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Bruce Springsteen's vindication as an LGTB icon: "He has many strangely homoerotic songs"

2022-03-27T05:01:19.874Z


The rocker from New Jersey has always been associated with heterosexual masculinity. But now the gay public claims him as a model and inspiration that encouraged them to be freer


Bruce Springsteen in a photo from the eighties.

Springsteen on Broadway

is a confessional direct from 2017

on

the one in which the New Jersey singer-songwriter recounts his life to viewers between song and song.

"A show dedicated to deconstructing his person and his character," wrote the filmmaker Jorge Arenillas, who attended three of those monologues live that would later become a special for Netflix.

Near the beginning, the musician describes a moment that changed his life forever.

That night when he, at the age of seven, saw Elvis Presley on television.

On any given Sunday night the world had changed, dammit.

In an instant.

In a wet and sweaty orgasm of fun.

And to prove it you just had to risk being yourself,” he says.

For him, that vision led him to buy a guitar but, as journalist Noemi Gordon-Loebl recently told

The Nation,

that story may have more readings.

“For some of us, Bruce also describes an epiphanic moment of self-discovery, the revelation of who he can become, and his acceptance.

It is a narrative that resonates particularly for

queer,

or non-normative, people who are aware that there is a freedom that changes their lives, a reward for stepping into their true selves.”

From this, the writer deduces something that many of us had not fallen into.

For part of this public, “especially the female one”, Gordon-Loelb specifies, the songs of this paradigm of the heterosexual man, dealing with being alone in the world and facing everything to be oneself, speak directly to them.

Springsteen is an LGTBI icon, because they are the Wendy from

Born To Run

to whom he says: “Honey, this city rips the bones out of your back.

It's a death trap.

Let's get out while we're young

. "

Or those Sherry, Frankie, Linda or Candy that appear in other songs and whom Springsteen usually places before a vital dilemma: let's take a risk and save ourselves together or we'll rot in a mediocre life.

"This song is about being weird and marginal until at the end you're like, 'Fuck this is who I am," they wrote in the

queer

post Astrostradle

about

Darkness On the Edge of Town.

“It's a song about going to the dark places inside you and looking them in the face, accepting that they are part of you.

But mostly, it's a song about stepping into your own skin, and like so many of Springsteen's, that can very easily be read as stepping into a

queer skin."

, he concluded.

The entire staff chose their favorite Springsteen songs, after discovering that they had all been hiding his devotion to his music.

"I've tried to hide my deep love for things like Bruce Springsteen forever, except on the 4th of July, when I'm allowed to embrace them in the name of

hipster

irony and street drinking.

And it turns out I wasn't the only one!” wrote one of the editors.

Bruce Springsteen, during the concert at Hammersmith Odeon.

It's fair to say that Springsteen has also done his part.

His audience enters his mythology.

The special connection between him and those listeners who revere him.

Although he has been a musician for 40 years, playing in stadiums before tens of thousands of people, many of whom can only know what is happening on stage through giant screens, he expresses himself as if he were addressing everyone individually.

That public that he presents as ordinary people.

Each of them is, in the eyes of the musician and in his songs, a hero of life who deals with his problems and survives.

The epic of the day to day.

For many, he is an almost exclusively male, blue-collar, heterosexual white audience.

But he has stood up to that vision.

In his videos there is space for women or racial minorities and in

Thougher than the rest

, one of the songs on

Tunnel of Love

(1987) featured gay and lesbian couples openly displaying their status.

Something very unusual for artists of his size at that time.

The idea was clear: everyone has a place among us.

When, in 1993, Hollywood finally took a stand on AIDS, and the homophobia it had brought with it, with Jonathan Demme's film

Philadelphia

, in which Tom Hanks and Antonio Banderas played a gay couple in which one of they contracted the disease, Springsteen contributed the title song,

Streets of Philadelphia

.

In 2012 he actively participated in the campaign to achieve the legalization of homosexual marriage in several states of the United States and in 2017 he canceled a concert in North Carolina in protest of a law approved in that state that curtailed the freedoms of transgender people.

Bruce Springsteen holds a guitar in his ranch house in Colt's Neck, New Jersey, in 1982.

And perhaps that is why we find traces of Springsteen in all corners of the LGTBI universe.

In academic publications such as

Popular Music

of the University of Cambridge, where the artist and Rosalie Zdzienicka signed an essay titled

Beyond blood brothers: a queer Bruce Springsteen,

in which he said: "Bruce Springsteen's work contains a surprising number of songs with homoerotic or strangely suggestive content."

In fictional literature, such as Tennessee Jones's book of short stories

Deliver Me From Nowhere

, inspired by the album

Nebraska

(1982), or

in listings such as

Springsteen's 13 Most Queer Songs.

There are also fanzines like

Butt Springsteen

, inspired by the mythical cover of

Born in the USA

.

"Seeing that incredible cover with Bruce's butt in 1984, at the age of six, turned out to be probably my first

queer experience,

and since that age I have felt a passionate love for the Boss and his music," the publisher of the post.

The aesthetic of that Springsteen seemed taken from the gay clubs of San Francisco.

Natalie Adler, a specialist in comparative literature focused on issues of gender and sexuality, wrote in

Electric Lit

: “The cover of

Darkness on the Edge of Town,

He taught me not only to dress, but also to look.

In his skinny jeans, V-neck T-shirt and leather jacket, Bruce poses in front of a floral wallpaper, not a racing car or a motorcycle.

Add to that messy wavy hair, biker boots, and a flannel shirt unbuttoned a bit too far, and I've got my

look

. "

Bruce Springsteen, in the campaign in favor of homosexual marriage.

THE FOUR 2012

It's all circumstantial evidence, it's true, but it all points in the same direction: Bruce Springsteen's looks, attitude, life philosophy and songs have helped many gays and lesbians because it has given them hope for a better future.

Perhaps the one who explains it in a simpler way is Springsteen himself, when he recounted his emotion that night he saw Elvis for the first time: “Suddenly there was a new world full of that happiness that elevates the soul because you have discovered a newer existence. free".

Amen, boss.

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Source: elparis

All news articles on 2022-03-27

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