When I was a teenager, in the late 00s in central Scotland, being gay was something I experienced as painful and overwrought. This didn’t match the depiction of gayness I encountered in mainstream culture at the time, which was mostly very cheerful. Almost all of the gay men on my radar were comedians – figures such as Graham Norton and Alan Carr, both of whom I found funny and still admire today, but who were too easy-going and unpretentious to satisfy my desire to see myself as a tortured poet.
When I got to university, I found the representation I was looking for – solemn and beautiful – in writers such as Edmund White and James Baldwin, but earlier in my teenage years I had to make do with what was available: romanticising being gay through songs about straight men falling out with their platonic friends.
It’s a small but furtive canon, halfway between the diss track and the breakup ballad. Standouts include How Do You Sleep?, John Lennon’s spectacularly mean-spirited takedown of Paul McCartney; So Long, Frank Lloyd Wright, Paul Simon’s elegiac send-off to Art Garfunkel, who was pained to discover it was about him only years after its release; several songs arising from the falling-out between the Dandy Warhols and the Brian Jonestown Massacre, and No Regrets by Robbie Williams, a song about his decision to leave Take That – and specifically Gary Barlow, if you believe the speculation. While focused on the bitter aftermath, these songs portray love between men with a tragedy and grandeur typically only afforded to heterosexual romance.
