- The Observer, Sunday 12 November 2006
Boyzone were the biggest boy band in Britain - six number ones, 10 million albums, sold-out arena tours with a not a dry seat in the house - and Stephen Gately was going out with Spice Girl Emma Bunton. Or was it one of Eternal? No, it was Mandy Smith, that teenager once married to Bill 'Sticky Fingers' Wyman ...
Ask him directly who he fancied, and Gately would reply with airy mentions of Madonna or Meg Ryan or Demi Moore. Even when it was clear that these were actually 'girls that I really admired, talent-wise,' rather than the stuff of celeb-on-celeb fantasy, no one listened too closely. 'I never lied,' says Gately. But equally, no one questioned too closely either.
The Boyzone star was - whisper it - gay. He had confided in his bandmates five months after the line-up had been assembled by svengali Louis Walsh in 1993; they told him 'we already knew'. The singer thinks Walsh must have known from the outset, too. 'I don't see myself as really camp or flamboyant but I'm sure they all knew because I didn't have girlfriends, I was very secretive, kept to myself in terms of emotions. I was very closed off.'
It was an open secret among the pop press, too. 'Everybody knew that Stephen was gay,' says Peter Loraine, former editor of Top of the Pops magazine. 'One time in an interview, we asked them what they'd been doing at the weekend. They'd been car racing or at the pub getting hammered - but Stephen had been reading his horoscopes and getting into crystals.'
So everyone knew. Except the fans. All those screaming girlies bedazzled by those smilin' Irish eyes, who saved up their pocket money to buy each new record by the Dublin five-piece? They were being peddled a lie. Yeah, that shifty Gately. Probably fancied the girlie-fans' brothers more. Right. That's it. We're not buying Boyzone records any more.
Such, at least, was the prevailing view in an industry still little used to dealing with gay pop stars who weren't 'militantly' - or just flamboyantly - queer like Boy George, Jimmy Somerville, Pete Burns or Frankie Goes To Hollywood. In this prelapsarian era of all of seven years ago, if a boy band member were revealed to be homosexual, the very fabric of the pop myth would be rent asunder. The wet dream would die and record sales would tumble.
Little wonder that none of the all-singin', all-dancin' show ponies from A1, Bad Boys Inc, Worlds Apart, 5ive, Another Level, Let Loose, 911, 'NSync, or Westlife had ever come out, despite rumours. If any of those rumours were true, the love that dare not speak its name would turn out to be a pop marketing crisis that could only spell d.i.s.a.s.t.e.r.
Then came the Sun of 16 June 1999. 'Boyzone Stephen: "I'm gay and I'm in love"', screamed the front-page headline. 'Three weeks ago, Boyzone's Stephen Gately asked the Sun to help him come out,' the leader writer explained. Naturally, it wasn't really like that. A security guard on Boyzone's tour had gone to the papers, selling a story that Gately was gay. It was an inevitable development. He had had years of leading a lonely, 'compromised' existence. 'I felt very isolated and I blocked people out 'cause I was scared. I wasn't living my life fully,' the 30-year-old singer and actor now recalls. 'Not that I wanted to go out to gay clubs and bars.' But the singer had, eight months previously, met someone. He was Eloy de Jong, a member of a Dutch boy band called - no sniggering at the back - Caught in the Act.
Caroline McAteer, Boyzone's publicist at the time, says that the relationship caused Gately even more stress. 'They always had to be conscious, particularly on the road, of people seeing them.' Ploys such as checking into hotels separately, five minutes apart, didn't bear much scrutiny. 'Eloy was obviously there, as other band members' wives and girlfriends were there. He was part of the tour party. But anyone outside of the band was going to start looking at it, thinking, well who's that guy?'
The Sun approached McAteer with the security guard's story. Did Gately want to comment? Cue two weeks of nervy discussion between PR, management, record label and pop star. This was uncharted territory for all concerned. The band's label, Polydor, was supportive. But Boyzone were about to release their Greatest Hits, a career and sales landmark. Was the outing of Gately about to overwhelm the promotional campaign, becoming the gay tail that wagged the mass-market dog?
