Total Eclipse of My Teen Gay Heart
Bonnie Tyler’s heated prep-school fantasia was an explosive force in my young life
With the internet and mass media providing a constant stream of hot, sexualized men these days, younger gays don’t realize how hard it was to find objects of desire back in the days when VHS tapes were still a new technology.
Today, young gays exploring their sexuality have Pornhub and Grindr. Gen X had the Sears catalog and the underwear ads in the back of GQ.
So just imagine the impact I felt when I first saw the video for Bonnie Tyler’s “Total Eclipse of the Heart,” with its cast of scantily clad prep school boys dancing in animal skin loincloths in the dim (but not too dim) moonlight. I can’t call it a sexual awakening — at 15 I was already many years into the secret knowledge I was gay and the furtive seeking of images that I desperately wanted to see — but it certainly was a blossoming.
Straight boys had the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue. I had Friday Night Videos and Bonnie Tyler.
Hearing the news today that she’s passed certainly fills me with sadness. But I also feel a lot of gratitude for something she gave me that she may never have intended at the time (though I’m sure she’s heard enough from gay men of a certain age over the years to know the impact of “Total Eclipse”). That’s the great thing about art, you put your work out into the world and sometimes people find something beautiful in it you didn’t expect.
Whatever Tyler may have intended with the prep-school fever dream of the video, I definitely believe some, if not most, of the people who made it had some clear intentions. It is one of the gayest things in pop culture from the time. It wasn’t until a couple years later, away from home and freer to explore, that I stumbled on the work of famed French gay porn director Jean Daniel Cadinot, a product of the time when porn had higher artistic ambitions. (Note: that’s a mildly spicy link, if you’re thinking of clicking it at work or in public.)
Let’s just say, the aesthetic of “Total Eclipse of the Heart” and Cadinot’s Les Minets Sauvages (a.k.a. Wild and Crazy Boys) share a lot. Cadinot was as revelatory for me at 17 as Tyler’s video was at 15 and I find the crossover endlessly amusing.
So thank you, Bonnie Tyler, for all the gifts you gave us, especially to a young gay boy who was figuring things out in rural Kentucky. You’ll never be eclipsed in my heart.
