A preview of Fox's musical dramedy Glee aired the evening of May 19, 2009 following the penultimate telecast of American Idol (the next night Kris Allen won in an upset over Adam Lambert). I was on vacation in Yosemite National Park that week and watched both shows from my hotel room.
I've written in a previous post of my affection for Disney's High School Musical, but I never became a fan of Glee. While I liked HSM for being a happy fantasyland in bright colors, I found Glee's angst-filled storylines annoying. Furthermore, too much attention was paid to Jane Lynch's villanous Sue Sylvester, who became more of a comical character. She became a tiresome presence, not unlike Fonzie on Happy Days, Kramer on Seinfeld and Mimi on Drew Carey. Also, as blasphemous as it is for me to admit, the gay character Kurt made my skin crawl.
Despite my lack of overall enthusiasm, props go to Glee creator Ryan Murphy for writing plenty of thought-provoking gay storylines. And I did like quite a few of the show's song "mash ups", twenty of which are on my iPod, especially Marry You, Halo/Walking on Sunshine and Cherish. Oh, and Darren Criss was a scrumptious addition during Season Two.
Of course the show wasn't produced for my demographic and it became a ratings success. However, since its first season it has lost a sizable portion of its audience. Some speculate the fall-off was due to its emphasis on gay storylines. The show will air for at least one more season, which will be its fourth. Whenever the show finally goes off the air, perhaps a fitting last episode might have a Wizard of Oz theme with a tornado striking McKinley High.
We've probably all seen the TV infomercials for Time-Life Records' various music compilations, e.g. "Love Songs", "Groovy 60's", "Mellow Moods", etc. I've bought a number of them, and am glad I did, because they introduced me to some great songs. One in particuar was Secretly by Jimmie Rodgers. It entered Billboard's Top 40 today in 1958 and became a #3 hit. (Rodgers is best known for the song Honeycomb which topped the charts for four weeks the year before.)
It's a pleasant tune, typical of so many songs from this vanilla decade, but what got my attention was its gender-neutral lyrics. In my interpretation the song tells the story of two men who, due to the mores of the 1950's, must conduct their romance "secretly". Here's the chorus:
"Wish we didn't have to meet secretly
Wish we didn't have to kiss secretly
Wish we didn't have to be afraid to show the world that we're in love
'Til we have the right to meet openly
'Til we have the right to kiss openly
We'll just have to be content to be in love secretly."
Of course, these lyrics could also apply to a West Side Story situation between a boy and girl of different races or ethnicities. Still, I thought the hidden message was a bit daring for the conformist 1950's. (Reminds me of the secret delight I got when I first listened to the Village People's innuendo laden songs.) I'm curious whether the song was popular with homosexuals at the time.
Of course, there have been other gender neutral songs such as Secret Love by Doris Day and the Beatles' Do You Want to Know a Secret? but their lyrics don't have an air of illicitness to them. One that does, however, is the disco classic by Madleen Kane, Forbidden Love, from 1979. In the song's opening line Kane sings, "How can you stop a trembling hand, reaching for another hand, even though it is forbidden love?"
Here's a wonderful video/photo montage from a website called "GayTwoGether" that has been set to the very song discussed here:
The Saint was the nation's (perhaps the world's) premiere gay dance club during the 1980's and its closing party began on April 30 1988 - and continued until Monday morning, May 2. Although I love dance music I was never part of the Saint crowd; however, I'd go once or twice a year. My first time there was in June 1981 a few weeks before it closed for the summer; the last time was two weeks before the final weekend. And it was more than just a dance floor - there were a lot of other places to explore and "experience".
An ex-lover of mine, Rick, went to closing weekend in two shifts. During his second shift he got into a bit of medical trouble because he bought some bad GHB and collapsed on the dance floor. He woke up in the special triage unit set up at the club for these type of "situations".
Here are five songs I most fondly associate with the Saint:
Hills of Katmandu - This beautifully tribal song is the one I associate most with the Saint. The club's renowned planetarium projector that rose out of the middle of the dance floor projected images of stars that swirled on the circular scrim-like ceiling above the dance floor. To me, this effect along with the glow from the burnt orange lighting evinced a feeling of being out on the savannahs of East Africa. Such a gorgeous song.
Your Love - This was played during my first visit to the club. It was the group Lime's first hit. While we danced to it my boyfriend at the time passed out after taking a hit of poppers.
Dracula's Tango - A great dance song with a Halloween theme.
