ravenna_c_tan

I was up all night last night when I discovered David Bowie had died. My entire Twitter feed turned into a wake until dawn. 100% of the tweets, except for the promoted tweets about the movie The Martian (eerie coincidence) having won a Golden Globe award. Spiders from Mars indeed.

I’ve talked about Bowie a lot, and written about him a little. Most recently the essay I had in QUEERS DESTROY SCIENCE FICTION I talk about how as a misfit 11-year-old I found a role model in Bowie not only for daring to declare himself bisexual, but in the embrace of science fiction analogies to define himself “Other.” He created a persona that was a space alien. Later he created other personas…some of which were space aliens pretending to, or learning to be, humans. Just knowing he existed was a spark of encouragement that growing up a sci-loving nerd with gender conformity issues was going to turn out OKAY.

At the time I didn’t grasp that his true role as my guardian angel had a third component, that of creative person and artist itself.

Read the rest of this entry »

Mirrored from blog.ceciliatan.com.