Wowed By Bowie

January has been a cruel month. First there was the loss of the incomparable David Bowie and then of that old Fianna Fáil warhorse, and friend of Hot Press, P.J. Mara. The connection between the two might seem tenuous, but in truth what they had in common was their very Hot Press-ness.

In covering rock ’n’ roll and politics, the magazine engaged with both men on and off over the years, albeit in very different ways. They were worlds apart, of course. But they shared one essential quality: they were both great showmen.
There was more than that too. 
P.J. Mara may have operated within the grey confines of the Irish political system. It is essentially a conservative world, in which individuality, flamboyance and an ability to see beyond the straight-jacket of conventional thinking are seldom rewarded. In many ways, he was one of the exceptions that proved the rule. He may not have known a whole lot about music, but he had a rock ’n’ roll sensibility.
In most respects, he conformed to the stereotypes of his generation. He enjoyed male company. He was a bit of a lad. He was fond of a drink. And he left the job of changing nappies and organising the house to the women in his life. He had no apologies to make for the fact that he was most decidedly not a “new man”.
But he stood out from just about everyone else in Fianna Fáil anyway, to the extent that, to many of them, he must have seemed as if – rather like David Bowie – he was from another planet entirely.  Eamon Dunphy, who came from the same part of Drumcondra as P.J. and was a few years younger, had a great line: “I always said that when he was growing up, P.J. had pinstripes in his short trousers.” In fact, he was so well turned out that Z.Z. Top might have been referring to P.J. when they sang: “Everybody’s crazy about a sharp dressed man.”
Some people spend their lives hiding in plain view. P.J. did the opposite. He was born into the horribly mouldy, Roman Catholic Ireland of the 1940s, but he had more than a touch of camp about him, to the extent that you felt that he’d have been well at home in the decadent atmosphere of Germany between the wars and whispering “Come to the cabaret, old chum” in your ear. 
Which is why his choice of Truman Capote as his favourite author in the Mad Hatter’s Box in Hot Press many years ago should come as no surprise. He also named Capote’s Music For Chameleons as his favourite book, which makes sense too. There was an element of the chameleon about P.J.: he knew how to play the Fianna Fáil game, but he could adapt to any environment and knew how to impress whoever he was talking to. It isn’t just that he was very bright, well read and funny. He was also a showman, who loved the razzamatazz, and didn’t mind putting on the red shoes and dancing the blues when the occasion demanded.  
If he had been born in New York in 1950, he might have ended up hanging out with Andy Warhol or joining the New York Dolls. If he had been conceived 20 years later in Dublin, he might worn a dress, fraternised with Gavin Friday and joined the Virgin Prunes. A few years later again and he could have been a star in his own right, doing stand-up and competing on the world stage with Perez Hilton for Twitter followers. Ok, maybe just with Dara O Briain, but you know what I mean...
If P.J. was part chameleon, David Bowie made a vocation of it. He started as David Jones, but changed his name, in part at least to avoid confusion with Davy Jones of The Monkees. But it was when he began to adopt personae, and dress-up in earnest, that his career really started to take shape. It began with his appearance in a dress on the UK sleeve of the album The Man Who Sold The World, with flowing locks that added to his androgynous appeal. There was more of the same on the sleeve of Hunky Dory, with Bowie again looking positively girlish in a photographic image inspired by Marlene Dietrich. But here the music took a giant leap forward: from the opening track ‘Changes’, it was clear that, in hooking his star to the idea of reinvention, Bowie had found a voice that was entirely convincing, and his own. 
Next came The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars, a concept album about a bisexual alien, who just happens to be a rock superstar. It contained one of the great, enduring 70s classics in ‘Starman’, but that was just one glittering track among many. It is astonishing now to see just how prolific Bowie was in his 70’s glam rock pomp. And at every turn – from Ziggy through Aladdin Sane and Pin-Ups to Diamond Dogs – he was playing in a different way with the notion of identity, and challenging gender stereotypes while he was at it.
He confessed to being bisexual and at one stage claimed that he’d had sex with Mick Jagger. But far more important than the details of his romantic life, whether with boys or girls, was the fact that he challenged the sexual orientation of males and females alike, by presenting to all and sundry the image of a creature that seemed neither one thing nor the other. Boys who couldn’t help themselves thinking that he looked attractive in a dress were as common as girls who felt the tug of a different kind of same sex attraction. 
There were mis-steps along the way. In the context of the Ziggy Stardust persona and storyline, he had developed the idea of Homo Superior and there is a possibility that he took it just a bit too literally. Certainly the mad moment when he spoke admiringly of Hitler and was seen delivering what was interpreted as a Nazi salute was not entirely out of context with the artistic furrow he had been ploughing. It was also fuelled by a cocaine habit, which at the time was in danger of spiralling out of control, and by who knows what other forms of superstar indulgence. All we can say now is that he had the good sense to apologise later for the stupidity of what he had said.  
It is difficult from the vantage point of 2016 to understand just how brave – and how compelling – David Bowie’s gender defying tactics were at the time. Even in the relatively liberal context of England, homosexuality was still seen as weird. Very few people were officially out. And while the gay rights movement had started to gather momentum in the US, it had barely gained any traction at all on this side of the world. 
In Ireland, homosexuals had to remain in hiding, gathering in clandestine groups, in a small number of pubs in the centre of Dublin. If Philip Lynott was the only black guy in Ireland, Micheál MacLiammóir and Hilton Edwards were the only homosexuals. Or so we were led to believe. And they were treated with undisguised condescension by just about everybody.
And so for young Irish men and women in the early 1970s, Bowie’s arrival was like an invitation to a different kind of party than any of us had ever dreamt of before. On Transformer, released in 1972, and most particularly in the gorgeously sleazy classic ‘Walk On The Wild Side’, Bowie’s soul brother, Lou Reed, introduced a cast of characters from the other side of the tracks of whom David would have approved, including Puerto Rican transgender actress, and star of Andy Warhol’s Trash and Women In Revolt, Holly Woodlawn. 
Suddenly a very different sort of cat was out of the bag and long-held prejudices were being challenged in exactly the right way: by the positive depiction of difference; by artists making a claim on their own behalf and on behalf of their gender-bending friends to respect and ultimately to equality.
History is a slippery thing. In Ireland, David Norris did the hard yards when he took his case against the criminalisation of homosexuality to the European courts. Without him, the Marriage Equality Referendum of 2015 never would have happened, never mind been passed. But there is also a case that through his extraordinary manipulation of image and his very public gender-fluidity, David Bowie – along with other key figures in rock ’n’ roll – also made a huge contribution by changing the very soil in which the idea of Marriage Equality would be sown – and would ultimately grow and thrive. 
We of course owe David Bowie a huge thanks for the extraordinary music that he produced during his life, which is written about with great eloquence by Paul Nolan and Stuart Clark among others in the issue of Hot Press that is currently on the news stands. And also for the grace with which he planned his own final bow: he retained his extraordinary sense of style to the very end. But we also owe him a psychic debt, and a political one too. I doubt that we would be where we are as a nation – or what we are as a people – if it had not been for the sexually and musically liberating influence of rock ’n’ roll, and of David Bowie, as one of its greatest protagonists.