This opinion
article was first published on CLUAS in September 2005
CLUAS Opinion
'You've Got To Hide Your Love Away'
Aidan Curran reflects on homosexuality in pop music and the taboos that still
surround it...
Mark Feehily from Westlife recently revealed - via tabloid, naturally - that
he was gay. Being neither gay nor a Westlife fan, I had no feelings of
solidarity, shock or anything about it. Initially I gave it as little
interest as I do to Brian McFadden's nauseating attempts to cling to
celebrity status by moaning about it as publicly as possible. On the whole,
the 'news' was typically greeted with the so-whats of those not normally
given to considering either Westlife or who Westlife are sleeping with.
However, there's more of interest here than just pop gossip.
Why does this have any relevance beyond the tabloid world? Well, even though
much of rock and pop's power comes from dabbling with taboos and shocking
the mainstream its main subject matter has always been traditional
heterosexual lust, and creating pop and rock idols of either female romantic
desire or manly hero-worship has been a lucrative business ever since Elvis.
In his excellent books on the British music scene
in the 1960s, Simon
Napier-Bell recalls one of the first British pop impresarios, Larry Parnes,
who masterminded the late '50s explosion of UK rock n'roll acts such as
Billy Fury and Cliff Richard. Napier-Bell believes that Parnes' genius was
to spot the young men that he himself fancied, give them butch-sounding
names and groom them into stars for teenage girls to similarly lust after,
thus creating the money-making machine that is the modern teen-idol
phenomenon.
"The prospect of an openly-gay teen idol or
R n' B star, for instance, may be a long time away...."
Boybands, though often initially promoted through the gay-club scene, are
ostensibly marketed at pre-teen girls gazing doe-eyed at Smash Hits posters
of this month's squeaky-clean-but-just-a-little-naughty heart-throbs.
Feehily's revelation, therefore, arguably spells the end for Westlife just
as Stephen Gately's similar disclosure marked the fading-out of Boyzone. Yet
both groups were already in a state of terminal decline and disappearing interest anyway. Between McFadden's departure and Feehily's disclosure,
little had been heard of Westlife. Their amazingly misjudged and ill-advised
album of Rat-Pack standards was a deserved flop; the group clearly had outstayed their welcome. Nowadays even their manager is more visible than
they are. For their part, neither Feehily nor Gately before him seemed
willing to reveal their sexuality at the peak of their success, to
effectively sabotage their lucrative careers as dream-fodder for young girls
and their pocket-money. Some may cry 'hypocrite'.
But let's be fair here - a person still probably needs a lot of courage and
support to come out. The additional pressure of public attention must surely
exacerbate the matter. Having done the honourable thing in perhaps inspiring
others to make the same admission as he's done, let's hope that Feehily will
not now follow the form of McFadden and desperately milk his private life
for tawdry tabloid publicity.
"Successful and aspiring artists must
submit themselves to the relentless pressure of image, conformity and
audience approval...."
In truth, however, many openly gay mainstream pop stars, such as Elton John,
Boy George or the
Scissor Sisters, are usually stereotyped as flamboyant
queens or cordoned off into glam or disco. In recent years, though, a
country artist like K.D. Lang, rocker Melissa Etheridge and indie acts like
Bob Mould and
Rufus Wainwright have spoken and written frankly about their
sexuality without resorting to caricature - yet these are arguably
left-field acts who can already rely on a more liberal-minded audience. The
prospect of an openly-gay teen idol or R n' B star, for instance, may be a
long time away. Rap and reggae, for their part, have long been blighted by
the homophobic lyrics and attitudes of a few.
For all our 21st-century liberalism and shock-proof reality-TV modernity,
homosexuality still seems to be a taboo too far, one that we can only seem
to deal with by hermetically sealing it into schoolyard insults, wink-wink
innuendo and pantomime-dame gameshow hosts. Successful and aspiring artists
(watch them on 'Pop Idol', 'X Factor' and other such shows) must submit
themselves to the relentless pressure of image, conformity and audience
approval. It would be naive to think that, for every Mark Feehily who comes
out, there aren't others in the charts who profit by being something they
are not. Maybe even more naive, though, would be to believe that the
entertainment industry is any respecter of individuality or personal
happiness.
Aidan Curran
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the discussion this article provoked on the
CLUAS discussion board.
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