Long before Lil Nas X gave a lapdance to Satan and made the Fox News crowd clutch its pearls, people were making Very Gay Music Videos. Not just the usual suspects like Culture Club, Frankie Goes To Hollywood, or Queen… heterosexual Teen Beat megastars like Duran Duran frequently made videos that spent more time focusing on Simon Le Bon’s pout or Nick Rhodes’ makeup than the, ahem… Girls On Film. From today’s perspective, it looks a bit like queerbaiting, but my sense is that it was mostly down to the convergence of rock’s then-common love of hairspray/guyliner and the efforts of queer video directors to make an impact in what was an ostensibly hyper-masculine musical space.
And then there’s Billy Squier’s Rock Me Tonite.
Squier was on a roll in the early ‘80s, with lots of radio airplay and arena gigs… he and bands like Loverboy were delivering power-pop decades before Fallout Boy came to town, and his primary legacy remains a timeless song that every stripper in America was obligated to use for the next twenty years: The Stroke.
But it was still early days in music video creation —Martin Scorcese, David Fincher, and company hadn’t yet brought their talents to the table— and time/budget/vision was frequently lacking. So for some reason, a young Kenny “High School Musical” Ortega got the nod to slap something together for Squier’s next big hit.
And, well… the results are at the top of this post.
Ortega is understandably defensive about it to this day… the video is widely believed to have murdered Squier’s career —which was largely dependent upon the enthusiasm of cishet teen boys— and no director wants to believe his three minutes of infamy did so much damage. And to be sure, it’s not all on him… after all, Ortega’s a choreographer, and whatever flailing nonsense Squier is doing in the video could not have possibly been conceived by a fully-engaged professional. Also, a couple years later, Squier decided to lean in to the whole thing and do a duet with Freddie Mercury that would serve as the last gasp of his stardom.
(Granted, it was years before HIV forced Freddie to come out, so it’s possible Squier had no clue about the potential associations, but c’mon… the nature of Mercury’s sexuality was an even more open secret than Elton John’s.)
Still, the consensus among those in the know is that watching Squier prance around in pastels while writhing on the floor shirtless and playing a pink guitar alienated the overwhelming majority of his fanbase, but I don’t think that alone would have done it. It’s not just the content: it’s how fucking awful and amateurish the whole thing turned out.
Ortega put on a master-class in 80’s editing cliches —the shirt-ripping freeze-frame, for fuck’s sake!— that would have looked ridiculous even if he’d butched-up the production with explosions and dead-eyed dancing girls in bikinis. Most videos of the era were bad in a variety of ways, but the man somehow managed to incorporate them all into one piece of work that I don’t think counts as queerbaiting simply because no self-respecting homosexual would look at such a tacky, tasteless mess and think, “Mmm, gimme some of that!”
The world is a better, more accepting place today, of course. But I’d like to think it would still reject a turd like Rock Me Tonite, no matter how much pink was poured over it.