Originally published on www.sosogay.co.uk
The gay anthem is something that has become synonymous with the gay community over the last couple of decades. From ‘Over the Rainbow’ to ‘I’m Coming Out’, all the way through to ‘Beautiful’ and ‘Born This Way’, sung by Judy Garland, Diana Ross, Christina Aguilera and Lady Gaga respectively; and that’s only a few songs and singers off the top of my head.
There are plenty more where they came from as the gay anthem can date back to as early as the 1920s with ‘The Lavender Song (Das Lila Lied).’ The song is often thought to be one of the very first gay anthems as it was produced during a brief moment in time when the quality of life for gay men and lesbians was improved in the German Weimar Republic, and was written after the first international conference of sexual reform. Even ‘Over the Rainbow’ is more than 70 years old, and when it comes to listing gay anthems today we can usually see the formula used to create it: a bit of struggle, a dash of hardship and the mandatory big voice to belt it out.
However, the one thing I have noticed when it comes to the lists of gay anthems is that they are always rather mainstream and obvious choices. These lists tend to contain a number of artists closely associated with the gay community in one way or another. It’s not unusual to see gay anthems being listed as everything in the back catalogue of artists like Madonna, Kylie Minogue and Barbra Streisand, which in all honesty is a little limiting. After all, there are plenty of songs from other genres, besides disco and Broadway show tunes, that contain songs that can be viewed as gay anthems and in fact convey a message that many of these often-recognised anthems do.
There are two very specific songs that spring to mind from the rock genre, which may surprise you because it isn’t an obvious place to look for a ‘gay anthem’. The first of these songs is ‘Minority’ by Green Day. The song unashamedly shouts out about wanting to be the minority and not, as they put it, ‘the moral majority’. You can see that this song is giving a voice to all those people who are persecuted because they aren’t the white, straight, middle class American suburban family that are married with two children and a white picket fence. In a way, this song, much like Lady Gaga’s ‘Born This Way‘, is giving a voice to anyone and is a song about rights and embracing who you are. However, as a rock song it doesn’t really make the standard lists which are filled with big voice divas belting their way through four minutes of self-discovery.
The second song that stands out is ‘Standing in the Way of Control’ by American rock group Gossip. The song itself was written as a response to the denial of gay marriage in America, something that the gay community across much of the world can understand. Despite receiving considerable chart success here in the UK thanks in part to its use in the promotional advert for teen drama Skins, and being heavily considered as an alternative indie floor-filler, it is often overlooked for what it is actually about – equal rights, which automatically puts it in the alternative gay anthem category. Furthermore, a lesbian with a big voice sang it and, even though Beth Ditto isn’t your conventional diva, that surely gives it enough credit to be a gay anthem.
There are many more songs by various artists that could also be included on this list of alternative gay anthems. Just listen to a handful of songs by Placebo whose songs were used throughout Queer as Folk USA due to their subject matter, specifically ‘Taste in Men’. Then there are artists such as Peaches, whose gender-bending stage antics and controversial lyrics about sex and sexuality automatically put her high on the ‘gay icons’ list. But songs such as ‘I U She‘ convey a message that, although we are forced into boxes, it is ultimately ourselves who choose how and who we have sex with, something that many in the gay community know about. Clearly there are more songs out there other than Broadway tunes that give gay equality a voice, and in many cases they have far more substance to them than those by the big voiced divas.
Even though stereotypically rock and indie music aren’t considered to be favourite genres of gay people, it certainly has many songs that the gay population can relate to.
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