The Top 10 Pop Songs: Beefcake and Gay Icons

Yesterday I discovered that the most popular country-western songs involve rather gym-deficient white guys asking girls for dates, discussing their girlfriends' hotness, or crying in their beer after their girlfriends dump them, with gay people nowhere to be found except in a few homophobic tweets.

But maybe pop music is similar.  I haven't really been paying attention to it for a long time, but back in the day, "girl!  girl! girl!" reigned supreme, and no one ever acknowledged that gay people existed, not even Sir Elton John (I remember when rock was young: men and Suzie had so much fun).  It would only be fair to look up the top 10 pop songs on Billboard's list, andsee if they are just as bad as the country-western crooners.

1. Jonas Brothers, "Sucker":  I'm a sucker for you.  I'll follow you anywhere, even if it gets me in trouble. 

No "girls! girls! girls!"  Gender not specified.

The Jonas Brothers are proud to be gay icons.  In 2013 they appeared on the cover of Out magazine.

See: The Jonas Brothers: I Wanna Be Like You

2. Sam Smith with Normani, "Dancing with a Stranger." A duet, with boy and girl parts.  We broke up, so I'm dancing with a stranger.  Jealous?

Ok, that's rather heterosexist, but Sam Smith is gay, and Normani recorded "Love Lies" with Khalid for the gay teen drama Love, Simon

3. Ava Max, "Sweet but Psycho."  She's crazy, but boy, tell me you don't love it.

The music video stars Prasad Romijn as the pretty boy being poisoned, tied up, and chased with a butcher knife by the psycho girl.

Ava Max is gay-positive.  She tweets: "Thank you for having me at the iconic G-A-Y heaven in London.  I love you!"

4. Post Malone, "Wow."  A rap song.  Most of the lyrics are obscure, but the gist is that he's rich and famous: "I got a hunnid bands ($100) in my pocket, so when I come in the room, people say 'wow.'"  

Gee, I've had a hunnid bands in my pocket lots of times.  Nobody cares.

No romances in the song.

Post Malone is mentioned in online articles about rappers who support LGBT people, so I'm concluding that he's gay-friendly.

5. Ariana Grande, "Break Up with Your Girlfriend, I'm Bored."  Self-explanatory.

The music video stars Charles Melton (top photo) and Ariel Yasmine as the couple Ariana is trying to break up, and ends with a girl-on-girl kiss, which according to an article in L'Officiel, left many gay fans "confused and disheartened," fetishizing lesbian sexuality without providing a meaningful narrative for the gay experience.

But Billboard has an article on 10 times she was a gay ally.

6. Lil Nas X with Billy Ray Cyrus, "Old Town Road"  This is Lil Nas's first published song, a country-western-rap hybrid, so what is it doing on a pop list?  The lyrics are obscure, but I think it's about how rich and famous he is: he's riding a horse onto old town road because he's tired of his life of "bull riding and boobies."

Lil Nas is rumored to be gay. Wow -- a gay black country-western singer.  How many more barriers are there to break?.

Billy Ray Cyrus is pro-gay.

7. Taylor Swift, "Me."  Boy, there are a lot of girls out there, but I'm the only me.

Taylor Swift is a gay icon.  According to the NewNowNext website, she was expected come out as gay or bi in April 2019, but instead she released "the gayest non-gay music video ever."  She does sing in male drag in pastel colors, and she and pansexual Brendan Urie do find a rainbow-colored skyscraper, but it's still about boy-girl trouble.

8. Ariana Grande, "7 Rings."  A parody of "My Favorite Things" from The Sound of Music, but instead of simple pleasures, she likes Breakfast at Tiffany's and bottles of bubbles/ Girls with tattoos who like getting in trouble.

No boys mentioned.  The music video shows her surrounded by girls.

9. Khalid, "Talk":  Let's talk about our relationship.  Gender not specified.  He states that he doesn't use pronouns in his songs because he wants them to take the point of view of the listener.  The music video shows him trying to talk to a girl, but then there's a boy there, then a whole group.

10. Halsey, "Without Me"  We broke up, and now you're regretting it, aren't you?  Gender not specified, but the music video shows her kissing a boy (Will Brandt) a lot.

Halsey is bisexual.

Results:  Wow, talk about diversity!  Male and female, black and white. The themes are similar to country-western: 7 relationship problems, 1 "things I like," and 2 about how rich and famous the singer is.

