MTV: 30 Years Of Gay (ish) Videos

John Taylor, Duran Duran: In the first year or two, videos primarily were coming out of Europe, with a very sophisticated milieu. And they were dropping like bombs on the suburbs of Ohio and Texas, places that were so conservative. For people that were a little different — maybe they didn’t yet know they were gay, or didn’t know they were into art — the kinds of things that were on MTV were like life changers. All this stuff like Culture Club was the result of an underground, London art-school sensibility.

Michael Stipe, lead singer of R.E.M.: Our contribution to MTV — and I’ll use a term that was not really around in the 1980s — was very queer. And purposefully so. If you saw a beautiful woman wearing not much in The One I Love video, then you were also going to see a man wearing not much. There are a lot of shirtless men in R.E.M. videos. I shot and edited Finest Worksong and basically called all my hot, male friends and said: “OK, everyone take your shirt off and get sweaty.” I shot from a particular angle that was taken from Russian Constructivist art, where everyone looks like a god or goddess. I wanted our videos and our songs to appeal to guys and girls. And that exactly reflected my sexuality, actually.

Been through the papers.
I have been reduced - REDUCED! - to filling a space by quoting from a piece in The Times on The Golden Years Of MTV.
And they're just quotes nicked extracted from a book anyway.
From John Taylor from Duran Duran FFS!
I now feel like a whore like all the rest!
I think it is best I pass over in silence that four (4!) newspapers today ran the "news story" about Chris Birch, the supposedly once straight rugby player who woke up as a screaming pansy after coming out of a coma he went into after trying to perform a backflip.
That's right, performing a backflip - how extremely heterosexual.
One of those papers that ran the story was The Daily Mirror - cribbing quotes from yesterday's Mail, seemingly oblivious to the fact that the Mirror had first ran this story two months ago.
Chris' tale is apparently so unbelievably fascinating it has now gone global.
I shall also spare you my thoughts on the fact that several papers today are STILL GOING ON ABOUT THOSE FUCKING "GAY PENGUINS"!
Many people are clearly gripped like nuts in a vice by all this tenuous pantomime pseudo-news bollocks, but I'm not.
Sorry - but feel free to ask me again after the lobotomy.
So I'll just go for a walk and try to calm down.
Good day!