Seduced and Abandoned

Seduced and Abandoned examines the different ways that gay men use pop music, both as producers and consumers, and how, in turn, pop uses gay men. Richard Smith asks what role culture plays in shaping identity, and why pop continues to thrill gay men even though it so often lets them down. These 40 essays and interviews look at how performers, from The Kinks' Ray Davies to Gene's Martin Rossiter, have used pop as a platform to explore and articulate, conform to or contest notions of sexuality and gender. Some of these pieces are love letters (Nirvana, Take That); others hate mail (Erasure, Happy Mondays). Some figures keep reappearing - Madonna, Morrissey, Pet Shop Boys, 'Ziggy Stardust' and Suede; as do certain themes - AIDS, 'ambisexuality', camp, 'homosexualness', unmanliness, why dance music means so much to gay men though rock often says more about their lives, and how we read the stars and our desire to 'know' them.

Beyond its central premise, the book can be read through the connected lenses of LGBTQ+, Nonfiction. Those themes offer useful points of attention as the characters, ideas, or world develop, especially where the book complicates the expectations of its primary category.