My desire to consume music (in physical form) took hold in a tiny neighborhood shop called Carl’s Records. Located barely three blocks from the house I grew up in, I visited Carl’s on what seemed like a weekly basis for a solid two or three years. I usually went home with a free 45, courtesy of the titular Carl. It wasn’t until much, much, much later that it was made clear to me that my frequent visits (and my free records) were largely due to the fact that one of my relatives had a little thangy thang going on with the very married (not to my relative) Carl. In retrospect, certain things (his picking out “Just Be My Lady” by Larry Graham to give to this relative, pressing records with this relative’s name on the label) make a lot more sense given this context.
Messiness aside, one of the memories from my jaunts to Carl’s that will be forever burned into my psyche is this: said relative (joined by a few others IIRC) took me there one night. I’m thinking this was late 1980 or early 1981, so I was either 4 or barely 5. There were two album covers at eye level that disturbed me so much that I bawled and howled until someone covered them with other albums. Those albums?
Two very artistic, extremely queer album covers by artists who, while ostensibly heterosexual, openly played with gender and sexuality in a way that was highly unusual (especially for Black musicians) at the time. They rocked my preschool-age world in such a visceral way that I couldn’t even look at them.
Was this my own queerness rearing its head at me long before I understood that I was queer or even understood what queerness was?
Was this an early example of fear and shame towards queerness and blurry gender boundaries that manifested in me for decades to come?
Was I already so indoctrinated into “men look/act like men” and “women look/act like women” socialization that these obvious rule breakers threw off my simple ideas of what the world was?
How is it that I remember an incident that took place 43 years ago so clearly?
The mind wanders.
Needless to say, I’m not afraid of either of these album covers any more. Actually, Dirty Mind and Nightclubbing are two of my favorite albums of all time.
Sigmund Freud that, folks.
You sang my life. The exact same thing happened for me with these two artists (Grace is bisexual btw.)