Time for Music and Romance

Last weekend I chose Steve Grand as Song for Sunday - mostly because he is the current big thing in gay music. But also because I like his slant on Americana with a pop influence. It's a style that's easily accessible.

But it got me thinking.

Great though Steve is, he is one in a line of out gay musicians, and for many of us it sometimes feels like things haven't moved on substantially in music for, well, decades.
Then I realised that that's clearly rubbish - every artist i've included in Song for Sunday in the last few  months is an out gay male singer (and apologies now, I will get to more of the LBT and Q in time, but i wanted to focus on the G to begin with) and it would be inconceivable thirty years ago to have access to so much quality gay music. And it is progress, those musicians are working across a spread of styles - jazz, electronica, pop, folk, blues and country - that out musicians wouldn't have featured in previously. It maybe taking time, but we are getting there. There being a place where out musicians are making music about many different aspects of our lives. Particularly making music about the love part of life (yeah, I know, most songs are essentially love songs).

But there is a history, quite a long history really. Remember this?

Well its thirty-ish years old. Just take that in for a moment. Thirty years ago there was a song in the Top 40 that opened with the lyric 'Turn us on ... turn us on ... boys'. Think about that. In thirty years we haven't moved on much from 'oh, that singer is gay'. We've haven't looked deeply into the work of artists and how it reflects what's going on in our lives. Well to be truthful some of us have done that, but many haven't.
(The same thing happened with Looking the TV programme - many LGBT people took a quick look at it, decided it wasn't representing them on a very surface level, so didn't continue watching. So it got cancelled. There was no exploration of what the programme was trying to achieve, what it was setting up, where it might go, what it was looking to explore in terms of inter-generational gay friendships, modern relationships, or the positive-negative divide. Or indeed anything beyond the surface. Which, some might say is what pop music is all about).

But then Jimmy Summerville has never been a typical pop act. Witness this:

or this

or this

or indeed this

This was the best selling song in the UK that year - and it was by an out, proud, political musician. And it was thirty years ago.

Each of these songs mix pop music with politics. A catchy tune to get airplay, mixed with a message about life as it is - from comments on the destitution in the UK at the time, through to what the gay community has gone through and was going through, through to a very memorable love song.

This is kinda the reason that I have-a-soft-spot-for M/M romance. The unapologetic, upfront, in your face and fuck-you approach to love. It's here, it's queer and (for me) it's my life in all its complexity: the sadness, joy and absolute wonderfulness of it all. I want to see that life, that complexity in books. I want to see that diversity not just shown but celebrated. I yearn for stories of love amongst the 5 to 15% of the population that is rarely shown to be about love. I want to celebrate with others the love that is found. And in amongst the passing of laws to obviously, absolutely, actively discriminate against that community that love is important.  And the great thing about M/M romance is that it does explore all those things, and more, so much more.

Remember that what you are writing and reading is political. Intensely political and personal for some. That's a small point about this genre that often gets forgotten in the rush to celebrate the latest story about two wonderfully written men falling in love. But let me be clear: I'm not about acceptance. I'm not about tolerance. I'm about equality without exception. Because without that the things that we read become meaningless. M/M romance becomes as much high fantasy as science-fiction. I don't want my life treated that way in fiction or in reality. And you shouldn't settle for that either.

Let's hope things are significantly different in another thirty years. Let's hope that Steve Grand is still singing songs about what love is all about for him as a middle aged man, but that we don't notice that the video is about love between two men, because that's not the important part. The important part is the love that's being expressed.

But in the meantime let's have Steve Grand's latest video