A very happy birthday to the lovely Jimmy Somerville (47 today)!
As gay pop stars go, Jimmy is one of the most ground-breaking and influential of recent generations. In the early 80s, an era when "gender-bending" and innuendo were the norm, out of the blue came this ordinary-looking little Scottish boy with a falsetto voice, proudly declaring his gayness to shake us out of our complacency.
He (and his compatriots in Bronski Beat) stood up and made the facts about discrimination against gay people an issue that could not be ignored, brushed over or treated as irrelevant - much to the chagrin of the tabloids, who were used to treating gay people as the subject of ridicule or exploitation. The cover of Bronski Beat's first album The Age of Consent featured all the differing rules that countries across the world applied to gay sex in law.
I adored them, and especially Jimmy - small, not particularly attractive, but spunky in every sense of the word - as their rise to fame, and in particular the supremely brilliant Smalltown Boy coincided quite neatly with my own coming out. I was indeed "pushed around, kicked around, always the lonely boy..." I was "the one that they'd talk about around town, when they put you down..."
Jimmy went on to produce a wealth of wonderful commercial and not-so-commercial pop hits from the early 80s through to the mid 90s, and, still recording, he continues to trawl the Gay Prides of this world performing to this day. I have bumped into him on many occasions on London's gay scene - and notably cruising around Islington on his push-bike.
The significance of Jimmy Somerville's influence upon the gay politics and freedoms of today must never be forgotten. Happy birthday, darling!
Jimmy Somerville on MySpace
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