Music
Accidentally Gay: “Backstreets” by Bruce Springsteen
Is this classic song from Born to Run actually about a closeted gay couple?
“Backstreets” is track A4 of Bruce Springsteen’s 1975 album Born to Run, his breakthrough album and a classic of rock music by any standard. It is an emotional coming of age story about two young men who feel ill-fit for their expected roles in society. And, if read a certain way, it’s gay as hell.
One soft, infested summer, me and Terry became friends
Trying in vain to breathe the fire we was born in
Catching rides to the outskirts, tying faith between our teeth
Sleeping in that old abandoned beach house, getting wasted in the heat
And hiding on the backstreets
“Terry” is a traditionally gender-neutral name, and some choose to interpret Terry as a woman. But Bruce’s narrator evokes masculine ideals that he and Terry share and are harmed by, so it’s pretty clear to me that Terry and the narrator are a pair of young men. In this first verse we see them “trying in vain to breathe the fire [they were] born in,” a powerful potential description of trying to grow up to become someone you aren’t. The pair are shown as young ruffians hitchhiking away from town and squatting together in an abandoned house, kids purposefully getting themselves into trouble because they feel alienated from society.
The last lines of the first chorus set the stakes:
With a love so hard and filled with defeat
Running for our lives at night on them backstreets
We’re talking about a love that is intense and doomed, and that might threaten their lives. If we’re talking about two gay lovers in the ’50s or ’60s, we could hardly find a more apt description.
The next verses are in the “heap of broken images” style typical of Bruce’s early work, but we get another bit of a storyline at the end of the bridge:
Blame it on the lies that killed us, blame it on the truth that ran us down
You can blame it all on me, Terry, it don’t matter to me now
When the breakdown hit at midnight, there was nothing left to say
But I hated him and I hated you when you went away
We can easily read this as the breakdown of the narrator and Terry’s relationship — “the lies that killed us” and “the truth that ran us down” resonate very strongly with a closeted gay love affair, and there is a telling depth of emotion as the narrator invites Terry to blame him and curses everyone involved.
The song ends with the narrator reflecting on the end of his time with Terry through the lens of the beginning:
Remember all the movies, Terry, we’d go see
Trying to learn to walk like the heroes we thought we had to be
These lines hit home hard for the young queer experience. Two young men watching “real” men onscreen and knowing they don’t measure up. Trying to learn to force themselves into an ideal, knowing that even if they succeed, it will all have been an act. And the way Bruce sings “we thought we had to be” marks this line as an emotional node of the song — his voice breaks (artistically, of course) at this point, and the rest of the song is screamed — cried, perhaps.
Well, after all this time, to find we’re just like all the rest
Stranded in the park, and forced to confess
To hiding on the backstreets
“Stranded in the park” could easily refer to any number of urban gay scenes in the past, in which men would cruise a certain park at night knowing that other men were looking for hookups there. You can imagine what the narrator and Terry might be “forced to confess” if they’re found “hiding on the backstreets.”
This is, to me, a fairly obvious way to read this excellent song. But I don’t think it’s what Bruce was thinking of when he wrote it. I’m pretty sure this song is gay by accident.
Bruce Springsteen is a heterosexual man. Just look at this picture of him heterosexually kissing his fellow heterosexual Clarence Clemons on the lips during a concert:
There are dozens of these pictures because they did it constantly throughout the ’70s and ’80s. And I know you think I’m being sarcastic when I call this heterosexual behavior, but I’m dead serious: I don’t think these guys are gay. (Or bi, pan, what have you.) Bruce has talked about this at length: he loved Clarence Clemons, and those onstage kisses were outpourings of emotion based around that love, but it wasn’t a romantic or sexual love. It was something else, rooted in music and brotherhood. It was also a love that flew in the face of the mores of the Jersey Shore of the early ’70s, but not because they were two men — because they were different races. To hear Bruce tell it, the onstage kisses began as an intense “fuck you” to the people in the audience shocked to see a Black man in Bruce’s band. But they grew into an expression of what he and Clarence meant to each other throughout their careers.
Bruce’s relationship with Clarence was one of the most intense relationships of his life. (See: his autobiography.) It was also, as far as I can tell, not a romantic or sexual relationship — and any attempts to assert that it must have been would be reductive. People who would assert Bruce and Clarence as closeted bi or gay men ignore the possibility of an intense and meaningful relationship that isn’t centered on romantic love and/or sex. Writing off Bruce and Clarence as secret lovers is just as insulting as writing them off as “just friends” — it’s a mischaracterization of a beautiful, meaningful thing. It’s saying “I see what you say about how you care about each other, but actually I have decided it must be this other thing.”
Perhaps this is the same logic with which we must approach “Backstreets.” We can see the narrator and Terry as two misfit boys who love and support each other through a hostile world, sharing a bond that is deeper and more intense than friendship but also not romantic or sexual. Maybe, like Bruce and Clarence, they are divided by race. Or maybe they are simply misfit kids for their own reasons.
Readings like these are almost certainly closer to Springsteen’s intent when he wrote the song, and I find them just as satisfying as the gay reading.
That’s the beauty of “Backstreets.” It depicts the life of an outcast so viscerally that a group of outcasts who likely weren’t on Springsteen’s radar at the time — the queer community — can see themselves vividly reflected in it. The fear of rejection by society, the beauty of finding someone like you to share your life with, the bone-deep hurt when the same society you tried to flee is what tears you apart from each other — it all resonates perfectly, and it doesn’t matter to me that Bruce was writing about straight street kids.
If there’s one feeling I could communicate to all the misguided Swifties insisting that the world’s straightest pop star must be queer, it is the joy I find in “Backstreets.” Just because someone wrote a song that resonates with you doesn’t mean they have to be like you. And, in fact, it is a primary function of the human experience that someone unlike you can make art that resonates with you. Bruce or Taylor not actually being gay but still writing songs that move your gay heart in gay ways — that is a feature, not a bug.
So yeah, Bruce Springsteen probably didn’t write “Backstreets” about a gay couple. But that won’t stop me from listening to it that way, and it shouldn’t. Letting the gay and the straight interpretations of that song nestle so close together in my brain that the differences stop mattering… it just makes a beautiful song better. That’s the power of good art.
If you click any of those Amazon links up there to buy stuff, I’ll make a couple of cents off it, and you won’t pay any more. So, y’know… if you like.
