Pop music can be divided between songs that affirm the status quo and those that, in longtime Village Voice critic Barry Walters’ words, “epitomize an alienation not specific to LGBTQ people but familiar to those of us who feel an anguish that exceeds what pop typically articulates.” Mighty Real, Walter’s mammoth history of LGBTQ music from 1969 to 2000, takes a dual approach, covering both music made by LGBTQ musicians with more or less overt references to queer lives and musical forms, especially club music, and songs that can be “read as a metaphor of LGBTQ existence” more or less regardless of who created them.
Mighty Real is not primarily an alternate history or a rediscovery of marginalized artists, though traces of both approaches run throughout the book. It’s a massively ambitious, deeply personal, and wholly persuasive retelling of 30 glorious years of pop music as something wholly other than what record companies, mainstream media, many listeners, and even some artists actually thought it was for or was doing. As a straight-identifying outsider growing up in the first decades this book covers, I responded deeply to much of this music without knowing why, and was pushed away from much of it for reasons I had never really considered. Reading Walter’s book unlocked truths about pop music that I have sensed and questioned for years but never fully understood or articulated.
It is difficult for anyone who did not live through it to grasp how artificially polarized and culturally repressed any kind of gender fluidity was until long into the 1980s. Despite signaling that in retrospect seems blatantly obvious, social norms—at least outside of major cities like New York—more or less compelled either simply overlooking what was there to be seen or seeing it and being actively marginalized. I mean, it really couldn’t get more obvious than naming your all-male rock band Queen or the Kinks. Or crafting a hit single about trans women (the Kinks’ “Lola”, Lou Reed’s “Walk on the Wild Side”), or stating directly in a 1972 interview (David Bowie): “I’m gay, and always have been.”
When John Lennon asserted the Beatles were bigger than Jesus, records were burned across the United States. But queerness, as Walters demonstrates over and over, really waseverywhereand nowhere, subject to a tacit policy of “don’t ask, don’t tell” that many of us weren’t even aware of. It was not so much hidden in plain sight as simply not to be acknowledged into existence. What the 60 brief chapters of Mighty Real do so well is unpack the subtly coercive ways in which this bizarre sociocultural two-step played out in real time. From Sister Rosetta Tharpe and Little Richard at the birth of rock ‘n’ roll through 1960s icons like Dusty Springfield and the Supremes to closeted ’80s stars like George Michael and Whitney Houston, “LGBTQ musicians have made an art out of saying what can’t overtly be said, just as LGBTQ listeners have learned to hear what others can’t.”
“Ambiguity is built into queerness,” Walters emphasizes about the 100+ artists he has included in his history. That ambiguity is baked into pop music, and he deftly limns the ways producers and performers blurred pronouns, skewed perspectives, and mixed up musical forms to take full advantage of it. Whether experienced on the radio or remixed for the dance floor, the rhythms and emotions of pop songs, like the heavily censored but omnipresent queer coding of classic Hollywood, could be registered in radically different ways at the same time.
So much remained unspoken because there was not yet any shared mainstream language or culturally acceptable space for it to happen. The pitched battle over whether to admit the B-52s’ self-titled first album onto the record player in my high school common room was ostensibly about “Rock Lobster” not being “rock” enough. The battle was our local version of the manufactured furor over disco’s inauthenticity, even though artists were constantly crossing the ostensibly hard-and-fast borders between disco and rock.
I would quickly cross over to the campy, joyful, and subtly eviscerating wonders of the B-52s in 1979 when I found a new group of friends from a different school. They were cool, fun, different, and shared my profound alienation and discomfort with conformity. That they were all also what we’d these days call “gender nonconforming” never really crossed my mind. I didn’t consciously think of myself that way, either, even though I was always puzzled when my more conforming friends, male and female, refused to have anything to do with them or their music. It was so easy to be clueless back then, no matter how miserable it made you.
Were they drawn to the B-52s because they were queer or just because the B-52s were great? Were my gay and lesbian friends in college dancing to Madonna because she spoke to their identities or because her music was so fresh and, well, danceable? Walters wants to have it both ways, leaving the question undecidable. That’s both the wonder ofMighty Realand also, at times, a source of frustration. This is especially the case when, periodically, Walters tilts perhaps overly much into spelling out minutiae of queer coding at the risk of losing sight of the broader history he’s telling.
However, I think this tilting is also a conscious strategy. When the Smiths‘ classic dirge “How Soon Is Now” turned up as a starred track on the rotation playlist at my college radio station, was that because the station manager was gay or because it was a mesmerizing epic that sounded like nothing else we had ever heard? As Walters comments, “the song’s quotable line, ‘I am human and I need to be loved / Just as everybody else does’ … A hetero person could’ve written that line, but we had to. Like much of the music in this book, ‘How Soon Is Now?’ captures a universal condition while signaling to us that it might be specifically about ours.”
