Indie Rock Fag: The Indie Rock Fag Needs to Find His Own Morrissey
Original illustration by Ryan Bloomberg
I have to admit: I’ve never really been a Morrissey fanatic. I have a more-than-passing knowledge of The Smiths, born from a 7th grade obsession with “How Soon is Now,” but that knowledge is mostly relegated to singles and I’d be hard pressed to name more than one or two of their albums. I know that Morrissey’s solo career is just as storied (though I sometimes have trouble remembering which hits are his and which are his old band’s) but most importantly I know that the man himself inspires the kind of rabid devotion usually reserved for religious cults and favored brands of diet pop. I saw him play at the Warner Theatre last Saturday, though, and realized something I’ve long suspected: Morrissey — the morose English rockstar, the man who still won’t admit he’s gay (but isn’t fooling anyone) — just doesn’t do it for me.
When he took the stage, half of the audience flocked into the aisles and stretched out their hands like disciples. I could see the glow of bliss on their faces when he would touch their hands or look in their eyes — it nearly overshadowed the stage lights. He took his shirt off at two different points during the show and threw it into the masses. The first time someone grabbed it greedily and held on for dear life. The second time a four-way tussle for the garment ensued and two security guards were powerless to stop it. Morrissey, the master of all things ambiguous and dreary, clearly held a sway over his followers.
But me? I observed all of this from the low balcony at stage right, as far removed from the maelstrom as “Ask” would be from the sound system at Apex. Looking down at the rabble below I saw every possible queer permutation — two men holding hands, two women kissing, a transman dancing with an alterna-twink, even a pierced-and-tattooed straight couple that would do better at Homo/Sonic than they ever would on M Street — singing every word, cheering at every break, radiating excitement that shone around their heads like gossamer manic panic.
Among my friends, even, the highest level of Morrissey devotion that I regularly observe is in gay males in their 30s. I think that at the height of his popularity he was a living, breathing representation of whatever gay life existed beyond the youthful closet. Gender neutral lyrics, a mysterious public persona, a rumored relationship with Michael Stipe: all these factors conspired to make Morrissey an accessible gay icon, but his ambiguity made him safe for worship by men and women, straight and gay, pretty much anyone who felt on the outside.
His sway is so strong that I have one friend who passed on his first chance to see Morrissey because he didn’t want to know that his legend was actually a living, breathing person. I once told my boyfriend that I used to sneak downstairs as a 16 year-old night to watch Queer as Folk on Showtime. He told me that they had nothing like that when he was growing up in the 80s. His closest equivalent was Morrissey videos.
Its a funny comparison: I had the resources of internet pornography, explicit Showtime dramas and Chicago’s Boystown neighborhood at easy access, yet I feel like I’m the one who lost something by not having a figure like Morrissey in my life. Its not that music didn’t factor into my depressed fag years, it’s just that I never stumbled across anything quite as iconic. For a while the Smashing Pumpkins’ version of “Landslide” accompanied my 7th grade nights alone in my room, but that dream was shattered when I got into Fleetwood Mac and found out that theirs came first. In high school it was Belle and Sebastian’s “If You’re Feeling Sinister,” which appealed to me more for its loneliness and isolation themes than its occasional invoking of bisexuality. Later in life I fell head over heels for The Velvet Underground and The Magnetic Fields, but neither of those bands are really mine. People who want (or wish) to be on the outside have been obsessing over VU for years, and my boyfriend has forgotten more about Magnetic Fields than I will ever know. They are games that I am late for.
I am happy to no longer be the under-sexed archetype of the “gay and depressed teenager,” but I do think you lose something when you emerge into the culture you’ve waited so long to find. Like any other dream, it can lose its luster when its finally found. The people around me at the Warner Theatre seemed able to reclaim a little bit of their old selves in the face of an icon. I’m now 25 years old. Is it too late for me to find my own Morrissey?
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this is one of your best essays, zack. i think it speaks to the larger issue of the strange place many of us occupy between a more isolated gay culture of the past and the more integrated communities we are shaping today (think: andrew sullivan’s essay on the end of gay culture). i would much rather have integration than my own morrissey (i’m 27 years old, btw), but at the same time, maybe hindsight will reveal your own morrisey. maybe these 30-something gays are morrisseyphiles in part because of nostalgia, and you’re simply too young to have enough distance from the past to recognize who your morrissey might be or might have been. just a thought.
Before Morrissey, it was Elton John and Freddy Mercury. And then Jimmy Somerville.
You go with the music that speaks to you, that enters your soul and makes a place there. It may be a performer’s oeuvre, or it may be just a bunch of unrelated songs. And it may change over time.
I liked the Smiths back in the day, but I didn’t fall into the Morrissey cult by a long shot. These days, if there is any musician I’d most like to meet and hang out with, it would be Manu Chao, who is most likely straight (I really don’t know). Him, or Emmylou Harris. Other than those two, for me it’s just a list of songs, by many different artists.
You kids don’t know what good music is, in my day we had asexual icons!
There is no real reason for you to be a fan of Morrissey. Just because he is a gay community icon doesn’t mean he has to be your icon.
I might argue that The Smiths and Morrissey, despite his continuing career, were before your time. That your formative years came after the rush of success of The Smiths and even before Morrissey’s early solo work.
As a straight, mid-40′s male who is sometimes (maybe often) thought to be gay, Morrissey and The Smiths fit well into my life’s timeline. I certainly wouldn’t think of holding it against you for not loving Moz like I and others do.
Where are these ‘more integrated gay communities’ of which you speak?
From my point of view, they’re just as atomized, and maybe more so, as they were when I was young and was told I wasn’t gay because I liked rock, didn’t dress well, was fat (and I should add I probably weighed about 200 lbs at 6′ tall then, which is not exactly fat) and didn’t like the right boys.
Mind you, the notion of ANY community being ‘well integrated’ horrifies me – assimilation – so that may just be me.
As a heterosexual Morrissey fan, I can certainly say that his fanbase has typically been predominantly heterosexual. In fact, it’s the reason why his fanbase is considered one of the strangest phenomenons in modern pop. Morrissey attracted the sensitive loner. In that sense, being a sensitive outsider in general made you vulnerable to Morrissey. Obviously, such qualities will be attractive to both gay, and straight fans.
Judging the Morrissey effect by his current incarnation is really judging him well past his prime, and well out of context. In my opinion, Morrissey’s persona worked well in the 80′s and early 90′s, but he soon lost context after grunge came along. Many artists experienced the same sudden shock with the advent of grunge. The style of his album releases essentially corroborates this timeline is well, and it exhibits a clear attempt to keep up with the trends as much as Morrissey knows how to.
While I am likely digressing far too much, it’s interesting to see how extreme the labeling of so many things as “gay” has become in America. Even though homosexuals experience much greater acceptance now, than they likely ever have, it’s odd to see such a narrowing of what currently passes for straight, and gay behavior. All the while, straight men are becoming more self-conscious than they’ve ever been.
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