Streets of Philadelphia: When Bruce Springsteen became an LGBTQ ally
Bruce Springsteen rocked the music world 30 years ago — and he didn’t use his guitar.
Instead, his song — the synthesizer and hip-hop drum loop ballad “Streets of Philadelphia, “from the movie “Philadelphia” — broke ground for rock ’n’ roll allyship of the LGBTQ community, and for those battling HIV and AIDS.
The movie “Philadelphia,” starring Tom Hanks and Denzel Washington, premiered on Dec. 14, 1993. “Streets of Philadelphia” would go on to win an Academy Award for Best Original Song in 1994.
“When you think about how much progress has been made over the last 30 years in combating discrimination and the stigmatization of people living with HIV, it is powerful to think about Bruce’s humanity and lyrics that capture the emotional journey of those facing these challenges in the earlier days of the AIDS epidemic,” said Christian Fuscarino, executive director of the Asbury Park-based Garden State Equality.
The first diagnosed cases of AIDS were in 1981, but often in the media, and the Reagan administration, it was derisively referred to as a gay plague, dismissed as an affliction to an outlier community.
A majority of its victims at the onset were gay males, but its specter grew to include heterosexual men, as well as women and children, from across the country and around the world. Overall, about 40 million people have died from AIDS-related illnesses since the start of the epidemic, according to UNAIDS.
Elizabeth Taylor and Hollywood were among the first non-LGBT public voices to address the crisis. The death of actor Rock Hudson in 1985 put a face on AIDS for the mainstream. It was a face that was often wan and pallid as AIDS ravaged the body. Magic Johnson’s admission that he was HIV-positive in 1991 added a new dimension to the public perception of the disease.
Through the ‘80s and early ‘90s, the American rock and hip-hop world was largely silent about AIDS. In some quarters, performers were hostile to its
victims and the LGBT community. In 1989, Sebastian Bach, then the frontman for the Jersey band Skid Row, wore a T-shirt with the phrase “AIDS Kills F--Dead” on stage. He later expressed remorse for the act and raised funds for the cause on Broadway.
Director Jonathan Demme, a Baldwin, New York, native, had just won an Academy Award for “Silence of the Lambs” and he was inspired to make a film on the AIDS crisis. Demme’s close friend, Spanish illustrator Juan Suárez Botas, had been diagnosed with AIDS, giving Demme a close frame of reference, according to Smithsonian Magazine.
Demme called Springsteen to ask if he’d write a rock song for the film.
“I spent a day or so trying to accommodate, but the lyrics that I had seemed to resist being put to rock music,” said Springsteen in his “Born to Run” memoir. “I began to fiddle with the synthesizer, playing over a light hip-hop beat I programmed on the drum machine. As soon as I slowed the rhythm down over some basic minor chords, the lyrics fell into place and the voice I was looking for came forward.”
The lyrics, written in the first person, fatalistically tells of physically wasting away, much in the way people with AIDS did without modern medical treatment. The song aligned with the movie, in which Hanks played a lawyer who was fired from his Philadelphia law firm for being gay and living with AIDS. Washington played his initially reluctant lawyer who helps him sue his former firm.
The movie and the song “put a human face on an issue that might otherwise prove abstract for people who weren’t personally connected with it,” said David Masciotra, author of “Working on a Dream: The Progressive Political Vision of Bruce Springsteen” and a frequent contributor to Salon.com. “I think his position as an avatar of allAmerican traditional masculinity allowed that message to register and resonate with a certain audience in a way that it might have not have resonated if Elton John or George Michael wrote and performed a similar song.”
Springsteen’s mega-smash “Born in the U.S.A.” album and tour took place less than 10 years before the release of “Streets of Philadelphia.” The contrast couldn’t have been starker. The image of Springsteen in popular culture at the time was the broad-shouldered rocker, often pictured with an American flag.
“To have Bruce Springsteen, who possessed such an all-American image of what we would have thought of then traditional, conventional masculinity, write and perform the song carried a great deal of cultural and political weight,” Masciotra said. “He followed the song by giving an interview to (the LGBTQ magazine) the Advocate, (which) featured it as its cover story.”
Fellow Jerseyan Whitney Houston presented Springsteen with his Oscar at the Academy Awards.
Music can “take the edge off of fear and allow us to recognize each other through our veils of differences,” said Springsteen in his acceptance speech.
It was a bold moment, but those following Springsteen’s career closely knew that the Boss’ musical world was sometimes a not so binary place. “Mary Queen of Arkansas,” from Springsteen’s debut album “Greeting from Asbury Park, N.J.,” and “Wild Billy’s Circus Story,” from “The Wild, the Innocent & the E Street Shuffle,” both have circus themes — and both can be interpreted as involving same-sex relationships.
The 1988 video for the “Tunnel of Love” romantic ballad featured samesex as well as male-female couples.
“‘Backstreets’ is one of his great songs that could very easily be a romance about two young gay men hiding out in the backstreets,” Masciotra said. “The object of affection of that song is named Terry, which is a unisex name, and there are lyrical references on that song to having to run when the cops appear. Why are they hiding in the backstreets when they are affectionate to each other?”
“Backstreets,” from 1975’s “Born to Run,” has been featured of the E Street Band’s current tour. Springsteen dedicates the song to the late George Theiss of Freehold, who was Springsteen’s bandmate in the ‘60s era Freehold group the Castiles.
On the band’s 2016 tour, Springsteen and the E Street Band canceled their April 10, 2016, concert in North Carolina to protest the passage of the state’s Public Facilities Privacy and Security Act, also known as the “bathroom bill.”
It was a very public show of support for the LGBT community of North Carolina and beyond. Pearl Jam, Ringo Starr, Demi Lovato and Nick Jonas, and Ani DiFranco subsequently canceled North Carolina shows after Springsteen’s stand. The NCAA stated that it would not allow the state to host college basketball championship games unless the law was changed.
“The law also attacks the rights of LGBT citizens to sue when their human rights are violated in the workplace. No other group of North Carolinians faces such a burden,” Springsteen said in a statement on April 8, 2016, announcing the cancellation of the North Carolina show. “To my mind, it’s an attempt by people who cannot stand the progress our country has made in recognizing the human rights of all of our citizens to overturn that progress.”
The bathroom bill was eventually overturned.
“Asbury Park and New Jersey are known for its rich diversity and acceptance,” said Fuscarino of Garden State Equality, and Bruce’s unwavering commitment to social issues throughout his career embodies the values that we hold dear as a united New Jersey community. Bruce continues to be the straight ally the LGBT community deserves.”
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