Dusty Springfield: I Want To Be A Free Girl

Forty years ago it was not done to inquire about a woman’s sexuality — especially not if that woman was a famous singer much loved by the great British public.

Yet that was exactly what Dusty Springfield mischievously goaded me into asking during an interview with her in 1970.

As two lapsed Catholics, we’d been talking about guilt, mortal sin and going to confession as children.

From there the conversation had led to sex and promiscuity, when Dusty suddenly said: ‘There’s something else you should ask me now. Go on, ask me. I know you’ve heard the rumours.’

She was right. I had heard the gossip that said she preferred girls to boys. So I hesitantly put the question, and she was off.

Never admitting that she was exclusively lesbian, and hating the idea that she might be thought of as a ‘big butch lady’, she happily talked about not being upset that girls ran after her a lot. She was, she said, ‘perfectly as capable of being swayed by a girl as by a boy’.

‘Being a pop singer I shouldn’t even admit that I might think that way, but if the occasion (to swing either way) arose, I don’t see why I shouldn’t,’ she told me...
Daily Mail.

This was pretty bold for its time - no similar British male singer had said anything similar.

Here's the original Evening Standard interview. Oh, and there's yet another Dusty biography just out, which 'reveals sensational new details about Dusty’s childhood, her relationships, her addictions and her lifelong struggle to come to terms with her sexuality.' Really?