What with Tory prominents like Chris Grayling making noises about understanding wanting to keep the poofters out of good Christian homes again, is there a better time to launch a site devoted to the first political gay pop song? As the site puts it
Glad To Be Gay is unusual for being a precise and prominent song about an issue that simply had no precedent. Apart from a few gay activists nobody had heard a gay song before, let alone one as militant and furious. Tom Robinson put one in the top 20 and into the mind of the straight public.
It had been written a year earlier, to be performed as a one-off at London’s 1976 Gay Pride rally. It was a bitter, snarling assault on the attitude of gay people who’d turn up to gay events wearing the ‘glad to be gay’ badges then in circulation, yet take them off in public, try to pass for straight at home and in the workplace. It accused them of tacitly accepting repression rife in the media, and out on the streets from thugs and the police.
Once it was played to a wider audience with punk pioneers the Tom Robinson Band, it became an anthem of combative pride. Audiences largely composed of straights would sing along in solidarity with gusto.
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It’s hoped that this will balance the scales a little – a songwriter as socially aware and politically forthright as Robinson deserves to be remembered for more than 2-4-6-8 Motorway.
Beyond that, it’s not just about musical history and insight into the creative process. It’s social and political history too.
Glad To Be Gay was written in a world where people were routinely referred to as ‘self-confessed homosexuals’, the same way you’d talk about murderers and rapists.