Driving and Diving with "Smalltown Boy"
The erratic timing of A Song a Day (or week or month) has stretched even beyond the longest of the periods in its name, due mostly to my being on vacation for the last two weeks of May. I drove around Sligo and Donegal in Ireland, stopping to find 7th-century crosses on the sides of main streets, walking deserted beaches, learning how to navigate narrow roads and avoid agricultural equipment, and eating my body weight in potatoes. Then, thanks to cheap and cheerful Ryanair, and an organized friend with a plan, it was a week at a truly luxurious château in France where we cooked, strolled around market towns, replaced potatoes with croissants and their brethren, and learned to navigate agricultural equipment on tiny roads with the steering wheel back on the more familiar side.
Within a few minutes of getting in our rental car out of Bordeaux and hitting the highway east, we’d heard “Marcia Baila”, the subject of my very first Substack post, on the radio station, and I knew we’d chosen well. The song we heard everywhere, though, in two countries throughout the trip, was Bronski Beat’s “Smalltown Boy”. And it’s halfway through Pride month, so if you haven’t yet, you’re going to hear it sometime before June is over, too. It’s a hit that is forty years old now, which seems incredible, since there’s still dance music that sounds like this, and it’s still played on the radio, and it also implies that I’ve been around at least that long. Time is sneaky like that.
The song is timeless, but the video is not. Not for the grimy 1980s Britain it shows – though that too. And, to be honest, not because what happens in the video, a boy being beaten up because he’s looked, ever so tentatively, at the wrong, super-defensive, I’m-not-gay guy, isn’t something that happens today. But, maybe, because this was kind of a depressing but not unfamiliar story at the time, in a video played over and over again on all the top hit shows of the era. Watching it with 2024 eyes, it’s just brutal. Even with the happy end – the kid leaves his hometown for good on a train, and two of his friends show up to make the trek with him, so we know he has community on his way to London, where they will (to some extent) have freedom to be themselves – I was weeping.
Hearing the song in Ireland made me think of the successful Irish referendum on gay marriage, which seemed like it had taken place recently, and turns out to have been nine years ago, already. (The years are long, the decades are short, someone once said.) It’s just one of many milestones in the last forty years. (Progress is not always linear, someone else said.) Thousands of Irish living abroad flocked home by ferry and plane to be able to vote on marriage equality, using Twitter to broadcast their journeys with hashtags like #gettheboattovote and #hometovote and encourage others along. People who weren’t able to travel asked others to vote on their behalf: #BeMyYes. It’s one of the most joyful events yet to be shared on social media.
The bully in the Bronski Beat video is a diver: in a couple of scenes, the protagonist admires his toned swimmer’s upper body and stylish jumps at the pool. It made me think of British diver Tom Daley, who will compete in his fifth Olympic games in France this summer, this time in synchronized diving. Daley is 30 years old, born ten years after “Smalltown Boy” was released. He was a frequent media star of the 2021 Tokyo Olympics, in part due to his constant knitting in the stands, which he features on his Instagram. He’s happy, fit, married to Dustin Lance Black, the screenwriter of “Milk”, and dad of two. And, as any armchair Olympics-viewer could tell you, he creates much less of a splash when he enters the water than the thug diver of the Bronski Beat video. Tom Daley’s more likely to be in regular TV rotation this summer than the video for “Smalltown Boy”. In 2024, he’s definitely the diver I want to be seeing on screen.
