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MIGHTY REAL

Barry Walters

A History of LGBTQ Music, 1969-2000

The definitive history of LGBTQ music, from Stonewall to RuPaul, and its impact on culture and American life
From the underground dancefloors of the Seventies to the global charts of the Nineties, LGBTQ artists and audiences shaped music's sound, style, and spirit. In MIGHT REAL, veteran journalist Barry Walters chronicles its LGBTQ history from the Velvet Underground to the 21st century's dawn as he honors the artists who redefined gender, defied tradition, and dared to challenge sexual norms with the help of a record business that wasn't as straight as commonly believed.

Drawing on his decades as a New York- and San Francisco-based music critic, Walters examines how LGBTQ musicians, music industry executives, and fans reshaped the mainstream. He connects the dots between David Bowie's dazzling reinventions, Grace Jones's androgynous glamor, Prince's boundary-shattering sexuality, and the radical candor of the Indigo Girls to prove they're all doing the same thing: fighting oppression.

With exuberance, insight, and encyclopedic knowledge, Walters brings to life the songs and society that filled dancefloors, bedrooms, and streets as he uncovers yesteryear's coded LGBTQ messages that paved the way for today's unabashedly queer hits. MIGHT REAL is a masterful love letter to the music that liberated generations, and it's written in a page-turning, personal way that blurs distinctions between chronicle and memoir. This is the rare and revolutionary music history told to help you laugh, cry, and then rally against lingering inequality.

Barry Walters has spent forty years documenting the intersection of mainstream and LGBTQ culture. He began his career at The Village Voice, where he came out professionally in a 1986 Pet Shop Boys review, and went on to contribute for decades to Spin and Rolling Stone, where he was named Senior Critic. In 1992, Walters became the first critic to receive an award from The National Gay and Lesbian Journalists Association for his work at the San Francisco Examiner. Throughout the '90s, he was The Advocate's music
columnist and wrote extensively for Out. His writing has since appeared in Entertainment Weekly, NPR, Pitchfork, and other outlets.
In 2020, his mini-documentary, Love Me Like You Should: The Brave and Bold Sylvester, created for Amazon Music at the start of the
COVID lockdown, won a Clio Award.
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Published by Viking Books

Comments

Mighty Real is an incredibly real reminder that the people who changed music were often the ones told they didn't belong.

An essential book for this moment.

Barry Walters has been writing about music from an American queer perspective for five decades. This is his testament: a musical, personal and political history that explores and celebrates the LGBTQ contribution to popular music.

It's waaaay more than disco. It's rock, pop, soul, punk, hip-hop, folk, singer-songwriters, everything: the LGBTQ community has made massive contributions to them all, and Mighty Real finally tells the tale in all its inspiring, outrageous, ingenious and moving glory. No matter how much you already know, you'll learn a lot more.

Witty, incisive, and beautifully writtenan illuminating queer reframing of popular music as lived history.