Society
The New Statesman Profile - The gay icon
Published 15 April 2002
Liza Minnelli, Kylie, Will Young, Becks and Thatcher: all of them played a special role for homosexuals. Why? The gay icon profiled
''Ladies and gentlemen, prepare yourself for the greatest resurrection since Jesus Christ. Please welcome . . . Liza Minnelli!" To secure Minnelli's first standing ovation of the evening, Graham Norton needed only to mention her name. The throng of fans, most of them gay, filled the Royal Albert Hall with tsunamis of applause.
Fresh from her famously gaudy wedding to a man whom Elton John has claimed is gay, Minnelli has been in London this month, self-consciously milking her status as gay icon. This role, as she is well aware, is especially powerful because she was born to the momma of all gay icons, Judy Garland. A gay icon was originally a person - usually a troubled woman - who reflected in her life the characteristics, anxieties and confusions of being gay. She was revered because she was seen to be somehow closer to the essence of being gay than the rest of us. But as gay people's lives have transformed and improved, so too have their icons changed.
Thus the interesting journey which culminated at the Albert Hall the other week was not that of Minnelli from an obese has-been to a star once more. Rather, it was that from the self- hating gay men who identified with her homeless, Benzedrine-addicted mother, to the self-confident, laid-back gay men who celebrated Liza's return from the brink. In the shifting nature of gay icons, we can identify the shifting nature of homosexuality.
It all began with Garland. Gregory Woods, Britain's first professor of gay and lesbian studies, believes she was the first person to be dubbed a gay icon. To many people (gay and straight), she still embodies the term: a tragic, lonely figure, fighting back the tears. She died unglamorously of a (possibly intentional) overdose of sleeping pills in 1969, two weeks after her 47th birthday. It was a miserable end to a miserable life. She was forced on to the stage by her parents at just two years old, and snapped up by MGM at 14. A predictable cocktail of unhappiness awaited her: anorexia, hepatitis, alcoholism, liver damage and addictions to a whole pharmacist's cabinet of drugs.
Even when she belted out her most famous number, "Get Happy", she carried an air of tragedy that could only remind her listeners that it is actually a song about death ("Get ready for your judgement day . . . It's quiet and peaceful on the other side"). Her five marriages mirrored the unhappy, transitory partnerships to which most gay men were condemned before gay liberation. Garland thus became the icon of a closeted generation who could only dream of happiness "somewhere over the rainbow". She established the prototype of the gay icon as a depressed, doomed failure, and this model persists, to some extent, with the ongoing canonisation of Marilyn Monroe, James Dean and Princess Diana.
But emerging at around the same time as Garland, there was another type of gay icon: the eunuch. Kenneth Williams, limp-wristed, camp and utterly asexual, was the classic example, although Quentin Crisp, Frankie Howerd and John Inman were also vital to the formation of this type.
When Steven Collins, now a retired engineer, was discovering his sexuality in the late 1950s, he looked to Williams as an icon. He says today: "You have to understand, dear, they might look ridiculous to you, but they were the only examples of obviously gay men that existed in the public eye. You knew you weren't alone. If you didn't want to be in the closet, then you could be a screaming queen like Ken [Williams] . . . I dare say they are outdated now, but your generation dismisses the power those icons had over gay men too quickly. They gave us an identity. Not a great identity, maybe, but it was something, and back then we had nothing."
The eunuch-as-icon has been revived in the past few years, and can be seen in Graham Norton and Brian Dowling (winner of last year's Big Brother). Harmless men seemingly drained of testosterone have become popular with straight women who buy into the Bridget Jones notion that gay men make lovely best friends.
However, by the early 1970s, when Professor Woods came out, these two models of gay icon seemed to be waning in their appeal. He can remember older men on the scene who had a fetish for Marlene Dietrich, and finding them anachronistic. Dietrich was by that time a parody of her former self, and appeared in public embalmed in clown-like make-up and wearing preposterously outre outfits. Younger gay men recoiled from her in horror. "We wanted to move away from all that," Woods says. "We saw it as patronising to women and demeaning to ourselves."
A paradigm shift had occurred in 1969, he believes, with the Stonewall riots. A generation of gay men had refused to lie back and internalise the homophobia of the culture around them. New icons were needed to reflect this mood. For a generation, gay men had reacted to being derided as "feminine" and "sissy" by embracing the insult and trying to say they weren't ashamed of it. Now they wanted to show that the stereotype was a lie.
