Was Syd Barrett gay?

[Roon]

David Gilmour: He functions on a totally different plain of logic, and some people will claim, 'Well yeah man he's on a higher cosmic level' - but basically there's something drastically wrong. It wasn't just the drugs - we'd both done acid before the whole Floyd thing - it's just a mental foible which grew out of all proportion. I remember all sorts of strange things happening - at one point he was wearing lipstick, dressing in high heels, and believing he had homosexual tendencies. We all felt he should have gone to see a psychiatrist, though someone in fact played an interview he did to R.D. Laing, and Laing claimed he was incurable. What can you do, you know?


http://www.geocities.com/julienindica/syd3.html

[Bassic]

1. Maybe, but independently,

He's is seriously fucked up.

[johnnie]

2. I think Syd was whacked out

I think he had problems even before he indulged in too many drugs. I don't know if he was gay though, but he seemed a bit experimental with a hell of a lot of things.

[Tyrone Slothrop]

3. I dunno about that, but...

As far as Gilmour's acid comment, in the biography A Saucerful of Secrets (Nicholas Schaffner), Barrett's crazy Swinging London apartment complex is described as being filled with acidheads who were constantly dosing each other. The author/sources claim that Barrett -- both knowingly and unknowingly -- was basically tripping the entire time that he lived there; they said that even if you tried to take a break from the acid, you'd get dosed the first time you had tea at someone else's apartment.

Per the author, one of Barrett's biggest problems with this was that he never knew whether he was tripping (whether someone had slipped some LSD in his drink) or whether he was just going crazy or whether he had dosed himself and forgotten about it. Schaffner, IIRC, hypothesizes that living in such a fractured state of mind for so long (a year or two) was the primary cause of Barrett's schizophrenia.

[Squeech]

4. Yeah, but

Syd had certain issues even before his so-called friends tried to turn his cerebral cortex into lysergic oatmeal.

The Pink character in The Wall is highly fictionalized, to be sure, but some parts are based on the real Syd. (And some on the real Roger, who also made it hard to tell the difference.) Like Roger, Syd was raised by a single mother, and while he never comitted the same sort of public primal scream that Roger has done, the song "Mother" is thought to depict his real emotional state. (And he also had a girlfriend that he beat the shit out of, like Pink, but I think that was during the perpetual trip days, so he may not have been in complete charge of his wits at that point.)

I mention this because one of the old cliches about where gayness comes from is a domineering mother.

But in 1967, wearing flowery clothes and makeup was part of the general hippie flamboyance, not a statement of same-gender preference. Consider Brian Eno in 1972, similarly adorned, and legendary for his groupie conquests-- he was the Sting of his day.

[WritingIsMyReligion]

5. He was a member of Pink Floyd, for all's sake!

Maybe not gay, but psyched-out. Majorly. They all were.

:evilgrin: