David Bowie Was Gay? The Truth About His Sexuality, Bisexuality, and the 2002 Revelation

The most honest answer to whether David Bowie was gay is: it depends entirely on which David Bowie you’re asking about, and which year you caught him.

In 1972, he was gay. Definitively, in his own words. In 1976, he was bisexual. Also definitively, in his own words. In 1983, he was a “closet heterosexual” who called the whole thing the biggest mistake of his life. In 1993, he confirmed the heterosexual line, telling Rolling Stone he’d never really been bisexual. In 2002, he walked most of that back in a long, careful pause.

What you get when you line those statements up isn’t a mystery. It’s a portrait of a man who shifted his public sexual identity in direct correlation with what was commercially useful to him at the time. Which is either a coherent observation or a brutal one, depending on how much you love him. Both can be true.

Table of Contents

Quick Bio

Info	Detail
Born	January 8, 1947, Brixton, London — as David Robert Jones
Died	January 10, 2016, aged 69 (cancer, kept private for 18 months)
The 1972 statement	“I’m gay, and always have been, even when I was David Jones” — Melody Maker, January 22, 1972, interviewer Michael Watts
The 1976 statement	“It’s true — I am a bisexual” — Playboy, 1976; also claimed the 1972 interview had “misquoted” him
The 1983 retraction	“The biggest mistake I ever made was telling that Melody Maker writer that I was bisexual” — Rolling Stone, Kurt Loder; Rolling Stone titled the piece “Straight Time”
The 1993 line	“I think I was always a closet heterosexual” — Rolling Stone again
The 2002 walk-back	“I don’t think it was a mistake in Europe, but it was a lot tougher in America. I didn’t mind that people knew I was bisexual.” — Blender
First wife	Angela “Angie” Barnett (1970–1980); open marriage
Second wife	Iman (1992–2016, his death); private, devoted
Confirmed male liaisons	Mick Jagger (by multiple accounts including Angie’s); Scott Richardson (Angie’s lover, also reportedly David’s); numerous others less documented
The commercial pivot point	Let’s Dance (1983) — $50 million earned that year; the retraction appeared in the same promotional window

What the Melody Maker Interview Actually Said

Here’s what everyone quotes: “I’m gay, and always have been, even when I was David Jones.”

Here’s what almost nobody mentions: the writer, Michael Watts, noted it in the piece with a description of “a sly jollity about how he says it, a secret smile at the corners of his mouth.” Even in 1972, the interviewer was registering something equivocal. The quote landed as a thunderclap but Watts was seeing a man performing a line, however honestly.

That article was ostensibly about Hunky Dory. The “I’m gay” line slipped in just over halfway through. Melody Maker ran it, the Evening Standard picked it up, and suddenly this not-quite-famous-yet 24-year-old with critically acclaimed records and no mainstream audience had a headline that would follow him for fifty years.

His manager at the time, Kenneth Pitt, was furious. Pitt later said he wasn’t happy when the interview appeared. Which is interesting because Pitt had known Bowie was at minimum bisexually active before this point. What Pitt presumably objected to wasn’t sexuality — it was the public declaration of it.

One week later, Bowie made his debut Ziggy Stardust performance at Friars Aylesbury. The groundwork had been perfectly laid.

The Sombrero Club, and What “Magnetized” Means

Let’s talk about what was actually going on in his life around that 1972 moment, because this is where the mainstream profiles get lazy.

Throughout 1971, Bowie was a regular at the Sombrero club — London’s most prominent gay bar, on Kensington High Street. He and Angie both went. He was embedded there. He wasn’t showing up as a tourist. He’d also just seen Andy Warhol’s Pork in London in August 1971, which brought him into contact with the Warhol circle — Cherry Vanilla, Leee Black Childers, Tony Zanetta — and that crowd was openly queer and openly doing everything.

He later told Rolling Stone in 1993 that he was “more magnetized by the whole gay scene, which was underground.” He admitted to “actually trying it out with some guys.” He said he wanted to “imbue Ziggy with real flesh and blood and muscle, and it was imperative that I find Ziggy and be him.” That phase lasted, he said, “up to about 1974.”

