David Bowie Taught Me to Be Queer

The following was originally posted to facebook on January 11 2016, one day after the death of David Bowie.

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"When I was 14 and trapped in small-town suburban hell, before I even knew the name David Bowie, this image glowed at me through a jewel case on a rack of CDs.

There it shone from the rows of corporatized alt-rock and drab adult contemporary, a beacon of strangeness... daring me, I felt; just daring me to pick it up. It took me three tries to work up the nerve, going to that one shitty little music shop in that one little shitty mall in that shitty little nowhere town. Three terrified visits, furtively reading the track listing, looking around to see if anyone was looking. Three attempts brimming with that teenage mix of fear and lust that still comes rushing back to mind when I look at this image.

On my third attempt, shivering but resolute, I finally managed to puff up as big as I could, grab this scintillating object of ultimate queerness which was my secret desire, bring it over to the salesman and face the music, so to speak. In my raging, bored, terrified young mind, this act was a declaration to him, to anyone there, to myself, that I was, in fact, not normal. That I wanted something else. It was exhilarating, buying something that seemed to mean so much, a double-disk no less ( this image was the cover of a 1969-1974 best-of compilation released in 1997) that cost me about two weeks allowance. I feverishly biked it home, popped it in my CD/tape combination ghetto blaster and began falling in love with the work of this brilliant, fearless alien being.

Listening to those early, career-making recordings: Starman, Space Oddity, The Man Who Sold The World, Ziggy Stardust, Jean Jeanie, Rebel Rebel, Aladdin Sane... His words, his ever-mutating persona and stunning visual presentations, his ineffably 'other’ perspective on life, art and love... He made me feel that there was in the world somewhere I might feel at home; that I might find beautiful, strange people there who had different desires and hopes, different sensitivities and powers than those perceptible in my immediate surroundings.

David Bowie was the promise that if you did not fit the mold, you might in fact be destined to break it. Through his music and performance, he irreversibly changed the aesthetic path of our entire world… I sometimes wondered if he had simply been given a vision of what the world would one day be, and managed to beat his contemporaries to the punch, expressing the poetry and the sounds of the future years before anyone else even saw it coming.

I write this today because learning about his death this morning has profoundly saddened me. It was unexpected (I even harbored the unspoken certainty that I would spot him one of these New York days, just carrying about living his life in this city that I love) and I needed to think about why it is that I am so shaken, why it is that I have been unable to stop periodically crying since 8:30 this morning. Is it that our icons seem immortal? Is it that he represented in my mind the ultimate model of success in art, culture and business?

I’ve been thinking about it as I write this and, after a few drafts, I’ve come to what feels like a conclusion. Beyond the mesmerizing combination of plasticity, soulfulness and high artifice that he showed us through his work, his greatest gift to us goes far beyond the enduring strength and relevance of his art. Through his exploration of gender, isolation and otherness, he changed people’s minds about themselves. He taught us never to stop searching for the new, to be open, to be pliant and brave. He taught us to face the strange, whether in ourselves or others, and let it be free."