This post was submitted by Philip Clark

Hidden History is my new Monday afternoon column for The New Gay. Each week, I’ll cover a different nook or cranny in the gay and lesbian past.

So, the question is: was Alan Murphy gay?

Or maybe there’s another question: does it matter if Alan Murphy was gay?

The first question is (relatively) objective. The second question is (completely) subjective. I don’t have a definite answer for either.

What I do know:

A friend was recently pulling old records out of his collection for me to look at. One was Baldry’s Out! by the British blues musician Long John Baldry. I slipped the inner sleeve out of the record jacket to find small caricatures of the main supporting musicians on the album. To my surprise, there was Alan Murphy cradling his guitar, long hair flowing in all directions. He looked different than I had ever seen him before.

In truth, this was the first I had seen Murphy’s name since high school. Then, I had become enamored of an ‘80s pop-rock band called Go West; songs from their ‘90s comeback album were on the radio, and I went back to find their earlier recordings. Not being a musician, I tend not to notice individual instruments so much as a band’s total sound, but on Go West’s first, self-titled album, songs like “S.O.S.” and “Haunted” had guitar solos so assured and powerful that I couldn’t not notice them. I found the name of the session guitarist listed in tiny type in the liner notes of my cassette copy: Alan Murphy.

When I noticed that Go West had dedicated their comeback album to Murphy’s memory, my interest was piqued further. A little research in a rock ‘n’ roll almanac told me that Murphy had worked with artists like Kate Bush and Go West before briefly joining as a full member of another British band, Level 42. He only recorded one album with them; on screen in Level 42’s “Heaven in My Hands” video, a gaunt Murphy can still throw himself through a vicious guitar solo, but he is obviously sick. Alan Murphy died of complications from AIDS on October 19, 1989. He was 35 years old.

Always on the hunt as a teenager for role models—or at least, in the days before celebrities shed the closet as often as they do now, a few forthright gay men whose work I could admire—I made the assumption Murphy had been gay on the basis of his AIDS diagnosis. As of 1989, gay men had by far the highest mortality rate from the disease. But could I be sure of Murphy’s sexuality because of this? Even at the time, I knew that such a link was tenuous.

Seeing Murphy’s name for the first time in so long, though, made me remember the questions I asked myself back then. The appearance on the Baldry’s Out! album seemed to be another clue. Long John Baldry had been openly gay at a time when to do so could be career suicide. He was well-known in British music circles; Elton John, who had been a member of Baldry’s band Bluesology, took his stage name in part from Baldry. But this was just another tenuous connection: if working with a gay artist made one gay, one hundred percent of the artistic community would share a sexuality.

I was sure that the Internet would yield the answers I sought. Nowadays, with constant media saturation and coverage of all details of even semi-celebrities’ personal lives, someone must have written about Murphy on the web. True—to a point. There are many sites that mention Alan Murphy, both for his own sake and for the work he did with other musicians. There’s both a well-made and attractive tribute website (complete with photographs, an informative biography and discography, and music clips) and an Alan Murphy page on MySpace. All these pages are admirably up-front about the cause of Murphy’s death; unlike when performers such as Liberace and Rudolf Nureyev were desperately trying to hide what was killing them from public view, AIDS now seems to carry much less of a stigma. Murphy’s personal life and sexuality, though, go unmentioned.

This isn’t necessarily intentional omission. These sites focus mainly on Murphy’s music. It seems a bit churlish to demand discussion of what can be such an intensely private matter as a person’s sexuality, and it isn’t quite fair to mandate that those whose interest in Murphy stems from his music also address his personal life. But for not one site even to mention in passing one of the most basic details influencing a person’s life—who it is they love—indicates either an all-too-familiar loathing to identify gays and lesbians as gay and lesbian or a strange lack of basic curiosity.

Murphy’s case highlights a truism: in order to “do” gay and lesbian history, one has to be attuned to the smallest of clues. An association, an interest, an illness, a lack of personal detail: individually or collectively, any of these could indicate a historical figure’s homosexuality—or they could mean nothing at all. When everyone is assumed to be straight until proven otherwise and when even recently, only the bravest men and women would publicize their homosexuality, there is no way to proceed into the gay and lesbian past without a nose for the vaguest scents.

My wandering through the world of online music discussion finally yielded one brief exchange about whether Alan Murphy was gay, on a Level 42 message board. This exchange may also go some way toward addressing whether the answer to the question even matters. The back-and-forth is worth reading in total, but I am struck by the attitude of the poster Mrs_Pink, which I quote as she wrote it: “It wasn’t a case of coming out but those that knew him knew that he was gay. Never liked the whole hing abotu making gay people ‘come out’ anyways! Why dont we let people be??? Gay straight – who cares i say.”

I find myself simultaneously nodding along with Mrs_Pink and furious with her. Her response seems both progressive and naïve, caring and dismissive. Her answers to the questions are black-and-white: Yes and No. I say to myself: Would that it were, for so many of us, this simple.

So, was Alan Murphy gay? Does it matter if Alan Murphy was gay?

I still don’t have a definite answer for either question.

For Hidden History, I’ll write more about pornographers and poets, furies and faggots, books and bootleggers, singers and scandals. If you’ve got suggestions about people, places, and ideas I should cover, particularly if they have a D.C. connection, shoot me an e-mail: philip@thenewgay.net.

Next week: The Lesbians of Michael Field

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