Heterosexism: Counting only the lyrics, only 5 of the 10 songs specify heterosexual romance.

Beefcake:  3 of the 5 male singers (counting Billy Ray Cyrus) have presentable physiques, but most of the female singers perform with hot guys.

Gay Content:  None in the songs, but 10 of the 11 singers are gay allies!

I don't think we're in Alabama anymore.

See also: The Top 10 Country Songs

Smalltown Boy: Subtext Songs of the 1980s

After the demise of the drag-queen ABBA and the faux-gay Village People, I started listening to popular music more aggressively, looking for "real" gay-friendly songs. Or at least songs with subtexts.  I found no depictions of same-sex romance, anywhere -- the most you could hope for was a dropped pronoun.  But a few Top 40 Hits -- one or two per year -- were about the search for a Good Place, or celebrations of male beauty (with beefcake-heavy music videos), and or just about being proud of your identity.

1. "Physical" (Olivia Newton-John, 1981).

2. "I'm Coming Out" (Diana Ross, 1981).  Ms. Ross claimed that it was about teenage girls "coming out" into high society, but gay teens knew what it was really about:
I'm coming out -- I want the world to know, got to let it show.

3. "It's Raining Men" (The Weather Girls, 1982).  The catchy beat made it easy to appropriate.  I didn't even mind the heterosexism:
God bless Mother Nature, she's a single woman too
She took off to heaven, and she did what she had to do
She taught every angel to rearrange the sky,
So that each and every woman could find a perfect guy.

4. "Self-Control" (Laura Branigan, 1982).  She goes to a mostly heterosexual orgy, screams when hands reach out to grab her, and ends up sleeping with a mysterious man in a white mask and red gloves, but in a era where gay teens had to live in masks, a celebration of the night resonated:
Oh the night is my world. City lights, painted girls.
I must believe in something, so I guess I'll just believe that this night will never go. 

5. "Holiday" (Madonna, 1983). No gay people mentioned, but coming out often required forgetting about years of pain: it's time for the good times -- forget about the bad times.

6. "So Many Men, So Little Time" (Miquel Brown, 1983).  A woman praises heterosexual one-night stands, but you could also use it to praise the joy of boy-watching.
Each new one I meet makes my heart beat faster, when I see them so strong and tall.
So many men, so little time. How can I lose?  
So many men, so little time.  How can I choose?

7. "Relax" (Frankie Goes to Hollywood, 1983).

8. "I Am What I Am" (Gloria Gaynor, 1983) could be read as a response to the bigots (and there were a lot of bigots) who kept screaming that gays were worthless, subhuman, monsters out to destroy the world.
I am good, I am strong, I am somebody, I do belong.
I am useful, I am true, I am worthy, I am as good as you.

9. "Smalltown Boy" (Bronski Beat, 1984).  I didn't realize at the time that the boy was leaving town to escape homophobic harassment --but it could easily be applied to anyone searching for a "good place." (and I liked the music video with the smalltown boy swimmer in tight speedos).

The answers you seek will never be found at home.
The love that you need will never be found at home.

10. "Let's Hear it for the Boy" (Deniece Williams, 1984).

Not much after.  AIDS, conservative retrenchment, and the re-demonization of gay people eliminated even those few songs that could be appropriated.  In 1985, Madonna was singing "Like a Virgin" (about sex, not pride), Wham started making their previously androgynous songs gender specific (I said you were the perfect girl for me), and the vigorously homophobic Eddie Murphy was inviting heterosexuals to "Party All the Time."

See also: Ocho Rios: Tracking Down a Jamaican Bodybuilder; and Culture Club

Let's Get Physical

I heard Olivia Newton-John a lot during the 1970s. Her easy-listening, feelings-drenched songs appealed mostly to girls. "If Not for You" (1971) and  "I Honestly Love You" (1974) didn't specify pronouns, and  "Have You Never Been Mellow?" (1974) wasn't about romance at all, but I still wasn't a fan.

But after the success of Grease (1977), Olivia's music became as sexually liberated as her character.  Her next big hits included: "Totally Hot" (1979), "Physical" (1981), "Make a Move on Me" (1981), and "Heart Attack" (1982). Again, no pronouns, and this time desire was added to the cuddliness.

