GLR May-June 2026

could be true, but there’s something missing here. That same year, Bowie (married with a son) declared in an inter viewwith Melody Maker : “I’m gay, and have always been.” That admission may have been opportunistic (and was later backpedaled), but it boosted his career. This is a curious omission in a book that doesn’t shy away from homosexuality. Bowie and his family then decamped to Los Angeles, where he fell into drugs and depression, attempted suicide several times, and started wearing a cross. He was cast in the 1976 movie about extraterres trials, The Man Who Fell to Earth (whose protagonist, Thomas Jerome Newton, Bowie would reprise for his “musical the ater piece” Lazarus half a century later). Relief came after a move to Berlin, where Bowie grew interested in the realities of the Cold War and the city’s storied pre fascist past (think Christopher Isherwood and Cabaret ), but he also became in trigued by the Nazis’ cult of personality (“Hitler was the first rock star,” he impru dently said), Aryanism, Germanic mythol ogy, and contempt for liberal democracy. This is when he wrote his song “Heroes,” which became an anthem a decade later when Bowie performed it at Live Aid. At some point, Bowie discovered

where he fell to his knees and recited the Lord’s Prayer. Then he embraced the In ternet: “Bowie had built much of his ca reer on mystique and distance; now he was extremely available, popping into chatrooms, subjecting himself to matey online Q&As, posting diary entries on line, sharing his art and his enthusiasms directly, unmediated.” Bowie returned to the U.S., to a recording studio in the Catskills, where he had almost finished Heathen when the 9/11 attacks struck. Eerily, the album cover contains biblical motifs—all slashed and desecrated—and seminal works by Einstein, Freud, and Nietzsche. A straight path from Hiroshima to the Twin Towers, from the death of God to Muslim terror ism? Bowie flirted with New Atheism, a rejection of religion based on reason and propagated by the likes of Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens, but he never fully embraced it. A heart attack in 2004, when he was 57 years old, spelled the end of his world tour. After a nine-year hiatus, Bowie returned on his 66th birth day (having refused to perform at the 2012 London Olympics), streaming his latest song, “Where Are We Now?” In 2010, the Victoria & Albert Mu seum, where Bowie’s papers are ar

chived, presented the David Bowie Is exhibit of artifacts from his career, the most popular in the museum’s history. It traveled the world with the same success. In 2014, he was diagnosed with terminal cancer. In his will, he requested that his ashes be scattered in a Buddhist ritual in Bali, Indonesia. Ormerod sums up: “Bowie was an icon of rootlessness who changed how he looked, how he sang, how he wrote, how he spoke, following in fluences, whims or commercial interests; he seemed untethered from any particular location or tradition or responsibility or even time. He was an icon of individualism, and it was essen tially all about himself.” This concise biography is enjoyable, especially its self-dep recating tone, but the focus is clearly on God, not sexuality. The two might have made for a fruitful juxtaposition, though, for Bowie seemed to struggle with both.

Gnosticism, basically the belief that God can be known but also a system that challenges authority. It gave us a more political Bowie, condemning racism and the stigma surrounding sex work. A new album, Let’s Dance (1983), featured (post)disco music and a new Bowie look on the cover: a topless boxer. He played Pontius Pilate in Martin Scorsese’s hugely controver sial The Last Temptation of Christ (1988), while the tour for Never Let Me Down (1987) represented the nadir of Bowie’s career, a performance that worked well in an intimate setting but fizzled when aimed at tens of thousands of spectators. Peo ple also increasingly accused Bowie of selling out. Eventually, Bowie got his act together, married fashion model Iman Abdulmajid in a church in Florence, and joined Al coholics Anonymous. However, controversy followed him at the Freddie Mercury Tribute Concert for AIDS Awareness,

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