Mighty Real

“An excellent history of the queer world’s countless music scenes.”
—Emma Alpern, Vulture

“An essential book for this moment.”
—Rob Sheffield

The definitive history of LGBTQ music, from Stonewall to RuPaul, and its impact on culture and American life

From the underground dancefloors of the Seventies to the global charts of the Nineties, LGBTQ artists and audiences shaped music’s sound, style, and spirit. In Mighty Real, veteran journalist Barry Walters chronicles its LGBTQ history from the Velvet Underground to the 21st century’s dawn as he honors the artists who redefined gender, defied tradition, and dared to challenge sexual norms with the help of a record business that wasn’t as straight as commonly believed.

Drawing on his decades as a New York- and San Francisco-based music critic, Walters examines how LGBTQ musicians, music industry executives, and fans reshaped the mainstream. He connects the dots between David Bowie’s dazzling reinventions, Grace Jones’s androgynous glamor, Prince’s boundary-shattering sexuality, and the radical candor of the Indigo Girls to prove they’re all doing the same thing: fighting oppression.

With exuberance, insight, and encyclopedic knowledge, Walters brings to life the songs and society that filled dancefloors, bedrooms, and streets as he uncovers yesteryear’s coded LGBTQ messages that paved the way for today’s unabashedly queer hits. Mighty Real is a masterful love letter to the music that liberated generations, and it’s written in a page-turning, personal way that blurs distinctions between chronicle and memoir. This is the rare and revolutionary music history told to help you laugh, cry, and then rally against lingering inequality.

Barry Walters has spent 40 years documenting the intersection of mainstream and LGBTQ culture. He began his career at The Village Voice — where he came out publicly in a 1986 Pet Shop Boys review — before becoming a fixture at Spin and Rolling Stone. In 1992, Walters’ work at the San Francisco Examiner made him the first critic to receive an award from The National Gay and Lesbian Journalists Association. Throughout the Nineties, he was The Advocate’s music columnist before a decade’s worth of writing at Out. Along the way, he’s regularly appeared in Entertainment Weekly, NPR, Pitchfork, and other media mainstays. Love Me Like You Should: The Brave and Bold Sylvester, a 2020 mini-documentary he wrote and co-produced for Amazon Music, won a Clio Award.