 One of ten or twelve songs with gay subtexts from the early 1980s, "Physical" (1981), has about the same theme as "You're The One that I Want," and for that matter, "Show Me" from My Fair Lady (1964): we've done the dinner and movie thing, we've talked about our feelings.  I've got nothing left to say except "Let's get horizontal."
 

The music video responds directly to gay fans.  Olivia plays a personal trainer whipping men into shape, leering at various disembodied, muscular pecs and arms, and semi-nude men in jockstraps.

She gives extra attention to an out-of-shape specimen, until he gets stronger, younger, and more handsome.  And seems to change his race.  But to her consternation, he goes off with a man, one of the first explicit evocations of same-sex desire in popular music.

Kenny recreated the iconic song on a 2017 episode of The Real O'Neals.

"Make a Move on Me" (1981) makes a similar plea to stop talking: "Spare me your charms and take me in your arms."  (You couldn't carry on a conversation anyway, with disco music blasting).

Not that the romance was absent.  The movie Xanadu (1980) was about the Greek goddess of. . .um, roller disco. . .helping a nebbish  (Michael Beck, left) open a nightclub.

But the song "Xanadu" is about leaving the straight world behind, running away to West Hollywood.

 A place where nobody dared to go
The love that we came to know
They call it Xanadu

See also: Madonna, Gay Diva of the 1980s

Fall 1991: Looking for Beefcake on MTV

In the fall of 1991, for some ill-advised reason, I moved to Nashville for a graduate program in Religious Studies at Vanderbilt Divinity School.

Nashville had a large but rather closeted gay community (same-sex acts were still illegal), and no specific gay neighborhood.  So I was lonely and homesick a lot.

I listened to a lot of music, searching for gay subtext songs, just as I had done in college a decade before.  Except this time I watched the music videos on MTV, and added beefcake to the search.

I came up with 8 gay subtext songs:

1. Good Vibrations (Marky Mark and the Funky Bunch).

The lyrics weren't much, mostly "Such a good vibration," but Marky Mark performed shirtless, and dropped his pants for no apparent reason except to display his basket.

2. Cream (Prince and the New Power Generation)

The gay-vague Prince of "When Doves Cry" returned with a song explicitly about having an orgasm (lyrics too embarrassing to reprint here).  There were no pronouns in the lyrics, although the music video showd him all over a woman.

3. Ring My Bell (Jazzy Boomer and the Fresh Prince)

A few "girls!" in this rap number by future superstar Will Smith and his bff Jazzy Boomer, but mostly it's about using the telephone to reconnect with a lost love.

Besides, they looked like a couple to me.

4. Hole Hearted (Extreme)

There's a hole in my heart that can only be filled by you.

The buffed Gary Chereone and the androgynous Nuno Bettencourt of Extreme also seemed like a couple, and "Hole Hearted" drops pronouns altogether.


5. It's So Hard to Say Goodbye to Yesterday (Boyz to Men)

Most of the boy band's songs were loaded down with girl! girl! girl! refrains, but this one wasn't.  The lost love had no pronouns.  I interpreted it to mean not a person, but the gay world I'd left behind:

I thought we'd get to see forever 
But forever's gone away 
It's so hard to say goodbye to yesterday. 

6. Black or White (Michael Jackson)

Some "girl!" here, too, but it was mostly about diversity, if you're thinking about being my baby, it don't matter if you're black or white.  Plus the music video had a cool CGI morphing of various faces and races, including a gay prettyboy.

7. Finally (CeCe Peniston)

Finally it has happened to me right in front of my face, and I just can't describe it
Finally it has happened to me right in front of my face, and I just can not hide it

The future drag queen classic not only omitted pronouns, its music video showed a muscular, shirtless guy dancing in psychedelic light.

8. Losing My Religion (R.E.M.)

Apparently the title comes from an old Southern phrase meaning "losing my temper," but I thought they were really losing their religion, their purpose in the universe, away from West Hollywood where things made sense:

That's me in the corner -- that's me in the spot light, losing my religion
Oh no, I've said too much, I haven't said enough.
That was just a dream, that was just a dream, just a dream, just a dream.

Ok, it was December, and I was still depressed.  Time to go home.

See also: outing a Medieval Knight; dating a Country-Western Star; and helping Larry find his fetish.

Why Everyone in West Hollywood Listened to Madonna

When I first moved to West Hollywood in 1985, Madonna was everywhere, part of the backdrop of everyday life, as universal and taken-for-granted as working out, drinking Perrier, and reading Frontiers magazine.