'That was something that was in the back of my mind,' admits Gately, 'Would I be harming the other guys' [in the band's] careers?'
McAteer gave Gately the options as she saw them. 'You can't deny it because you'll be lying, so that's not even an option. You either say, yes, I'm gay, or you say nothing at all. If you say nothing, they're just going to hound you. It's out there now - they'll follow you until they get that picture of you and Eloy, or until someone else sells them the story. It's only gonna be a question of when ... This is going to come out anyway. My advice is: you're better just saying it, and it coming from you. Otherwise it turns into some kind of sordid story.'
Tom Watkins is a veteran manager of pop acts, including Bros, Pet Shop Boys and East 17. He says he dealt 'many times' with having a member of one of his boy bands - not necessarily any menioned here - who was secretly gay.
'I still think, as a gay man myself, it's very difficult at an early stage to know your arse from your elbow and know where you're at sexually,' he says. 'There are a lot of life experiences that have to be undergone before anyone can deal with the problems of coming out in what is still a relatively hostile environment.' Neil Tennant's 'solution', he thinks, was particularly elegant. Asked if he was a gay pop star, Tennant replied: 'No, I'm a pop star that happens to be gay.' This, notes Watkins, 'is a subtle distinction, but it's very relevant.'
But Pet Shop Boys were never a boy band and had more room for sexual manoeuvre. It's hard to imagine George Michael in his Wham! days, for instance, releasing a single called 'Rent'. If he had admitted to his homosexuality 'in the early stages [of our career]', Michael told me in February 2004, 'it would have ruined us, absolutely.'
('I didn't care who was spreading what rumours,' Michael continued. 'I cared when I thought things got really close to the press - you'd hear occasionally that that was happening. But that was all a long time ago. I can't imagine being that afraid of that now.')
In the end, Stephen Gately's coming out went very well indeed. The Sun displayed extraordinary, if melodramatic, sensitivity, letting Gately pre-approve every aspect of the story and calling it 'the most moving showbiz interview you will ever read'. A helpline was established for traumatised fans. But the fans weren't traumatised: they were cool and supportive and, if any anything, even more ardent in their love of Boyzone's blue-eyed baby-face.
Letters came in by the sackload. Gately was voted Smash Hits' Hero of 1999. An avalanche of flowers and messages from his pop peers (Spice Girls and Backstreet Boys) and gay icons (Elton, George) rolled over Gately. 'A massive array of people sending me congratulations,' he says, still a little choked. 'Two years ago, even Sir Ian McKellen came up to me and said well done!'
It was all over the papers, even in America. Gately, conveniently on tour in Italy on the day the story broke - the PR, the pop star and the paper had colluded on the timing of the exclusive, too - woke up in a Milanese hotel room with de Jong to find his story a lead on Sky News.
'We had so many young fans that the press had to deal with it in a sympathetic way,' thinks Gately. 'And partly because they knew that I'm sensitive. I was always friendly with everybody. I knew the press, I had done a lot of interviews - they knew me, and that I wouldn't hurt anybody.'
Crucially, too, Gately had never lied and in this respect, he paved the way for Will Young, who came out in the papers at the moment he won Pop Idol in February 2002. Peter Loraine, who now runs Fascination, a Polydor imprint to which talent show alumni Girls Aloud are signed, views Young and Gately as standard bearers for a new kind of 'out' pop star. 'Neither of them is going, "Hey, I'm a gay role model." They're not having to do anything other than prove they're like everyone else.'
Does anyone care now if a pop star is gay or straight? No one seemed too excited when Mark Feehily from Westlife came out in the Sun in August last year, nor when Lance Bass from Justin Timberlake's old band, 'NSync, declared earlier this summer: 'I'm gay.' For some, it still matters a great deal. Robbie Williams repeatedly jokes about being gay but steady on, he is not, and last year took £200,000 off the People, the Star and Hot Stars for alleging that he had got it on with a bloke in a Manchester nightclub. The first interview of Take That's comeback campaign appears on the cover of the new issue of Attitude magazine. McFly recently got their willies out on the stage of London club institution G.A.Y. And yet, and yet ... old habits, and old prejudices, die hard.
