I posted about Erasure's "Blue Savannah" recently, so now I'm dedicating a post to the band. They weren't just part of the soundtrack of my late teen / early twenties years back in the '80s. Like "Blue Savannah", their discography (or at least their earlier work) was the soundtrack that followed me into the '90s and took over my personal airwaves, if you will, when I discovered so many gay-themed films and actually went out to see them in the theater. And since I was the only one who was interested, I went alone.
And these were the movies that also dominated my consciousness back then to the point where I purchased VHS tapes of some of them when they came out. Some titles were older and weren't in the theaters by the time I became aware of them, so I rented them from video rental places.
Edge of Seventeen / Get Real / Trick / Kiss Me Guido / Lilies / Wild Reeds
Edge of Seventeen, Get Real, Trick, and Lilies were movies I obsessively rewatched either in the theater or via VHS tapes because I loved them to pieces.
At the same time, I also discovered gay fiction and read Andrew Holleran, Alan Hollinghurst, Robert Rodi, Matthew Rettenmund, and a few erotica anthologies. It wasn't until the early 2000s when I stumbled across speculative fiction that was proudly LGBT, and I never looked back.
Those were the early, heady days of writing, when I was simultaneously immersed in a wholly different world of new stories that I felt were both unique and specific to the intended audience but also encompassed such a wide range of experience that's equally universal. Having grown up exposed to nothing but heterosexual fiction and entertainment, this was an expansion of my world that I happily dove into.
And Erasure, always so upbeat and very much out and proud, were my "chaperones" throughout this adventure.
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