BOTHWAYS.COM Hosted by Tom Robinson |
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The Gay Liberation movement of the early 70s regarded "gay" as an all-inclusive term. For UK collectives such as Gay News, Gay Switchboard, Gay Sweatshop and the Gay Liberation Front the word covered embraced the entire LGBT spectrum - female, male, bisexual, homosexual and all points in between. My song Glad
To Be Gay was written in 1976 to perform at the Gay Pride march and rally in London that year - see gladtobegay.net for full background & history. It was released in 1978 on an EP
called Rising Free by my band TRB which reached No.18 in the UK charts despite an
unofficial BBC ban. (John Peel was the only Radio One DJ who
played the song at the time). "Everybody has the right to do what they want with their own body if nobody else is being hurt. However, I want it on record that I was with a woman the other night, and it would be a shame if in singing out about the rights of gay women and men I would be then regarded as a traitor if I then went to bed with whoever I wanted to.... As far as Joe Public is concerned, if you’re interested in other guys you’re a queer... to call ourselves bi-sexual is a cop-out. Some of the top musicians in rock make me laugh." Some years later I did - rather inconveniently - end up falling head over heels in love
with a woman. I mentioned this in interviews with the London gay press who didn't think it was much of a story at the time. But in 1987 The Sunday People decided it was - and ran a sensationalist centre page spread about how I'd "turned straight". A brief period in tabloid hell followed. Tom Robinson |
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