"Glad to Be Gay"

A few times here at EC, I've posted lyrics and a youtube clip of a song from the late 70s. It was called "Glad to Be Gay" by the Tom Robinson Band. I usually post it to make one of a few points. Tom was (at the time) singing about RIGHT NOW. He was gay, his friends were gay, and they were routinely getting beat up and laughed at not just by thuggish punks but by the police as well. The fact that a musician would not just say "I'm gay" but "I'm gay and this is bullshit" on record in 1978 was jaw-droppingly incredible. And, as I've pointed out, his bandmates were straight, but went on TV playing the song anyway, because (as Tom said) they all believed in this, as much as being anti-racism (a popular "button" topic for other punk and post-punk bands at the time).

In any event, I found out today that Tom Robinson offers the mp3 for free for anybody who wants it. So if you like the track, download it and share with your friends.

Here's the video clip I post. The lyrics are somewhat different here. He tended to change the lyrics live to highlight anything currently in the news. So in the mp3, the song is dedicated to the World Health Organization, which at the time (as he implies)
still had "homosexuality" on their list of diseases. But in the video clip, he dedicates it to the Manchester police force who apparently had recently beat up some gay guy.

[youtube]w7awIacy4uo[/youtube]

Lex