Glad To Be Gay 87
Recorded live at the Mean Fiddler, London, 30 March 1987
Released as ‘Glad To Be Gay (1987)’ on The Collection [EMI EMC3540], 1987
Also released as a bonus track on Last Tango: Midnight at The Fringe [Dojo/Castle DOJOLP51], 1987
[Lyrics new to this version are marked in bold]
The British Police are the best in the world
I don’t believe one of these stories I’ve heard
‘Bout pretty policemen in leather and jeans
Showing their leg through a split in the seams
Leering at people and leading them on
Then running them in when they start to respond
The press all ignore it, they don’t want to see
Except when the case is a Tory MP
Sing if you’re glad to be gay
Sing if you’re happy that way
Pictures of naked young women are best
In the News of the Screws and the popular press
They plaster their pages with bingo and tits
Then add all the scandal and slander that fits
The women of Greenham they smeared and despised
They crucify Elton with sneering and lies
If it’s paedophile teachers or lesbian nuns
If it’s filthy and fiction it’s all there in The Sun
Sing if you’re glad to be gay
Sing if you’re happy that way
And now there’s a cancer to blame on the gays
It’s brutal and fatal and slowly invades
The moral majority like a lot
Cos it’s the wages of sin and the Judgement of God
The medics are baffled and caught on the run
They say it’s a nightmare that’s barely begun
While government spending is barely a joke
Cos saving gay lives doesn’t win any votes
So try and sing if you’re glad to be gay
Sing if you’re happy that way
And sit back and watch as they seize all our books
And treat us like lepers and sinners and crooks
Just hope you don’t get caught up in the raids
Or pick up a pig or a partner with Aids
Lie to your workmates and lie to your folks
Put down the clones and tell lesbian jokes
Forget the aggression from everywhere else
While we still do a wonderful job oppressing ourselves
Sing if you’re glad to be gay
Sing if you’re happy that way
Sing if you’re glad to be gay
Sing if you’re happy this way
Explanatory notes:
“The women of Greenham”
In the early 1980s the American government decided to deploy nuclear cruise missiles at several UK bases. One of them, Greenham Common in Berkshire, became the focus of protest. Thousands of women lived there in a protest camp that not only bore witness but acted as a base for relentless bold direct action. As a women-only venture, it challenged the patriarchal values of militarism in spectacular style.
Not content with repeatedly vilifying them as a bunch of mad lesbians with poor hygiene, on hearing that Paul and Linda McCartney had sent the women a hamper of food, The Sun sent one to the military police guarding the base.
“If it’s filthy and fiction it’s all there in the Sun”
Britain’s best-selling daily newspaper is a tabloid famed for its lies, celebrity focus, xenophobia and all-round low brow appeal. You need a reading age of 6 or above to understand it.
Talking to Tom:
There’s a lot of lyric changes for glad to be gay 87. The ‘pretty policemen in leather and jeans, showing their leg through a split in the seams’.
That’s an Eric Presland verse.
The pretty policemen thing, was that new to the 80s?
It did happen in the 70s, but there’s only so much you can fit into a song! There had been a case of agent provocateur around the time of that verse being added.
I remember Jimmy Somerville getting caught in Hyde Park by policemen who’d been pretending to get it on with each other. His arresting officer asked for an autograph for his daughter.
‘They don’t want to see, except when the case is a Tory MP’.
And that’s been a Scottish QC, a Labour MP, it’s varied according to whatever the latest scandal happened to be.
And that kind of maps where the power lies, the Tory MP would have been more interesting under a Tory government. So these would have denoted specific cases. Do you remember anything about them?
[laughs] No, absolutely not! But you know, how many Tory MPs have been caught with their pants down? Quite a lot. And the thing is it was particularly good when it’s a Tory MP because it’s not only the party in power but the party that at that time was ‘whip and flog the perverts’.
This is 1987, clause 28 was given assent in 1988, so this was also the party that was enacting specifically homophobic legislation. [For more info on Clause 28, see the Explanatory Notes for GTBG 2004]
In comes ‘pictures of naked young women are best / in the News of the Screws and Sunday Express…’. What prompted laying into The Sun? Had your thing with The People happened yet? [For details, see ‘Talking to Tom’ on The Last Word]
No, 1988 or 89 that was. But Elton had the rent boy thing where he had to sue The Sun.
Wrong target! Don’t pick on someone who can afford better lawyers than you! They did a run of stories on him, there was the one about how he’d had his guard dogs voice boxes taken out so the barking wouldn’t annoy him. Completely made up.
It was really hurtful. I knew Elton quite well at that time. He found it so hurtful, he loved his dogs. The other thing was they tried to run this rent boy and cocaine stuff. He denied it and sued them. And while that was pending he had his birthday party and The Sun picketed it, they actually had braziers outside the gates with ‘Happy Birthday Elton from The Sun’, that sort of ‘we’re here, we know where you are’. Just really evil.
