Today on the site I’m thrilled to welcome John S. Garrison, whose contribution to Bloomsbury’s 33 1/3 series, which is dedicated to deep dives into various classic albums, covers Red Hot + Blue, the first major benefit album to fight AIDS. Here’s a little more on the book:
Red Hot + Blue is a meditation on music’s capacity to find us, transform us, and help us make sense of our historical moment. Blending memoir and cultural history, Garrison recalls his coming out at the height of the AIDS crisis alongside the music industry’s first major response to the epidemic. In 1990, a groundbreaking effort by musical artists sought to combat the silence and stigma about the disease. The resulting tribute album to legendary composer Cole Porter was evocatively titled Red Hot + Blue, capturing both the joy and melancholy that accompany love during turbulent times. It re-imagined those iconic songs – including “Don’t Fence Me In,” “Every Time We Say Goodbye,” “Night and Day” – not just to celebrate the composer but also to offer a shared vision for survival. In this book, Garrison reflects on his own life story through the lens of Porter’s life and music to illuminate the emotional landscape we all navigate in the search for love.
Red Hot + Blue returns us to the early 1990s to reveal how the love songs of the past can be revived to speak to new audiences in times of need. The book is the portrait of an album, a pandemic, and a young gay man’s coming of age in the era of both.
And here’s John S. Garrison to talk about the role of music in queer history, and specifically in his own coming out:
Jimmy Somerville was right there beside me when I came out in high school. Not in person, of course, but in his music.
First there was “Smalltown Boy” (recorded when Somerville was part of the band Bronski Beat). Its story of queer heartache spoke to my own feelings of isolation, and I learned that the album title The Age of Consent was itself a political call against anti-gay discrimination in the United Kingdom. Then there was “You Make Me Feel (Mighty Real),” which covered an original version by Sylvester, the disco singer who shared Somerville’s love of falsetto and who died from AIDS-related complications in 1988. I recognized the title of that solo album, Read My Lips, both as a criticism of President Bush’s political stances and as a slogan used at many kiss-in protests for LGBTQ+ rights. These songs inspired me. They were performed by an openly queer performer, and they pointed me toward a politically charged history for my identity that I was only beginning to learn about.
And then, during my first year in college, I heard Somerville’s version of the 1950 jazz standard “From This Moment On.” By making me aware of composer Cole Porter, that song broadened my awareness of a much-longer queer history that I newly belonged to. Porter died before I was born and didn’t live to see the Stonewall Riots. But he was both married to a woman and had relationships with men, wrote music filled with gay innuendo, and in January of 1942, opened the 1-2-3 Club at 123 East 54th Street in New York City. It was one of those life-saving spaces where gay people could gather, listen to music, and meet other people like themselves.
Somerville’s version of Porter’s song appeared on the 1990 album Red Hot + Blue, which is at the center of my new book of the same name. In my Red Hot + Blue, I explore how music can be so central to learning about who we are, to finding community, and to fueling political action. The album was the music industry’s first major response to the AIDS epidemic. It sold over a million copies, raised crucial money for HIV treatment and awareness, and featured some of the era’s biggest talents: David Byrne, k.d. lang, Annie Lennox, Debbie Harry, Iggy Pop, Erasure, Neneh Cherry, Sinéad O’Connor, Jody Watley, U2, and others. My book traces how many of these artists had their own deep connections to the LGBTQ+ community or had been personally affected by the epidemic. And, for many of them, this album represented the start of a deeper engagement with queer rights and long-term commitment to HIV/AIDS activism. Making music was their way of entering queer history and establishing their path within it.
The release of the album coincided with the airing of a television special in over 30 countries. It featured information about HIV prevention, and it contained the first use of the word “condom” on network television outside of news broadcasts. It showcased music videos directed by Wim Wenders, Jim Jarmusch, Jonathan Demme, Jean Baptiste Mondino, Percy Adlon and Neil Jordan. Somerville’s video (directed by Steve MacLean) for his song proved one of the most controversial. The coupling of two shirtless men in the video was just one of several instances of tension around the airing of Red Hot + Blue’s television special, where the network complained that the sight of an inter-racial, same-sex couple embracing without shirts was “a little too specific.” Somerville continued to push boundaries and make history.
When I was writing Red Hot + Blue, I became fascinated by these stories behind the project and the people who made it possible. And I came to realize that I could not tell these stories without intertwining them with Cole Porter’s personal history as well as my own history. What ties all this together is the enduring capacity of music to stir our emotions and give voice to both our personal and public histories.
Buy It: Bloomsbury | Amazon | B&N
John S. Garrison is the author of seven books, including Glass (Bloomsbury, 2015) and The Pleasures of Memory in Shakespeare (2024). In 2021, he was named a Guggenheim Fellow.
