom and discovered Gately’s dead body on the sofa, and according to him, in a weird ‘praying mantis’ position. Read the rest of this entry »
