LA Review Of Books - Thursday, June 18, 2026

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1. 98.7 FM Santa Barbara and at kpfk.org for the world.
2. Hello and welcome to the LARB Radio Hour brought to you by Reader Supported LA Review of Books.
3. I'm your host, Kate Wolfe, and I'm joined by my co-host, Eric Newman.
4. Hi, Kate.
5. We're so glad to be speaking with the journalist and music critic Barry Walters today.
6. He got his start at The Village Voice and was a columnist at The Advocate.
7. His writing has also been featured in countless other publications, including Spin, Rolling Stone, NPR, and Pitchfork.
8. And his 2020 mini-documentary, Love Me Like You Should, The Brave and Bold Sylvester, won a Clio Award.
9. He lives in San Francisco, and he joins us today from the road where he's promoting his new book, Mighty Real, a history of LGBTQ music 1969 through 2000.
10. Spanning three decades of pop, disco, rock, funk, folk, and much more, Mighty Real looks at the power of popular music to challenge sexual norms and gender categories in ways both coded and unmistakable.
11. With 60 entries on everyone from David Bowie, The Velvet Underground, Motown, Nirvana, and Judas Priest, to more obscure acts like Lavender Country and the lesbian label Olivia Records, Walters shows how queerness is encoded in the very DNA of some of our most beloved songs and albums, and how music both reflects the reality of gay culture and subversively brings it into the mainstream.
12. Thank you so much, Barry, for being here.
13. Hello.
14. All right. So, Barry, I think probably the best place to start off is how you came to this particular project. What pushed you to kind of put together this collection now?
15. Well, I have been working on it nine years, and actually it was inspired by a pioneering film book written by a friend of mine, Vito Russo.
16. He wrote The Celluloid Closet, Homosexuality in the Movies. I discovered it in the early 80s when I was a grad student at NYU Cinema Studies Department. And it opened up my eyes to seeing films from a queer way.
17. And I wanted to, well, I mean, years after that, when I became a journalist documenting queer music, as well as, you know, whatever you want to call the opposite of that, straight music, mainstream music, whatever.
18. I wanted to bring those two things together in a book.
19. I tracked down Vito's agent and then I wrote a very bad book proposal and I didn't know what I was doing and I had to go back to freelancing.
20. So maybe that's too lengthy an answer for you.
21. Well, I think that another reason now, well, that I started nine years ago, I had a health scare and I started to think about my mortality.
22. I wanted to leave something wonderful behind for my stepchildren and their generation So you know it sort of only coincidence that it finally came to fruition
23. during a horrifying conservative moment. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's funny that you say
24. there's an opposite of queer music, the straight music, because from reading your book,
25. I feel like there is nothing but queer music. I mean, really, when you if you're identifying,
26. you know, the beginnings of rock and roll with someone like Sister Rosetta Tharpe or
27. Little Richard, it seems very baked into the DNA. And I wanted to run by you a quote that I read
28. recently in a New York Review of Books article from John Savage, because I felt like it was
29. really exemplified in reading your book. This is from an article of his from the 80s, but it was
30. quoted recently, pop's attitude to sex as to other things is contradictory and confused,
31. part knowing, part deliberately innocent, part libertarian, part repressive. And I just felt in
32. this book that by looking at all the gay and queer and LGBTQ influence throughout the history of pop
33. music, I felt like I understood things even less in a way because it just seems that there's so
34. much provocation. There's so much gayness in almost every popular musician of the last 50 years.
35. So how does queerness exist apart from that and have this very kind of cloaked
36. reality outside of music? How can the music be so gay and it not impact the culture
37. more. That was like what I was struggling with here. Well, I think that at least I can recognize
38. when queerness is being co-opted. I remember in the 80s, the wonderful flood of queer musicians
39. and queer adjacent musicians. Of course, I'm talking about the second British invasion of
40. Boy George and Eurythmics and Culture Club and Duran Duran and all that.
41. Then MTV decided that it really needed to focus more on the male, suburban, straight, teenage boy.
42. And we got co-opted queerness from the hair metal acts, Bon Jovi, Motley Crue, Poison.
43. I mean, Poison really kind of looked like drag queens with guitars, right?
44. So I think that genre is, in my mind, an example of how the look of queerness gets a little skewed and filtered into a suburban, straight male rock aesthetic.
