Debbie Harry’s strange encounter with David Bowie: “Can I fuck you?”
At the CBGBs, Debbie Harry never once tried to be something she wasn’t. “I was always sort of the pop tart,” she recently said, celebrating her own femininity as the root of her authenticity.
This kind of self-assurance also meant she never really felt the need to answer to anybody. Though a lot of this could be pinned down to toxic masculinity, expectations under the male gaze, and Harry’s desire to ignore the rules about fronting a band set by audiences who only turned up for one thing. As she said in 1976, “Rock and roll is a real masculine business and I think it’s time girls did something in it.”
But that didn’t mean shunning her own heroes. Harry’d looked up to figures like Mick Jagger when crafting her own stage presence, taking notes on maintaining a high energy on stage and how to keep an audience engaged with the physicalities of the performance, and how becoming someone who seemed somewhat contortionist when it came to gender and expectations wasn’t a means to alienate audiences but to attract them.
As Chris Stein once said, Harry’s appeal wasn’t to push female fans away but to draw them in and show them that her so-called “sex-appeal” – whatever that means – was a lot like Jagger’s in the sense that it made sense because it attracted you, regardless of who you were, or what you thought you wanted in the dynamics of another band, or in the mannerisms of a frontman or frontwoman. It was a magnetism you couldn’t describe or understand, but it worked because it evoked an emotional reaction.
But this ability, the one that made Harry seem constantly poised no matter what, also stemmed from the tragic elements of her own story, and the surface-level implications she’d come across in almost everybody she met. A seemingly harmless encounter back then might be seen as deeply troubling today, but if we’re to focus only on Harry’s character and how she handled certain situations, it speaks to a thick-skinned leader who didn’t have time to entertain anybody else’s oddities.
At least, this is the sense you get when looking at the times she crossed paths with David Bowie. Aside from the one famous incident that most revert to when discussing the topic, their conversation also turned sexually suggestive, though Harry was quick to shut it down with a confident remark he most certainly wasn’t expecting.
In a recent interview with Vanity Fair, Harry recalled the moment Bowie asked “Can I fuck you?”, to which she replied, “I don’t know, can you?”
“Yes, [I said that],” she said. “I was such a smartass. I regretted saying that, because he was such a wonderful artist and a wonderful person. I was just being punk; I worked very hard at being punk. I answered correctly. He’s British and [I thought] British people have more control and knowledge of proper English.”
It seems that the acts that others were apparently “notorious” for didn’t really affect the singer all that much, probably because there was a sort of familiarity there that also came with being a woman in an all-male band. A means for survival, if you will, even if it doesn’t make it OK. Even if it becomes confused with an otherwise genius who has respect from all over: “He’s one of the great men that I admire in the music world, clearly a genius.”
