Smith was heterosexual, but her perceived lack of conventional feminine beauty had prompted her to play up her tomboy side to an extreme degree—so much so that early on she had attracted the amorous attentions of the poet Allen Ginsberg, who mistook her for a fetching young man. Smith’s deliberately ambiguous image, and her determination to define herself by her own rules, would almost certainly have struck a chord with the teenaged Stipe, who was then in the process of working out his own sexual identity.
When asked in 2011 by journalist Sean O’Hagan if he had been troubled by his sexuality while growing up, the singer claimed, “Not troubled, no.”
Not confused either. But I just felt there wasn’t a place for me . . . I never identified with [the term] “gay,” that’s all. I will always honor anyone who had to make a different choice, then stand by them, and I would hope that honor would extend to me and my choices as well. I’m talking about how one chooses to define oneself, the community within which one feels comfortable.
These words were spoken with the advantage of 36 years of hindsight. It is difficult to believe that the 15-year-old Georgia-born Stipe was really so serene about his nascent sexuality, when virtually every other young person throughout history has, at one point or another, been troubled and/or frightened by the sudden onset of sexual desire that comes with puberty. But perhaps we’re getting overly caught up in semantics here. Stipe’s frustration at there not having been any place for him sounds an awful lot like what his interviewer probably meant by “troubled,” whether Stipe wants to use that term or not.
One key to Stipe’s apparent sereneness on this subject may lie in his discovery, in eighth grade, of the novel Dhalgren by science fiction author Samuel R. Delany. “Where I learned,” Stipe later told the New York Times, “that in the future you could have unbridled sci-fi sex with every man and woman within reach, without guilt, fear or weirdness, and have great end-of-times adventures.” Indeed. The sexual encounters depicted in Dhalgren are varied and explicit, and take place in a post-apocalyptic city in which traditional authority has vanished, along with its attendant social mores—a handy metaphor for the post-revolutionary society wished for by ’60s radicals. To be fair, Delany does not shy away from the inevitable violence and chaos that would accompany such a scenario, and the novel is surely tempered by its author’s observation of the hippie movement’s decline in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Even so, there is a giddy exhilaration to its depiction of unconstrained sexual possibilities.
It is unclear if Stipe learned anything about Delany’s personal life after discovering this book, but the parallels in the two men’s approaches to sexual identity are striking. Like Stipe, Delany came to accept his sexuality in adolescence, but nevertheless went on to have a long-term relationship with a woman (as Stipe would do a number of times). In adulthood, both remained wary of labels and hard-and-fast definitions of something so malleable as sexuality. While generally homosexual in orientation, both could be strongly attracted to kindred spirits of the opposite gender. Whether or not Stipe knew any of this, Dhalgren itself—which was a sort of coming-out for this side of Delany—would surely have been a powerful confidence booster at such a crucial age.
One thing is clear: attempting to shoehorn Stipe’s early predilections into separate categories of “gay” or “straight” is an exercise in futility. Stipe has said as much in interviews, time and time again, though when he first trotted out this line of thinking in the 1990s, many journalists and observers concluded that he was simply obfuscating because he didn’t want to declare that he was gay. That is a view I also held until I began researching this book. Mike Doskocil’s recollection of Stipe during the Rocky Horror days seems to further muddy the waters. Or, looked at another way, perhaps it clarifies them. “I remember that, at least to me, he seemed like he really wanted to be quite the player,” Doskocil says.
Come on, you walk around with a journal under your arm, especially in Missouri in 1978, somebody is going to ask you what the hell it is. And he was always ready, willing, and able to break it open for any piece of trim. I remember that myself and my friends that I spoke to, that I hung out with, we looked at Michael Stipe as a bit of a weirdo, because he didn’t seem to ever score [laughs]. We were all getting hand jobs out back behind our VW bugs, and he never seemed to close the deal. He just didn’t seem to be very successful at it. I remember thinking, “Boy, that guy is just never going to get laid.” He needed to come up with something new, because his “Will Work for Pussy” sign just wasn’t happening.
Perhaps the young seeker found, in the form of Patti Smith, a role model and a perceived kindred spirit—someone who provided an alternative to the confusing and maddening rituals of gender expression, teen courtship, and sex he saw all around him. Even as Stipe did his best to conform to the parameters of the world he found himself in, the strength that this newfound identification gave him would carry him through his bewildering first few years in the public eye.
No discussion of Michael Stipe’s origins would be complete without an acknowledgment of his unusual speaking voice. We have no way of knowing what he sounded like pre-adolescence: whether he engaged his family and friends with a full dynamic range or employed a modulated squeak. We do know that from puberty until fairly recently he addressed the world in a deep, unvarying monotone: a flat tire of a voice, not unpleasant in its sonorousness, but difficult for the listener to latch onto.(6) It was as if he reserved all of his emotion and dynamics for his singing voice, which is a different story entirely. His singing would evolve over time, but on R.E.M.’s earliest recordings the Patti Smith elements were firmly in place, to be showcased or modulated depending on the occasion. Yelps. Strange throat noises. Guttural grunts. An occasional dropping of consonants following an o (more becomes moe, etc.) He emphasized what he called the “acid e”: an elongation and overemphasis on that vowel (“What noisy cats are weeeeeeeeee...”), a technique that had more in common with the country and bluegrass he’d heard in his youth than with the punk and garage rock he was listening to in the late ’70s. This vocal quirk alone set him apart from just about every other rock singer in his age group.
It is possible that the mumbling style that would become his vocal signature initially served a purely utilitarian purpose. Stipe began his musical career singing in cover bands and often had difficulty remembering other people’s (and, later, his own) lyrics. The mumble, then, may have come about so he could fake his way through some of these songs, wrapping a hodgepodge of vowels and consonants in the cloak of the song’s melody and just barreling through. That’s certainly what he did when R.E.M. performed covers, and there’s no reason to presume that the practice didn’t begin earlier.
Gangster, the Athens-based band Stipe joined shortly after his family left Illinois and moved back to Georgia in 1979, was the brainchild of Derek Nunally, a local