So here’s what we actually have: a man who by his own admission was sexually active with men through at least 1974, who was embedded in London’s gay social scene through 1971-72, who married a woman in 1970 in what was publicly described as an open arrangement, who told a music magazine he was gay, who later said that was a mistake, who in 1993 confirmed he’d been “trying it out.”

The question of whether that makes him gay, bi, or a “closet heterosexual experimenting” is, honestly, a question about what words mean rather than what he did.

Angie, the Open Marriage, and the Specific Thing She Said

Angie Bowie is a figure who gets filtered through a particular lens — the exotic, outrageous first wife who tells embarrassing stories on reality television and gets quoted saying provocative things. And she does say provocative things. But on this subject, she’s also the closest witness to David’s actual private behavior in the 1970s.

They met, famously, because they were both sleeping with the same man — Calvin Mark Lee, a record executive. David later joked about this. It was not a cover story; it was apparently just true. Their marriage was explicitly open from day one. “I’m not really in love with you,” David reportedly told her at some point early in the relationship. She seems to have found this more clarifying than devastating.

Angie has said on multiple occasions that she caught David in bed with men. Multiple times. She has named Mick Jagger specifically as the best occasion. When she arrived home one morning, her assistant warned her someone was in the bedroom. She went upstairs and found David and Jagger naked in bed together.

“I walked into the bedroom, and David was there with all these pillows and duvets on top of him and on the other side of the bed was Mick’s leg sticking out,” she said after carefully describing what she had actually witnessed. “It was a tremendous love affair. It was a big love affair. It was probably more drunken pawing.”

But she also said something much blunter elsewhere: “The best time I caught him in bed was with Mick Jagger.” The word “best” means something interesting there.

Jagger’s response to all of this was “complete rubbish.” David Bowie’s lawyers issued a statement saying any implication of a gay affair was “an absolute fabrication.” Then Ava Cherry — who lived with the Bowies during this period and was both Angie’s and David’s lover at various points — said she’d been in bed with Mick and David multiple times and had “ended up just watching them have sex.”

At some point the pile of testimony becomes hard to dismiss as misremembering.

The Moment in 1983 and the Reasons Behind It

This is the crucial part that the hagiographic Bowie coverage handles with too much gentleness.

By 1983, Let’s Dance was out. Produced by Nile Rodgers. Massive global hit. That year, Bowie earned an estimated $50 million. Blonde quiff, tan, white teeth, dancing pop. The mainstream was finally fully his.

Additionally, he sat down with Kurt Loder of Rolling Stone during the same promotional window and stated: “Telling that Melody Maker writer that I was bisexual was the biggest mistake I ever made.” Masks Masks Masks Masks Masks “He is not gay, whatever he may have blurted out in 1972, nor was he ever a transvestite, thank you,” Loder said in his own editorial.

It’s worth noting that 1983 is also the year AIDS was becoming impossible to ignore. The first major wave of public AIDS panic was in full swing. Being publicly associated with gay identity in America in 1983 had shifted dramatically from what it meant in 1972. What had been transgressive and commercially useful had become, in certain markets, commercially terrifying.

I’m not saying that’s definitely why he retracted. He never said it was. But the timing is not subtle. And some critics at the time said it plainly: he had used queer identity when it was interesting and distanced himself from it when it became dangerous.

The music gay icon Tom Robinson — an actually gay artist — put it bluntly: “For gay musicians, Bowie was seismic.” And then Bowie stepped away from the seismic thing right when the seismic thing started to carry a cost.

The 1993 Clarification That Made Things Worse

He did it again ten years later. 1993, Rolling Stone once more: “I think I was always a closet heterosexual. I didn’t ever feel that I was a real bisexual.”

However, he quickly made a statement that went against that, acknowledging that he had been “magnetized by the whole gay scene” and that he had been “actually trying it out with some guys” until 1974.

So the “closet heterosexual” line sits directly next to a description of years of active male sexual experience. One sentence says he wasn’t really bisexual. The next describes bisexual behavior sustained over multiple years. You can’t hold both at once. He was either trying to minimize something real, or he genuinely had some internal framework where “experimenting” didn’t count as orientation.

That second option is, honestly, not inconceivable. Bowie was a man who genuinely seemed to understand desire as a thing that happened to him in particular circumstances, not as a stable identity that needed a label. Which is actually quite a sophisticated position. It just happened to be communicated through a series of public statements that landed as retreats and retractions.

