I’m pretty sure I have it on cassette, somewhere in my big plastic tub o’ tapes.
Thanks anyway!
But your post was the most unlesbionic of them all!
:o
I seem to remember Dr Demento playing some novelty songs concerning sexual orientation. Dirty Deeds, Done With Sheep readily comes to mind, but what other songs were in the mix?
How is “Lola” about gay male action?
To continue the “Lola” hijack:
There’s at least one other possible interpretation: that the narrator is glad he’s a man, and he is also glad that Lola is a man.
The narrator does make a point of telling us that he’s “never, ever kissed a woman before”, and when Lola first invites him to come home with her he pushes her aside and starts to walk away. I think this is usually taken to mean that the narrator is young and inexperienced, but it’s also possible that (whether or not he realizes this before meeting Lola) the narrator prefers men.
How is it not? I mean, maybe “action” is the wrong word, if you take it to mean actual sexual intercourse, but on the most plausible interpretation, the song is about a man dancing with another man, and discovering that he likes it. I have always taken it to be implicit that the (male, but confessedly not very masculine) narrator ends up in a relationship with Lola (who is, of course, a man in drag). Even most of the alternative interpretive possibilities still imply that there is something or other pretty darn gay going on.
ETA: Plus what Lamia said. But note also, that after he pushes “her” away, he falls to the floor, and gets to his knees looking at “her”.
There are a lot of layers in “Lola”'s lyrics, making any definitive interpretation dicey.
Earlier, the narrator says he “almost fell” for Lola, implying that in the end, he didn’t.
And after pushing Lola away, he says they looked at each other, and then immediately says “That’s the way that I want it to stay, and always want it to be that way,” which implies he doesn’t want the relationship to go any further than this.
We also can’t be sure that events are related in the song in strict chronological order, either, so although the line “Dear boy, I’m gonna make you a man” comes near the end, she could have said this at an earlier juncture, and it could have been one of the factors that ultimately led the narrator to reject “her.”
Again, I’m saying the lyrics as written allow for multiple outcomes, all of them plausible, but none that are unequivocally pointed to.
I not have the album on vinyl, but have a freebie demo copy that they sent out to record stores (remember them?) I was working for one when the album was released. It got pretty heavy play in our store for quite a bit.
I’d assumed Lola was a transgender woman. I thought that was implied in the song much more than her being a gay man in drag.
It can go either way.
Yeah, I guess it’s vague enough I simply applied my own bias.
If transgender women (in any sense different from gay biological males who liked to dress in women’s clothing) existed at all in 1970, there certainly wasn’t much public awareness of them. If they were known about at all, they were thought of as very rare anomalies. I am pretty confident that Ray was thinking about a gay man in drag, and and very confident that that is what nearly all of his listeners (of whom I was one, at the time) took him to be singing about.
If they existed at all in 1970? Good grief…yes we did, actually. We’ve existed for millennia, and became a household word after Christine Jorgensen landed in New York in 1953. The mid/late 1960’s was the start of a second wave of transsexual awareness when Benjamin published his magnum opus and US and UK surgeons started performing SRS operations in quantity. Transsexual model and socialite April Ashley wrote in either her first or second autobiography that she did hang out with Ray and Dave Davies in the late 1960’s, and *implies * (Ashley always plays it cagey to make herself more mysterious) she slept with one of them, although she does specifically note that she was **not **the inspiration for the song “Lola.”
Like I said, I’m probably applying my personal bias to it.
I agree with Una.
We could look at the lyrics meaning anything our own bias gives them. But to make a blanket statement about transgendered people not existing in 1970 is quite odd. Even as a child in the '60s, I knew of those who I later learned were transgendered.
I fear we may have derailed the thread, tho. My apologies for my part.
I said “if”, and although I do not doubt that there have been people who wished they were the opposite gender for centuries, I am reasonably confident that for many of them to do much about it (beyond dressing up) is a quite recent trend, and one that only in its very early stages by 1970. (When I wrote my post I spent some time trying, but failing, to recall the name April Ashley. But the point I was going to make about her was that, at the time, she was considered very much anomalous, very much a “one off”, even by people with very “progressive” sexual attitudes for the time. Germaine Greer, as I recall, strongly disapproved of Ms. Ashley.)
Anyway, my main point was that, unlike today, there was very little public awareness of transsexuals in 1970. Most people either had no idea that they existed at all, or thought that there was about one (April Ashley) in the entire world. There really wasn’t much discussion about them, whereas there was a lot of discussion about male homosexuality (which had only been decriminalized in Britain a couple of years before the song appeared). Even if (if) Ray was himself very aware of transsexuals, few of the people who made the song a hit, who bought it and enjoyed it, were. Given that the song makes perfectly good sense if you take it to be about a “mere” homosexual transvestite, assuming otherwise seems otiose and extravagant. The song is not really even about Lola herself. It is about the singer-narrator’s response to her, and, as I read it, about him coming to realize and accept his own homosexuality. Making Lola an actual trans-woman would actually blunt that point (“I’m glad I’m a man and so’s Lola.” If Lola is a trans-woman, she is not a man, right?)
I agree with njtt’s overall point (even as I continue to maintain that there is no one, absolute and irrefutable interpretation of “Lola”'s lyrics).
I have to confess to never having heard of April Ashley, although the case of Christine Jorgensen was known to us in the States in the 1960s. But beyond this one instance, nothing. So transsexuals were exceedingly rare at least as far as public awareness was concerned.
We are the opposite gender, just not the opposite sex. Until surgery.
I don’t even know what your point is with Ashley; my point was that she specifically claimed to have hung out with Ray and Dave Davies prior to Lola having been written. But I also admitted she also could be mistaken or lying, because, well, that’s what she does.
I don’t know what Germaine Greer’s approval or otherwise has to do with anything. She’s not even a member of the community; she’s just an old feminist activist from the era of 2nd-wave feminist thought.
You’re wrong. Jorgensen was 1953, and was so well-known in the early 1970’s that Spiro Agnew used her as a vehicle for a joke about a fellow Republican opponent.
Look, I admitting it could go either way - Lola could have been either transgender or a crossdresser. ways. But please don’t try to educate me on trans issues; I do research on this subject professionally almost every single day.
I’m done here.
Does this thread have room for closeted lesbians like Janis Ian and Laura Nyro who wrote songs about how guys are rotten as lovers?
The derailment is more interesting than my OP. 
I think back when Lola was written and popular the vast majority of the straight community would not have made distinctions between cross dressers, transgendered or whatever. You were either straight acting heterosexual or you were a “homo” regardless of what gender you were attracted to. Considering the diversity of human sexuality would be too difficult, easier to divide everyone into Us and Them.
I know people here in this conservative area that still think this way.
There are also a number of songs by lesbian or bisexual songwriters that are addressed to a “you”, “baby”, etc., whose gender is never specified. When Melissa Etheridge wrote “Bring Me Some Water” (1988) she presumably had a woman in mind, but this isn’t explicit in the lyrics.