The comfort of glam.

In this excerpt from the new book Rolling Stone: The '70s, New York Daily News pop-music critic Jim Farber recalls how glam made it safe for one gay teen to explore his sexuality.

On a swampy July night in 1974, I left my suburban home bound for David Bowie's "Diamond Dogs" concert, dressed in midnight-blue eyeliner, hepatitis-yellow platforms, and a lollipop-green jacket poofed at the shoulder and bustled at the back.

Somehow I was not killed. Done up to this degree--and joined by a male friend bedecked in a banana-cream suit with strawberry-puff platforms--I made it down the street where I lived, onto the Metro North train, through Grand Central Station, and up to Madison Square Garden, all the while drawing no more than a few affectionate snickers--mainly from the old or the clueless.

At perhaps no other time in history could two 16-year-old boys have made such a trip and not been slandered, beaten, or worse. Yet here we were, graced by a time (the mid '70s) and buoyed by a trend (glitter rock) that turned out to be golden--a time when the relationship between flouncy affectation and sexual orientation seemed tenuous at best. The glam revolution, which took Bowie as its hermaphroditic patron saint, promised to forever sever the bonds between prissy finery and what you did down there, to fuck with gender like it had never been fucked with before. How lucky for me to be going through a sexual identity crisis at the precise moment that the rest of pop culture was having one too!

At its commercial zenith (1974-1975), glitter shone through nearly every genre of pop. It dictated fashion and loosened behavior: The more fey an act, the more media play it got, affecting everyone from hard rock acts like Blue Oyster Cult to R&B groups like Labelle.

In such a topsy-turvy sliver of time, no one had to know that I was precisely as gay as my clothes might inform anyone from a later--or earlier--generation. In fact, with my attachment to glitter as a nervous, virginal midteen, I wasn't announcing my coming out but insuring my staying in. Glitter rock awarded me a safety zone in which I could both side-step old definitions of what it meant to be a boy and stave off a commitment to what it would eventually mean for me to be a gay man....

You could start an international incident trying to name precisely where and when glam rock first glistened. Stateside, the trend snakes back to Alice Cooper, the first male rocker loopy and press-starved enough to take a girl's name, in late 1968. Overseas, the equally-hungry-for-attention David Bowie rouged his cheeks and wore a billowing dress for the cover of the 1971 U.K. version of The Man Who Sold the World.

Using their androgynous images to create very different characters, Cooper and Bowie epitomized a schism between the American and British glam to come. America's glitter czar distanced himself by claiming to be playing a character. In his off-hours, Alice indulged in such ultra-straight activities as golf and drinking beer. To him, glitter was just a gig. Bowie treated it like a lifestyle. Eagerly labeling himself "bisexual," he cemented glam's tone of hedging provocation.

In 1971, it was the cherubic Marc Bolan who became the style's first star. Bolan's use of glitter on his face and hair inspired the English press to name the emerging trend after the sparkling stuff. Yet his pretty-boy looks still conformed to an unthreatening world of teen idols. Once again Bowie pushed glam to a more daring level with his seminal work The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars in 1972.

That was the year glam seized the U.K. It's no surprise that the trend first took hold there instead of America. Not only did the British lack the definitions of masculinity rooted in America's cowboy culture, they boasted a smaller, trendier, more pop-saturated media, allowing their crazes to fester faster.

But only in media-saturated America would a glitter-style icon arise from real life rather than showbiz--Lance Loud, the gay son of the Loud family of Santa Barbara, Calif., who were the subjects of PBS's landmark 1973 documentary series An American Family. While his parents got divorced in full view of the public, Lance lazed around New York City's Chelsea Hotel in the company of obvious homosexuals. A role model was born!

Lance seemed the ultimate figure of freedom to an incubating gay boy of 15 suffocating in the suburbs. To cement my identification, Lance's record collection, featured on the show's sound track, seemed always to include the latest glitter music from London. Even those who expressed horror tuned in often enough to make the show a smash.

Similarly, even those resistant to the larger glitter trend couldn't deny its role as the era's cutting-edge sound. It gave rock and roll its balls back. Contradictions in the music abounded: Bowie's "Rebel Rebel" floated lyrics like "Got your mother in a whirl / She's not sure if you're a boy or a girl" over the most virile rock riffs since those in "Jumpin' Jack Flash...."

By 1974 performers from every genre--save that last bastion of butchness, Southern rock--had to apply some blush to stay current. Within this ever-broadening glam world, however, actual homosexuality remained veiled. In the mix of friends making up my glitter coterie, I was the only one who was gay (and the only one who knew I was gay). My situation mirrored the drama existing within one of the new glam bands of 1974: Queen. It used to amaze me that [gay] singer-front man Freddie Mercury could come flouncing to the front of the stage and address all the hard young boys in the crowd as "my little bathing beauties" and get away with it! He was protected by the band's music; the harder you banged your guitars, the more you could camouflage bent desires....

By 1975 glitter's days as rock's cutting edge were numbered. Soon its covertly gay concerns were overshadowed by a more direct form: disco. Yet the fading of glitter hardly halted rock's fascination with gender-fuck. By the '80s, more forthright gay images came along. While "outrageous" stars like Boy George and Pet Shop Boys didn't literally "come out" at fast, any gay kid could tell they weren't just pretending like the earlier crew.

In the '90s, the flirty old tease of sexual ambiguity transformed into a kind of wan sexual ambivalence from artists like Michael Stipe of R.E.M. and Kurt Cobain. At the same time, the campy shock value of Alice Cooper's glam coarsened into the creepy violence of Marilyn Manson's goth. The humor and adventure of the '70s has turned to self-righteousness or depression today.

No matter. Crucial changes in gay life have wound up making rock's sexual critiques more useful to straight listeners than to gay ones. Real gay people are coming out in full view of the media like never before. Many kinds of pop stars can speak their love's name and suffer no material consequences, from Elton John to k.d. lang.

Unlike the teens of the '70s, today's kids no longer need rely on older straight stars to serve as mock role models. Current queer kids can see handsome, young openly gay men each night on The Real World.

Yet modern kids lack what I had. They can't call on glitter's zone of ambiguity that defended me against my own fears and sheltered me from the world's judgment. I'm sure gay kids still have to suffer many of the same old internal fears and external hostilities. Only now, in a less naive world, they have to face the truth sooner. Shorn of glitter's use as a cunning decoy, modern kids lose a whole world of freedom that made the style such a gift to my generation of the stumbling young.

"The Androgynous Mirror" appears in the forthcoming Rolling Stone: The '70s, edited by Ashley Kahn, Holly George-Warren, and Shawn Dahl, to be published in October 1998 by Rolling Stone Press/Little, Brown and Company.