Belligerent Ghoul sends the link/excerpts:
Vaguely Gay: From David Bowie to Jared Leto by Locksley Hall - AfterElton.com
Over the past thirty years, a small but significant number of male celebrities--from David Bowie to Morrissey to Jared Leo--have played the queer card without ever explicitly and permanently confirming themselves as queer. They have made references in their works, dropped hints in interviews. Some have even stated that they are gay or bisexual, only to take it back later and say that it was never true, that they were joking...
Morrissey is a famous inheritor of the gay vague persona. From the early 1980's till today, he has danced around the issue of sexuality in interviews, giving oblique and sometimes contradictory answers. He's celibate. He's not celibate. He's attracted to women. He's attracted to men. He's attracted to both. He's not attracted to anyone.
His songs are similarly ambiguous. There are lyrics that use the male pronoun and could be taken as expressing gay desire. There are lyrics that could be taken as expressing straight desire. And there are lyrics that are gender neutral.
Morrissey's admiration for gay icons such as Oscar Wilde and James Dean, and his references to gay culture (as in the picture of openly gay Andy Warhol star Joe Dallesandro on the cover of The Smiths' debut album) have led many fans to conclude that he is, in fact, gay. But while his fellow 80's vaguely gay pop stars George Michael, Neil Tennant, and Boy George have all eventually made their way out of the closet, Morrissey's sexuality has remained undefined...
...Some queer journalists have attempted to answer this question. Richard Smith, of the UK magazine Gay Time, has repeatedly admonished Morrissey that he has a responsibility to his gay fans to come out if he is gay.
But to longtime Morrissey fan Mark Simpson, such appeals are pointless. Simpson attributes to Morrissey a desire to stand outside the entire modern structure of sexuality, the structure described by words such as "gay" and "straight" and "coming out". As Simpson stated in a 2003 interview with Attitude magazine, “‘Bisexual' might describe [Morrissey], if it didn't suggest twice the opportunity instead of twice the frustration and rejection.” In his recent book Saint Morrissey, Simpson wrote that "Morrissey's ambition, his perversity, his sensibility was far too large, too talented, too vicious to be fitted into this harmless, silly, precious, sequinned little word 'gay'."
But some critics of Morrissey would argue that the only way for the word "gay" to cease to be “harmless, silly, precious, sequined” is for gay men to own it. The only way for the word to shed the stereotypes and denote nothing except same-sex attraction, is for homosexual men of all types to use it.
This is what really bothers certain gay activists about Morrissey and other gay men's refusal to label themselves: if men who are attracted to men avoid the word "gay" because of the stigma and stereotypes it connotes, then the stigma and stereotypes will never be eradicated.