45. but on the other hand i i do know people young queer men younger than me who love rock
46. and love the the campiness of those acts i can't tell you what does it have i don't know
47. air supply um i'm trying to think of the blandest thing i can think of um
48. And I even have Chicago in the disco section.
49. So maybe like Chicago when it discovered power ballads That straight music So yeah I think there also something inherent to similar to theater that music also is it is theatrical in a way that always even if the producer is not queer it lending itself to a kind of an exuberance that we tend to culturally associate with queerness and transgression as well
50. There was a point in the 90s where naturalism made a kind of comeback and bands were just sort of stumbling on stage and not putting on a performance, not speaking to the audience, having very blank expressions.
51. And to me, there was not much cult campness or queerness in a band like Stone Temple Pilots or Audioslave or a band that is just dead serious and wants you to take them seriously and wants you to, I don't know, submit to whatever.
52. I don't think a queer audience really wants to submit to a kind of their music or at least submit to that.
53. We would say that's just like bad taste.
54. I was trying to think of any band that through your history was not somehow affiliated.
55. And I guess the within this gay family of pop and rock and roll.
56. And I the only thing I come up with is something like, you know, Kid Rock or Limp Bizkit.
57. You know, these kind of like.
58. Oh, yes. Limp Bizkit. Yes.
59. Taking opposite of queer.
60. Right. Taking maybe like the more misogynistic and kind of tough, rude, broey parts of rap.
61. And even that genre of like metal rap, melding those things together.
62. But it does seem, and I agree with Eric, that just throughout the history of rock and roll,
63. something of, you know, singing on stage puts one in the mode of abjectness and emotion and emoting.
64. And it's kind of unavoidable.
65. But also it's really that looking at what you do here is kind of make this lineage that because rock is so,
66. and pop, you know, they're so recursive.
67. They're so much based on everyone who comes before.
68. As I was saying that all these people,
69. even hair metal is kind of referencing glam rock
70. and glam rock is the most gay thing ever.
71. Right.
72. Well, I do think there are trans musicians now
73. who are making electronic music
74. that is trying to break from the songwriting tradition,
75. from the traditional performance tradition,
76. people like Sophie and the artists that she influenced.
77. So maybe there's something there,
78. but maybe we're heading toward,
79. we're just like hitting a dead end,
80. trying to look for straightness.
81. Why do that?
82. And speak to me.
83. I'd rather talk about the queer stuff.
84. Totally.
85. Well, maybe you could, you know, because this is such a voluminous book, talk about the timeline that you have set here and why you wanted to mostly focus on post-Stonewall acts.
86. There is some pre but how were you thinking about the time period that you would write about in the book Well I really did intend to start at the very beginning of recorded music with the lesbian blues singers
87. like Bessie Smith and Big Mama Thornton.
88. But if I did that and went up to the present day,
89. all of my entries would be the level
90. of the most superficial Wikipedia opening paragraphs.
91. And I didn't want to do that. I wanted to create a narrative that would be fun for the reader, that it would be, that it would tell a story. I didn't want to be purely encyclopedic.
92. So I started with the Stonewall riots because I think that is where, I mean, of course, yes, there had been pre-Stonewall Barbra Streisand, pre-Stonewall rock and roll with Little Richard, all that.
93. But I think right after Stonewall, there were a number of things that began happening. First of all, the very act of a man dancing with a man and a woman dancing with a woman was something that could get you arrested, even in New York City.
94. That's really at the foundation of why Stonewall happened, because these kids were just dancing with each other. What's the problem?
95. Well, it was a big problem because there were vice laws whenever there is liquor sold and the cops could enforce them the way they saw fit.
96. It was also illegal to wear less than three articles of clothing that weren't traditionally associated with your birth assigned sex.
97. So even if, say, you looked like the Velvet Underground or the Rolling Stones, the wrong cop could arrest you. That really feeds into what we now know as disco or have known as disco and now just known as, you know, known as dance music.
