Pick of the glitter.

Velvet Goldmine (original sound-track album) * Various artists * London Records

What's pop's queerest era? The dyke-rock mid '90s? The New Wave early '80s? The disco late '70s? Even the heroes of those homo high times would take their lavender caps off to the rock movement too fabulously freakish to be fully embraced by American airwaves--the glam rock of the early '70s. Although David Bowie, Lou Reed, Iggy Pop, T. Rex, Roxy Music, and the New York Dolls are now considered rock royalty, glam's artifice, androgyny, camp, and boy-to-boy innuendo got little respect back in those days. Alice Cooper and Kiss of course sold heavy-metal glam to the U.S. teenage wasteland, but Bowie, Reed, and followers presented themselves as the first alternative rockers to both assault and disdain the mainstream, an attack that officially began when Bowie proclaimed his bisexuality.

Director Todd Haynes looks back on that era with Velvet Goldmine, a film that references the lives and sounds of the glam gang. One of its executive producers, R.E.M.'s Michael Stipe, pulls strings to help assemble a sound track with classic cuts, star-studded cover versions, and new songs in the old glam styles.

Since the film revolves around Venus in Furs, a band that radiates Bowie's thespian excess, both actors and rockers supply the characters' singing voices. Velvet Goldmine star Jonathan Rhys Meyers approximates Brian Eno ("Baby's on Fire") and Cockney Rebel's Steve Harley ("Tumbling Down"), while Radiohead's Thom Yorke warbles demanding Roxy oldies "Ladytron" and "Bitter-Sweet." Elastica's Donna Matthews punks out with Teenage Fanclub on the New York Dolls' "Personality Crisis," and Mudhoney's Mark Arm contributes an Iggy Pop impersonation for "T.V. Eye."

Read about glam, and you'll inevitably encounter "fey," a fag-insinuating code word often applied to describe arch vocals that embraced soul's emotional excess and musical theater's mental maneuvers. Those oral quirks aren't easily replicated, but Shudder to Think, Grant Lee Buffalo, and Pulp summon forth the appropriate sighs and whispers on glittering new tunes. Yet as vintage tracks by T. Rex, Roxy, and Reed, testify, nothing can beat the originals' effete savagery. There are few things gayer than the moment in Roxy Music's "Virginia Plain" when the bubbling synths and churning guitars drop out and Bryan Ferry exclaims, "You're so sheer! You're so chic!" He could be singing about himself.

Walters is a pop-music critic for The Advocate.