Dancing with the Knows and Don’t Knows
These days, boundary-crossing just looks like a Spotify playlist or a typical indie pop artist’s cool mash-up. During the 1970s and ’80s, musical eclecticism like mine, as my inimical friend groups seemed to understand, read as psychotic. I never gave up listening to more or less progressive but staunchly heteronormative rockers from Bob Dylan to Bruce Springsteen to Neil Young to the Allman Brothers Band (absent from Walters’ history as also from the dance floor); hiding-in-plain sight queers like Elton John, David Bowie, and Lou Reed; queer-friendly punks like Blondie and Talking Heads; and what we called back then new wave but which Walters appropriately traces back, again, to the dance floors: the B-52s, early New Order, Grace Jones.
There was also Jim Jarmusch’s no-wave dance band Del-Byzanteens, absent from Walter’s history but with two songs (“Girl’s Imagination” and “Lies to Live By”) penned by Lucy (then Luc) Sante whose lyrics perfectly capture what Sante in her 2024 memoir termed “the sophistication of my repressive mechanism”: “the fact that I was able to write those words, show them to my friends, hear them set to music, hear them sung live dozens of times and on record in two formats, print them in a chapbook I made of my early poetry in 2009—and not once tumble to their real subject, which seems unmistakable to me now. For that matter, look at the refrain of the other song I wrote for the Del-Byzanteens, the title track of their album Lies to Live By: ‘If I only have one life, let me live it as a lie.’ … The conflict is spelled out so explicitly you’d think I would have noticed.” [ I Heard Her Call My Name: A Memoir of Transition, 2024]
Mighty Real equally traces a personal history, from the years when “I was still figuring out who I was” to the years before he publicly came out in 1986 (“when the Voice assigned me to review Pet Shop Boys’ Please, it dawned on me that I couldn’t fully write about it without acknowledging its gayness—as well as my own.”) to moments of celebratory visibility in chapters on Indigo Girls, Melissa Etheridge, or RuPaul. He is keenly focused and particularly illuminating in his discussion of the role of the dance floor as a space of liberatory identity and as a laboratory for the promiscuous mixing of forms that has kept pop music—or at least the best parts of it—fresh and unpredictable over the years.
Walters also adeptly interweaves the high cost of repression, lack of representation, and bigotry, both active and unconscious, with the defiant refusal to give in to despair or defeat that has always been one of music’s great gifts to its artists and fans. Because of Walters’s extraordinary access over the years to many of the creators and performers he profiles in its pages, Mighty Real is shot through with telling details, compelling anecdotes, and revealing insights. His deep understanding of the impossible binds that so many of these artists found themselves in, often with tragic consequences, is especially moving.
That access and experience also provide a revealing look into the challenges that non-conforming artists continue to face when navigating a recording industry dominated by “the scrutiny and commercial pressures of mostly straight, white, male music-industry execs who, 57years after Stonewall, despite countless award-winning LGBTQ films, TV shows, books, and plays, still find reasons to nix or marginalize undisguised queer content in most pop unless it comes from a juggernaut like Chappell Roan.” Mighty Realis especially strong on the ways in which female artists, whether queer or not, paved the way for overtly gay and lesbian performers.
Although the majority of the figures he surveys are white, Walters gives ample space to crossover Black artists and is sensitive to the ways race plays out in pop music. There is some consideration of the different cultural norms between the UK and the US, but beyond a few pages on Kraftwerk and a brief mention of Charles Aznavour’s influence on Liza Minnelli, there’s little else about European pop music here. Nor, regrettably, is there any coverage of Latin artists to speak of.
Mighty Real is pitched well and will likely resonate with many readers on a personal level. For me, the most riveting sections spanned my own lost years of immersion in pop music during the 1970s and ’80s, both the music I still know intimately and the music friends were dancing to at clubs like Danceteria in New York. (My girlfriend’s best friend, Paul, the gayest guy I knew while ceaselessly insisting he wasn’t, generously offered many times to get me in, but I still dressed like a post-punk from Kentucky.)
Mighty Real also showed me the limits of what I thought were my broad musical tastes back then, even as it reveals contexts I had never caught. I knew my college French professor was gay, but only now do I understand why Tina Turner was playing on the stereo the Sunday afternoon he invited me over to see if I was open to being seduced. (He understood pretty quickly that I hadn’t gotten the message.) I wonder now what lay behind the call-in request for Wham! that I weaseled out of on my college radio show. I wonder about the introverted guy who rented out the back room of my apartment and listened to nothing but Hüsker Dü, a band that, to my surprise, merited a full chapter here.
Readers who came of age in the 1990s with riot grrrl, grunge, and queercore, or who heard more clearly the messages that my unconscious blocked, will likely find different paths through Walters’ capacious volume. Its brief chapters work either as a read-through history or as a loose roadmap to browse at one’s own pleasure, a mode of reading Walters would no doubt heartily approve.
Finally, if any evidence were still required to back up Mighty Real’s claim to be rewriting pop music history, there is a 30-page discography and an accompanying 100-song Spotify playlist. From the Partridge Family, Janis Joplin, and Smokey Robinson to Bikini Kill, Green Day, and Queen Latifah? Hard to argue with the scope of that list and hard to overstate how much it has helped us through the years, despite what state legislators and Supreme Court decisions insist to the contrary every single day.