The 2002 Reversal That Nobody Covers Enough

Here’s the one that gets underplayed. Blender magazine, 2002. Bowie was asked if he still believed calling himself bisexual was the biggest mistake he’d ever made.

He paused. A long pause. The interviewer noted the pause specifically.

Then he said: “I don’t think it was a mistake in Europe, but it was a lot more difficult in America. I didn’t mind if people knew I was bisexual.

That is a fundamentally different statement from everything he’d been saying since 1983. It confirms bisexuality, contextualizes the retraction as a geographic and commercial calculation, and quietly acknowledges that the American market had been the problem rather than his actual identity. It’s the most honest thing he ever said publicly about any of this, and it appeared in a magazine interview that most Bowie biography covers in a sentence or not at all.

The man who said “biggest mistake” in 1983 had become, by 2002, a man saying essentially: it wasn’t a mistake, the American audience was the problem.

What He Actually Was, Probably

Let me say what I think, with the caveat that nobody can say for certain about anyone’s sexuality but their own.

The weight of evidence — not “evidence” in a prurient tabloid sense, but the actual pattern of what he said, what people who knew him described, what his own qualified admissions added up to — points to a man who was genuinely attracted to and sexually active with both men and women over an extended period of his life. That is what bisexuality describes.

Whether he felt that identity deeply, the way some bisexual people experience it as a core part of self, is unknowable. He seemed to experience his sexuality the way he experienced his musical identity: as something he inhabited and shed with intention rather than something fixed underneath all the personas. That might be a more fluid way of being bisexual, or it might be bisexuality that he intellectualized into flexibility. The distinction matters philosophically and not at all practically.

What he wasn’t was simply gay. Gay as a permanent label never fit because the actual record includes genuine relationships with women — not just marriages of convenience, but by most accounts real emotional and sexual connection with both Angie (in the early years) and profoundly with Iman in the last thirty years of his life.

And what he wasn’t was simply straight. That much is established by his own 2002 admission that he had no problem with people knowing he was bisexual, which implicitly confirms the thing he was calling a mistake in 1983 was an accurate description.

He was bisexual. The label was accurate. The retraction was a commercial and cultural calculation made in a specific historical moment. And the 2002 interview was the closest he ever came to saying so out loud.

Final Words

Here’s my blunt read on this, after going back through everything.

The question “was David Bowie gay” has a boring answer and an interesting one. The boring answer is: no, he was bisexual, he said so himself when he wasn’t busy revising it. The interesting answer is: what does it tell us that one of the most chameleon-like artists in pop history handled his sexual identity the same way he handled his musical identity — as something plastic, something to be designed rather than disclosed?

Because the truth is, the 1972 “I’m gay” statement wasn’t exactly a disclosure. It had — as the interviewer noted in real time — a “sly jollity” to it. It was a performance. That doesn’t mean it wasn’t true. It means Bowie understood that his truths and his performances were hard to separate and maybe he didn’t want to separate them.

The LGBTQ community has a complicated relationship with his legacy for good reason. He gave them something enormous in 1972 and then spent 1983 taking it back. The fact that he quietly re-confirmed it in 2002 doesn’t undo the generation of gay fans who felt betrayed when he said “biggest mistake” while collecting his mainstream success.

He was magnificent. He was also calculating. He was both those things simultaneously, on the subject of his sexuality as on everything else. You can be grateful for what he gave and clear-eyed about what he took back. Those aren’t contradictions. They’re just the full picture.

FAQs

1. Was David Bowie actually gay?

No, not in the sense of exclusively gay. He said “I’m gay” in a 1972 interview but later revised this to bisexual in 1976, and in a 2002 Blender interview confirmed he had no problem with people knowing he was bisexual. The evidence from his own words and from people who knew him points to bisexuality rather than exclusive homosexuality. Calling him “gay” is a simplification.

2. Why did David Bowie say he was gay in 1972?

He told Melody Maker writer Michael Watts on January 22, 1972: “I’m gay, and always have been, even when I was David Jones.” The context matters: he was embedded in London’s gay scene, a week away from his first Ziggy Stardust performance, and using shock and provocation as career fuel. The interviewer noted a “sly jollity” in how he said it. Whether it was pure persona, genuine disclosure, or both at once is exactly the question.

