David Bowie’s dark side
The iconic rock musician had problems
What’s not to love about David Bowie? If you surf the edges of the rock musician’s fame, he seems a colorful, beautiful, mysterious, Sci-Fi being.
Then read Bowie biographies, and it’s another story. I’m marking passages that horrify me, and the pages are full.
“He slept with women because it appealed to him; he slept with men as trophies as he exerted control over them.”
He was born ‘David Robert Jones’ in 1947.
He was remembered by his aunt as a “vain child” who kept thinking he was dying. Christopher Sanford’s Bowie: Loving the Alien reports:
“Even in 1951, the Joneses’ neighbors would routinely be startled by the arrival of the borough ambulance summoned by the boy’s plausible, but always unfounded, claim to be ‘dying’.”
But that was David Bowie’s one plotline. His first hit, in 1969, was “Space Oddity,” released a week before the Apollo moon landing. At a time when there might’ve been excitement about the ‘space age’, he delivered a grim suicide song, nearly an elegy for the human race.
“And I think my spaceship knows what I must do, and I think my life on earth is nearly through,” the depressive astronaut sings in the song’s early demos.
Even as released, as Sanford notes, the song has a “message of withdrawal, of life closing down.”
There’s many more suicide songs.
In “Conversation Piece,” a 1969 demo (later recorded for Heathen), Bowie sings of a scholar who comes upon a bridge and jumps off.
“Rock n Roll Suicide” on the Ziggy album as well, has incoherent lyrics but seems to refer to his alter-ego killing himself. Death was his theme. There’s “Five Years,” off Ziggy Stardust, is about a man talking a walk as he watches humanity react to the news Earth is ‘dying’.
To think of David Bowie music is often to think of lonely figures on the edge of death, or going crazy over “fame,” etc. As he says: “Thematically, I have always dealt with alienation and isolation.”
Since a teenager he’d say he was “bisexual.”
He had girlfriends and boyfriends. It seems odd to try and analyze his feelings, when Bowie was regularly saying he didn’t have any. “I’m a pretty cold person. A very cold person, I find.”
Bowie is talking about himself in 1972. “I can’t feel strongly. I get so numb. I find that I’m walking around numb. I’m a bit of an iceman.”
But with women, Sanford finds, Bowie was an old-school sexist. His views on women: “It was their business to ensure the continuity of the race and to look after men and children.” He’d become incensed if kept waiting for service from women. John Lennon reprimanded Bowie for barking at Lennon’s fiancé to make breakfast.
Bowie had married, and his wife Angela reported terrible scenes: “David hurtled across the room, grabbed my throat in both hands, and started to throttle me.”
He seems to have had sex with men continuously.
Angie Bowie spilled some of the tea on The Joan Rivers Show on May 4, 1990. “I caught him in bed with men several times. In fact the best time I caught him in bed was with Mick Jagger.”
Mick Jagger rushed in to dismiss it as “complete rubbish,” and Bowie’s lawyer said any “implication that there was ever a gay affair between Mick Jagger and David Bowie is an absolute fabrication.”
Angie Bowie wondered if Bowie was just sexually indiscriminate. He wanted to do the same thing to everybody. She notes: “David made a virtual religion of slipping the Lance of Love into almost everyone around him,” though in her experience, “the sex was lousy.”
In 1971 he announced he was gay.
He added: “And always have been, even when I was David Jones.”
Then, he un-came out? “I didn’t ever feel I was a real bisexual,” he tells Rolling Stone. He’d sent all his handlers out to reassure that he was straight.
So apparently it was just a “phase.”
And I realize Bowie wrote many “gay death” scenarios of the type that Vito Russell studied in The Celluloid Closet:
“Once homosexuality had become literally speakable in the early 1960s, gays dropped like flies, usually by their own hand, while continuing to perform their classically comic function in lesser and more ambiguous roles.”
Bowie continued to flirt with ‘queer sexuality’.
