‘Mighty Real’ Is The Definitive History Of Pop Music From An LGBTQ Perspective

LOS ANGELES – NOVEMBER 4: Disco singer Sylvester aka Sylvester James poses for a portrait on November 4, 1984 in Los Angeles, California. (Photo by Eric Blum/Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images)

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The veteran journalist Barry Walters’ new book, Mighty Real, is an extensive history of LGBTQ music from 1969 to 2000, spanning from the Velvet Underground to RuPaul. But the work is more than just a survey of notable LGBTQ and LGBTQ-adjacent acts: it almost reads like a memoir in which Walters occasionally weaves in aspects of his personal life — including his difficult childhood in Rochester, N.Y., his experiences as a writer during the AIDS epidemic in the 1980s, and his recollections of some of the musicians he interviewed and who are in the book.

“I was drawn to a lot of the acts in the book before I knew who I was,” Walters says. “I got the message that I was different. I grew up in a suburb where everyone had the same skin tone as me, but not everyone was like me. And I went to New York City, where many skin tones were not like mine, but I felt at home there. I felt I belonged in a world of difference…That was something I wanted the young reader to absorb. I wanted to explain my journey so that people could think about theirs.”

Each chapter in Mighty Real examines a particular artist and how they and their music addressed directly or indirectly LGBTQ themes. Some of the most obvious ones include David Bowie, Donna Summer, Elton John, Melissa Etheridge, Cher, Michael Jackson, Indigo Girls, k.d. lang, ABBA, Village People, Cyndi Lauper and Boy George. But the book also mentions musicians whose repertoire one wouldn’t necessarily think has an LGBTQ connection, such as Tina Turner, Bonnie Raitt, Talking Heads, Olivia Newton-John, New Order and Green Day. And Mighty Real also spotlights under-the-radar but equally important LGBTQ pioneers like Lavender Country and the artists from women’s music label Olivia Records.

Walters, whose work has appeared in The Village Voice, Rolling Stone, The Advocate and Out, began writing Mighty Real almost 10 years ago. He was inspired by the film historian and activist Vito Russo, who wrote the groundbreaking 1981 book The Celluloid Closet.

“He was just an excellent writer who pioneered a gay perspective on film,” Walters says. “So, as a cinema studies student, that was fascinating to me. And it gave me the perspective that I could see the world through this lens. And it was just when I was coming out.”

Walters says that he thought about his mortality after experiencing some health issues. “Like, what do I want to leave behind? I have a stepson and a stepdaughter, and I want to leave something behind for them and also for younger people who grew up with the internet and with AIDS drugs, and all sorts of things that we take for granted.”

“I wanted to show them that music was the way my generation — and really those ahead and behind — first learned about ourselves,” he adds. “We couldn’t just go online and find other gay people. We had to put on a record. David Bowie captured something about the alienation I felt growing up in a suburb where I was misgendered. To me, I looked like a boy, but to some others, I didn’t. I felt a kinship with him that I didn’t feel with the people around me.”

Among the important musicians highlighted in the book is the late 1970s and early 1980s disco singer Sylvester, whose signature song “You Make Me Feel Mighty Real” inspired the work’s title. Walters also interviewed Sylvester shortly before the singer’s AIDS-related death in 1988. “I took a train into New York City for my freshman orientation [in college],” Walters recalls. “And I got lost on the subway, and I missed the orientation. But I did get to Times Square. And the first record I bought was a 12-inch single of “You Make Me Feel Mighty Real” and “Dance (Disco Heat)” on the other side.”

“I tell the story in the book where I heard that Sylvester was in the PWA — the person with AIDS contingent of the San Francisco Pride Parade,” he later says. “That was the first time that a celebrity of any sort — not just music, but anything — had said, ‘I have AIDS, and I want to do what I can do while I’m still alive to raise awareness.’ He was in a wheelchair. So I thought, ‘Well, let’s pay tribute to him while he’s still alive.’ Nothing prepared me for this man who represented so much because we didn’t have words like ‘pansexual.’”

