Our Kylie Has Been Snubbed!

It’s fair to say that most of us would agree Our Kylie, the eldest of the extremely talented Minogue clan of Camberwell, is officially a Gay Icon. Lucky bitch. God knows my only goal in life (other than landing a plum job as a presenter on Ukrainian breakfast television) is to be beloved by the Gays. But the National Portrait Gallery in the UK has chosen to ignore Kylie in their new summer exhibition called Gay Icons. Blame Elton John…

From The Guardian:

There will be no Kylie, no Judy, no Liza and not even Barbra. But there will be Alan Turing, Sylvia Townsend Warner, Margarethe Cammermeyer and Mstislav Rostropovich. And Will Young.

Minogue, Garland, Minnelli and Streisand may be adored by gay men across the world but they will not be part of a major summer exhibition announced yesterday by the National Portrait Gallery called, simply, Gay Icons. Instead, a 10-strong panel, including Elton John and Billie Jean King, has cast its net beyond an ability to look and sound fabulous and gone for a far more considered list of names.

Wait, so the panel were looking for Gay Icons who represent a side of queer life that is more than a “complete amylathon with feathers on its head and sequins cascading out of its arse“? Interesting!

Here’s a few names who did make the cut.

Yesterday the gallery divulged about a third of the icons. The novelist Alan Hollinghurst has chosen two wildly different men: Andy Warhol’s sex symbol Joe Dallesandro, who starred as a hustler in Paul Morrissey’s trilogy Flesh, Trash, and Heat; and the Victorian poet Gerard Manley Hopkins, an intense and painfully repressed Catholic who wrote some of the century’s most homoerotic poems. Elton John chose two straight men – his longtime lyricist Bernie Taupin and one of the greatest cellists, the late Rostropovich. Nelson Mandela was chosen by King on the grounds that he is everybody’s icon, gay or straight. She also chose Althea Gibson, the first black woman to win a grand slam tennis tournament.

The actor Sir Ian McKellen picked the assassinated San Francisco supervisor Harvey Milk and the much less well known Cammermeyer, who was discharged as a US army colonel after admitting she was a lesbian.

Chris Smith, the UK’s first out gay politician, chose the brilliant Enigma mathematician Turing, who in all likelihood killed himself in 1954 after he was criminally prosecuted for his homosexuality. He was just 41.

Smith’s other choice was Virginia Woolf, who had a passionate affair with Vita Sackville-West.

Toksvig’s own choices include the 19th-century French sculptor Rosa Bonheur, who would probably not have called herself a lesbian but who lived with the same female companion for 50 years, the gay rights activist Peter Tatchell, and kd lang, “just for being gorgeous”.

Other icons include Young, Princess Diana and Lily Savage, all chosen by the media entrepreneur and peer Waheed Alli. The poet Jackie Kay has included Quentin Crisp and the bisexual blues singer Bessie Smith; the Stonewall chief executive Ben Summerskill chose poet Maya Angelou and playwright Joe Orton; and Tipping the Velvet writer Sarah Waters named the novelist Townsend Warner as her icon.

Surely they could have squeezed Kylie somewhere in there? Heh.

MORE: National Portrait Gallery snubs Kylie Minogue and picks Nelson Mandela for gay icons list