Eve of the War - This song is on par with the Hills of Katmandu in terms of its mystical/tribal vibe. What a beautiful orchestral opening. The only verse was, "Chances of anything coming from Mars are a million to one he said. Chances of anyone coming from Mars are a million to one - but still, they come!". A number of years after the Saint closed I came across the 12-inch single among a pile of records someone was selling on Christopher St. What a find!
Tonight is What it Feels to be Young- From the soundtrack of the 1984 rock movie Streets of Fire.
The not-a-care-in-the-world vibe of the club was brought home to me during a visit in October 1983. It was a week after a truck bomb ripped apart a U.S. Marine barrack in Lebanon killing more than 250 servicemen. As I pranced on the dance floor at 3AM I thought of all the serious things going on in the world and how here on this fabulous dance flooor I was insulated from all of it.
Forgive some of our gay elders if they look askance when the younger generation gushes about seeing Cher, Barbra or Madonna in concert. This may be because, in their mind, they saw the concert, i.e. Judy Garland at Carnegie Hall. This wildly acclaimed performance took place on Sunday, April 23, 1961.
Judy's career had been somewhat fallow since the late 1950's. Her last big movie had been 1954's A Star is Born. She and her managers decided 1961 would be the year for a comeback. After all she still had quite a resevoir of goodwill from fans to tap into and she was saddled with debt. Her Carnegie Hall concert was part of a larger tour that went on during April and May. (In addition to the concert tour she also landed a small but pivotal role in the movie Judgment at Nuremberg.) In May she returned to Carnegie Hall for another sold out performance and then in July she performed at the Forest Hills Tennis Club.
Judy's live concert album won five Grammys and was the nation's #1 album for 13 weeks. The following year she starred with Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin in an acclaimed TV special and the following year CBS gave her own variety show. It lasted just one season largely because it had the misfortune to be scheduled opposite Bonanza. Still, Judy was back!
45 years later out singer-songwriter Rufus Wainwright, who wasn't even born until 1973, gave the very same concert at Carnegie Hall on two nights. He seemed to have much fun as Judy did - and the audience was almost as adoring - but the reviews weren't nearly as glowing. Here, below, is his version of Judy's San Francisco.
I bought the Village People's eponymous first albumwithout having heard any of its songs. I did so because their medley San Francisco/Hollywood had been high on Billboard's dance chart for months so I figured it was worth taking a chance on. I was in my junior year at Penn State and I bought the LP at the record store in State College. (The first disco album I bought was Donna Summer's double-LP Once Upon a Time the previous summer.)
The late 70's were my formative coming-out years and the songs on this album, e.g. Fire Island,Key West and San Francisco, provided me with somewhat of an education about gay life. I'd get a frisson of excitement listening to these songs' lyrics about places I'd yet to experience.
The dorm complex I lived in at University Park, West Halls (pictured), was where many members of the school's Nitany Lions football team lived; some players on my floor occasionally asked to borrow this LP for their parties. Despite the fact that the Village People were embraced by gay men and their song lyrics were filled with gay double entendres, they managed to cross over to the oblivious general market, who seemed to get a kick out of the group's "camp pop".
The first Village People song to chart was Macho Man, from their seconnd album,followed by the ubiquitous YMCA, which spent three weeks at #2 on Billboard's Hot 100 in the winter of 1979. Their third album Go West was released in the spring of 1979 and the single In the Navy went to #3. Rolling Stone Magazine even put them on its cover. However, overexposure soon ensued and the group "jumped the shark" in 1980 with their embarassingly bad movie Can't Stop the Music.
Other Village People-inspired posts found on ZeitGAYst:
Three years after their first hit single, Waterloo, ABBA got their one and only #1 hit in the U.S. this week in 1977 - Dancing Queen. Although it stayed on top for just one week - Thelma Houston's Don't Leave Me This Way was breathing down its neck - it became a beloved classic.
Despite their wild popularity worldwide, here in the U.S. ABBA managed to have just four top-10 hits. (They had ten other singles that peaked between #12-#32.) It was a similar fate met by other singers from foreign shores such as Kylie Minogue, Robbie Williams and Boney M.
A few years after Dancing Queen, ABBA had a string of dance-oriented tunes that became big hits in gay clubs: Voluez Vous; The Visitors; Lay All Your Love on Me; On and On and On and Gimme! Gimme! Gimme! (A Man After Midnight). A lasting memory of my first visit to Fire Island Pines, in July 1982, was dancing to The Visitors at the Pavilion.
