Errattic: Music Tagged as 'Pride'

VICE: What initially made you decide to write this book?

Darryl W. Bullock: I wanted to write a book about LGBTQ people making records, but to be honest, it was a bit dull. It was starting to look a bit like an encyclopedia, an A-to-Z of gay musicians. Then, maybe three or four months into the project, David Bowie died, and his death struck me really viscerally.

But it was while I saw how others reacted to his death, especially the stars I grew up with—the Boy Georges and the George Michaels and the Madonnas—that I realized I was going down the wrong track. I realized the book shouldn’t just be about LGBTQ people making records, but how they influenced each generation that followed. You start to build up this timeline, and it stretches back over 100 years, almost back to the birth of commercially available discs.

It was also a definite decision to include voices you don’t hear of. It would be easy to write a book just about Elton John, George Michael, Boy George, Freddie Mercury, those kinds of people. But I really wanted to document the lives of people like Patrick Haggerty, Blackberri and John “Smokey” Condon (pic above), people who have made incredibly important contributions to music and to LGBTQ lives but have been basically ignored by the mainstream media.

Vice

Tags: All Rights, Business, Celebration, Celebrity, Entertainment, History, Inspired, Interview, LGBTQ, Music, Opinion, Pride, Tribute

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21-Nov-2017

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