Photo: Moviestore/REX/Shutterstock. According to a retrospective on Bowie’s life produced by London’s Victoria and Albert Museum, at least one reason for Bowie moving to Berlin was Romy Haag — a transgender nightclub owner. Bowie and Haag were lovers, and Haag has been called Bowie’s muse. Bowie created three albums while in Berlin and Haag’s influence supposedly can be seen, for instance, in “Boys Keep Swinging,” a song plainly about male privilege with jabs at heteronormativity (“When you’re a boy, other boys check you out.”); the video featured a suit-clad Bowie with three female backup dancers who were played by Bowie in drag.
Let’s face it, David Bowie might have been the world’s first transgender ally — before we had words like “transgender” or even “ally” in our vernacular. He was also one of the first famous gay allies. Bowie “came out” as gay in a 1972 interview long before the likes of Freddie Mercury or Elton John had even hinted at coming out of the closet. Later, Bowie said he was bisexual— in 1970 he married his first wife, a model named Angie, after they met because they were sleeping with the same man. Much later, Bowie said that saying he was bisexual was “the biggest mistake I ever made” because he didn’t feel like a “real bisexual.” “I’ve always been a closet heterosexual,” Bowie said. But even in his own searching, Bowie was illustrating a fluidity of sexuality that many still have trouble grasping.
At a time when performers in America were characteristically dressing down— “affluent, suburban kids disguised as Appalachian farmers or Canadian lumberjacks,” Ian Buruma wrote in the New York Review of Books— Bowie was dressing up. Or, arguably, dressing out — out of the strictures and norms of traditional masculinity. At the V&A’s Bowie exhibit, the sense one walked away with was of Bowie as changeling — that there was no way to characterize Bowie except to say he was beyond characterization. The only way to sum up his various costumes and personas is to say they can’t be summed up — that their cumulative effect is to represent the full spectrum of human expression and suggest that spectrum can be singularly inhabited by one person, or by implication any of us.
For me, it’s hard to think about David Bowie without picturing Labyrinth, the 1986 film in which he starred, a favorite of mine as a child and now one of my 7-year-old’s favorites, too. In Labyrinth, we’re all the Jennifer Connelly character — the young naive trying to follow the maze as though it’s linear and non-changing — while David Bowie’s goblin king sits at the center of the ever-changing and evolving puzzle. Even when we eventually “solve” the maze, we learn that’s not the point. The ground shifts, literally. The ceiling becomes the floor. Up becomes down.
We were never supposed to go anywhere but simply to find ourselves, guided by David Bowie singing for us all the infinite possibilities. Bowie was an artist in the truest, most original sense. With his music, with his personas and with his life, he painted a vision for a future we’re only just now starting to inhabit. And it’s amazing.
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