The chapter about Madonna, one of the longest in Mighty Real, details how her music occupies a space in LGBTQ identity and expression. Walters followed Madonna from the very beginning of her career when she was an emerging artist in New York City’s early 1980s club scene.

“I just understood that she represented a lot of downtown club life because she just had the look,” he says. “She had the attitude. She had the sound. She had clearly absorbed a lot of the same things I loved. So seeing her at Radio City Music Hall on her first tour [in 1985] — that was like taking downtown New York and putting it on the stage, not just Radio City. That tour was a huge success all over America.

“The Blonde Ambition Tour [in 1990] was really unlike anything I had ever seen,” he continues. “With the choreography and the staging, it was in the between-song dialogue. It was all of a piece in a way that set the template for what we understand now as mainstream pop. Then it was selling in huge amounts, but it really pissed people off. A lot of rock critics really loathed Madonna. A lot of women were uncomfortable with Madonna. They felt as though she was pandering. And I could tell it was coming from a really smart, personal place.”

Some of the heartbreaking moments in the book are the chapters discussing the late Whitney Houston and Luther Vandross, both of whom Walters had interviewed. The two musical titans were rumored to be gay, but they never publicly came out during their lifetimes because such an admission would threaten their careers, which Walter understands.

“It was sort of painful to watch the latest documentary about [Vandross] because I felt it really sort of said, ‘Oh, that stuff isn’t important,’” Walters says. “But you know what, it is important because he did not take care of himself. He did not have the self-esteem to address his diabetes and his weight issues in a healthy way. Instead, he compulsively ate and dieted, and you can only do that so much until it takes a toll… He didn’t have AIDS, but he survived the AIDS crisis only to die from diabetes. I think that the fact that he couldn’t come out had a lot to do with why he died so prematurely.

“And I must say, the same thing for Whitney: a vessel that channeled that power — how could it fall apart? How could the people around her let that happen? They let it happen because they were making money from her secrecy. They were making money from her unhappiness. That is a really horrible thing. It’s only in retrospect thinking about how she introduced me to her partner [Robyn Crawford] after the tape recorder was turned off [from our 2000 interview for Out]. After we had this battle, she was like, ‘I want you to meet the love of my life.’ But she didn’t put a label on that…People who are not white have a harder time saying, ‘I’m gay,’ and having their community accept them, because they’re already thought of as second-class citizens because of their race.”

Today, the visibility of LGBTQ and LGBTQ-adjacent artists is greater than it ever was—among them Brandi Carlile, Lil Nas X, Orville Peck, Lucy Dacus. Julien Baker, Troye Sivan, and Chappell Roan. Although they are not mentioned in his book, as it covers up to the 2000s, Walters says he’s open to writing about them and others as their careers progress.

“People had been asking me that years ago when I realized, ‘Oh, I can’t make this book to the current day.’ It just isn’t really possible because the current day keeps getting farther and farther away, right? I would love to do a book about what happened to the gay participation in popular culture once the internet really kicked in, once we got a reality-show president and the big shifts back and forth between Obama and Trump — how did that affect popular music? So I would love to. I haven’t thought about what my next book will be like yet, but that is a possibility.”

If there is one important thing that Mighty Real can do, it is to enlighten and inspire readers to go seek out the music of those artists and gain a new perspective about their place in LGBTQ history.

“I was explaining to my editors that I wanted the book to be so gay that it becomes accessible to everyone in the same way that the rap acts,” Walters says, “someone like Kendrick Lamar, [who] makes his music so much about Black culture that white people want to know about it, that it allows everyone access into that culture.

‘So that’s what I wanted the book to do. It’s thrilling to me that I did that with the rebellious elements of the book still intact because I wanted it to feel like rock and roll. I wanted it to feel punk rock at times because that’s part of our culture. But I also wanted at other times the writing to reflect those kinds of vocal runs that Luther Vandross does, which, to me, are so ennobling. They are elevating because gay culture is that, too.”