Barry Walters with Stephan Pennington: Mighty Real

Join us at Brookline Booksmith to celebrate the release of Mighty Real with author Barry Walters, in conversation with Stephan Pennington.

Register for the event!

RSVP to let us know you’re coming! Depending on the volume of responses, an RSVP may be required for entrance to the event. If we reach capacity and have to close RSVPs, there will be no waiting list.

Mighty Real: A History of LGBTQ Music, 1969-2000

“An essential book for this moment.”
—Rob Sheffield

The definitive history of LGBTQ music, from Stonewall to RuPaul, and its impact on culture and American life

From the underground dancefloors of the Seventies to the global charts of the Nineties, LGBTQ artists and audiences shaped music’s sound, style, and spirit. In Mighty Real, veteran journalist Barry Walters chronicles the LGBTQ history of the record business from the Velvet Underground to the dawn of the 21st century, honoring the artists who redefined gender, defied tradition, and dared to challenge sexual norms, with the help of a record business that wasn’t as straight as commonly believed.

Drawing on his decades as a New York- and San Francisco-based music critic, Walters examines how LGBTQ musicians, music industry executives, and fans reshaped the mainstream. He connects the dots between David Bowie’s dazzling reinventions, Grace Jones’s androgynous glamor, Prince’s boundary-shattering sexuality, and the radical candor of the Indigo Girls to prove they’re all doing the same thing: fighting oppression.

With exuberance, insight, and encyclopedic knowledge, Walters brings to life the songs and society that filled dancefloors, bedrooms, and streets as he uncovers yesteryear’s coded LGBTQ messages that paved the way for today’s unabashedly queer hits. Mighty Real is a masterful love letter to the music that liberated generations, and it’s written in a page-turning, personal way that blurs distinctions between chronicle and memoir. This is the rare and revolutionary music history told to help you laugh, cry, and then rally against lingering inequality.

Barry Walters has spent 40 years documenting the intersection of mainstream and LGBTQ culture. He began his career at The Village Voice — where he came out publicly in a 1986 Pet Shop Boys review — before becoming a fixture at Spin and Rolling Stone. In 1992, Walters’ work at the San Francisco Examiner made him the first critic to receive an award from the National Gay and Lesbian Journalists Association. Throughout the Nineties, he was The Advocate’s music columnist before a decade’s worth of writing at Out. Along the way, he’s regularly appeared in Entertainment Weekly, NPR, Pitchfork, and other media mainstays. Love Me as You Should: The Brave and Bold Sylvester, a 2020 mini-documentary he wrote and co-produced for Amazon Music, won a Clio Award.

Stephan Pennington is an Associate Professor of Music at Tufts University. His research interests concern the politics of identity performance, focusing on race, gender, and sexuality. He has presented on a wide range of topics, from the rumba craze in 1930s Germany to appropriation as an historical process. A pioneering scholar on Transgender Studies in Music, he has been sought out for a number of public intellectual projects, including the documentary No Ordinary Man about trans masculine jazz musician Billy Tipton, and a forthcoming documentary on Black Queer music history, Hiding in Plain Sight. He is currently working on two book projects, one on transgender vocality and the second on the persistence of enlightenment white supremacy in current musicological culture.