52 Essentials: No. 6, "Can You Forgive Her?", Very, Pet Shop Boys (1993)
Welcome to Maps & Legends, a project by two new parents looking forward to sharing our favorite art and culture with our new edition. Each week in this space, we'll pick a personal favorite of ours (or at least a favorite of one of us) and write about what it means to us and why we're excited to pass it down.
Setting aside all the new gadgets and social media nonsense, there may be no bigger difference between my childhood and what Max has in store than the visibility and acceptance of LGBTQ people in his community. It's not just that he'll grow up in Seattle instead of St. Louis. There's just no comparison between the America of 1978 and 2016.
Max was born into a post-marriage equality, post-"don't ask, don't tell" era. When I was born, even though it was a decade after the Stonewall Riots and just two weeks before Harvey Milk's assassination, we were also still a decade away from the removal of homosexuality as a disorder from the DSM, and twenty-five years before anti-sodomy laws were struck down by the Supreme Court. Max has two gay, married "uncles" who were readers at his parents wedding and stop by the house every other week. I, on other hand, can't say that I knew a single out LGBTQ person before I went to college.
In fact, I can't say that I could've named even one out LGBTQ person, period, by the time I was a high school freshman in 1993. I have no doubt that I knew plenty of closeted people. And sure, I must have seen some flashes of them on TV. Glimpses of AIDS victims and activists, or flamboyant performers flaunting gender norms in feather headdresses and fishnets. But rarely a full profile of a person in three dimensions.
I can blame some of my ignorance on growing up in the Midwestern Catholic bubble that was St. Louis in the 1980s. Not that any part of the country was all that great for LGBTQ folk back then. But I'll bet that I'd have at least been more aware of what was going on if I lived anywhere other than the sexually repressed, culturally segregated, oppressively "polite" Archdiocese of St. Louis--the "Rome of the West." My upbringing was so sheltered that I didn't really understand that Protestants were a thing until I was in high school, and it shocked me to realize that we were a religious minority in the U.S. (And that's before we get into the racial segregation that in many ways defines St. Louis--a topic for another time.)
So while I understood that non-straight people existed by the time I was in junior high, it was more of a concept than a reality. A theoretical possibility, not unlike how extraterrestrials probably exist somewhere in the universe. You see them on TV and in the movies all the time, after all. Although, in the 80s, you were far more likely to see a Little Green Man on TV than an out homosexual.
The 1980s seemed like a bad time for LGBTQ representations in pop culture--in fact, arguably far more so than the 70s had been. Pre-thirtysomething and Ellen DeGenres, the two shows that I was most likely to catch on TV featuring a recurring non-straight character were M*A*S*H (yes, I mean the phony transvestite Corporal Klinger) and Soap (which had an actual gay character named Jodie Dallas played by Billy Crystal).
It's pretty amazing how complex Jodie's character was in what was otherwise an over-the-top daytime soap spoof. Jodie goes from being a closeted gay man, to contemplating a sex-change so that he can be with the football player he was secretly dating, only to decide that would not be true to his identity as a gay man, before having a tryst with a woman that results in a pregnancy. That's a degree of complexity that pop cultural wouldn't really get near again for decades. Hell, The Kids Are Alright was considered groundbreaking by some when it came out in 2010, despite the fact that its central conflict over a married lesbian having an affair with a man was basically ground already covered thirty years before that on prime time TV.
That was all before the great cultural rollback of the 1980s, though. Morning in America. Time to set aside all the nasty social unrest of the 60s and 70s and return to a simpler time. A time of Family Ties and Cosby Show. A time without Jodie Dallas around to confuse everyone.
Growing up in that cultural environment, anything I learned about LGBTQ people came through heavy filters. If homosexuality was discussed on TV, it was typically in the context of HIV and AIDS. Oblique, ominous acronyms that both frightened and infantilized us. The politicians and talking heads debated "lifestyles", "agendas" and "closets." It seemed everything was euphemism. Everything was in code. In reaction and by extension, the schoolyard talk was exaggerated. Everyone was a "fag", and everything was "gay." There were a few dozen ways of hurling the same slur at each other, and we basically did it all day long.
