My Diva: 65 Gay Men on the Women Who Inspire Them

Annie Lennox (1954): Desire, Despair, Desire

225 Annie Lennox Desire, Despair, Desire RJ Gibson Maybe it’s a sort of fogeyism, but I find so much contemporary pop music boring. Lyrically, radio-oriented pop has always been a little lacking in heft, so it’s not that. I know it’s supposed to be disposable : I’m not looking for truth or universality, really. Part of my distaste is the over-reliance of wailing melismas and show-offy vocals passing as soul or something engaging. It leaves me thinking , “Great, you went to church, and you’ve got range. What else ya got?” And don’t get me started on the other end of things: the digitally treated, the overproduced, the lip-sync reliant. What galls me most, perhaps, is that these new chanteuses just aren’t 226 that visually interesting. Sure, they’re groomed and styled within an inch of their lives; they have nice bodies and good hair, but there’s a superficiality to it that just doesn’t charm. Calling some of them mannequins is insulting to mannequins—their sole purpose is to highlight an ensemble. It’s the difference between pretty and beautiful. Pretty is easy. Beauty isn’t. Their mass-market, FHM, Maxim, men’s magazine quality leaves me cold. I want something a little more complicated, a little less easily digested. I want oldschool Annie Lennox. She’s been a fact of my life since I was eleven or twelve years old. I knew of Eurythmics from the radio and catching a video here or there, but I wasn’t too caught up in them. I remember her cover photo on one of my sister’s Rolling Stones: cropped orange hair, black leather jacket, New Romantics’ mask of eye makeup. There was something unusual about her; she definitely caught my eye, but I didn’t really latch onto her then. I didn’t feel any strong interest in or connection to her until I saw her in full-on rockabillydrag at the 1984 Grammy Awards: that black suit and pompadour wig with sideburns hooked me. This little voice inside my head went, “Oooooooh, so that’s it.” It took me a couple of years to figure out what “it” was, but from that moment I was a devotee. I remember my mother noticing her and asking, “Is that a man?” It was my first chance to be knowing and (I imagined) a little sophisticated when I said, “No, it’s a woman.” The tension she created that evening attracted me—appearing in full drag, singing in her lower register, passing as a man. (What’s surprising to me now is that people still ask if she’s a man in that clip. Go to YouTube. Look up the clip and read the comments; more people are fooled than you’d think.) It’s why I love her videos. There’s a fascinating combination of visuals at work. Her video for “Money Can’t Buy It” has her cast as a chic Vermeer socialite rapping about her wealth. “No More ‘I Love You’s’” reminds me of Nora Desmond in a Lautrec painting. She appeared on David Letterman once in a PVC and cotton Minnie Mouse outfit, looking like a collaboration between Disney and Gaultier. High art and Annie Lennox 227 pop art, cartoon and sex club, this theatricality counterpoints her restrained delivery. The multiplicity of visual references is amped up when she plays multiple characters, switching from male to female to neuter with amazing ease. The “Love Is a Stranger” video (originally banned from MTV for gay content, when one of the “men” in question was actually Lennox in drag) is a perfect example . Toward the end of the video, through a series of close-up shots, her face shifts between the sexes and the sexless simply by tricks of light and angle. My personal favorite is the “Little Bird” video. It takes her filmic past and turns it on its ear as psychodrama . Costumed like the love child of Sally Bowles and the Emcee , she fights for stage space against her past video and concert personae, an array of Annies played by men and women, shot in a way that you’re never quite sure until later in the video who’s who. These ideas—of playing with identity, defying easy definition, unsettling people—appealed to me when I was younger. There was...