The weekend before last was the Gramophone record awards, or Grammys as I believe they are known to their friends. If you followed the ceremony with the same care and attention as I have then you’ll already know that the best newcomer award went to Chappell Roan and that she came up to receive her award accompanied by a burst of her song Pink Pony Club, one stanza of which goes like this:
I’m having wicked dreams of leaving Tennessee, hear Santa Monica, I swear it’s calling me. Won’t make my mama proud, it’s gonna cause a scene – she sees her baby girl, I know she’s gonna scream “God, what have you done? You’re a pink pony girl and you dance at the club.”
We’ll come back to that song, but first a little on Chappell Roan. Off stage she’s called Kayleigh Rose Amstutz, she was born in 1998 in Missouri – not Tennessee – and although her first recording contract was with Atlantic, she now works with Island records. In her acceptance speech she spoke up for struggling artists and encouraged record labels to offer a living wage and health insurance to those they sign. Rather pointedly, she felt that Atlantic didn't do this for her.
That stanza from Roan’s song tells the story of a midwestern girl who longs to move to LA to be a go-go dancer. Chappell is not from Tennessee and has said that she wouldn’t have the courage to dance on stage in that way but that she was struck by those who did and wrote the song about the experience of not feeling like you belong in your hometown and moving out, leaving your parents to, in this case, dance at the club.
An older song from the synth-pop genre that casts a darker, less pink, light on that story is Smalltown Boy by Bronskii Beat which starts:
You leave in the morning with everything you own in a little black case.
Alone on a platform, the wind and the rain on a sad and lonely face.
Mother will never understand why you had to leave, but the answers you seek will never be found at home. The love that you need will never be found at home.
The more observant and musically knowledgeable of you will have worked out where I’m going, because as well as writing about leaving home and enjoying the musical genius of the synthesiser, what Chappell Roan and Jimmy Somerville, lead singer of Bronskii Beat, have in common is that they are gay and February is LGBT history month. The history of LGBT people goes back as far as the history of humanity, but those of you familiar with the internet might have come across the song History Hates Lovers, which complains that gay sexual relationships have always been covered up with euphemisms as close friends, besties, roommates, colleagues, side kicks, good pals, buddies – anything but lovers. It’s by Oublaire – you should look it up. There have always been gay people, but their history can be difficult to unearth.
Today’s history, however, is going no further back than the lead singer of Bronskii Beat. James William Somerville, since we’re giving full names, shares his first names with me but is even older – born in 1961 in Glasgow. In 1980 he left home and moved to London where he faced the challenge of being a struggling artist, squatting in unoccupied flats – in some ways not much has changed between his experience and Chappell Roan’s. In some ways, but not in others – Smalltown Boy is a darker song than Pink Pony Club for a reason: the 1980s was not a decade in which it was easy to be gay. The video of Smalltown boy depicts the teenage hero getting beaten up for his sexuality and leaving an unfriendly home town because of this, but an even bigger threat came from the AIDS epidemic, first reported in the UK in 1981.
In the 1980s, AIDS was a strange and frightening disease – I remember the government information campaign “Don’t Die of Ignorance” which deliberately scared the population in the hope of making them avoid unprotected sex, particularly gay sex, and sharing needles when injecting drugs. These remain good pieces of advice – please keep yourselves healthy and safe – but the threat of AIDS has reduced from an unstoppable death sentence. After leaving Bronskii Beat, Jimmy Somerville joined up with Richard Coles, another musician who moved to London in the early 1980s to live in a squat in the hope of making the big time. Together they formed The Communards and had some big hits after which Richard became a radio presenter, vicar and, most recently, jungle celebrity. In his autobiography, Fathomless Riches, he talks about the fear of that time, of being in your early 20s and seeing friends and acquaintances get ill, drop off the scene, and then not be heard of until you were invited to their funeral. Nowadays there is treatment which is free in the UK, but requires health insurance in the US – treatment that means that life expectancy is the same for HIV patients as those without the virus and which reduces the viral load to the point where it is not passed on. There is also pre-exposure prophylaxis, PrEP which reduces the risk of catching the disease – it’s recommended for gay and bisexual men.
As well as the terrifying epidemic and the threat of violent homophobia, back in the 80s there were legal restrictions on gay people. Smalltown Boy comes from an album called Age of Consent, referring to the disparity that meant that straight teenagers could have sex at 16, but gay men had to wait to 21 – the law has never had much to say about lesbianism. This was reduced to 18 in 1994 and equalised at 16 in 2000. In the meantime, in 1988, the government passed a law, called Section 28 of the Local Government Act, which would have made this assembly illegal when I was in the sixth form. Schools weren’t allowed to teach about homosexuality – this was repealed in 2003, so you don’t have to worry about the Feds turning up to arrest me.
Some of you are gay, some of you aren’t – most of you I have absolutely no idea and quite right, it’s none of my business. It’s none of anyone else’s business – ok, a very small number of people’s business – a maximum of one at a time is traditional. All of you, however, are young people growing up, thinking about making that step away from living under the careful supervision of your parents. My mother’s philosophy on this is that young people need roots and wings – she saw her role as a parent in making sure that my sisters and I felt secure at home but confident to go out into the world. I think she’d be happy with Chappell Roan’s lyric “Don’t think I’ve left you all behind, still love you and Tennessee, you’re always on my mind; and Mama, every Saturday I can hear your southern drawl a thousand miles away.” There are deep roots there as well as enthusiastic wings.
So that’s my first message – if you’re just here for the messages, take a note – it’s normal to want to go out into the world and find the place you belong. It can be scary, for some people it feels like a betrayal of where they’ve come from, but I don’t see it that way – the confidence to make your own way reflects well on the people who made you: it’s not leaving them behind, it’s giving them reason to be proud. I hope you all have good roots and if you don’t feel like your wings are enthusiastic enough yet then that’s ok, we have another couple of years to strengthen them and that’s what the Clapham eagle is for.
My second message is in the history of section 28 and in Oublaire’s song that talks about “Twenty one centuries of hate, some things may not have been okay back then, but it’s sure alright today.” We are lucky to live in a Pink Pony Club world rather than the Smalltown Boy one – we should be thankful for the changes in society and science that mean that both Aids and gaybashing are rarer than they were, but both still exist – AIDS is still common in Southern Africa and homophobia is common wherever people think other people’s love lives are their business. That, by the way, is not Harris Clapham Sixth Form – it’s not okay to tell other people that being gay is not okay, it’s certainly not okay to be unpleasant to them because they are.
And my final message comes in Chappell Roan’s decision on what to speak about in her acceptance speech. It would be easy for her to have said something bland, to be satisfied with the wealth and security that her success has brought her but she chose to speak up for others who have not yet had her good fortune. I hope that when you fly out into the world and find the place you belong that you will remember your roots, remember that not everyone will have done as well as you and do something about it. There are lots of ways of doing something – I, obviously, recommend becoming a teacher – and there are lots of places you could end up – Chappell Roan talks about a special place where boys and girls can all be queens every day, but I guess that’s even more niche than a career in schools. My point is that wherever you go and whatever you do, it will be you that is going and doing. Will that you be bold, and kind, and determined, and well-qualified? Well, that’s up to you.
Footnotes
1. Writing about the winners of the Grammys is becoming a habit - indulged in A Bend in the Road and Getting out of the Mood.
2. Gay relationships (and particularly gay poetry) are explored in Briefly Gorgeous.