TrannyRock or Really Gay Music Appreciation Thread
soulmarcosa
4,296 Posts
Anybody else really into outrageously camp music, but not in an ironic way?I'm listening to Soft Cell's THIS NIGHT IN SODOM and the incredibly melodramatic, gloomy, and bitchy scenarios are themes that 95% of hetero bands would never dream up. So what are some more records that seem to be primarily aimed at a gay audience (and more specifically a transvestite audience) but have a universal appeal to anybody who enjoys crying into their drink past closing time at the local cabaret? Records like...Loleatta Holloway: "Greatest Performance of My Life"Melba Moore: "Miss Thing"Pretty much anything by Shirley BasseyPretty much anything by Soft Celland of course Lou Reed's TRANSFORMER and BERLIN albums.Disco, house, synthpop, goth and glam obviously will be the main contributing genres in question, but I'm looking for the real outrageous shit. I'm "curious" to hear about your favorites.
Comments
edit: if depeche mode is considered "gay music" then i enjoy gay music.
This woman, (La) India, sings on the Masters at Work song When You Touch Me, which is a so-so song with a fantastic dub. I am sure that I own more overtly homosexual records, but this one is the gayest. She has that total 1991 sultry grit style vocal, and they chop up her voice and put these pulsing synths all over the track; totally faux-lush.
She has recorded salsa albums recently; working with Tito Puente, Eddie Palmieri and Celia Cruz. She was also married to Louie Vega for a minute
One of my favorite cds is Llego La India Via Eddie Palmieri. Let me know if any of this is on vinyl.
She was also in a hip hop electro group, TKO? TRL? I can't remember now.
She has a bunch of forgetable dance 12s, but generaly the MAW stuff is all worth a spin.
Dan
"You Make Me Feel Mighty Real" is the shit[/b].
I remember seeing Sylvester on TV when I was kid and thinking WTF?!?!
PC Police Here: Um, Marco, can I just say that all music is gay/transgendered music? I mean, you of all people should know that! I heard you and the inimitable Candis Cayne tear it up at Barracuda on Monday nights!
Barracuda
275 W 22nd St
212-645-8613, 4pm-4am, free
Retro-glam hot spot with stern cocktails, great DJs, fierce drag shows, musical appearances. Happy hour 4-9pm Mon-Fri, 2-for-1 drinks. Mon: Candis Cayne, DJ Marco[/b].
Of course there are gay people on this board...But I doubt they will ever out themselves on this bastion of homophobia known as the 'Strut.
(Do you wanna funk 12" is the shit.)
Love hangover-Diana Ross
Love sensation-Loleata holloway
Are classic tunes regardless who listens to them.
It's raining men -weather girls is another story
chick had some interesting records and one can't help but wonder about the symbolism of the lyrics:
Prince Charles & The City Beat Band - In The Streets - chorus: "THERE'LL BE WARRRRRRRR.... IN THE STREETS" ... she had 2 copies, wonder if she juggled the break?
Phyllis Nelson - Don't Stop the Train
Lydia Murdock - Superstar - classic billy jean response record
Jesse Towers - Give Me Your Body While We're Dancing
Cheri - Murphies Law
Chantel Condor - Hands Up
People Like Us - Midnight Lover
bunch of moby dick stuff.. and loads of quebec jammies.. including the super wigged out IKO 83 - Digital Delight...
Back in the day, when I frequented lesbian bars, these were some of the dance floor staples:
AC/DC "All Night Long"
Faith Hill "Breathe"
Monifah "Touch It"
DMX "Party Up"
Juvenile "Back That Ass Up"
Melissa Etheridge "Does She Rock You"
Cher "Believe"
Joan Jett "I Love Rock n' Roll"
...There were lots of other tunes that struck me as strange and undanceable, but people were tearin' the club up anyway.
but yea hit seems like these days lesbians just wanna listen to crap like white snake and ironic hard rock..
NO! But my boyfriend is
Aretha - Think
Barbara Mason - Another Man
Carl Bean - I Was Born This Way
4 To The Bar - Slam Me
Alice Clark - Maybe This Time
Also, last warehouse party I played I got props from the tall-hairy-knuckled trannies for playing Celi B and The Buzzy Bunch - Superman. That set managed to please both the trannies and the lone Jay Z fan.
Basically Disco is very gender-flexible. Which is cool.
If you can get one of those Southshore Commission T-Shirts the man is wearing on the cover i'll have one in each colour.