There was a colorful androgyny and imagery from urban gay life. But gay commentators would note that Bowie’s act was, actually, highly negative on the ‘gay lifestyle’.
He told you that if you’re gay, you’re not really from Planet Earth, and maybe this isn’t the place for you. His aliens die horribly — killed, or killing themselves.
In 1973, the gay critic Andrew Kopkind wrote:
“My impression is that the space motif has always allowed Bowie to make more ambiguous the anguish of coming out, and to escape to a degree the reality of his personal-social conflict about sexuality.”
The gay scholar Wayne Studer, similarly, would note the “gloomy, depraved vision of homosexuality that emerges from Bowie’s corpus. There’s nothing ‘gay’ about it. It’s all bitchiness, shock, pain, misery, loathing, and decadence.”
One might say: homophobia in pretty clothes and makeup.
By 1976, Bowie was fully ‘cured’ of the gay.
“Oh lord, I got over being a queen quite a long time ago,” he tells Playboy that year. “I would say that America forced me into it.”
He leaves the impression of the homosexual impulse is itself dying—whether ebbing out of the man who feels it, or prompting the gay person to commit suicide, go crazy, or just somehow disappear.
But as I look through images, over years, of Bowie and Jagger together, and it looks a lot like a kind of marriage taking place over years, in secret.
In a 2012 biography, Mick: the Wild Life and Mad Genius of Jagger, Christopher Andersen claims the two men had a longtime affair.
Tina Turner spent time around the two of them, recalling: “They were like brothers, kind of like brothers or close, close, close friends.”
In a 2015 memoir, Warts And All, the concert promoter John Ffitch-Heyes recalls showing up at Bowie’s house just as Jagger came storming out. A “stark naked” Bowie followed, with Angie explaining it was a “lover’s tiff.”
What was ‘love’ in Bowie’s world, otherwise?
I think over his songs that I’d seemed to like.
“And you, you can be mean
And I, I’ll drink all the time
’Cause we’re lovers, and that is a fact
Yes, we’re lovers, and that is that”
“Heroes,” his apparent ode to courage, is actually a portrait of abusive addicts. I wonder if it’s his version of a love song. And if he lived his life staging savage scenes of dominance.
There was that time in 1987, when a woman put up a fight. Apparently having sex with a female fan after a concert, he bit her and told her he’d given her AIDS.
He might’ve done it for laughs?
He might’ve been playing at being a vampire. He was regularly called a vampire, as by Danny Fields in David Bowie: The Oral History:
“David was a vampire, but a good vampire, he did something good with the blood. He shared the nutrients.”
That refers to all of Bowie’s famous artistic “borrowing” from other acts, as his music was often a pastiche of other performers.
He could easily read as a pedophile.
A reported sex scene with a 14-year-old girl is horrifying.
Bowie should’ve been #MeToo target, though somehow evaded it. He appears to have gotten everyone around him to have sex. It seemed fun and interesting?
“When word leaked out that he had a habit of seducing anyone who worked for him, job applications to his management company rocketed,” notes the Daily Mail after his death in 2016.
As if it’s a joke that a workplace was his harem.
Then Bowie was, of course, a Hitler enthusiast.
“Oh he was a terrible military strategist,” he says, “the world’s worst, but his overall objective was very good, and he was a marvellous morale booster.”
I don’t see that Bowie ever recanted his Nazism. In later years, as he progressed to greater stardom, he made a few excuses for his remarks—that he’d been on drugs, and had become “apolitical.”
That is to say, he just didn’t talk about it.
I remember as a teenager being drawn to his act.
Now I think back to the product Bowie was creating in the 1960s and 1970s. It was a time of sudden interest in free sexuality, and age-old prejudices against gays and the sexually different were slipping.
Bowie seemed to champion these ‘changes’—but also subtly defeat them. He acted, finally, as a brake on true intimacy.
Underneath the androgyny and color and pretty clothes, maybe, was the same gray, menacing man there’d always been. 🔶