Even if you find yourself strolling along Fire Island Boulevard today you're certain to hear Dancing Queen coming from at least a few of the houses in the Pines (or in Cherry Grove). At my house it was a tradition to play it whenever we celebrated a housemate's birthday after the cake was presented. But while the song's lyrics are certainly appropriate for "the gays", I never thought the beat was fast enough to make it particularly danceable (at least for my taste).
I planned to show a video of ABBA performing but, unfortunately, they're such wooden performers that instead I chose one of Kylie Minogue performing Dancing Queen at the closing ceremonies of the 2000 Summer Olympics in Sydney.
One year after her first acclaimed TV special, titled My Name is Barbra, 23-year old Barbra Streisand starred in her second CBS special. Coinciding with the release of her new album by the same name, Color Me Barbra was filmed largely at the Philadelphia Museum of Art over one weekend during off-hours. A big difference from the first special was that this one was in color.
I finally got around to watching the telecast when I rented it during the winter of 2007. I was especially enchanted by the opening song, Draw Me a Circle, which I'd never heard before - and I immediatedly bought it on iTunes. (However, it wasn't a track from Color Me Barbra, but an earlier album).
Now a single woman, and starring in her own variety show, 29-year old Cher was in the midst of Version 3 of her career. (V1 was as a singing duo with Sonny in the mid-1960's; V2 began in 1971 with their CBS variety show). Her "emancipation" warranted a TIME Magazine cover story* and this glamorous cover from the mid-March 1975 became an instant classic. (And since then Cher's career has continued its iterations including Hollywood Cher; Disco Diva Cher; Infomercial Cher; and Retirement Tour Cher.)
*Cover date of 3/17/75 but on newsstands March 11.
Four months after Cher's TIME cover Elton John would get one of his own as well. Other gay icons bestowed with covers have included Liza Minnelli (1972)*, Linda Ronstadt (1977), Madonna (1985) and Bette Midler (1987). But none compare to Cher's in terms of "Wow!" factor (OK, Rondstadt's sultry cover comes close).
*Surprisingly, while Liza merited a cover story her even more iconic mother never had one.
27-year old Ricky Martin went from being a sexy Latin pop star to a studly mega-star overnight after his hip-swiveling performance of his international hit The Cup of Life at tonight's Grammy Awards in 1999. It was a performance that ranks up there with Michael Jackson introducing his Moon Walk in 1983 at the Motown 25th Anniversary special. However, truth be told, I thought Martin's peformance was relatively tame, and what I found curious was how unresponsive the audience was - at least until the very end (perhaps it was because the song wasn't a hit here in the U.S.)
A few months later Martin's single Livin' la Vida Loca (from his first English language CD) was released and zoomed to #1 where it stayed for five weeks, vying with Cher's Believe and Deborah Cox's Nobody's Supposed to Be Here as the song of the summer. The song's video featured a woman dripping hot wax on Ricky's chest.
After about eighteen months Martin seemed to take on a lower profile (relative to 1999 levels). Perhaps it was due to some backlash after he performed at the inauguration of George Bush in 2001. An uptick in attention occurred in 2004 when a young guy named William Hung gained notoriety on American Idol for his tone-deaf rendition of Martin's single She Bangs.
Over the last few years Ricky Martin's life has entered a new phase after fathering twin boys in 2008, finally coming out after years of speculation (he described himself as "a fortunate homosexual") and publishing his autobiography titled simply Me at the end of 2010. He's easing into middle age very nicely (he turned 40 at the end of 2011) - and is as hot as ever.
Frank Sinatra's daughter Nancy had one of the biggest hits of 1966 with Boots, an early song about female empowerment. (Two years earlier Lesley Gore had come out with a similarly-themed song, You Don't Own Me.) It went to #1 the week of February 20. However, it wasn't until twenty years later that the song became part of the "Camp Hall of Fame" when cable network VH-1 uncovered a primitive video for the song that had been produced for video jukeboxes.
I was 8 years old at the time the song was popular and remember thinking that the song was pretty dreadful. Now I've grown to like it, thanks largely to the video with Nancy and her bevy of young vixens with their teased That Girl flips and go-go boots. And who can forget the call to action at the song's end - "Are you ready boots? ... start walkin!".
A year later Nancy and her dad had an even bigger hit with the song Something Stupid which topped the Billboard Hot 100 for four weeks. It was very popular despite the creepiness factor of father and daughter singing about romantic love.
