So, here's a bisexual I did meet, disc jockey Alan "Fluff" Freeman, who died yesterday.
Of course, many of you readers will have no idea who he was, but to British teenagers in the 70s - and subsequently adults who liked his rock shows - his radio programmes were a highlight of the week.
"Greetings, pop pickers", he used to say on his Sunday night chart show Pick of the Pops. "Not 'Arf".
I had no idea he was bisexual until I read the Guardian obituary last night. Apparently, in 1994 he told a "shocked" breakfast TV programme host that he had been celibate since 1981, but before that was bisexual. According to a (non-bisexual) chat room I often frequent, AF was outed in Michael Palin's autobiography - although it sounds like no outing was necessary. Unfortunately, though, I have no idea what his bisexuality consisted of... Or am I just being nosy?
So how did I meet him? Well, I am using the term "meet" in a very loose kind of way, of course. I was working at the BBC (years and years ago) and I had to collect him from the lift and make sure he could walk the few steps down the corridor to some programme-making bod. He was gushingly friendly and, at that point, the campest man I had ever met, wearing some kind of tunic-thing over his velvet trousers. That goes to show what a very, very long time ago it must have been!
All right. Stay Bright. RIP Alan Freeman
1 comment:
I too had no notion of his sexual traits. It was in 1969 I was invited to a dance by my female cousins and boyfriend to a place near Chester in UK. It was a pub with a cellar under it where Alan Freeman was the Dee Jay. We failed to notice this small man sat on a box with a record playing table and a pile of records filed in covers in a cardboard box on a stool next to him. The dance floor was any place where the cellar floor extended and suddenly we heard an impression of Alan Freeman saying welcome pop pickers it is time to boogy aint it Half way through the night I was at Freemans site asking fora request my cousin had asked for earlier. To my surprise he looked up at me and it was Freeman. We talked about his TV shows but he seemed half not with me. I never got to the bottom of why a star so big would do a disc show down a dark celler in a pub I think was called the Horseman?
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