Was David Bowie good for Planet Earth?
For many fans, the late British singer David Bowie is remembered as a fun, colorful alien. A pioneer of gender bending, maybe “queer” or “genderqueer.” The reality, I’m afraid, is that underneath the make-up and costumes is the oldest, worst thinking about sex.

He was creepy in a lot of ways. A man having sex with 14-year-olds is not acceptable. I read Bowie biographies, marking passages that horrify me, and the pages are full. “He slept with women because it appealed to him; he slept with men as trophies as he exerted control over them.”

Christopher Sanford’s biography, Bowie: Loving the Alien, continues on, detailing Bowie’s views on women: “It was their business to ensure the continuity of the race and to look after men and children.” A female lover is quoted saying he had “almost a pathological aversion to open up to a woman.” His ex-wife, Angela Bowie, notes that “David made a virtual religion of slipping the Lance of Love into almost everyone around him,” but in her experience, “the sex was lousy.”

He’d become incensed if kept waiting for service from women. John Lennon reprimanded Bowie for barking at Lennon’s fiancé to make breakfast. Angela has a scene: “David hurtled across the room, grabbed my throat in both hands, and started to throttle me.” There’s his odes to Hitler. “Oh he was a terrible military strategist,” he says, “the world’s worst, but his overall objective was very good, and he was a marvellous morale booster.”

He goes on and on about Nietzsche’s “superman” as a model for himself, so the Hitler praises are an obvious extension.

On reflection, I came to realize that Bowie was hostile to the very ideals he seemed to champion. He sold the illusion of being liberated, but the “changes” were cosmetic, skin-deep.

He remained fundamentally male—if that means: detached, misogynist, and violent.
['Jonathan Poletti']
['David Bowie', 'Sexuality', 'LGBTQ', 'Life', 'Music']