Stroking Billy Squier

Lonely is the Night - Billy Squier (mp3)

I miss the days when concerts were the cornerstone of great urban legend.

Ozzy bit the heads off live bats. Alice Cooper drank human blood. Prince had real live sex with real live fans right there on stage at his concerts. So did KISS. Zappa ate human turds. These are just the ones I remember vividly. I also recall Styx, 2 Live Crew, Motley Crue, and dozens of other bands and performers being mentioned in rumors of concert insanity. There were even rumors of entire audiences falling asleep during Dan Fogelberg concerts!

To this day I can’t say for certain which of these concert stories are complete bullshit and which ones are based in reality, nor do I know which ones were invented locally in Chattanooga and which ones were viral elsewhere and invaded my hometown circle. More importantly, I don’t want to know. I prefer having to use my own common sense to figure it out while cherishing that golden nugget of uncertainty.

Easily the most disturbing -- and therefore most memorable -- concert rumor of my young life revolved around freakishly girly-looking rock star Billy Squier and his extreme gayness. The specific rumor about him, as I remember it, went something like this: He gave other guys blowjobs on the stage during his concert.

First, I need to clarify something. In 1985, adults did not talk to children about homosexuality. Not in the South, anyways. Dad used the word “sissy” on a number of occasions, and in hindsight that word and its context seem obvious, but at the time I just thought it referred to men who sucked at sports, which is to say, guys like me. So even when adults talked about gay men, I didn't quite connect it to the conversations of kids around me.

I don't remember any teachers talking about it, either in positive or negative ways. It was almost as if the entire queer world existed solely for hidden gay adults and teenage conversations. And Billy Squier, the most openly gay rock star ever.

The singular way I knew anything about being gay, about gay people, about gayness, is from talk with my friends and my peers. If this comes across as defensive, it's intended to be, because attending an all-boys school put us on the defensive about this issue from day one, and adults wanted nothing to do with it. Or else adults just didn't hear it. Either way, Gay Was Bad.

Of course Billy Squier didn't blow men on stage during concerts. He isn't even gay.* But I didn't have the Internet. Catastrophic or unbelievable concert moments couldn't be hunted down on YouTube. So if a half-dozen cool dudes who were three years older than me insisted that Billy Squier was some gay queerbag who blew his drummer on the stage, who the hell was I to argue the point?

It may seem ludicrous that I actually believed this could happen. But we were still emerging from the chaos that was the 1970s, a decade that even in my youthful cluelessness symbolized that anything and everything was possible, particularly regarding sex and sexual positions. Further, when one has attended a single Suzanne Vega concert in his whole life, and when one is as totally clueless about sex as I was -- hell, Kurt Cobain was almost dead before I had sex, and my On Base Percentage in the 80s hovered right about .005 -- who was I to say with any authority or knowledge that some rock star would simply not blow another man on stage at a concert?

Somehow the Village People missed me. I mean, I had two of their albums, but they were never a focal point of any conversation about gay men. Can’t explain it, but it’s true. Same with Freddie Mercury and David Bowie. Don't remember their names coming up much until later. But the Billy Squier stuff, and the stuff about Rod Stewart having to have his stomach pumped? Yup. Those are definitely a part of my pre-teen memories.

I'm glad I went back and listened to Squier's hits. There's nothing earth-shattering in them, but it's comforting to know that "The Stroke" isn't literally about some guy jerking him off, and I get the lyrics to "Lonely is the Night" in ways a virginal naif pre-teen cannot. His music is better than the fate he sealed in my personal history book, and that would be true regardless of his sexual inclinations.

So, from one Billy to another, and speaking for an entire generation of clueless and insensitive bastard teens, I apologize. I can't believe what insensitive and homophobic pricks we were.

But you still shouldn't have filmed the video for "Rock Me Tonite." Talk about stoking the damn fire.



* -- Even as I type these words, having researched it a little to verify what I'd suspected, it's difficult to accept, so deeply has that rumor been ingrained in my memory.