Heroes: A Distracted Meditation on Bowie and Reagan

Heroes: A Distracted Meditation on Bowie and Reagan

“I have a copy of the first album that David Bowie ever released in the United States.” He said from beside me at the Capital Grille bar.

“OK.” I didn’t even feign interest.

“What a terrible loss for all those people who lived heroically through his music. For people who always wanted to be someone else, who is there to look up to?” His slurred British accent annoyed me.

“How sad.” I demurred, sipping my Hendricks. I wasn’t in the mood for the morose babbling of a sneering queen which would eventually become an assault on my insular American sensibilities. It was too cold outside and I’d had a long day. I just wanted to defrost and watch some ESPN.

Were I to entertain this conversation, I told myself, it would be with Billy Manes. At least I like him and I’ve learned to appreciate his accent.

While I sympathize with the visceral loss felt by some of my friends, I have had difficulty really empathizing with what it was about David Bowie that touched so many. Frankly, I’ve spent the past week trying to piece together what should have been more of a loss to me. I was never really a music snob; I was never really a misfit. 

I did, however, enjoy Labyrinth.

Insofar as I don’t feel the overwhelming emptiness that some of my more drama-phillic friends—many of whom I love very much and with whom I want to share this sadness–do, I feel left out. In the David Bowie mourning club, I am the outsider.

Although I declined to engage the mourning drunk Brit in a conversation that night at the haughty bar, his words have echoed in my mind:

Want to be someone else?

Who to look up to?

A terrible loss?

Clearly I get how Bowie served as an icon to a segment of gay society and how that segment of gay society represents an avant garde of the wider culture. He was gender bending before it was cool. He was—by many accounts—a gifted singer and performer. He embodied personal redefinition. I have friends who could fill out this paragraph with a gushing novella. 

I get that he and I are kin.

I now begin the journey that will lead me into the sunset of my life. I know that for America there will always be a bright dawn ahead.

When Reagan died, I got the news from a friend by text on my Blackberry. I had just stepped off the Carousel of Progress at the Magic Kingdom.  He was my hero, the icon to my coming out as a flaming patriot in elementary school when that was quite possibly the most uncool thing to be (maybe I was more of a misfit than I thought?). While Reagan had announced the brave sunset of his life more than a decade before, long past the time of his multiple personal redefinitions, he nonetheless continued to serve as an icon to me. 

In the queue to a dated ride in a kitschy land dedicated to a forty year old vision of tomorrow, I quietly wept. 

Bowie and Reagan, in this meditation on heroes and icons, are not so different really. In what they did for our world, and even in how they did it, memorializers and detractors alike should agree: they changed their worlds: they changed our world: for four decades easily, they changed our tomorrow.

Each, in his own way, worked to upend the despair of otherness: one by pulling the velvet beauty out of it, one by optimistically (velveteenly?) imagining it away.

Each, in his own way, practiced the art of personal reinvention: one by invoking a series of personae from whimsical songwriter to Ziggy Stardust to Alladin Sane to elder statesman, the other by invoking a series of personae from charming actor to union activist to politician to elder statesman.

Each, in his own way, used the arts to affect culture: one by crooning through the haunts of the human mind, the other through the eloquent exposition of the American spirit.

Each, in his own way, lived—saddened—through the AIDS epidemic and watched friends and strangers alike ravaged by a disease for which neither they nor the world was equipped: one mired in the politics of misunderstanding, the other working to support eradication of both the malady and the stigmas around it. 

Both were, in an interesting piece of trivia, cold warriors. In 1987, one week before Reagan’s famous, “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall,” speech, Bowie incited riots in Berlin with a daring and provocative concert played at the wall meant to stir the souls of  those whose lives were oppressed by stifled speech and poverty.

Their politics may not have been in sync, and surely the experiences of their lives and trajectories sent them into opposite corners of the shared Hollywood society in which they both mingled. But they were both sons and fathers and husbands and beautiful and made the world better for their existences.

While I may not share the personal loss that some have staked claim to in the passing of David Bowie, I understand the loss of an icon. I understand that there are some people whose passing from this earth serves to magnify their presence in our ether. I am sad that these men, like all men, must eventually die, and that we feel loss as we wander about the crater in which their passings leave us. I understand, lurching toward empathy,that David Bowie was important to all of us and that he should continue to be.

And perhaps, like lovers at the Berlin Wall, Reagan and Bowie are together now, not merely joined in this meditation. Doubtless, they are “Heroes” for far more than just one day:

I, I can remember (I remember)

Standing, by the wall (by the wall)

And the guns, shot above our heads (over our heads)

And we kissed, as though nothing could fall (nothing could fall)

And the shame, was on the other side

Oh we can beat them, forever and ever

Then we could be heroes, just for one day.