One rogue social studies teacher known for causing stirs once said to us that, statistically speaking, there was bound to be two or three homosexuals in our class of 30 eighth graders. I recall the observation going over like a lead balloon. It wasn't even so much that it shocked the class. I don't think we even knew exactly what that meant. She might as well have said two or three of us sitting in the classroom that day were actually Valkyries.
I think that's why the track "Can You Forgive Her?" off of Pet Shop Boy's Very (available at Amazon) made such an impression on me when I heard it during my freshman year at high school. I probably had some vague notion at the time that the two guys in the band were gay. Or at least, not quite straight. Either that, or they were just British. I mean, they weren't Boy George. Or Elton John even, though he hadn't quite come out of the closet by then either. The Pet Shop Boys sang about "West End Girls," after all, and "It's a Sin" was vague enough to be about anything. (Catholics do have a lot of sins to consider.)
But then, all disco-electronic-dance music was at least a little bit suspect. And a friend pointed out that the track "Yesterday, When I Was Mad" off the same album sounded a lot like a lovers spat between two grown men. Also, the album ends with a cover of Village People's "Go West," which actually manages to sound gayer than the original version.
But "Can You Forgive Her?" was something else entirely. Right from the get go, the title threw me off. It's a question that has several questions baked into it. Who is "she"? What had she done that required "forgiveness"? Why wouldn't "you" (or "I") forgive her? And that's before you get to the music. It starts with a sucker punch before pummeling into the ground with blow after blow before it jerks into the a steady, heavy rhythm that isn't quite "dance-able"--unless by "dance" you mean kicking some poor fool in the gut while he writhes on the ground.
I don't think I really knew before then that disco could sound angry. As angry as anything grunge was doing at the time, really. (Though, the less said about the video itself, the better. Early 90s CGI simply has not aged well.) Then the lyrics begin and it throws you off yet again. Neil Tennant practically coos the opening lines, which he could've pulled from a child's lullaby:
Another night with open eyes
Too late to sleep, too soon to rise
This doesn't seem to be an angry song at all. If anything, it's forlorn.
The lyrics eventually tell the story of a man (that is, "you" in direct address) whose girlfriend shamed him in public over a previous homosexual experience. The details are mostly vague and conveyed by insinuation. The man recalls "youthful follies and changing teams", and he's ridiculed by his girlfriend because he "dance[s] to disco" but he doesn't "like rock." Then comes the definitive blow:
She'd make fun of you, and even in bed
Said she was gonna go and get herself a real man instead
Looking from a modern perspective, you might just want to call him a closet case. Or maybe a self-loathing bisexual. The song itself doesn't really suggest either of those things, not conclusively at least. The subject of the song is a man who's both in love with a girl and also haunted by a male lover from his past. But that's only half of what the song's really about. The Pet Shop Boys are taking the man to task over his anger. What's this really about? Is he angry about the embarrassment she caused him, or is he deflecting over his own doubts and insecurity?
At the end of the day, it's a song about ambiguity. It's about confronting one's inner conflicts and contradictions. It's about a man who may or may not be gay, who may or may not be bisexual, and who's stuck in a moment of uncertainty. It's about blurring all of the lines that the America of the 1980s worked so hard to draw. Perhaps even more so than "Being Boring" (the Pet Shop Boys' masterpiece reflection on the AIDS crisis), I could argue that "Can You Forgive Her?" is the band's definitive LGBTQ anthem. It's a song that defies stereotypes or simple answers. It's a song about being human and all the contradictions that follow from that, no matter what labels we choose for ourselves (or that get imposed on us).
I don't worry much about Max being exposed to out, proud and fully accepted LGBTQ people in his life. Not that there isn't room for society to improve. There's just no denying it's a far cry from the world I knew growing up. But then, there's always the risk of reducing people to stereotypes and over-simplification. Culture will swing back and forth from the complex to the simple and back again. I look forward to throwing a few curve balls like this his way whenever he needs a little complication in his life. Whenever he needs a reminder that none of us are quite so simple.