Dresses, Makeup, and Alter Egos: David Bowie's Visual Gender Exploration Explained

An essential feature on Dresses, Makeup, and Alter Egos: David Bowie's Visual Gender Exploration Explained, featuring critical updates.

Public fascination with Bowie's personal life often clashed with his penchant for contradictory media statements. In January 1972, he told Michael Watts of Melody Maker, "I'm gay, and always have been, even when I was David Jones." The declaration was revolutionary, arriving just five years after the United Kingdom decriminalized homosexual acts between consenting adult men via the Sexual Offences Act 1967.

Four years later, in a September 1976 interview with Cameron Crowe for Playboy, Bowie shifted his position: "It's true, I am a bisexual. But I can't deny that I've used that fact very well. I suppose it's the best thing that ever happened to me." Decades later, speaking to Rolling Stone in 1993, he pushed back against the labels entirely, describing his earlier public embrace of bisexuality as a major misstep for his commercial viability in conservative American markets and clarifying that he considered himself a heterosexual who had passed through an experimental bohemian period.

These shifting statements frustrate commentators who seek a consistent political stance. Bowie was an artist who viewed interview statements as performance pieces. He enjoyed destabilizing whatever label journalists attempted to pin to his lapel, refusing to let his public persona harden into standard sociological categories.