In an age when discussions of gender so often come with a side helping of earnest academic debate and social media controversy, it comes as sweet relief to read Simon Doonan’s charming new book about the glittering world of 1970s glam. At just under 150 pages, it provides a terse reminder that challenging established sexual identities and norms doesn’t only have the potential to be revelatory and liberating, it can also be tons of fun. Doonan establishes this through the snap of his prose and the absence of pretension in his worldview. The result is the inverse of Simon Reynolds’s Shock and Awe: Glam Rock and Its Legacy from the Seventies to the Twenty-First Century, published six years ago. While that 700-page doorstop was incredibly smart, useful and true, it also managed to render in pale monochrome a movement that was all about colour.
Doonan, the former creative director of Barneys, has mastered every hue of glam. It helps that he grounds his analysis in his own story. On the very first page, he describes himself as “a pansy amid the begonias”, setting the tone for a work that’s as much memoir and mash note as historical portrait and tribute. Now 70, he grew up at a time when gay sex was outlawed in his native UK. Though a little younger, I was the ideal age – 14 in 1972 – to also swoon over glam’s platform shoes, shag haircuts and implicit green light to lust after all the other young dudes I desired. Much like Doonan, I viewed the freakiness of glitter as a lifeline as well an encouragement to pursue a path of self-invention and pluck. At the same time, glam was hardly immune to the vexing, and often contradictory, sexual mores of its day.