When a Norwegian conman stole my boyfriend, "Material Girl" was playing.

When Alan met Raul for the first time, we were listening to "Open Your Heart."

When we ran into Fred and the Cute Young Thing during brunch at the French Quarter, "Live to Tell" was blaring from a car stopped at a red light on Santa Monica Boulevard.

During 300 Saturday nights at Mugi, "One Night in Bangkok" was always followed by "Papa Don't Preach"

When I was teaching Gay 101 at Juvenile Hall, I went to a party, and three guys started lip-synching to "Vogue."

But in the early 1990s, the Madonna fad started dying down.

In 1992, the book Sex bombed in West Hollywood.  I knew only one guy who actually bought a copy.

By 1993, record store commercials had people complaining "I'm bored with Madonna!", and all of the cars stopped at red lights on San Vicente were blaring "I'm too sexy for my shirt!" instead of "Bad Girl."

Madonna is still expressing herself, still recording songs and performing for millions of fans, but she is no longer an inevitable part of daily life in West Hollywood.

Nearly thirty years later, I wonder why Madonna became a gay diva.  Her songs had no gay subtexts: they were all about heterosexual women being touched for the very first time, living in a material world, picking up boys on the street, and asking "Come on, girls, do you believe in love?"

Maybe her hot male backup dancers, like Victor Lopez, Jull Weber (top photo), and Mihrab (left).  Many of them were gay, and worked out next to us at the Hollywood Spa.  They were family.

Maybe because she was a gay ally, outspoken in her support of LGBT people, a rarity in the 1980s.

Maybe because she was constantly offending 1980s conservatives with her frank lyrics and suggestive dance moves.  Gay people were constantly offending 1980s conservatives just by existing.  It was a match made in heaven.

See also: Mae West, Gay Diva of the 1930s and Let's Hear it for the Boy.

Ocho Rios: Tracking Down a Jamaican Bodybuilder

Sometime during the 1990s, I was walking through the living room, and I caught the end of a music video.  It was about a frizzy-haired musician in a 1970s suit trying to sell his new song.

As he acts it out, we see him in drag, in a blond wig and a muumuu,  in a lush tropical setting, singing to a drag queen chorus:

Musician:  I met a Negro in something something (four syllables).
The drag queen chorus squeals as a massive bodybuilder walks by, thrusts out his bulge, and flexes his bicep.
Musician: I met a Negro....
Jamaican-accented bodybuilder:  I'm a Negro...

The bodybuilder then takes the drag musician rowing, where he sings:
Something something...I'll make you mine.
He lowers his swimsuit, and her eyes widen, shocked at his enormous penis.

That's all I remember: no title, no names of performers, not even the full video.  But it kept getting stuck in my head, inappropriate term and all.

I would be at the supermarket, or on the bus, and suddenly catch myself singing I met a Negro in something something.  I got quite a few stares!

Recently I decided to use my internet sleuthing skills to track down the music video, and the Jamaican-accented bodybuilder.  All I had was: 1990s, frizzy hair, Jamaica, drag, and the term "Negro."

Dozens of keywords searches on Google and Bing turned up nothing.

Wait -- this musician was obviously gay and from the 1970s.

"Gay composer" and "1970s"eventually  led me to Paul Jabara (1948-1992), who composed such disco hits as "It's Raining Men" for the Weather Girls, my favorite song of all time, and "Last Dance" for Donna Summer (which won the Academy Award for  Best Song in 1978).

There was a song called "Ocho Rios" in his discography.  No lyrics online.  But the right number of syllables, and Ocho Rios is the name of a town in Jamaica!  Could it be the source of my elusive music video?

Digging deeper, I found an article about a "pop operetta" De La Noche: The True Story," which Jabarra tried to get produced in 1985.  It was about a "lady of the evening" who finds true love with a 7'2", 300 lb  Jamaican bodybuilder!  Their union results in female octuplets, who are stolen and sold on the black market.  She searches for 21 years, and finally finds them, performing as a musical group, the De La Noche Sisters.

Sounds silly; no wonder Jabara couldn't get the funding to make a stage musical.

"Ocho Rios" is a track on the album, also released as a single.  It didn't get much airtime, as the term "Negro" was deemed offensively racist.  So Jabara produced a music video about his troubles, and got it played on MTV.  A least once.

