In case you have been oblivious to the world of popular culture, and in particular popular music, in the past week – “controversy” now surrounds the career of singer-songwriter Sam Smith.  Smith made his name in 2014 penning the album In The Lonely Hour about his doomed adoration and unrequited love for an unavailable, married man.  Nicknamed a male Adele given the torch song genre and massive sales, Smith was then merely famous for his voice and his song writing.  Even then he was openly gay and made no secret that subject of his album was another man.  By rights, this could have made waves if not for the likes of George Michael’s profoundly personal outpourings concerning his grief for his lover Anselmo Feleppa lost to AIDS on his record Older in 1996 or the trail of other openly gay male singers making no secret of their losses in love from Will Young to Rufus Wainwright.  So, perhaps we were already used to that.

What set Michael (and now Smith) apart was not gayness but sex itself.  The homosexual has long been tolerated, if not even accepted, when devoid of the sexual activity that defines it – not so much the love that dare not speak its name as the sex.  The paradoxical proof of the pudding came in 1984 when Frankie Goes To Hollywood were banned for both releasing a song about ejaculation (Relax, interestingly also a Michael favourite) and a video set in an underground gay club where a “mock Nero” urinates over a “bound to a wheel of sexual fortune” Holly Johnson.  Of course, the apparent “paradox” at the time was this had the effect of sending Frankie Goes To Hollywood’s record sales stratospheric.  Oscar Wilde’s other proverb – there’s no such thing as bad publicity – was clearly invoked.  Cue near forty years later and a far milder reference to golden showers still sends the moral majority spewing their hypocritical bile all over social media – Piers Morgan cashes in (again) and the likes of Candace Owens in a podcast that drags on for well over ten minutes brands Smith “pornographic”, “diabolical” and “disgusting”.  Yet the real paradox here, as Louis Chilton in the Independent, columnist Owen Jones, and others have noted, is that the video for Smith’s I’m Not Here To Make Friends is, quite simply, not very racy – the apparent “pee” is equally champagne and this is no underground dungeon rather a camp castle of fun that draws on the Les Liaisons Dangereuses (dir. Frears, 1998) era in the way that Madonna did with her MTV live performance of Vogue.  In fact, the video in many ways is more pastiche than anything else – a series of nods to the world of Madonna (including the corsetry and tits) and Kylie (the troupe of cute dancing guys) as well as a direct homage to the successes of Ru Paul with a stream of “sashay to stay” poses in outrageously camp outfits.  And to finalise all that, Smith then drives off atop the car bonnet in a style not dissimilar to that “heel on the bus” routine used in Priscilla Queen of the Desert (dir. Elliot, 1994).  It is very queer yes, awash with gender and sexual ambiguity for both sexes, and very body positive as various dancers and Smith himself are to – put it politely – plus size.  Indeed, Daisy Jones in Vogue asserts that the furore is indeed centred more on fat phobia than anything else.  Similarly, the video for Smith’s Unholy operates like some kind of updated super spun version of the peep show of Open Your Heart (Madonna) complete with gender scrambled revenge on the double standards of the suited/married businessman.   Enormous visual fun, yes – radical confrontation, no.  Except for one thing – the blink and you miss it because it is so obvious you cannot see it factor – that Sam Smith whilst identifying as non-binary remains recognisably and biologically male.  What Madonna, Kylie, Christina and all the rest can do, he can’t – and, whilst campy female pop videos are two a penny, campy and raunchy (even when it is only implied) homosexual (and male) expressions of sexuality remain as rare, outrageous – and delicious – as ever.

W