Most of you are probably familiar with the Kinks song Lola, which along with Lou Reed's Walk On The Wild Side helped bring the transgendered into the public consciousness in the early 1970's (excuse the "academic asswipese" tone here, this is just one-draft filler since I didn't wanna just post the song by itself...)

There have always been hints of a gay and t.g. themes in the Kinks' music ("Is she big is she small, is she a she at all, who's on my party line*?", or that girl singer who drops from a lovely soprano into an obviously male singing voice (Surprise!!!) in the video of their musical Preservation Act...); but Lola was an AM radio hit, and groundbreaking in the tale it told: An unworldly young man meets a woman and in the course of falling for her discovers she's not genetically female. There's humor in it (she's apparently strong enough to pick him up and put him on her knee!) but rather than making Lola an object of derision it's actually quite sweet. In his moment of panic he pushes her away and heads for the door, but doesn't even get that far before realizing that he loves and accepts Lola. A pretty right-on song for its day, or any day...

Fewer people have heard of the Kink's other transgender-themed song, which appeared on the album MISFITS later in the 70's. It's wasn't as catchy, more of a ballad than a rock and roll tune (I don't have any info on it, I'm transcribing these lyrics from a cassette copy of the vinyl album I sold years ago, but I assume it was written by Ray Davies. Sure sounds like one of his...), and never made the music charts that I know of. It's about a transvestive and his wife, telling a tale not unlike many you'll find here at BCTS, and is called:

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HE'S OUT OF THE WARDROBE

Has anybody here seen a chick called Dick
He looks really burly but he's really hip,
He's six feet tall and his arms are all brown and hairy.
He married Betty Lou back in '65
when you had to be butch to survive,
But lately he's been lookin' at his wife with mixed emotion...

You see, he's not a commonplace closet queen
He shouldn't be hidden, he should be seen...
'Cause when he puts on that dress he looks like a princess.

Well the day he came out of the wardrobe Betty Lou got quite a surprise,
She didn't know whether she should get angry or not bat an eye.
She really couldn't call up her Mama,
Mama would positively die,
Should she go upstairs, should she try to get a trial separation?

You see, he's not a faggot as you might suppose
He just feels restricted in conventional clothes...
'Cause when he puts on that dress, he feels like a princess.

He's not a dandy, he's only living out a fantasy;
He's not a pansy, he's only being what he wants to be;
Now his life is rearranged, and he's grateful for the change-
He's out of the wardrobe and now he's got no regrets.

Betty Lou didn't know what to do at first
But she's learning to cope at last,
She got the best of both worlds and she's really in a state of elation.
She says that it helps our relationship,
Says a change is as good as a rest,
And their friends are finally comin' round to their way of thinking...

She wears the trousers and smokes a pipe,
He does the dishes, she helps him wipe...
'Cause when he puts on that dress he looks like a princess.

He's out of the wardrobe and he's feelin' alright,
He's out of the wardrobe and he's feelin' satisfied.
Now it's farewell to the past, his secret's out at last
He's out of the wardrobe, and now he's got no regrets.
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I hope you found this worth the time it took you to read it. I thought it was worth a blog anyway, and had been meaning to post this for a while now. I'm back on the internet. Huzzah!
~~~hugs all, Laika

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[* Remember party lines? This was something phone providers used to do that mercifully was phased out several decades ago (at least where I've lived) as the technology improved. You'd pick up your phone and hear someone talking, and if you were sneaky and uncouth enough you could actually listen in on your neighbor's conversation, but most people just quietly hung up and then swore, because you couldn't make your own call until your party line partner had finished theirs. I think there were usually 3 or 4 households on a party line, so it could get pretty annoying...]

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