Culture Slut: Overlooked Gay Icons You Should Know
Despite burgeoning clouds of asexuality, I have recently joined the dating app Hinge, and it has brought with it some interesting queer culture analysis, which I will share with you today.
I love writing short pithy profiles, whether it’s 100 word artist bios, single sentence summaries or self-serving solicitations for hookup apps, so I approached this new opportunity with gusto. Hinge is designed to give a more varied and genuine taste of a person, giving the user options to share several pictures and answer multiple different questions or conversation prompts. I have a lot to say about many things, so this was very fun for me. Once I’d listed the key to my heart (pizza, aperol, ouzo, midweek drag shows and European cinema) and weird things I have in my bedroom (a skull, Holy water from Lourdes, tiaras, art nouveau cigarette holders and a collection of 1930s kimonos), I came across a very intriguing prompt: My Favourite Off-Brand LGBTQ Icon.
What does that mean? What counts as off-brand? What counts as an icon? Do they want a mini essay on the ironic campness of someone like Shirley Phelps-Roper of the Westboro Baptist Church (very off-brand, but also my friend on Facebook)? Or just the name of an obscure TV character that I relate to (Blythe Danner as Marilyn Truman in Will and Grace, but no, that’s not off-brand, that’s very classic gay)? Is this meant to be where nerds can identify each other by claiming niche queens as their gay spirit animal? Is this designed for Pokemon gays (yes that’s a thing) to write things like yasssss jigglypuff, slay queen! and find comradeship through mutual stunted development? Or is it an opportunity to educate readers on icons that are often overlooked by the increasingly mainstream gay culture? I’m going to go with that last option. Strap in.
First things first, what makes a gay icon? In the past, gay icons have usually been prominent entertainers like singers or actresses that attracted gay fan-bases or related to queer issues, such as Judy Garland, Cher, Madonna and Whitney Houston. They are usually women - because in the past, only famous women could indulge in the glamour and flamboyance that was considered essential to be an icon.
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Shirley Bassey, Mitzi Gaynor, Liza Minelli all had extravagant stage shows and TV specials that made their glamour accessible to mass audiences and were easily parodied. We also had actresses that queer people identified with because they were often written to be avatars of our experiences, like Bette Davis, Vivien Leigh and Gloria Swanson (see my previous column on DIVA WORSHIP). There are stars who crossed over from entertainment and became vocal LGBTQ+ advocates, like Elizabeth Taylor and her AIDS activism, Lady Gaga and Janet Jackson.
Gay Icons can become revered for the image the produce, an image that becomes a signifier for queerness itself, such as Marlene Dietrich in her tuxedo, which has inspired everyone from Madonna to Kylie Minogue. There are many different ways to be a gay icon, and many more than I’ve listed here, but what they all share in common is that they are a cultural touchstone that many different queer people can relate to and share in their admiration of. A Gay Icon is not just a bitch in a sparkly dress, which is what was famously said of right wing pundit Katie Hopkins when she appeared on Celebrity Big Brother and endeared herself to a select audience with her acid drops and pithy quips. True Gay Icons transcend the media they exist in and make marks on collective queer consciousness.
Having said that, I will now present to you a few of my favourite overlooked gay icons, and why I think they are transcendent. Enjoy.
Barbara Cartland
Dame Barbara Cartland was one of the best-selling authors of the twentieth century, producing over seven hundred books, with a particular focus on romantic fiction. Known as the Queen of Romance (camp), she was a pillar of London Society, boasting Lord Mountbatten and Winston Churchill amongst her social circle. She broke off her first engagement after learning what sex actually entailed (camp), but then quickly worked her way through around fifty suitors (camp!) and married a handsome army officer, with whom she had a child, who grew up to be the famously crimped and coiffed Lady “Acid” Raine Spencer, Princess Diana’s wicked stepmother (CAMP!).
Cartland was unafraid to say what she thought, getting into a delicious televised spat with Jackie Collins (camp) about the vulgar content of Collin’s much more racy romance novels, and announced that her own output were the only books that Diana Spencer ever read, “not that it helped her much” (CAMP). But her connections are not really the reason I love Dame Barbara, the thing that stands out about her is her unique sense of style.
She was one of the most recognisable grande dames in London, a stout old woman laced into vibrant pink chiffon Norman Hartnell gowns, earlobes sagging under the weight of diamonds and ropes of pearls covering her scraggly neck. A huge blonde wig gave her a halo effect, with frosty blue eye shadow applied haphazardly all over her lids, and a great fuchsia smear for a mouth, lipstick invariably on her teeth. She had a kind of monstrous glamour, a coiffed artifice that crushed her before your very eyes. John Waters talks about how Divine was the intersection of Jayne Mansfield and Godzilla, I posit that Barbara Cartland is the convergence of Mae West and a crushed mosquito, the kind one finds on the wind-shield of a car. Her commitment to her aesthetics can be found in some of her work too, particularly her cookbook The Romance of Food, which features the most ghastly pink kitsch alongside her recipes for prawn cocktails and salmon croquettes. Truly inspiring, a glamour hag so unhinged that she has to be seen to be believed.
