A thank you to
david bowie
contents Sister Gloria
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Family
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Special Things
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Alien
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Ziggy
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Legend
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Stardust
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When I was eleven Sister Gloria, who was 63 at the time, made my knuckles bleed because I asked to use the girls’ bathroom. She whacked them with a ruler; once for incorrect behaviour, twice for worrying Maria Di Natale and three times because I was a boy. I suppose this might not have hurt so much if I also knew that I was a boy.
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I wore her shoes and she called me darling.
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I grew up in a strict Catholic family, in a stiflingly Catholic suburb. From the second I was born, the world began telling me who I should be. It started with my name and it ended with my gender and somewhere in the middle there, was where I tried to find myself. I was taught my rights from my wrongs, my dos and my don’ts. By the age of ten I had read the bible twice through and knew eighteen prayers but I still didn’t know who I was.
My father was a carpenter and he called me Peter, for strength. He had thick, browned shoulders and long, wiry legs. He lived in the paradox between success and happiness and insisted that the best was yet to come, if it was worked for. He married my mother when she was 19 and he was 22. Dissimilar to everyone they grew up with, they only produced one child. My mother took care of everything required; her’s was the most gentle of touches. I spent the first five years of my life dancing around our living room to a Lesley Gore record because apparently, my mother lived her best life in the ‘60s. I wore her shoes and she called me darling.
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One afternoon in 1977 when I was six years old, my father came home early from work and found my mother and I dancing to a song about an alien and a message by a man with red hair. He slapped me across the face and sent me to my room. I heard him tell my mother that I should be homeschooled because he thought that I was ‘special’. At the time this made me smile; people protect special things.
For the next five years, I went to school in the dining room and my mother taught me everything she could. I realised years later that my father saw little difference between the words ‘special’ and ‘embarrassing’. My father died of a heart attack a week after my eleventh birthday. Soon after, and almost unapologetically so, my mother sent me to the closest Catholic school she knew of.
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In a most ironic fashion, the day Sister Gloria cut my knuckles was also the most exciting day of my confused childhood. On my way home from school I passed a garage sale and picked up a record that included the words ‘Stardust’ and ‘Mars’ on its cover. I liked it because it reminded me of space and I’d never felt more like an alien. I paid for it with 50 cents that my mother had told me to give to the Sisters at school.
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I listened to that record every day for three weeks. Every time I played it I put new meaning to the lyrics as if it were the first time I had heard them. The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars gave me unrecognisable freedom and I found unspeakable satisfaction in dancing to the song that turned my father
against me. Ziggy Stardust wore pink eye makeup and had a shining red lightning bolt down the right-hand side of his face. He wore tight pastel blue suits and one-legged jumpsuits, lipstick and platform shoes. He looked like a woman and he looked like a man and because of him, I know that special is different to embarrassing.
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HIS SEXUALITY AND HIS PROMISCUITY SOOTHED MY MIND AND CALMED MY SPIRIT.
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A character that David Bowie created to avoid the humiliation of performing his songs on stage and being himself, was the very character that reassured me that it was okay for me to be myself. David Bowie invented, through every one of his personas, a life that, in reality, society would never allow him to live. His talent and his sound spoke to more people than many a politician. His lyrics spoke to me more wisdom than my father might ever have cared to offer.
I learnt from Bowie that it was okay to be feminine and masculine or neither all at the same time. His sexuality and his promiscuity soothed my mind and calmed my spirit. He lived a life not confined to society’s image and through his influence, I realised that I could too.
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In 1989, on my last day of school, I made Sister Gloria, who was somehow still alive, a mixtape of all the Bowie songs that gave me strength and I left it there on her desk. I think, more than anything else, I was trying to say thank you. If I hadn’t felt like an alien that day, I may have never picked up that record.
Master of drag, closet heterosexual and iconoclast. David Bowie sang for those whose voices, identities and entire worlds, are still repressed today. He may not have started the movement but his performances sure made it fashionable. His legend allowed me to live my best life and his legacy will continue to inspire the misfits and the outcasts for years to come. Through the most iconic, extravagant and exotic of ways, Bowie taught those of us trying to find ourselves somewhere in the middle, that it is okay to be whoever you want to be.
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Every Sunday I go and visit my mother and we listen to ‘Starman’ together and it makes her smile. She doesn’t remember a lot of things, but I know that she remembers that afternoon in 1977 and how we danced around the living room and how a lightning bolt and some stardust let us be free.
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And these children that you spit on, As they try to change their worlds, Are immune to your consultations, They’re quite aware of what they’re going through. David Bowie, Changes (1971)
THEY’RE QUITE AWARE OF WHAT THEY’RE GOING THROUGH.