Accordingly, when the Village People came along, Woods says, "our idol, if you like, became not a specific showbiz celebrity, but the generalised masculine type [represented by the band]. We aspired to become that type." Each member of the Village People fitted a macho, male stereotype: construction worker, police officer, Indian chief. "They spawned a clone look. Everyone on the scene wore jeans, no matter what their figure; everyone wore a lumberjack shirt; everyone wore boots - it was very egalitarian in a strange sort of way."
This changed again in the 1980s, with the onset of the Aids epidemic. At a time when gay literature and lifestyles became more sombre, paradoxically, camp and frivolity made a comeback. Joan Collins, playing Alexis in Dynasty, became the definitive gay icon of that era: the bitch. This led to the creation of one of the most unlikely gay icons of all, Margaret Thatcher. Quentin Crisp, the guru of camp, adored her, and a poll by the left-wing gay newspaper Capital Gay in the mid-1980s found (to the dismay of its journalists) that a majority of its readers saw her as iconic, despite her government's homophobic policies.
One aspect of this was simply admiration for the Iron Lady's unconsciously camp theatricality, but Woods also identifies "a very strong streak of covert right-wing thinking in gay men. It's to do with self-interest. As consumers, gay men are unusually powerful - the pink pound and so on. This is the great failure of gay liberation. It liberated us into the Thatcherite world of the market."
With the arrival of the less fevered 1990s, two new types of icon emerged, both perhaps symbols of a generation emerging from the shadows of homophobia.
The most novel of these was the straight-lust-object-as-icon, epitomised by David Beckham. Gay men had always lusted after heterosexuals - as anybody who has read A E Housman or E M Forster knows in painful detail. But only by the late 1990s did gay men feel confident enough to assert their lust for men like Beckham unashamedly, as of right. One need only try to imagine a similar public gay adoration of, say, George Best at his peak in the early 1970s (simply impossible) to realise that the Beckhamesque icon could not have existed before - too many layers of shame had yet to dissolve.
Becks shares the limelight with another type of gay icon: the happy, healthy, pop star enjoying life - Kylie Minogue and Will Young are the best examples. Apparently tired of identifying with victims, gay men found a new model in the relentlessly chirpy Minogue.
From her happy suburban childhood to her gradual rise to fame on Neighbours, she has effortlessly avoided the addictions and traumas expected of earlier gay icons. Even her brief flirtation with something edgy - her relationship with the late Michael Hutchence, who was the lead singer of INXS - soon ended, with Kylie apparently unscathed. Kylie herself has commented wryly: "Gay icons usually have some tragedy in their lives, but I've only had tragic haircuts and outfits."
If Kylie Minogue or Liza Minnelli had been of Judy Garland's generation, they would have had to die horribly to enter the pantheon of gay heroines.
Now Minnelli is admired by gay men not for her tragic qualities, but for her persistence, and for the way she has beaten the odds.
Similarly, Mo Mowlam became an icon not because of her brain tumour, but because she confronted it without self-pity.
According to Russell T Davies, the writer of the ground-breaking television series Queer as Folk, the whole idea of the gay icon is now outdated. "It's one of those things which is talked about and written about much more than it actually exists out there in the world.
"I always liked Boy George - I think he's great - but is he my icon? I would never use that phrase. And people say Liza Minnelli is a gay icon. It's a lazy phrase. I'd go to her concert and buy her albums, but the idea that, because of that, I worship her is just silly."
Davies argues that we have moved on from a world in which gay people need icons. "You have icons when you're repressed and you can't express things," he explains, "but as Gay-Land grows up and matures, you don't need to look up to icons any more." Davies often speaks to gay youth groups, and he has found that the idea of venerating iconic figures is fading away. "Weirdly, the thing they're most obsessed with is Star Trek," he says.
This change in attitude is exemplified by gay pride marches: these days, only older men are dressed as Garland - young gay men are far more likely to opt for a skinny Clone Zone T-shirt that shows off the hours they invest in the gym.
Indeed, Woods believes that the gay icon has already died, and that even Kylie isn't a bona fide example. "When somebody is declared a gay icon, who does the polling of gay people? Nobody. So who decides who is a gay icon? It's journalists, who are usually straight."
As the gay population swells with increasingly diverse groups of men and women who don't see coming out as a big deal, it is no longer possible to speak of a homogeneous "gay community" with a clearly identifiable set of "icons".
Perhaps, at last, gay people don't need Judy and co any more.
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