We awoke to the sad news of the death of David Bowie from cancer. Bowie had a profound effect on me during my fumbling years. His pioneering music, his constant reinvention and, above all, his sexual ambiguity taught me that to be different was ok. It was a lesson I learned well.

Bowie released his latest album, Blackstar, on his 69th Birthday, just a few days ago. It was reviewed in the Independent Daily Briefing by Andy Gill who wrote:

It may be significant that this is the first Bowie album that features no trace of his face on the sleeve, with even his name abstracted to a series of graphic fragments; it’s almost as if he’s retiring from public view, deliberately turning away from his own past.

Prophetic words indeed.

Imagine the absurdity of two openly gay, married, middle aged, middle class men escaping the liberal sanctuary of anonymous London to relocate to a Muslim country. I chronicled our exploits with the mad, the bad, the sad and the glad in a blog for the whole world to ignore. Then came the book which became a critically acclaimed best seller. Its success opened out a whole new career for me, firstly as an author, and now as a publisher. Who'd have thought it? Certainly not me. In June 2012, we ended our Anatolian affair and paddled back to Britain on the evening tide, washing up in Norwich, a surprising city in eastern England, then to the wilds of Norfolk as the only gays in the village. I’m sometimes nostalgic for our encounters with the hopeless, the hapless and, yes, the happy go lucky. They gave me an unexpected tale to tell and for this I thank them.

9 thoughts on “David Bowie, Starman”

  2. We’ve all lost a part of our youth – I can’t imagine there are many 40/50/60 year olds who don’t have a Bowie sound track in their heads when looking back on their younger exploits.

    Like

    Reply
  6. Pingback: Should Old Acquaintance Be Forgot | perking the Pansies

Share your thoughts

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

Gravatar
WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. ( Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. ( Log Out /  Change )

Cancel

Connecting to %s

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.