I'm gay. So is my mom (Cosmo, holler!). So is my sister. So is my butch dyke cousin. And I have a rather smashing tranny/gay music collection. A few recommended records:
Anthony & The Johnsons - I Am A Bird Now
(The critically acclaimed new album featuring the Johnsons plus special guests Julia Yasuda, Lou Reed, Devendra Banhart, Rufus Wainwright and Boy George. With photography by Peter Hujar, Don Felix Cervantes and Josef Astor.)
http://www.antonyandthejohnsons.com/index.html
Breathless - Somewhere Between Happiness & Heartache[/b]
Dominic Appleton of Breathless (This Mortal Coil fame) is the best lisping homosexual man singer next to Moz. I love his heartbreaking shit.
About this time of day, I start to wonder about this dream we chase. You and me, now. Well I can never make you happy so I shoudn't even try. I'll only make you suffer Looks like we should kiss this dream away. Looks like we should kiss this dream away. Well, I never make you happy so I shoudn't even try I'll only make you suffer Looks like we should kiss this dream away. I telling you now, telling you now, only a fool would trust me Only a fool would trust me. Only a fool would trust me Only a fool would trust me. I can see it in your eyes Proving my worst fears. I can see I'm hurting you..... I warn you now, I'm obsessive and I'm jealous, I've a need for love That's all I ever think about. But day by day and dream by dream my taste for belongingness is being Choked be distrust and fear.
Even though most folks wanna tart him up, I've never heard him say one way or another. Still, here's to all those die-hard Mexican fans who just know he is. The only dude who can rock a hearing aid, gladiolas in his back pocket, a chest-revealing satin shirt while memorializing serial killers in song.
"I TOOK UP WITH FAGGOT DADAISTS WHO DON'T BELIEVE IN FACES!"[/b]
Prolly my favorite suicidal homo-poet. Sucked dick for pocket change. Lived a life that's still getting sorted out. My dude just called and said he found the album on wax, complete with one sheet. Curious to see how they describe this record? FIND A HURT PLACE AND DONT EVER LET IT HEAL...
If you dare condemn his life it will come after you with a sharpened rake...
I'm really into a lot of that riot grrrl dyke rock shit as well. They got some good stuff to say. The shows are always energetic. Spitboy in the '90s playing Oakland warehouses where the toughest of dudes were scared to hang out. I've seen more than one drunk dude crumble in front of Adrianne after calling her a "cunt" or "bitch" or "dyke." Good times.
(You guys are probably joking. But I ain't.)
Bam, who is this?
Face
by Steven Jesse Bernstein[/b]
The following is pure fiction. Actually, I have been handsome and popular all my life.
There has always been something wrong with my face. "Look in the mirror, Stevie," my mother said, holding me up so I could see my face. "See? There's Stevie!" The little ears stuck out. That was the first thing I noticed. The two ears. And though the hair was pasted down with suave, and brushed neatly into a regular boy's hairdo, a few springy locks had popped loose - curly hair. Aagh. The nose was a pale blob of cold putty. Had the police already gotten to me? No, I was born like that. At two, my face already looked like the face of a convict. But the eyes and chin were pretty! Pretty.
When I was four, I got polio. I was paralyzed from the neck down. I could barely turn my head. My flesh withered. I didn't see my face again until I was five and a half. The cheeks had collapsed. A young death's head: taut, boney, unlined forehead, the chin had turned hard like a frozen lily. The eyes glowed the color of green figs. I opened my mouth; a blood-soaked bird's nest in which the mother bird had been killed and her fetal offspring left to die in their unhatched eggs. A mouth full of meat and feathers and tiny white coffins. A fat pink worm snarled from the red gash in my face. I watched my tongue moving in the mirror, enthralled.
Red was my favorite color. I took a tube of my mother's red lipstick and made big red Xs on all my dad's business stationary. My father hit me in the face hard. I always wanted a red face and black hair. Strait black hair, dark crimson face. Instead I had curly mouse hair and a bleached pink face. I thought of cutting my face up with a razor and pouring shoe polish on my head, slicing off my ears. I went to the bathroom and looked in the mirror. The blood was a pathetic little dribble. I cried.
When I was six I got glasses. The glasses' temples pushed my ears out even further and made them swell and blush a painful pink. Other kids made fun of me. I was the scrawniest kid in the whole school, too. I walked with my toes pointed in because of the polio and I had to wear big, bulbous, orthopedic shoes. My face mirrored my self- consciousness and embarrassment, probably even in my sleep. All through my school years I was one of the ugly kids. My mother bought me a pair of stylish black horn- rimmed glasses. They only enhanced my pallor. Other kids' faces turned brown in the summer. Mine looked like a cheap mask of blistered pink rubber from a joke shop.
