Adam Lambert VS Jobriath

Or: Lambert, The (Not So) Sheepish (Any More) Gay Lion

In the first week of August 2009, American Idol runner-up Adam Lambert was in the midst of an intensive tour of the States with the rest of the show’s finalists, appeasing the viewer’s of the talent quest and, hopefully, winning some over enough to anticipate his forthcoming November debut album. At that point, of course, Lambert wasn’t singing any of the originals that would appear on his own For Your Entertainment release. It was a set of hits taken from his time on the show, including the most popular, the Gary Jules arrangement of Tears For Fears’ Mad World, and a medley of songs by David Bowie – Life On Mars, Fame and Let’s Dance – an artist Lambert had identified as an influence on his own glam rock style.

Over his time on Idol, and seemingly with quite a push from Perez Hilton’s blog (who later commented with a snarky “took you long enough”), Lambert had gone from talented singer with a penchant for a rock falsetto and a dramatised arrangement of pop standards, to openly gay glam superstar. His ‘journey’, at least in the media, had been to ‘come out’, embrace his new position as a ‘gay singer’ (with public appearances with boyfriends and a Rolling Stone cover story) and turn the whole scenario into an all-singing, all-costumed spectacular that would overshadow any attempt to pigeonhole him into a lesser-selling niche market.

Come November and following a small ‘controversy’ in which Lambert simulated fellatio on a dancer in a performance at the American Music Awards, the press were declaring For Your Entertainment a relative success, comparable to many of the more successful releases by American Idol discoveries. The album has now gone gold, selling over half a million copies in the US, and was released last week in Australia.

In the first week of August a quarter of a century earlier, in 1983 (though the exact date, and sometimes month, changes source to source), the body of 37-year-old Bruce Campbell was found in the rooftop room of the Hotel Chelsea. Campbell had died alone of AIDS-related causes, but not a decade earlier, at the same age as Lambert, he was being spruiked as the next major pop star in the United States as Jobriath, the American brand of Bowie at a time when glam rock was the next musical phenomenon to sweep the western world’s largest market.

Jobriath was an openly gay former hustler and theatre performer who, under the wing of ambitious manager Jerry Brandt, was sold to Elektra Records, his debut album backed with an expensive marketing campaign that included a 40-foot billboard in New York City’s Times Square. Where Bowie’s – and others’, including Lou Reed’s – image at the time had a lot to do with the veiling of gender and sexuality to create an otherworldly creature, an unknown quantity, Jobriath’s homosexuality was slathered onto his marketing like shock-value icing, drawing snide comments from press and many audiences, and the widespread observation, later, that no one was ready for such a thing.

It’s difficult to find any information about the sales of the record, which received generally good reviews, though much can be assumed by the fact that a follow-up, with far less press, was delivered six months later and a tour once planned as a big-budget extravanganza (complete with ejaculating Empire State Building and Jobriath dressed as Marlene Dietrich) was cancelled. Jobriath wasn’t heard from again until Morrissey began championing him and the two albums were re-released on CD last decade.

Now, Jobriath is widely known as the first completely ‘out’ rock star. Adam Lambert is by no means the second, though there are parallels to Jobriath’s story that haven’t been drawn by any other, and not just his choice of genre from which to launch his songs. Lambert was signed and publicised with his sexuality on the table, not up for negotiation, through a campaign not aiming him at any kind of ‘art’ crowd, as others in the past have been (even Scissor Sisters in the States). Without that ‘outsider’ marketing or performance angle, Lambert has, so far, been open to record and perform as any majorly-backed pop singers do, using sex, not social politics, to add a seductive quality to otherwise catchy (and pretty dreary, in Lambert’s case) dance pop.

It’s too early to see if his sexuality has any real impact on his career (and it may be too intangible a value to quantify anyway), but already Lambert is retelling the fate of Jobriath. And it only took a quarter of a decade.