Dalida
Born Iolanda Cristina Gigliotti, Dalida was an Italian-French-Egyptian singer who had a fabulous career and a very volatile personal life. She started off as an actress in the late fifties, and blossomed into one of Europe’s most successful singers and entertainers in the sixties through the seventies and into the eighties. She did it all, serious ballads, a late seventies disco period, a whole section of her discography known as “The DIVA Years”, TV specials, sell out concerts and tours, multiple marriages and a relatively early death.
She is one of those camp icons that can only be produced by continental Europe, like Raffaella Carra or Moira Orfei. She was beautiful, talented, glamorous with a kiss of the exotic about her, sparkly costumes, handsome dancing boys and a permanent fixture of the kind of televised variety shows that still make up half the schedule for continental broadcasting. A reigning queen of Rai Uno. One of my favourite performances of hers is a section on a French TV special where she sings La Vie en Rose as a duet with Julio Iglesias (father of Enrique), and the two gaze out together at a projected sunset backdrop and make goo-goo eyes at each other. Honestly, I don’t want to fall in love ever again, unless it looks like that.
But the thing about Dalida is that, if you look at her for more than one song, you can see the great tragedies in her life. Despite the glossy lips, the bouncing honey-coloured hair, the strong nose, there is untapped sorrow and pain. One scratch, and the bloom is gone. Three of her lovers committed suicide (one current husband, one ex husband, one boyfriend), one of her best friends leapt to his death from an open window, and Dalida herself attempted suicide several times in Paris, finally succeeding in 1987 at the age of 54. This pattern of death amongst lovers and friends will be somewhat familiar to the queer people who lived through the 80s and 90s, as it mimics the mass extinction caused by the AIDS epidemic. People at the time, and afterwards, could see themselves in Dalida, beautiful and effervescent, joyful and powerful on the outside, but inside going through the most excruciating periods of loss and lovelessness. Her suicide note read “Life is unbearable. Forgive me.” Disco can’t save everyone, and no one knows that better than the gays.
The Goddess Bunny
Sandie Crisp was an underground legend, known to the world as The Goddess Bunny, drag queen, entertainer, actress and muse, who sadly died in 2021. In this world of constant social media presence and the mainstream dilution of the queer art of drag, The Goddess Bunny had a mysterious power, the reigning queen of underground cinema and a great beauty. She contracted polio as a child, and as a result was subject of medical malpractice by her doctors, and thus she was a wheelchair user for most of her life, but this never hindered her in her pursuit of herself.
She transitioned in the late 1970s and started building up her own mythologies, the air of an icon and excitement that enveloped her wherever she went. She claimed to have participated in a Paralympic Games that never happened, taken famous lovers whose identities she was sworn to keep secret, everything else that invokes an alluring mystique. She enjoyed moments of internet fame, a video of her tap dancing being one of the first ever viral videos to grace our screens.
Bunny’s body was often the only thing that people saw when interacting with her for the first time, a disabled trans woman in a wheelchair with wild wigs and wilder make-up. She was a true misfit in this world of primped princesses pouting on Instagram, baby drag queens that look like insta-beauty girlies.
Bunny was so much more than that. She was a stellar actress, a music video icon, and more importantly, a community leader and mother to waifs to strays. She adopted the lost souls that flocked to her, wayward boys who doted on her like a real parent, right up until the day she died. She knew that community and the collective queer spirit was just as powerful a resource as fame and beauty. She redefined beauty. She became beautiful on her own terms. Her body, which for so long was abused by the bad people around her as an adolescent, now is represented in one of the most famous art galleries in the world. She was a muse to fine art photographer Joel Peter Witkin, who made a portrait of her as the classical figure Leda, which now hangs in the Louvre, in Paris. From the gutter to the stars.
Iconic is a word that gets thrown around far too easily these days. Few things truly become the cultural flashpoint people claim they are, but I think that the ongoing discussion around Gay Icons is always exciting. Gays are discerning when it comes to who is remembered and who isn’t. Who truly serves? Not just serving face, or cunt, but serves our community? Our imaginations? Who teaches us and shows us who we really are? Who, despite possibly not being actually gay, can give life to so many queer people? Who can give us fodder for our dreams, an ideal of growing older, a shoulder to cry on, a standard to break?
Legends are more important than anything. Specific knowledge and biographies are boring, as are long lists of download sales and broken records. I don’t care about how many weeks Ariana has been number one, I don’t care about the box office takings of a Gaga film. That means nothing to me, its competitive capitalist codswallop. I do care about the lipstick on Barbara Cartland’s teeth. I care about Dalida crying alone in the Ritz, taking sleeping pills. I care about The Goddess Bunny and her lost boys running the streets of LA. It’s what matters. It’s what is remembered. It’s what becomes a legend most.
Words & Collages: Misha MN