The thing here is the focus of the target, just laying into the sun for a whole verse. ‘The women of Greenham they smeared and despised’ is broader politics rather than gay issues.
But the smearing was that they were gay, that they were a bunch of crazy fucking dykes. This is 87, the height of homophobia over Aids in the Sun, of ‘Pulpit Poofs Can Stay’, of [columnist] Richard Littlejohn unleashed at his most rabid, and [editor] Kelvin MacKenzie gone mad. Constant homophobia headlines in the Sun. Constantly.
It’s odd that they attacked Elton on a number of fronts with his homosexuality being the basis of their hatred, and conversely they hated the Greenham women politically so made homosexuality the basis of their attacks.
The Aids verse comes in with this version:
‘And now there’s a cancer to blame on the gays
That’s brutal and fatal and slowly invades
The moral majority like a lot
Cos it’s the wages of sin and the Judgement of God
The medics are baffled and caught on the run
They say it’s a nightmare has barely begun
While government spending is barely a joke
Cos saving gay lives doesn’t win any votes’
It was fucking outrageous how the Tory government did not spend any money on Aids. They were so slow to react to it. And when it did react it was only because they thought it would spread to the straight community. Otherwise it was letting them rot. They did not give a fuck. That’s the bottom line.
There was a subsequent reworking of that verse. ‘Brutal and lethal,’ there’s a subtle difference of meaning between lethal and fatal [lethal can kill, fatal has and does].
How did you approach talking about Aids?
Well that was the problem really. It was so big and so horrendous. Where did you start? As Eric said, ‘if I was going there I wouldn’t start from here’. It was difficult to squeeze the scope of what was going on into a new verse in a song like Glad To Be Gay.
And yet you have to, it’s perhaps the largest relevant issue to have occurred since the song was written.
You have to, you can’t not mention it, so I just did my best. My generation of gay men saw their friends die like flies around them. By 1987 I had already lost three former lovers to Aids, and tragically had they contracted it five years later they would still be alive today because the drugs keep it in check. Those therapies weren’t there at the time, they didn’t know what they were dealing with and they died. So it was real close to home.
I’m sure that’s part of the bitterness at the time that was expressed towards me in settling with Siouxs, like ‘oh, he’s bailing out of this thing’. It was hell, seeing these young fit men rapidly become crippled and unable to walk, then get covered in sores and die. It was a horrendous time.
To be honest the Aids verse in the 1987 version was clumsily written, because I couldn’t summon the proper anger to it. It’s different trying to write when you’re in the thick of something, and at the time I’d lost a lot of friends and lovers. Which is why I only properly got to grips with Aids in 1989 with the song Blood Brother – in the context of a first-person song about a relationship.
I disagree, I think it’s of a piece with the lyrics from earlier versions. It’s succinct and feels very angry to me.
Well I was spitting feathers, but I feel in retrospect that I didn’t manage to do justice to the depth of anger. There was a song about a year or two later called What Have I Ever Done To You which was more to the point, which was just direct quotes out of the tabloids strung together as a lyric. Nothing but what they said. ‘They’re a dismal miserable bunch of fanatics, We’ll all catch something from a glass of beer, There’s been too much toleration, Now we’re knee deep in them year by year ‘. At least I managed to nail that.
You can see that spilling over into the following verse with ‘they treat us like lepers and sinners and crooks,’ and ‘hope you don’t pick up a pig or a partner with Aids’.
That’s an ill-considered line.
How do you mean?
The implication of that line is you shouldn’t ever have sex with someone who has Aids. Whereas the reality of people who had the disease is that they could have safer sex, and you would tell the partner and it would be consensual knowing the situation. You don’t stop loving them just because they have this terrible disease.
So that is an ill-considered line. It was a first reaction, it was 1987, and I was experimenting live with different lines night by night. The fact that that one gig at the Mean Fiddler was recorded meant that night’s version became crystallised. It was just a lyric thrown out there for that gig, not realising it would later become permanent as a recording. So that ‘pick up a pig or a partner with Aids’ line was regrettable, and with hindsight it was a mistake to let that version go out.
I’d not thought of it from that perspective. but then, it’s in an ironic verse. It’s the one that replaces ‘sit back and watch as they raid all our pubs…’, it is an attack on that keep your head down, look after yourself attitude. It also has the feeling that people hadn’t known until recently what the disease would mean, so it’s about this unknowingness, finding out people you’ve been with are HIV positive and the terror of that.
But that would have been appropriate to 1983 or 84, not to 1987. By 87 we knew what we were dealing with. We were fighting the government and fighting The Sun, but at least within our community we knew. It’s just a bit of a lazy line.
