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A review by jonscott9
David Bowie Made Me Gay: 100 Years of LGBT Music by Darryl W. Bullock
2.0
With a grabby title like this, you'd think a certain acerbic wit is in your hands, but this historical, info-rich telling of LGBTQ+ musicians over many decades is far more studied than sassy. It's consistently dry in voice, playing out more like a straight-laced encyclopedia than a tome laden with a sprawling set of personalities.
Its fascinating subjects and their often-devastating experiences are not matched by the writing, though there's some deft, exhaustive reporting in this book. Strange that it lacks the verve of its characters, many of them all-timers in entertainment, considering Bullock also wrote Florence Foster Jenkins, which was spun into a silver-screen vehicle for the eternally scenery-chewing Meryl Streep.
A few of my favorite finds in DBMMG: Gladys Bentley, a gender-fluid performer before her time but succeeding in 1930s Harlem anyway, who sang of "sissies" and "bulldaggers"; Lavender Country (namely Patrick Haggerty), who I'd heard of before but found an even greater depth of affinity for as a pioneering country act since the early 1970s, and who continues to perform and record as he nears age 80, even with a new album out in 2022 since this book was published; and Jackie Shane, another true trailblazer, as a Nashville-born, Toronto-based singer who came out as trans in a 2017 interview, just two years before her death. You can bet I'm picking up Shane's posthumous this November on Record Store Day Black Friday.
There's not a lot about David Bowie in here as I recall, having read this in fits and starts over many months before burning stubbornly through its final 100 to 150 pages. Again, it's a profound disappointment that the storytelling and transitions don't match the meticulous research, and it's sometimes strikingly poorly edited, from its grammar to its craft. Often in this book, a few paragraphs about one performer simply launch into a few more about another, seemingly without concern for providing some shape to the writing. The result is what feels like a stream-of-conscious output when one hoped for a truly riveting set of outcomes. These singers, musicians and composers themselves are marvelous, so it's a shame that the delivery is quite short of fabulous.
Its fascinating subjects and their often-devastating experiences are not matched by the writing, though there's some deft, exhaustive reporting in this book. Strange that it lacks the verve of its characters, many of them all-timers in entertainment, considering Bullock also wrote Florence Foster Jenkins, which was spun into a silver-screen vehicle for the eternally scenery-chewing Meryl Streep.
A few of my favorite finds in DBMMG: Gladys Bentley, a gender-fluid performer before her time but succeeding in 1930s Harlem anyway, who sang of "sissies" and "bulldaggers"; Lavender Country (namely Patrick Haggerty), who I'd heard of before but found an even greater depth of affinity for as a pioneering country act since the early 1970s, and who continues to perform and record as he nears age 80, even with a new album out in 2022 since this book was published; and Jackie Shane, another true trailblazer, as a Nashville-born, Toronto-based singer who came out as trans in a 2017 interview, just two years before her death. You can bet I'm picking up Shane's posthumous this November on Record Store Day Black Friday.
There's not a lot about David Bowie in here as I recall, having read this in fits and starts over many months before burning stubbornly through its final 100 to 150 pages. Again, it's a profound disappointment that the storytelling and transitions don't match the meticulous research, and it's sometimes strikingly poorly edited, from its grammar to its craft. Often in this book, a few paragraphs about one performer simply launch into a few more about another, seemingly without concern for providing some shape to the writing. The result is what feels like a stream-of-conscious output when one hoped for a truly riveting set of outcomes. These singers, musicians and composers themselves are marvelous, so it's a shame that the delivery is quite short of fabulous.