Thinking

[Mya Summers]

I found a music video tonight by the group Aqua, it is their newest release it's called 80's I think and it caused me to do some thinking. All of the male 80's bands well all most all of them had long hair and wore make up and some of them actually looked like woman in the face with all the make up they wore. Now the only thing that is really different between them and us is we all for the most part wear woman's clothes and don't make the money they make. could it be possible that they might have been CDer's themselves or not? And for the most part no one really cared that they had long hair and wore makeup, and skin tight leopard pants, except the religious fanatics. Has any one else ever thought about this?

[Bev06 GG]

Hi Mya,
Yep hit the nail on the head. David Bowie, Steve Harley, the Sweet, one of the guys in the band Mud and Slades Dave Hill all had a touch of feminism about their attire if not their attitude. Infact the whole Glam rock theme was about being more adventurous with clothing and appearance than your average guy in the street. They maybe received a bit of ridicule from the older generation but we all loved it because it was different and took a bit of balls to stand up there and wave two fingers at what society perceived to be the norm.
Bev

[PaulaJaneThomas]

Bowie was going his glam stuff in the very early 70s whilst I was a long-haired student. By the time that sort of image had become mainstream, he'd dropped it and moved on. I can't look inside their heads and state that none of those artists were trans but I think it very unlikely that a closet trans person would happily appear in public dressed like that for fear that they might somehow give themselves away.

[Sarah Doepner]

Find a copy of the Rolling Stones "Goats Head Soup" and look at the photo of Mick on the front. Even he had the look for the time. It even moved over into the early days of the alternative music/punk scene before it was overwealmed by the hardcore punk look.

Artists have always had more leeway in how they presented themselves to the public. It would be nice to have that leeway for the rest of us, wouldn't it?

[Aubrey Green]

Hi Mya,
Yep hit the nail on the head. David Bowie, Steve Harley, the Sweet, one of the guys in the band Mud and Slades Dave Hill all had a touch of feminism about their attire if not their attitude. Infact the whole Glam rock theme was about being more adventurous with clothing and appearance than your average guy in the street. They maybe received a bit of ridicule from the older generation but we all loved it because it was different and took a bit of balls to stand up there and wave two fingers at what society perceived to be the norm.
Bev

Slade! Bev, you are the first person I have heard mention Slade in 30 years! I loved those guys. One of my favorite albums then was "Slade Alive" They weren't big in the US, but huge in Europe and the UK.
Let us not forget our sisters in Twisted Sister, heavy on the makeup and rock!

[anda_mouse]

i remember hearing about some singer from an 80s glam metal band actually getting the operation done to become a woman....cant remember the band though.

[Joanie_Shakti]

I don't know of any 80s rockers but Walter Carlos, a synthesizer pioneer of the 1960s/70s ("Switched on Bach," "A Clockwork Orange") baceme Wendy Carlos sometime in the 80s.

I've been reflecting a lot lately on early influences that led to me being who I am today. David Bowie, until he dropped the spaceman character and Alice Cooper were major influences on my musical tastes. Alice has the woman's name, and though he's more of a horrorshow entertainer in the vein of Vincent Price, his band started out crossdressing on stage. And I have a DVD of a Midnight Special broadcast, David Bowie's "1980 Floor Show." Tracked down a copy from a collector a few years ago as I remember really liking that particular show. I was surprised at the amount of female clothes Bowie wore in that show, he even wore wedgies for a number or two. This was after the Ziggy Stardust character and right before "Diamond Dogs" came out. I was a fan of his until a few years later when he decided to be Frank Sinatra instead. I'm still a fan of Alice's though.

[Rachel Morley]

David Bowie, Steve Harley, the Sweet, one of the guys in the band Mud and Slades Dave Hill all had a touch of feminism about their attire if not their attitude.
When I was a kid I used to watch Top Of The Pops and if bands like Mud, The Sweet and Slade were on I couldn't take my eyes off the screen looking in awe at how girly those guys were ... and the ultimate TOTP femme moment for me as a kid was David Bowie singing Boys Keep Swinging.
Here's a Youtube video of it. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8jRODPlfhys) The first time you see him dressed en femme (all three of the girls are him) is at 1:34 seconds but the best bits are at the end (2:15) where he takes his wig off, again at 2:35. I nearly had a heart attack when I first saw this in 1979 at 16 years old. Wow! I want to be like that!