98. And then, of course, there was Warhol and across the pond, Bowie was obsessed. David Bowie was obsessed with Warhol. And when he came over here, he met Warhol and his friend Mark Bolin was also interested in these performers who consciously put on a performance the way that I mentioned.
99. a sense of intentional performity that went against the whole naturalism of the hippie movement.
100. Of course, trends come and go. But when Bowie and Mark Boland put glam rock and glitter rock,
101. whatever you want to call it, on England's top of the pops, and it was televised throughout England,
102. people had to decide, is this a cool thing? Is this terrifying? And if you're watching it with
103. your parents and they're like, oh, you know, then it is cool. So they brought that over here and
104. you know, the rest is queer history.
105. you're listening to the larb radio hour on kpfk 90.
106. 7 FM. We've been speaking with Barry Walters, author of Mighty Real.
107. I was wondering of the people you write about here, could you talk about who spoke to you most
108. as artists when you were young? I mean, you referenced David Bowie, Lou Reed. Who else
109. was really important for you when you were grappling with your sexuality? I think you said
110. when you were 11 and who kind of gave you this idea of, wow, I'm not alone. There's other people
111. like me out there. Right. Well, I had an older brother and an older sister and David Bowie was
112. the first artist I picked up for just myself. He wasn't part of their world at first,
113. And I remember reading an article about David Bowie and the word bisexual and I didn't know what that was but if, if this creature in the magazine was bisexual.
114. Well, that seemed pretty cool. And I had to hear what that sounded like. And then following David Bowie and following the peak of glam rock, there was Patti Smith and the Ramones in the beginning of punk.
115. And I grew up in a very conformist suburb. I was really expected to conform in a big way. And by following David Bowie's lead, really, that created problems for me because I was being misgendered.
116. And I learned that something that's feminine is subpar, even if it's a man that they're saying this to.
117. So I feel like the punk rock definitely gave me some sense that I wasn't angry alone.
118. And then, you know, when my dad died and college was on the horizon, disco was there for me because it was so uplifting.
119. And I could, you know, a friend lent me a Donna Summer record.
120. And I remember tracks like Queen for a Day and Fairytale High.
121. And it just seemed like, OK, maybe one song, it could be coincidental.
122. but I think she's writing about queer experience here.
123. And so, and certainly the village people were,
124. or at least their producer was pitching things in that direction.
125. So, you know, I have really broad tastes.
126. I don't stay in my lane in terms of what I should be liking.
127. And, you know, I think it was when I just met Talking Heads. It was the first band I ever met. And Tina Weymouth was like, well, we like all these funk acts and soul acts. I thought, well, it's sort of punk to like something besides punk.
128. because when you like punk at the very beginning, you were expected to only like punk,
129. which really isn't very punk because it's just conformist, right? So hearing that was very
130. liberating I want to talk about some things that have come up in kind of contemporary culture My memory of the quote unquote gay pop star or like gay musicians
131. So, yes, we have certain like Boy George that when I was growing up, I would have understood was gay or bisexual.
132. But there were, for example, in the early 2000s, I feel there were like a swath of these folks like Johnny McGovern, for example, or Caswell or Amanda Lepore in terms of like a trans recording artist.
133. They were mostly, I would say, extremely niche. Right. And that nicheness was in part because they were so out.
134. But now we have these kind of more openly gay or queer pop stars like Troye Sivan or Billie Eilish, who are major recording stars. And then we also have this kind of accusation, let's say, of queer baiting.
135. So it's a very strange, and I'm curious how you think about that over the span of your career, of going from the pop star who insiders may know is gay, but that's not going to be an explicit thing that's put out about them, to pop stars whose sexuality, sometimes against their own wishes, is kind of made a public part of their persona.
136. and then straight pop stars who were actually trading on the very thing that you couldn't be before in order to get an audience?
137. Sure. Well, I do think that for so many years, the years before streaming, that the guys, the teenage boys were driving the record industry.
