ANDROGYNY IN ROCK

Sometime after the rock started rolling, it became quite obvious that not all the males in the audience were looking on Elvis and company with merely imitative longings. There were other plans afoot for that magnificent Pelvis, it was muttered in a zillion lockerrooms. And indeed, it was also muttered, Elvis might have been looking on some of the gazers a mite fondly himself. Like almost every other rocker who has been rumored to be uh . . . gay, Elvis cleared himself of that charge by marrying and fathering a child.

Perhaps the father of all those nasty rumors (if either nasty or rumor they were) was poor Johnny Ray. Poor, not because he mightn’t have been “straight,” but because his bus station soiries kept getting interrupted by the gendarmes, damaging his career beyond repair in that more puritan area.