3. Did David Bowie retract his statement about being bisexual?

Yes, twice. In 1983, Rolling Stone ran “Straight Time” in which he called his bisexual declaration “the biggest mistake I ever made.” In 1993 he doubled down, calling himself “a closet heterosexual” who “didn’t ever feel like a real bisexual.” But in 2002 he partially reversed again, telling Blender that he had no problem with people knowing he was bisexual, and that the issue was America’s reaction rather than the statement being wrong.

4. Was David Bowie and Mick Jagger’s affair real?

Nothing is definitively proven. Multiple sources — Angie Bowie, backing singer Ava Cherry, and biographers Christopher Andersen and Wendy Leigh — have described a sexual relationship between the two in the early 1970s. Angie found them naked in bed together; she described it as “probably more drunken pawing.” Cherry claims she witnessed them having sex on multiple occasions. Jagger denied everything. Bowie’s lawyers issued a denial. The weight of testimony is significant but the full truth isn’t established.

5. Did David Bowie really say being bisexual was “the biggest mistake of his life”?

This quote is often reproduced in an incomplete form. The full quote from the 1983 Rolling Stone interview: “The biggest mistake I ever made was telling that Melody Maker writer that I was bisexual.” The 1972 Melody Maker quote had used the word “gay” not bisexual, so by 1983 he was retroactively reframing his earlier statement. In 2002 he told Blender the statement was accurate but that the backlash in America was the real problem.

6. Why did Bowie retract being bisexual in 1983?

He never explicitly said why. But 1983 is when Let’s Dance made him his biggest commercial success to date (he reportedly earned $50 million that year), and 1983 is also when AIDS panic was peaking in America. Critics noted the convenient timing — queer identity had stopped being transgressive-interesting and started being commercially risky in certain markets. He never confirmed this calculation, but the Blender 2002 interview’s reference to America being “tougher” about it suggests the geography was significant.

7. Who were David Bowie’s male lovers?

Confirmed or strongly alleged: Mick Jagger (most documented, with multiple witness accounts); Scott Richardson, a musician who was also Angie’s lover; and various unnamed individuals described in his admission that he’d been “actually trying it out with some guys” up to around 1974. His connection to the gay scene at the Sombrero club was also extensive. He was photographed being intimate with Lou Reed and Andy Warhol, though “intimate” covers a wide range of things.

8. Was David Bowie’s marriage to Angie a cover for his sexuality?

Not exactly — or at least not simply. Both described their marriage as genuinely open. Angie was herself bisexual and had her own extramarital relationships. They met because they were both sleeping with the same man. Describing it as a beard arrangement misses that Angie was a full participant in the lifestyle. Their relationship deteriorated eventually and they divorced in 1980, reportedly with significant mutual acrimony. Bowie almost never mentioned her after the divorce.

9. Was David Bowie’s bisexuality just a performance or persona?

This is the genuinely interesting question and the one his own statements most complicate. His 1993 Rolling Stone interview suggests it was at least partly performed — part of the Ziggy identity he inhabited until around 1974. But he also admitted to actual sexual experiences with men during that period. Even if the public proclamation was theatrical, the underlying behavior was real. The persona may have given him permission or cover for things that were genuinely part of his experience.

10. Was Ziggy Stardust gay or bisexual?

Ziggy was explicitly bisexual — described as a bisexual alien rock star. Songs like “Queen Bitch” and “Suffragette City” and the Bowie-Ronson onstage guitar fellatio were part of that persona. But Ziggy and Bowie were never cleanly separable. Bowie himself described method-acting his way into Ziggy to the point of sexual experimentation. By the time he killed Ziggy at the Hammersmith Odeon in July 1973, he’d spent two years embodying that identity at a deep level.

11. Is David Bowie considered an LGBT icon?

Complicated. Yes, for many people, emphatically. His 1972 declaration influenced generations of queer youth who felt seen. His glam aesthetic gave people permission. But the 1983 retraction was genuinely painful for gay fans and communities who felt used — embraced as audiences when it was cool, distanced from when AIDS made queer identity dangerous. LGBTQ Nation published an article arguing that his behavior constitutes cultural appropriation rather than authentic queer identity. Others find that reading too rigid. His legacy in queer culture remains real and contested simultaneously.

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