138. sometime in the early aughts it became clear that the girls were actually the ones who were
139. paying for their downloads the way you're supposed to right that signaled to the big
140. the record companies that oh we better focus on the girls so now pop music is thought of
141. of as a fairly female dominated world. Yes, there are exceptions to that, like Troye Sivan. But
142. I mean, we'll see if Sam Smith remains, maybe he is the exception, that there's no one doing
143. Taylor Swift level numbers, who is male and is out. It seems as though the crossing of
144. the girls who love pop and the gay boys who love pop and the lesbians who love pop,
145. that it's basically, for the most part, female artists. And Chaperone is the ultimate example
146. of that who hits all of those things simultaneously and i think it was just really by accident that
147. that it happened but now that coming together allows for a record like good luck babe to be
148. fighting the idea of compulsory heterosexuality uh in a really meaningful way and like wow i could
149. not have seen a record like that coming. Shortly before I came on my book tour, I saw Sam Smith
150. open his, I think it was month-long run at the Castro Theater, literally right around the corner
151. from where I live And he sang a brand new song in which he sang he my guy he my guy much like Mary Wells did at the beginning of the Motown era with My Guy And then there is the Temptations answer song My Girl
152. And that is really the final frontier. If a super mainstream queer male singer can sing to a guy
153. and have it be unambiguous, then we'll see if radio will allow that. Because musically,
154. the song, it sounded like a hit to me. The audience was freaking out. So we'll see.
155. I'm curious because I think there's something to what you're saying, you know better than I do,
156. about the diversion that happens when we enter the streaming ecosystem. Because I think what
157. What you're talking about is there's a very conservative kind of infrastructure in radio play, in network TV play.
158. And it sounds like maybe what you're talking about is the ability to create and support artists and the way that all of them make money now to support their tours is increased for people that might have been marginalized in the industry or not able to get through the conservative filter because of, I want to be careful about it, but the diversification of streaming.
159. Right. Well, the idea that that numbers, numbers that are just checked in every different direction that runs across everything nowadays, everything is tallied and everything is assigned a number.
160. And if the number isn't high enough, then it's niche. My book, they tried to sell the rights abroad to it and they showed me the results. And I got a whole bunch of, oh my gosh, this book is so wonderful. Oh, the cover is so beautiful. Oh, but you know, it's kind of niche.
161. and that is really it's it's really the death of art if you want to say it anything that's not
162. hitting the broadest spectrum possible if that's it then that's the path that that ai
163. and trumpism and all that stuff that's where it's headed yeah that is the authoritarianism
164. that is happening. And it's driven by the idea that numbers are the end all and be all of market
165. value. As much as the teenager was a clear consumer of pop music, was there ever an idea
166. among record executives that LGBTQ people were consumers and things should be marketed to them?
167. Was that what disco was about? Did that signal a new frontier in the history of gay music?
168. Yes. Well, I think disco was a big example because disco bypassed the straight male,
169. I'm going to say an old fogey establishment that radio had ossified into by the mid-70s, say.
170. It meant that there were record labels that were selling hundreds of thousands of records without area play and they were largely happening in New York where there was a large concentration of gay dancers and gay listeners and also straight dancers who knew that the best places to dance were the gay clubs places that had
171. the most progressive up to the moment music that was in the gay clubs. And so they had hired
172. um homo promo men who felt comfortable going into the gay discos and
173. shaking the dj's hand and and being body to body on a you know sweaty gay male dance floor
174. they were the ones who were selling donna summer and and the people that came after so i i know
175. what you're saying but I also want to say like who would have thought that it's not just in San
176. Francisco maybe it's not in the south but every time I walk into a record store I see a Velvet
177. Underground album who would have thought that the Velvet Underground would be out selling the acts
178. that play things safe, that kids like 60 years on are listening to the Velvet Underground and
179. thinking that they're cool. It was not something that could have been manipulated in terms of,
180. oh, we've got to sell these songs about drag queens and hustlers and junkies,
181. because that's what the kids want.
182. Thank you, Barry, for being a real one yourself
183. and being here with us today.
184. That was Barry Walters.
185. His new book is called Mighty Real,
186. A History of LGBTQ Music, 1969 through 2000.
187. Thank you.
188. We'll be right back.
189. We'll be right back.
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