The Love Song We Need, Again, This Valentine's Day
33 years later, Billy Bragg's AIDs-era, anti-homophobia anthem, "Sexuality," is horrifyingly pertinent
When prompted to name a favorite love song for Valentine’s Day, the first to come to mind was one that had recently been rattling around in my head even though I hadn’t listened to it in ages: Billy Bragg’s gorgeous "Moving the Goalposts". So I listened to it. I think it’s safe to say it’s the only love song that mentions both “sticky stuff” and Gennady Gerasimov. (Don’t worry, I didn’t remember who he was, either: Soviet Foreign Ministry spokesman under Mikhail Gorbachev.)
“Moving the Goalposts” got me thinking about how Steve Earle bounces back and forth between love songs and political songs, (with addiction songs thrown in for good measure), whereas Billy Bragg includes love and politics in the same song.
That thought led me to cue up Billy Bragg’s iconic "Sexuality", his plea for sexual freedom that came out in 1991 during the AIDS crisis. The official video he made for “Sexuality” is beyond goofy, maybe because he didn’t want to make a video in the first place and preferred that people make meaning out of it through just listening. But frankly, it’s also not gay enough, so the link I provided is sans visuals.
(“Sexuality,” which Bragg wrote with Johnny Marr, features the voice of the great Kirsty MacColl, who died in a tragic accident in 2000. She’s been mentioned in recent stories about the passing of The Pogues’ Shane MacGowan because she duets with him on the greatest Christmas song of all time, Fairytale of New York.)
The thing about “Sexuality” is that, while it’s easy to dismiss the song as dated, a take that might have been accurate for, I don’t know, maybe the decade leading up to and lasting a bit beyond Laverne Cox on Orange is the New Black in 2013 and the Supreme Court’s Obergefell vs. Hodges same-sex marriage ruling in 2015, the part where Billy Bragg sings “Your laws do not apply to me” makes this song, once again, devastatingly timely.
Last year, according to the ACLU, there were 510 anti-LGBTQIA+ bills introduced in U.S. state legislatures. The proposed laws deprive trans kids and adults of life-saving healthcare; restrict people from using the bathroom that matches their gender identity; curtail the right to change i.d.s; censor school curriculum; restrict student and educator rights; ban trans kids from playing sports; forbid schools and public facilities from creating gender-neutral bathrooms; restrict freedom of speech and expression by banning drag queen read-alouds and performances; allow religious groups to discriminate against queer people; and otherwise roll back civil rights protections. Only three states — New York, Illinois and Delaware — and the District of Columbia didn’t have noxious anti-gay legislation proposed.
Also, according to the American Library Association’s Office for Intellectual Freedom, there were 695 attempts to ban 1,915 unique titles in the first eight months of 2023, the most since the ALA began compiling such data 20 years ago. Most of the censorship campaigns were mounted by local pressure groups. The ALA’s Banned and Challenged Books website notes: “The vast majority of challenges were to books written by or about a person of color or a member of the LGBTQIA+ community.”
“Sexuality” is the song that inspired me to do an interview with Billy Bragg for The Progressive magazine back in 1992. It's been a long time since our conversation, and I'm sure both of us might wince at some of the things we said, but he's sweet and smart and funny -- he said the only product he'd ever advertise is condoms, and that he'd be willing to wear one on the side of a London bus -- so I’ve linked to it as an historic artifact.
Rereading it just now, I’m surprised but kind of proud that I actually phrased a question this way: "Why can't they accept music that simultaneously makes you think and makes you horny?" He replied, “The horny music goes to the lowest common denominator regularly, and the political music’s targets are so high that it excludes a lot of people.” I think plenty of hip hop artists, not to mention Liz Phair, would disagree, but it’s certainly true that many critics in the ‘90s dismissed art that contained political content, opining that the latter rendered the former illegitimate, be it Billy Bragg’s music or Barbara Kingsolver’s novels. I’m glad that’s changed.
In a recent interview with Christopher J. Lee in Jacobin, Bragg says that what unites both his political songwriting and his love songs is his commitment to empathy. All musicians, he thinks, are “trying to get people to feel something.” In both types of songs he says he thinks he reveals his vulnerability and “a willingness to show that I had doubts….I wasn’t trying to put myself up there as someone who had all the answers and who was going to come and sweep you off your feet and everything.”
I think the reason “Sexuality” affected me so deeply when I first heard it has something to do with that. To me, the narrator in the song is a vulnerable straight man pushing himself to conduct a thought experiment, to use his imagination and project himself into a gay sexual relationship. It’s not just that he feels politically obligated to do so, though this is Billy Bragg, so that is part of it. But also, he loves humanity. So he’s open. He’s has faith that it’ll be fine, or even great. What could be a better Valentine’s Day message than that?
However, returning to the department of “one step forward and two steps back,” or, as Billy Bragg might put it, “waiting for the great leap forward,” I see that in the kicker of my old interview with him he expressed his fear about the upcoming American presidential election. His quote, like his plea for sexual inclusion, is unfortunately 100% on target: “Whoever you elect as a leader becomes a leader for all of us, whether we like it or not.” I guess we’ll never be without that old chestnut — though that’s probably what the British Empire thought, too — but I still haven’t given up on his song’s vision of a world where anyone can love and have whatever kind of consensual sex they want to have with whomever they want without fear of condemnation, or worse.
And I found a good kicker for the end of this post. During his 2021 UK tour Bragg updating the lyrics of “Sexuality,” changing “Just because you’re gay, I won’t turn you away. If you stick around, I’m sure that we can find some common ground” to “Just because you’re they, I won’t turn you away. If you stick around, I’m sure that we can find the right pronoun”. NME reported that he explained, “Times changed. Anyone born since the song was released would wonder why it’s a big deal to find common ground with a gay man. The front line now is trans rights.”
Cool that he changed the lyric to keep up with the times and again model what it means to be a human being...