In the fifth grade, I proposed to a girl named Denise Johnson, out on the lunch court. White blobs of seagull and pigeon shit rained form the sky. Denise said she wanted me to propose properly, between the gym and the cafeteria, after school. I combed my regular boy's, and wiped my modern glasses. At ten after three, I met Denise between the two buildings. I was shivering and my mouth was dry and tasted horrible. I got down on my knees on the shit-splotched blacktop in front of Ms. Johnson. My mouth was just level with her groin. I looked up at her pretty brown face and long, strait, black hair. She looked down at my damp cheeks and smiled benignly. "Denise, you are the prettiest, smartest girl in the whole school. Will you marry me?" My insides chattered against each other as I spoke the words. My face was livid and silly. I could feel my eyeballs bulging in their bone sockets, my knees ached. "Ha ha ha ha ha! You're too ugly! You look like you've been whooped with an ugly stick! Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha!" Her face had changed to a contemptuous snarl. Misty lavender donuts of shame appeared in front of my eyes. Suddenly a mob of snickering boys and girls jumped out from around the back corner of the cafeteria. They surrounded us, laughing and jeering. I stood up, wobbling, a lump in my throat, my asshole pinched tight. Denise joined the circle of snapping cruel children. She stood next to Rudy Stoltz, the handsomest most popular boy in the school. They held hands. "Fuck you, Jew-ass Bern-butt!," said Rudy. I put my huge, clumsy hands over my face. A cantaloupe skin hit me in the ear. I could hear the kids wandering away, giggling and guffawing. When I took my hands away from my face, I was alone. There was a thin white and green drool of seagull shit on my tan jacket. I walked home through a network of alleys.
Finally, because of my face, I quit school in the eighth grade. I spent my days hiding out in the dark, humid garage doing chemistry experiments and writing in secret codes. Sometimes I'd sneak out the side door, walk to the nearest storm drain opening, squeeze in, and walk around in the complicated black maze of tunneling underneath Los Angeles. There were rats and black widow spiders down there. I imagined myself dead from spider bites, my face being chewed off by rats. I derived a mysterious feeling of solace from this prospect. No one would ever find me down there, and even if they did, I wouldn't have a face anymore.
My mother took me to some psychiatrists. They agreed that I was a very disturbed young man. I had taken to wearing a red-hooded sweatshirt with the drawstring on the hood pulled tight, so there was just a little hole, like a squinched up anal sphincter muscle, for me to peer out of. I wore a black Beatles wig over the red hood. I ate my meals alone in the garage. My mother would sometimes stand in the doorway crying. Finally, I threatened to cut her throat with a butcher knife and smear her blood all over my face if she didn't stay the fuck away from me. I poured a pint of black lacquer on my head and had to have my scalp shaved. I hadn't bathed or changed clothes in months. The doctors felt that I need to be hospitalized. My mother signed some papers. There was a brief court hearing during which I was declared insane and my custody handed over to the state of California. Nearly bald, laughing hysterically, and muttering, I was hand-cuffed and delivered by the Sheriff's Department to a gruesome state hospital in California's citrus belt. There, I discovered that there were people with far uglier faces than mine. Some of these people were so ghastly I couldn't look at them without wretching. After a few months though, I got used to them. Still, I couldn't make peace with my own dreadful visage. The doctors put me on medication, they talked to me. Nothing did any good.
Six months was the longest they could hold me legally. I was released and immediately hit the streets. I took up with faggot Dottists who didn't believe in faces. I tried makeup, I tried turning into a woman. [/b]I straightened my hair and dyed it black. I wore a monk's cowl, so that all I could see was the sidewalk and no one could see me at all. I never returned home. Never went back to school. Never saw Denise Johnson or Rudy Stoltz again.
Erasure "Oh L'Amour" and "Chains Of Love"
Wayne Wonder "Glad You Came My Way" (don't believe me? listen for yourself)
Noel "Silent Morning"
Lisa Santiago "Feels So Good" (even though Kingmost hates this song, I lose it when that synth part kicks in at 1:15--and I bet Coselmed would love it, too)
Sonique "Feels So Good" (guess this is just a gay title, but this shit is kinda my jam)
Alice DJ "Better Off Alone" (maybe it's because I dated a Swede for two years who was way into this song, but I still dig it. Side note: It translates really, really well as a ringtone)
Hi, Bambouche!
PS I'll be spinning hip-hop at a Gay Pride tent this summer. HATE ME NOW ('cause you hate yourself).
The rebel hair. The romance. The sensible shoes.
You're right, I do like it. What year did this song come out? The synth sounds an awful lot like Moby's "Ain't Never Learned," but the pitch is different. (It sounds like someone was trying to mix in Rhythm is a Dancer at the end, which is not the best choice; I would have chosen Jocelyn Enriquez "A Little Bit (of Ecstasy)).
I don't think I can ever listen to that Sonique song again...Between the radio and gay clubs, it got way too much play.
Umm...1996? I think that's right. It was BIG in Austin (Latin Freestyle and all). The 12" I have has a different mix on it that starts with just the kick, then her voice, THEN that synth line. Far superior to the mix I linked to.