Assigned to review Pet Shop Boys’ debut album Please in the summer of 1986 for the Village Voice, journalist Barry Walters heard resonances unusual for the times. “The choice of font, the song subjects, everything about them spoke of queerness,” Walters said in an interview. “I thought, well, it would be unfair to talk about them as possibly being queer without being honest myself. So I came out. Maybe that’s tactical. I think that’s just, again, my heart leading my head.”
Mighty Real: A History of LGBTQ, 1969-2000 is the culmination of Walters’ decades-long reporting on queer music culture for SPIN, Rolling Stone, NPR, Pitchfork, and other publications; he won an award from the National Gay and Lesbian Journalists Association in 1992, a first for a critic. Its subjects include Motown, Lou Reed, David Bowie, Bob Mould/Hüsker Dü, Bronski Beat, and Nirvana. Holding it together is Walters’ voice, at once becalmed and zealous. If Mighty Real has a motif, it’s how these queer acts either yielded to the freedom of gender and sexual nonconformity or recoiled. Freedom is terrifying.
“We are pushed by technology and by marketing into micro-niches if you like something,” Walters said. “It reinforces the far right to be even more radical. Why not be free?”
Pitchfork: Why did you pick the title from that Sylvester song, “You Make Me Feel (Mighty Real)”?
Walters: For me, there was no other title. LGBTQ people, particularly if they came out of Stonewall, sacrifice a lot for being real. We sacrifice our physical safety. We want to be real so that we can be our real selves, but of course, that endangers us. We could lose our jobs and families for being real. The music we embrace as a refuge empowers us and enables us to be real.
This conversation is happening a few days after I wrote about how, despite being out for almost three decades, I still struggle to accommodate myself in putatively friendly spaces. You write in that Sylvester chapter: “The absence of that self-consciousness, it’s freedom from our own censorship, a place where we don’t need to perform, or adjust, where being ourselves is enough.” Why does that matter for certain queer lives?
I wrote this book for us. I wrote it for LGBTQ people. When I say “Q” I also mean our allies who are so into the same things we’re into. I’ve spoken to straight musicians who have a fabulous fashion sense, or, like, a freedom we have, and they totally relate. Look at Beyoncé, Kendrick Lamar, or Janelle Monáe, or many of the people whom I respect, and in Monáe’s case, really love. They bring their Blackness to the table. They might have Black people first and foremost in mind, and that truth, that realness, makes it, paradoxically, accessible to people who aren’t Black, because it’s like, here’s my world, not just my racial world, but my inner world. And I thought, if I double down on the queerness, it might paradoxically make it more accessible to lesbians, to trans people, everyone.
Did any of the theoretically straight acts you profiled over the years know your sexuality? Mighty Real includes an amusing anecdote about trying to finagle an interview with New Order’s Bernard Sumner in the early ’80s when bassist Peter Hook busts in and shows you his uncut willie. Is it something that he sensed, as in, “Oh, this guy might like it”?
