When David Bowie came out as gay, I was just a child, so little did I know he was paving the way for my own journey out of the closet, says Brian Finnegan.

When I was seven years old, David Bowie came out as gay. My older, football playing, utterly straight brothers, were obsessed with Ziggy Stardust, and from the record player in our sitting room, there came a constant stream of Bowie music. When Bowie told Melody Maker magazine he was gay, my brothers’ devotion did not wane. Outside on our street we lived in a world of children, where sissy’s were routinely derided, gay was the worst insult of all, and I was singled out for having a funny walk, like a girl’s. ‘Duckie’ the kids named me, and with my bandage eye-patch (to cure my lazy eye), my lisp, my complete horror of sport and desperation to own a Sindy doll, I did feel like an ugly duckie, lost and unlovable, a boy who wasn’t a real boy at all.

In our sitting room, while my brothers played Ziggy on a loop, I poured over the album cover for The Man Who Sold The World, which featured David reclining on a chaise long, sporting shoulder-length hair, a dress and knee-high boots. He was a boy who wasn’t a real boy at all, and it was the only image I had that told me this might be okay. That it might even be powerful.

David Bowie wasn’t like Mr. Humphries on the sitcom Are You Being Served?, my only other reference for boys who weren’t real boys. Mr. Humphries was a limp-wristed, mincing joke, to be laughed at, rather than with, and he horrified me. I didn’t know what homosexuality was, but I did know that when the kids called me ‘duckie’ it was the same as laughing at the awful, effeminate Mr Humphries.

Nobody was laughing at Bowie. He was universally acknowledged as a strong, self-directed man.

Power of the Outsider

His coming out as gay was a statement of that power, and it was the power of the outsider. For although many years later he told the world he was a “closeted heterosexual”, in 1972 when he used the word ‘gay’ to describe himself, he was speaking to boys who weren’t real boys across the world, saying that actually you didn’t have to be a real boy, in the sense that being a real boy was a narrow structure to which you had to adhere or else be damned.

In that moment, he turned a key in the lock of a door that had been kept firmly locked in popular culture. Renaissance painters and the like might have flirted with homoeroticism in the mainstream circa the 12^th century, but since then there had been little that wasn’t underground in the shadiest sense of the word. Bowie affirmatively added ‘gay’ to the androgynous mix of otherness he presented, making what was shunned suddenly sexy, selling the idea of sexual difference as something to aspire to. He was true to himself, and rather than being punished for it, he was lauded.

Some years later, when I was buying records, the bands I loved were Soft Cell and Culture Club, Bronski Beat, Erasure and Pet Shop Boys. The 1980s were the gayest years of pop music, with stars coming out left, right and centre, all powerfully presenting themselves on Top of The Pops – gay boys who were actually real boys, shouting it from the rooftops. None of that would have happened without David Bowie, who not only opened the door, but showed those stars how to be queer without compromise, and to sell their sexuality to the world.

Brilliant and Brave

Bowie told the world he was gay just three years after Stonewall. Half the world didn’t know what gay was, because homosexuality had been routinely and historically silenced and shoved under the carpet. But millions of teenagers across that unenlightened world were gay, and they suddenly had a powerful icon. In that Bowie was a first, and even if he renounced the ‘gay’ label years later, even if he used it simply as an image enhancer, he did a brilliant and brave thing.

He couldn’t have known how the world might take his declaration; all he knew was that he was stepping off the edge of a cliff nobody else in the world had ever dared to. At seven years of age, listening to him sing ‘Amsterdam’ it was an edge I was already approaching, and even though I didn’t know it, Bowie was helping me along the way. He was telling me it would all be okay once I jumped.