ANDROGYNY IN ROCK

Sometime after the rock started rolling, it became quite obvious that not all the males in the audience were looking on Elvis and company with merely imitative longings. There were other plans afoot for that magnificent Pelvis, it was muttered in a zillion lockerrooms. And indeed, it was also muttered, Elvis might have been looking on some of the gazers a mite fondly himself. Like almost every other rocker who has been rumored to be uh . . . gay, Elvis cleared himself of that charge by marrying and fathering a child.

Perhaps the father of all those nasty rumors (if either nasty or rumor they were) was poor Johnny Ray. Poor, not because he mightn’t have been “straight,” but because his bus station soiries kept getting interrupted by the gendarmes, damaging his career beyond repair in that more puritan area.

Thereafter, any remotely rebellious singer who has an inkling of ^falsetto range was (reportedly) a homosexual. Some diverted attention from themselves by other means. Some, like Little Richard, flaunted \^hat they had. Richard, it must be,admitted, is as much the Qpeen of Rock as Elvis is the King. Richard had everything: falsetto, long, splendorous curls, even billed himself as the Bronze Liberace — you couldn’t believe it was only because both were pianists. “Black faggot” was not too nice a term, unfortunately . . . but black before “faggot” anyhow.

Whatever the chronological continuum, it is nonetheless true that rock has been almost exclusively male during its 20 year existence. And, though the pleasures of heterosexual love have sometimes been sung in more than slightly ambiguous terms, the dominant trend has been (until lately) to studmanship. This has occasionally proved painful even for the performers. Smokey Robinson recalls being torturously embarassed by audiences who thought that it was his wife, not himself, who sang those early, high-pitched Miracles hits.

Even the heralded “girl group” era of the early 60’s was little more than a sort of Judy Garland renaissance, as Bette Midler has proven (lucratively) in recent months. As for the impresarios, can you imagine the noise when Phil Spector, a slight, mannered, and long haired teenager, came onto the scene in ‘59? Like most of those who’d follow, Spector squelched the rumors by marrying... in a typically grand Spector move, he married that most luscious of all the girl-group singers, Ronnie of the Ronnettes.

When equally effete British bands arrived, the curtain of rumor didn’t lift (at least not for a long time) but the faucet of allegations was opened, full stream.

It has since been stated by the principals, in only slightly guarded language, that manager Brian Epstein’s relationship with the Beatles transcended business on more than one occasion.

And the Rolling Stones, with their longest haired, pouty lipped leader, their snaggle-toothed skinny and their god-like Adonis, appeared in fullfeathered, utterly magnificent drag on the cover of the “Have You Seen Your Mother Baby, Standing in the Shadow” single.

And the Who wrote a charming little ditty called “I’m A Boy,” which ran something like:

I’m a boy, I’m a boy

But my ma won’t admit

I’m a boy, I’m a boy

But if I say I am, I get it!

And there were others of course, the P. J. Probys and the Ian Whitcombs, and others, and even Cliff Richard, who somehow never married. Icons, if not for real. But most of all there were the Kinks, whose leader, Raymond Douglas Davies, penned such fop-epics as “A Well Respected Man,” “Dedicated Follower of Fashion,” and “Dandy” before (you should pardon the expression) going all the way with a 1970 hit called “Lola.” Whose central message was sexual ambiguity, not to say confusion. Its final lines were: “1 know what I am and I’m glad I’m a man/ And so’s Lola.” Davies has since become one of the campiest performers in the history of show biz, let alone rock.

Davies had opened Pandora’s Box, on both sides of the Atlantic. In America, the Velvet Underground had already sported an androgynous drummer named Maureen Tucker, who may be the only woman in rock ever to play a lesbian role. The Velvets had treaded on sexually thin ice in the S & M arena, but achieved lasting fame by producing Lou Reed, who became the first homosexual ever to marry a woman and do Frankenstein in drag in the same month.

Alice Cooper emerged, with the furor due an all-male band whose lead singer’s name was Alice, later inspiring the immortal lines: “She asked me why the singer’s name was Alice/ And I said now, baby, you really wouldn’t understand.” Quite clearly, as later events have shown, she would have.

Captain Beefheart’s Magic Band at one time or another has had various members attired in frocks. Iggy and the famous Stooges have raised all kinds of previously sheltered myths, though whether sex or the butcher block was the issue is still open to question.

In Britain, things got further out, faster. The finely festooned Bonzo Dog Doo Dah Band, had they survived a calamitous and stormy career, might now be considered co-equal progenitors of camp-rock with Davies. Roy Wood is said to be pictured, somewhere, in drag. Mick Jagger wrote “Cocksucker Blues” — in order to get out of, a sticky publishing contract, true, but then, he wrote it.

And finally, the bitch queens of the movement: Marc Bolan and David Bowie, in order of appearance, David made his American debut l clad in an assortment of pinafores, wowing them coast to coast, and with a band absolutely swarming with pretty young androgynes. Marc Bolan never hid his attraction to members of his own sex, either. Both have alluded to these matters — though never so explicitly as to hetero subjects — in their songs.

Closet doors on either side of the Atlantic fairly leapt open. (Either they’d been stacked two deep, or someone was keeping something else in there.)

Before, sexual orientation had always been a guessing game — did he/she know why we responded to those pelvic thrusts? Was that genderless song written in such a way on purpose? — perhaps because of sbcial forces, or maybe because the audience was projecting. There are still plenty of people who find a lot of “gay” lyrics on such mid-sixties classics as Highway 61 and, say ^Between the Buttons.

Now, the halls of every record company are filled with glorious glitter and decked out camp followers. Strangely enough, almost every one of the current gay heroes has either married (Bolan, Bowie, Reed — the Big Three, after all) or has recanted (Alice, Mott the Hoople, whose “All the Young Dudes” practically became the national anthem of the newly gay last year). Who knows? Every record company has a glitter attraction, whether or not they call if that. Jerry Wexler of Atlantic calls it Jewel Box Rock. Others have termed it everything from glam rock to scuzz rock. Even staid Asylum, hardly a bastion of musical radicalism, has David Crosby, the man who wrote “Triad” for the Jefferson Airplane and was dismissed from the Byrds for you know what. (“Erk, erk,” as Crosby once put it.)

So, it’s back to the beginning, even now. Will the real homosexuals please stand up?