The Beatles: A feminist, LGBTQ+ success story
You don’t just become the biggest band in the world without a leg-up. For The Beatles, the hoist to lofty heights came from a billowing feminist and LGBTQ+ support network. In fact, the very first place that the band found success was Hamburg. The Saint Pauli district that they called home was a bohemian hive “full of transvestites” as George Harrison put it. This world of disenfranchised outsiders looking for thrills and a place to embrace their own identity took the fun little band to heart.
It was amid this aura of acceptance and carefree liberation that The Beatles learned to cut loose. “Hamburg was really like our apprenticeship,” Harrison would later reflect, “learning to play in front of people.” So, they returned to Liverpool with a wellspring of enthusiasm under their belt and looked to transport the liberated progression of Saint Pauli to the cobbled corner of The Cavern Club.
The club in question was made famous in the area, in part, because of a legendary performance by Sister Rosetta Tharpe, the bisexual blues star who invented rock ‘n’ roll guitar playing with her individualistic sliding style. Thereafter, the venue became a hub for the alternative beat scene in Liverpool and a community of kids looking to transact their lives rather differently from the stuffy status quo.
However, for many, mainly men, the status quo was working. Thus, the progressive band were rather squeezed out of the mainstream, to begin with. When Derek Taylor, the man who would eventually become their ingenious press officer, was assigned to write a review on The Beatles, his editors at the Daily Express were pushing the prevalent angle of slating them as a vapid teen fad. This is a slander that he couldn’t bring himself to partake in.
He was enamoured not only by the band but by the fresh atmosphere surrounding them. This wasn’t just fellows nodding appreciatively in a jazz club. This was youngsters truly having a great time. He recognised the vitality of this and its potential to shake the stilted system to its core. These screaming girls and the surge of liberation they embodied were not going to go away because of the stuffy print by the bourgeoisie.
These girls were onto something—something that tessellated with the forthcoming zeitgeist and offered change. This was a movement surely set to gain more traction, and the screaming fans were ahead of the curve on this front, beckoning it forward, willing the young lads towards success. These girls were tastemakers outdoing the patriarchal position of the cultural press and finally cherishing something that they could call their own.
Beatlemania was now born, and there was one man ushering it into place: the band’s homosexual manager Brian Epstein. As their manager, Epstein crafted the now-iconic look for the ‘Fab Four’ and allowed them to embrace the essential ‘fun’ that was making them the premiere entertainers of the day. All the while, he was open about his sexuality with the band during an era when homosexuality was still illegal in the UK. As the band have stated many times over the years, his defiance on this front was a trailblazing force that helped them to become more sagacious with their music and offer a beacon to the disenfranchised.
Along this path, they would once again be helped by a feminist hand in the form of Yoko Ono. Her avant-garde background instantly had an effect on the band when she met John Lennon in 1966. There is no doubt that their albums became more experimental thereafter. “When Yoko came along, part of her attraction was her avant-garde side, her view of things,” Paul McCartney told David Frost in 2012. “So, she showed him another way to be, which was very attractive to him.”
This influence drove them during a period when they could’ve simply hung up their boots. “She wanted more, do it more, do it double, be more daring, take all your clothes off. She always pushed him, which he liked. Nobody had ever pushed him. Nobody had ever pushed him like that. We all thought we were far-out boys, but we kind of understood that we’d never get quite that far out,” McCartney said of the progressive angle she brought to the band moving forward, and liberal feminism was certainly one agenda she tried to instil along with it. Suddenly Rubber Souls’ potentially troubling lyrics were a thing of the past.
Alas, there have been many other feminists and LBTGQ+ figures that aided their journey. These are merely the vital few that drove them to the place they now hold in culture. Because while the band might have consisted of four straight males, the beauty of the place they now hold in culture is that they are so much more than just a band.
After all, there have been other truly great bands, other pioneering artists and movements, and other beloved cultural zeniths. However, since a particularly lazy cave-dweller excused themselves from the hunt to scribble on a wall, and this thing we call art began, nothing has come remotely close to the sheer size, vigour and profundity of The Beatles’ progressive enterprise.
And while there are many bands worth celebrating where the feminism and LGBTQ+ involved are more apparent on the surface, it seems pertinent to always remember that the lofty transcendent sensation of The Beatles doesn’t just happen because you’re a great band or even the best band, for that matter. I mean, what even is a superlative like ‘the best’ in something as subjective as art? No, the buzz of Beatlemania, the LGBTQ+ scene that spawned it and the homosexual Svengali behind it all equated to a viral frenzy that put ‘The Fab Four’ on a pedestal, and its joyous buzz still subsumes us to this day.
As the very imperfect John Lennon once put it: “As usual, there is a great woman behind every idiot.”
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