There are so many facets of David Bowie’s career that it is hard to put him in a box. As a musician, actor, performer, and public figure, he was a one-of-a-kind artist and was hugely influential, and his death in 2016 was a huge loss. One area where Bowie left a big impact was as an icon for the LGBTQ community. Bowie‘s rise to stardom came at a time when being openly gay or bisexual was incredibly difficult to do, and there were few major stars who were able to come out.
David Bowie’s career was defined by his fearlessness, though, and he came out loud and proud. “I'm gay, and I always have been,” Bowie said in 1972, just a few short years after being homosexual became legal, and in an interview with Playboy a few years later, he elaborated, “It’s true—I am a bisexual,” he announced. “But I can’t deny that I’ve used that fact very well. I suppose it’s the best thing that ever happened to me.”
He was not shy about expressing his sexuality, and he cultivated an image that was often androgynous and gender-bending, with flamboyant, provocative outfits that few straight men could have gotten away with wearing.
One of the most important moments for Bowie as a gay icon came at the Top of the Pops performance where, with 14 million eyeballs on him, he threw his arm around Mick Ronson, his guitarist, and looked at him in a way that straight men seldom look at each other, in a moment that many saw as groundbreaking and countless LGBTQ youths who were growing up lost, found solace in that moment.
Mark Radcliffe, a radio presenter, was only 14 when the performance played on television, and he said that Bowie and Ronson appeared to have “arrived from another planet where men flirted with each other, made exhilarating music and wore Lurex knee socks”. Was his bisexuality all just an act, though? “That was just a lie. They gave me that image,” Bowie said later, and he says that he was “always a closet heterosexual.” Bowie could be hard to read, but whatever happened in his personal life, we know that he made it easier for many to become their true selves, and for that, he is an important gay icon.