REVIEW: Mighty Real: A History of LGBTQ Music, 1969–2000 by Barry Walters

Reviewed by Brian Watson

There’s an evolutionary advantage to categorization and compartmentalization. Sabre-tooth tiger? Bad. Ripe fruit? Good. At this point in my life, however, I’ve concluded that binaries, like good and bad, boy and girl, gay and straight, are actually spectra, or, abandoning linearity altogether, conceptual galaxies. Even so, I take delight when authors work to expand on the rainbow of queerness, and Barry Walter’s Mighty Real: A History of LGBTQ Music, 1969-2000 (Viking; May 2026) is one such expansive work.

The preface sets my expectations beautifully, with sentiments that both make me laugh with wisdom—“Straight white people tend to think everything is about them”—and align with my understanding of the word: “The closet and disclosure aren’t completely binary.” And after a nostalgic revisit to The Partridge Family (I remember watching The Brady Bunch and The Partridge Family back to back as a kid, delighted by technicolor families so unlike my own, and I suspected, had my father allowed it, that my televisual world would have truly birthed new ideas if I could have watched Love, American Style after The Partridge Family), Barry Walters sets premise for the sixty chapters of his book. “Straight critics have been telling us how to hear our music for ages, so I’m simply offering a queer alternative.”

Each of those chapters focuses on an artist or group of artists, allowing the reader to jump around among favorites, as I did, but also to consider the more surprising inclusions, such as Judas Priest, Nirvana, and Hole. The chapters are arranged chronologically, beginning with The Velvet Underground and Lou Reed and ending with RuPaul, which includes a grateful revisit to one of my favorite vocalists, Sylvester.

I started my exploration in the fourth chapter, the one dedicated to Motown, a choice that surprised me at first because of how firmly I had associated beautiful Motown ballads with heterosexuality. But Walters is here to disabuse me of those assumptions, and gratefully so.

The chapter begins with an homage to Smokey Robinson that, in the first paragraph, mentions trans performer Jackie Shane and her two-year run on the Canadian charts with her cover of “Any Other Way”. But Walters pans back to Robinson’s Shop Around. Walters describes Motown’s appeal thusly:

“[It] was particularly popular among LGBTQ people before, during, and after Stonewall. Common ground between show-tune gays and rock ’n’ roll queers. Motown crossed Broadway’s perky melodiousness with R&B’s ingenuities of harmony and meter. The Miracles and what followed showed us how to thrive in the straight world while being true to ourselves.”

A few pages later, and I have my cell phone in hand, my music app open, and I am searching for titles that Walter includes when he arrives at his tribute to The Dynamic Superiors: “Tony Washington, the leader of this Washington D.C. quintet, was unquestionably gay.” To then read the thoughts of one of the group’s producers, Valerie Simpson, brought home how much the 1970s had wrought queer changes. Speaking about a moment in 1975, when I was nine and already, thanks to my father, a music lover, she said,

“The first time I saw the group walking down the street, I didn’t know what we had gotten ourselves into, because they all had on loud fur coats in pastel colors. I was like, ‘I don’t know what this is.’ But whatever it is, I want to see it expressed. I think that’s what brings out the best performances. When people can find themselves, they’re singing their truths.”

Walters uses his historical review of The Dynamic Superiors (and the unfortunate passing of Tony Washington in 1989 from AIDS), including the background to “Nobody’s Gonna Change Me,” a power tribute to Tony’s authenticity, to bring us to what Walters describes as “the boldest LGBTQ anthem of the 1970s,” “I Was Born This Way,” which later inspired Lady Gaga’s “Born This Way.”

Happy to learn that the 1975 recording of “I Was Born This Way,” as performed by Charles Valentino, is available on YouTube (because I really wanted to hear Stevie Wonder playing those skippy triplets on the drums in the backing tracks). After Motown acquired the song from its original producer, Bunny Jones at Galilee Records, saying, “‘We didn’t purchase this record because it was socially controversial, but because it sold enormously in New York and is, we think, a hit record,’” they engaged Carl Bean to record it in 1977. I have heard the Bean version before, and learning this history inspired me to play both Valentino’s and Bean’s recording. A glorious start to any day.

Each of the chapters is a jewel box of history and joy unto its own. Readers can engage with Walters as music fans, and can come away fascinated with his perspective on such a wide array of artists. Beyond that, however, is Walters’ sweeping scope of queer history, viewed through his musical lens. As someone alive for nearly all of Mighty Real’s scope, I cherished the opportunity to not only reexamine my memories of the songs that I knew spoke directly to my experience as a baby gay boy (I felt my first adoration of television men like Bill Bixby when I was five and watching reruns of The Courtship of Eddie’s Father). Songs I either purchased as 45s or, after college, on CDs, like Bowie’s “Space Oddity,” Elton John’s “Daniel” (the name, incidentally, I chose for the protagonist of my first memoir’s fictionalized (and wisely unpublished) 1996 predecessor, In So Many Words), Donna Summer’s “I Feel Love,” Alicia Bridges’ “I Love The Nightlife,” and Prince’s “Controversy.”

Mighty Real is mighty glorious, a hug that combines nostalgia and empowerment one song at a time. I hope you have the chance to pick it up and sing through your memories (and make new ones) as I did.