11/02/2024
Delta FM, a French local commercial radio station based in Normandy, reports that a street has been named for the bisexual and countercultural singer David Bowie, on what would have been his seventy seventh birthday, on January 8th. Located in the 13th arrondissement of Paris, a few hundred meters from Bercy, the venue where David Bowie performed several times, the street was inaugurated in the presence of the artist's relatives. The gay and bisexual neo-pagan religion of Antinous Worship noted Bowie's birthday on its blog, reporting "He was born 8th January 1947 and died of cancer 10th January 2016 ... having revolutionized Western popular culture. When homosexuality was still considered a shameful secret to many, Bowie told the world he was gay, and music ... and the lives of many of his fans and followers ... would never be the same. "I'm gay," declared David Bowie, "and always have been, even when I was David Jones." They go on: "Bowie led the way in contextualizing pop through LGBT identity. The Hunky Dory song "Queen Bitch" is sung in gay vernacular ("She's so swishy in her satin and tat!") from the perspective of a participant in gay life and set to buzzing guitar chords clearly cribbed from The Velvet Underground, which earlier chronicled this gender-mutable world through its ties to Andy Warhol, who had a Hunky Dory tune written about him too."
