There’s More to Queer Than Pop Divas.

There is more to queer music than the officially sanctioned slick-pop, says Walter Beck. There is an alternative.

“We stayed up most of the night making picket signs and getting ready. You think we were blasting Lady Gaga? Fuck no! We were getting ready to face the craziest bastards on the religious fringe to 100db of MC5’s Kick Out the Jams.”

Queen, ‘We Are The Champions.’

To mark LGBT History Month, 2013, Polari asked its contributors to recall a song that had an impact their own stories.

“The power ballad I forwarded to play, then rewound to play again, was always ‘We Are The Champions’. But I was 11 years old and that purchase had no significance to my yet-to-be-discovered sexuality.”

Queen, Killer Queen

The Readers Wifes fourteenth choice of song with LGBT significance: Queen, Killer Queen. For 2012 LGBT History Month.

It’s a measure of just how estranged gay and straight people were from one another back then that Queen Freddie could preen his way through the 1970s in black nail varnish and white satin looking like a chiaroscuro Zandra Rhodes and yet… nobody knew.

[rating=4]
US: 111 min • Universal • DVD & Blu-ray

Is Flash Gordon the embodiment of camp? Why are there many hawkmen but no hawkwomen?

Flash Gordon earns Camp Wings from its very first frames. The camera zeros in on a dodgy papier-mâché model of the Earth, and then the hands of Ming the Merciless (played by Max von Sydow) appear sporting serious Bling. He starts his destruction of Earth – a planet he’s never heard of, even though he has a button labelled ‘Earth Quake’ on his Armageddon Console …