I finally found a synopsis: turns out that there were no drag queens, just bizarrely over-made up women. The lady in the muumuu was Pat Ast, formerly a member of Andy Warhol's Factory.  And "The Negro" was voiced by Paul Jabara himself, feigning a basso-profundo Jamaican accent.

But who modeled the Jamaican bodybuilder?

More searching revealed that in 1973, Paul Jabara wrote and produced a musical, Rachel Lily Rosenbloom (And Don't You Ever Forget It), which folded after only a few performances.  Perhaps it was an early version of De La Noche: there was a song entitled "Oh, Ocho Rios," and a cast member named "That Negro."

Played by Andre de Shields, who would become a renowned stage actor, with credits including Hair, The Full Monte, Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, and Ain't Misbehavin'.  

Obviously not the same person as the Jamaican bodybuilder, whose identity remains a mystery.

But at least it's not an ear worm anymore.

You can see the music video on youtube.

See also: Subtext Songs of the 1980s.

Let's Hear it for the Boy

In the early 1980s, I listened mostly to classical music.  I was too old for teen idols,  and adult music was dreadful, all about hetero-romance, hetero-sex, or large breasts.  Especially when MTV began playing music videos to illustrate the songs.

For instance, let's look at the charts for the spring of 1984, when I was working on my master's degree:

Phil Collins, "Against All Odds": a girl left him, and now he's depressed.
Lionel Richie, "Hello": a girl left him, and now he's depressed.
Ultravox, "Dancing with Tears in My Eyes": a girl left him, and now he's depressed.
Julio Inglesias, "To All the Girls I've Loved Before."
Nik Kershaw, "Dancing Girls."  'Nuff said.

But there were exceptions.  A dozen songs of the early 1980s could be appropriated, read as gay-positive regardless of what the performers intended.  Especially "Let's Hear it for the Boy," by Deniece Williams


The lyrics are standard pop hetero-romance, about the female singer's boyfriend, who is not rich, a fancy dresser, or a good singer, but nevertheless provides hetero-romance.  In the music video, however, she praises a variety of boys, starting with with a tap dancing little kid (Aaron Lohr, later photo), who of course is not her boyfriend.

Here's another recent photo of Aaron, in a stage version of  The Full Monty.

The scene shifts to a teenager who plays the piano and dances, badly, then to more teenage boys and adult men, playing chess, playing football, dancing with her, dancing with each other.  Some are athletic, some aren't, some are shirtless, some aren't, but all of them are beautiful due to their exuberance, their energy, and their fun-loving joie de vivre. Who has time to even think about muscles?

 Finally there are thirty men and one woman on stage.  The song has become a paeon to the entire male sex.

And that's not all.  It's the background music in the intensely romantic montage in Footloose (1984) where city boy Ren (Kevin Bacon) teaches redneck Willard (Chris Penn) to dance, and they end up posing, running, frolicking, hugging.

With the absence of a female focus character, it becomes a paeon to men loving men.

See also: Ocho Rios: Tracking Down a Jamaican Bodybuilder.

Frankie Says Relax

March 1985: after several years of subtext songs, the radio was booming with plaints about heterosexual sex:  Madonna living in a "Material World," Phil Collins begging for "One More Night," Tina Turner rasping about being a stripper.  So I should have noticed that the lyrics to "Relax" could be construed as sexually suggestive -- after all, the song was banned in Britain for several months in 1984.

But my acceptance letter from the University of Southern California had just arrived, and I was eagerly planning my crosscountry move to West Hollywood.   The group was named Frankie Goes to Hollywood, so:



Make making it (in Hollywood) your intention.
Live those dreams, scheme those schemes.

Relax, don't do it (play it cool, don't get over-excited)
When you want to go to it ( Hollywood).

I added "Relax" to my list of songs about finding a "good place."

Years later, I saw the original music video (banned in the U.S. and the U.K.), in which Holly Johnson (one of the two gay members) goes to a underground club, hugs a leatherman, gets leered at by a woman, and tames a tiger, to the delight of a decadent Roman emperor.

Then he gets into a nightmarish fight with women, leathermen, and drag queens.

So I changed my interpretation: relax, don't get excited, and you can overcome your aggressive impulses, tame the tiger within.

Or else it's an orgy, and the song is about heterosexual sex, like everything else on the radio in 1985.