Rossi also turned to the scholarship of Jessica Beck, a curator at the Andy Warhol Museum in the artist’s native Pittsburgh, to guide him through the narrative of Andy’s love affairs with two important men: Jed Johnson and Jon Gould, with whom the artist had long-term relationships.
Aren’t you prissy and sanctimonious? In 1976, most visitors to Fire Island had never known the freedom and self-acceptance of living “openly gay”, “Out”, in their daily lives wherever they originally came from.Netflix's 'The Andy Warhol Diaries': TV Review
They did not get to have boy friends in junior high (now called middle school), high school, any many even in college. Society was very anti-gay, the gay community had lots of internalized homophobia, and whenever and wherever pockets of freedom existed, of course there were excesses that cover compensated for what most of their lives were previously, and for the majority, off of Fire Island. In those days, many guys wee gay on weekends, straight acting Monday through Friday. Society didn’t like it, families raised eyebrows. It was the era of “couples” always having separate apartments, not talking about the other at work or school, or among straight friends. If a pair did become known in the non-gay world, your partner was known as your “friend” or your “roommate”. Gay marriage was not even on the radar screen yet. The military was weeding out gays left and right. These Fire Island frolicers were all born during the gay bashing and gay witch hunts of the lavender scare, under Sen Joe McCarthy and NY asshole closet case lawyer Roy Cohen. mere suspicion of being gay, or even unmarried beyond a certain undefined age, could be grounds for loosing government jobs, and of course, no security clearances for gays. So as you smugly criticize these guys in the film, I urge other viewers to try to place yourselves in their shoes, and imagine what gay life was in 1976. I knew a guy who once told me that he only could feel alive in summer on fire Islan, the rest of the year in upstate New York where he was a teacher, he had no social life, no outwardly gay experiences or appearances. It’s wonderful how all our gay activists over the years have fought the good fight and won so much for all of us and future generations of gays.Cast your mind back to 2012. Among seminal releases from Frank Ocean, Taylor Swift and Tame Impala (not to mention the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee, the Olympics in London and Barack Obama’s re-election), there came Electra Heart.Īs difficult as it might be to believe, Marina’s second album celebrates its tenth birthday on Wednesday (27 April 2022). You’d be hard-pressed to find an artist with such a consistently strong output, and the impact of Electra Heart - her real ‘pop’ album - cannot be overstated. A departure from the new-wave inspired sounds of Marina’s 2010 debut The Family Jewels, Electra Heart is pure electro-pop, and as Marina fan Ollie, 25, puts it, it’s “fundamentally one of the best pop records of our generation.”įrom the outset, there was something unique about Marina. She released The Family Jewels at the age of 24, and its new-wave infused synthpop was a hit.
I was really into ‘cool’ female pop musicians like Lily Allen and Santigold – when Marina came along, she fit that category perfectly.Īt the time, that sort of quirky indie-pop was big in the charts, with plenty of overlap between fanbases: “I’m super proud to say I was a fan since the really early days in 2010. Her fierce lyricism and unapologetic persona was really exciting to me”, says Mia, 24. The Family Jewels was well-received a UK top-five album and second place on the BBC Sound of 2010 list is a pretty good start to your career by anyone’s standards. However, Marina described her career as “more like a failure than a success” in January 2011, particularly when considering her popularity in the US, where The Family Jewels peaked at 138 in the charts.
Electra Heart, then, was the project designed to crack America, and while it didn’t make Marina a global star in the same vein as Katy Perry or Lady Gaga, say, she has a dedicated international fanbase to this day, and straddles the pop and indie markets well, as the success of the current Ancient Dreams in a Modern Land tour shows.Ĭharli XCX on Marina Diamandis plagiarism row: 'Unfortunately, it looks similar'Īnd more broadly, how many pop stars from the UK have really broken through internationally? In terms of groups, there’s One Direction and Little Mix, and the likes of Adele and Ed Sheeran have been flying the flag for solo artists, but when it comes to pure pop, who have we got that’s been able to rival the Katy Perrys and Lady Gagas of the world? Dua Lipa, and perhaps Charli XCX should be in that conversation, but nobody else has had that real global success in recent decades.