"At the beginning of the show,he appeared as a kind of Marlene Dietrich,but with a white captain's jacket and a cap,"Gaultier wrote."It was obvious that it was not Bowie playing a captain,but Bowie playing Marlene Dietrich playing a man."
Bowie's longevity as a star extended his influence."When people are growing up they're generally looking for something in the culture that reflects their subconscious yearnings,"Grayson Perry wrote inThe Guardian."Bowie certainly did that for my generation. In fact,he probably did it for two or three."
Although Bowie freely experimented with fluidity in music,gender and fashion,he was frequently asked to categorise his sexuality with a label.
"I'm gay,"he said to the journalist Michael Watts in 1972,"and always have been,even when I was David Jones,"his name at birth.
Eleven years later,in an article forRolling Stone titled"Straight Time,"Bowie called this declaration"the biggest mistake I ever made."
He would still face the question in interviews years later:Was he gay or bisexual? (Wherever he fell on the spectrum,Bowie understood that the entire concept was part spectacle:"Sex has never really been shocking,"he toldPlayboy in 1976,"it was just the people who performed it who were.")
The preoccupation with the was-he-or-wasn't-he part of Bowie's sexuality often overshadows his more nuanced contributions to queer culture through imagery and style. Still,he was not really an activist.
On Instagram,Justin Vivian Bond,a transgender singer,clarified that Bowie was"was not an activist in the traditional sense."
Instead,the musician"provided a soundtrack and visuals which reshaped our world."In other words,he was not a campaigner for gay rights,but Bowie's art complemented a larger fight for acceptance and civil rights.
Whether his lack of activism made his artistic,sexual and sartorial experimentation a form of cultural appropriation is a topic of debate,but as J. Bryan Lowder wrote inSlate,"you can't appropriate what you help create.
"He may have bucked or played coy with identity labels presaging our modern situation quite well,"Lowder continued,"but,especially at the beginning of his career,he was recognisably'gay.'Culturally speaking,I think it's a label he deserves."