THE OFFICIAL COMPANION PLAYLIST to MIGHTY REAL by BARRY WALTERS.
A note from BARRY WALTERS:
I’ve created this playlist to give you, the listener and potential reader, a sense of how my book, Mighty Real: A History of LGBTQ Music 1969-2000, works.
Often I examine a group universally recognized to be LGBTQ with a song that’s fairly obviously about queer life, like Bronski Beat’s “Smalltown Boy."
Other times I select a song from a straight act beloved of LGBTQ people that signals the singer’s connection to us through the queerness of its music, which in turn becomes a metaphor for LGBTQ experience, like Donna Summer’s “I Feel Love.”
I may choose the quintessential track from an LGBTQ-relevant band, like Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody.”
Or I may select a deep cut from an ally who reaches out to us, like Madonna does with her use of “we” throughout “Why’s It So Hard.”
And sometimes, I get a little mischievous and pick a mega-mainstream hit that’s LGBTQ almost accidentally, like the Partridge Family’s “I Think I Love You.”
I’ve done that right off the bat to let you know my book—and, indeed, this playlist itself—aren’t “normal”—they’re queer.
As Mighty Real makes clear time and time again, that’s a mighty good thing.
MIGHTY REAL by BARRY WALTERS
The definitive history of LGBTQ music, from Stonewall to RuPaul, and its impact on culture and American life.
From the underground dancefloors of the Seventies to the global charts of the Nineties, LGBTQ artists and audiences shaped music’s sound, style, and spirit. In Mighty Real, veteran journalist Barry Walters chronicles its LGBTQ history from the Velvet Underground to the 21st century’s dawn as he honors the artists who redefined gender, defied tradition, and dared to challenge sexual norms with the help of a record business that wasn’t as straight as commonly believed.
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Photo: © Kelly Lawrence
About BARRY WALTERS
Barry Walters has spent 40 years documenting the intersection of mainstream and LGBTQ culture. He began his career at The Village Voice — where he came out publicly in a 1986 Pet Shop Boys review — before becoming a fixture at Spin and Rolling Stone. In 1992, Walters’ work at the San Francisco Examiner made him the first critic to receive an award from The National Gay and Lesbian Journalists Association. Throughout the Nineties, he was The Advocate’s music columnist before a decade’s worth of writing at Out.