In spring and summer 2004 I spent three months, on and off, in the company of a new boy band called V. I was writing the story of their launch, which was being masterminded by Prestige, the management company that ripped up the boy band rulebook by inventing Busted and McFly: boy bands with guitars! But V would be a more traditional combo - five lads, dancing and harmonising and smiling and winking.
In the run-up to their launch, the V lads had been put up in a des res apartment complex in north London. One day I interviewed each of them in their bedroom, lobbing them starter-questions like: What's your role in the band? Who's the Robbie in V? Have you ever taken drugs? Are you gay?
They all unblinkingly denied the last one. One year later, after the band had split, one of their number, Kevin McDaid, popped up in the papers as Mark from Westlife's boyfriend. Then in August this year, a second member, Aaron Buckingham, contributed a piece to Attitude.
'No one ever made me keep my sexuality a secret,' he wrote. But a friend had recently been expelled from the line-up of a new band 'being put together by a major record label' after admitting he was gay. His manager told him: 'We're sorry but we don't want any gay guys in this band.' Buckingham reported that '[her] suspicions were apparently raised while seeing him dance in what she described as a "camp manner". It's disgusting behaviour like this which made me determined to keep my sexuality a secret ... As it turned out, two future Gatelys managed to slip through the V audition net.'
I ask Kevin McDaid why he lied to me about his sexuality. 'It was a difficult situation,' he says. 'I was in my comfort zone, in my bedroom, but that was the first time I'd been asked that.' In discussions with management and the label he had been given the choice of coming out or not. 'I felt a lot of pressure. People were saying that it wasn't a problem, but they probably would prefer me to not say anything.'
He took the advice of 'professionals' whom he felt knew more than he did about the situation. He was told that 'it might affect the band's success'. Plus, it was a personal matter.
Buckingham, who confided in McDaid that he was gay towards the end of the band's existence one year later, wrote that V were given 'a strict set of rules to abide by. I remember one of those clearly being "no visits to gay clubs".' McDaid ignored this rule. 'One of the managers would say, "You were seen at some gay club last night", and that was a problem.'
With V, a new band starting out on pop's perilous foothills, all the boxes had to be ticked, every opportunity maximised. These were enlightened times ... But why confuse the issue by having a gay member - two gay members - in a brand new boy band, explicitly targeted at young girls?
It was different when Mark Feehily came out. Westlife were already established and he and McDaid had been an item for over a year. 'It was stressful, but not over the top,' says McDaid of that period. But Feehily needed to come clean. 'I was there to hold his hand and stand by him,' says McDaid, now a photographer who shares a London flat with the Irishman. 'There's always going to be few negative comments. But that would be the same about anything - even changing his hair colour! But the support has been fantastic for him.'
Even so, Feehily declined to be interviewed for this story. From a professional point of view this is perhaps understandable: this month, Westlife release The Love Album. And for McDaid and Feehily, the first known/well-known boy band couple, it wasn't all sunshine and roses, literally. After they came out, 'I was waiting for the flowers from Elton and George and they just didn't arrive!' laughs McDaid. 'Maybe we're just not worth it, darling. Or it was so old news.'
Indeed. To paraphrase the slogan popularised by American activists Queer Nation: gay boy band members - they're here, they're queer, get used to it. But Tom Watkins claims this heartening, thoroughly modern sexual accommodation could be tested in the not-too-distant future.
'I happen to know a band at the moment who, it would appear, are going to be very well known. They're an indie band from Scotland. Not only is the lead singer most certainly gay but he likes much older men. Which puts him in another league. I'm thinking, Christ, the rest of the band are great womanisers and he's incredibly handsome - how is he gonna deal with liking fat old men?'
What would be his advice to them?
'Because they're so cheeky this band, and so lively, I would encourage them to come out - he would handle it well.'
Who is it?
'I wouldn't tell you who it is!' Watkins laughs. There are still limits, and there are some secrets that are still not ours to tell.
