The Smiths Win For Queerest Album Covers
He may not have come out until 2013, but Morrissey has long been the most queer-coded artist in music history.
The Smiths were only a band for five years. But their trademark of jangly guitars and haunting lyrics resonated with outsiders, romantics, and intellectuals long after their break up in 1987. Mainstream media would have you believe that Morrissey’s brand of alienation was reserved exclusively for a hetero-normative archetype of the music-obsessed, crumpled necktie, handsome wallflower whose perfectly curated mixtape will release him finally from the shackles of “friend zone” and into the arms of the most beautiful girl in the room. Every fictional story that mentions The Smiths’ music portrays this exact same dude.
Understandably, these bookish straight boys might see themselves in the shoes of Morrissey. He permits them to feel things that traditionally masculine rock stars do not. But the mainstream media has wed Morrissey to strictly heterosexual desire when he’s actually made a career of being explicitly the opposite. He may not have come out until 30 years into his catalog, but Morrissey has been wearing queerness on his sleeve (album sleeve, that is) since 1982.
As the frontman of The Smiths, he handpicked all 27 of the band's album cover photos, and more than half—15 to be exact—incorporate blatantly queer imagery. By choosing images of iconic gay figures, homoerotic scenes, or subtly suggestive male subjects, Morrissey infused The Smiths’ image with a sensibility that challenged heteronormative expectations, even if heteronormative people never noticed. Let’s take a closer look at these album covers:
“Hand In Glove”— Before the band’s debut album was released in February of 1984, this image, taken from the photography book The Nude Male, was chosen by Morrissey as the face of The Smiths. There’s no band photo on the back cover. This was the first and only impression Morrissey wanted to make about who he was or who should listen to his music. By the way, bassist Andy Rourke didn’t get a say in the cover art. According to Mozipedia: The Encyclopedia of Morrissey and The Smiths, Rourke said when he showed the recording to his parents, his father was mortified. “He said to me, 'that's a bloke's bum' and I said, 'yeah' but when he asked me why I just didn't have an answer for him.”
The Smiths — For The Smiths’ self-titled debut, Morrissey chose a cropped still photograph from the Andy Warhol film, Flesh, of bisexual actor Joe Dallesandro. Here’s the uncropped version depicting intimacy from a queer film.
“This Charming Man” — Jean Marais was a queer French actor, director, and visual artist who performed in over 100 films with his lover, acclaimed director Jean Cocteau. The album art for The Smiths single, “This Charming Man,” is a still from Cocteau’s 1949 film, Orpheus, depicting Marais laying on the ground. Cocteau and Marais are seminal figures in queer history, having chosen to remain in Nazi-occupied Paris as a proudly gay couple despite the threat of danger. Cocteau, a literary icon, had influential admirers who provided protection. Though the Nazi-controlled press publicly vilified the pair, they were never arrested. Marais later claimed he was rejected by the French Resistance due to his sexuality. Cocteau passed away in 1963, and Marais—who survived him—always referred to Cocteau as the love of his life, often wishing they had met sooner. Cocteau’s gravestone reads, “I stay with you,” a message that serves both as a testament to his lasting artistic influence and a personal reassurance to Marais.
Hatful of Hollow — Here’s another reference to queer director and artist Jean Cocteau. The model on the original artwork for Hatful of Hollow is Fabrice Colette, who sported a tattoo of a Cocteau drawing on his shoulder. The sleeve was redesigned in 1987, however, with the image cropped so the tattoo is no longer visible. The original photograph was taken by Gilles Decroix.
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“The Boy With The Thorn In His Side”: Truman Capote, the infamous queer novelist who wrote Breakfast at Tiffany’s and In Cold Blood is the cover star of “The Boy With The Thorn In His Side.” Capote had died at the age of 59, just a year before the single’s release, so this may have been a posthumous nod by Morrissey to a fellow queer writer. He remarked in 2006, “When I put Capote on the cover of The Smiths single, a certain member of The Smiths (who unfortunately is still alive) said, ‘is that Ernie Wise?’ …. dear God …”
“Sheila Take A Bow” — A still from another Warhol film, Women in Revolt, served as cover art for the single, “Sheila Take a Bow.” This is a photo of transgender icon Candy Darling.
The Queen Is Dead — A still of bisexual French actor Alain Delon from the 1964 film The Unvanquished was used as the album cover for The Smiths’ album, The Queen Is Dead. Delon’s most notable film was 1960’s Purple Moon (Plein Soleil), an adaptation of the 1955 novel, The Talented Mr. Ripley, by lesbian author Patricia Highsmith. Delon plays sinister queer serial killer Tom Ripley.
“How Soon is Now” — The original cover pictured a still from the war film Dunkirk of British actor Sean Barrett praying, and it was deemed too controversial for American audiences, who worried that Barrett looked like he was fondling his crotch. It was replaced in the U.S. by a picture of the band backstage at Glastonbury.
”Bigmouth Strikes Again” — Morrissey’s fixation on bisexual actor James Dean culminated in several ways throughout his career. In 1983, he penned the paperback, James Dean is Not Dead. He told Smash Hits magazine in 1984, “Nobody had a passion for him as I did — for that constant uneasiness with life. Even though he was making enormous strides with his craft, he was still incredibly miserable and obviously doomed. Which is exactly the quality Oscar Wilde had. That kind of mystical knowledge that there is something incredibly black around the corner. People who feel this are quite special and always end up in quite a mangled mess." Morrissey would later pay further tribute to the actor by filming the video for solo single “Suedehead” in Fairmount, Indiana, where Dean grew up.
Strangeways, Here We Come — Recognize this charming man from Morrissey’s bathroom? Actor Dick Davalos, whose most famous role was alongside James Dean in East of Eden, became the most iconic of all of Morrissey’s cover art subjects as his face was used on several album covers, including Strangeways Here We Come and the two Best of albums.
Dean and Davalos shared an apartment during the filming of East of Eden. Dean’s bisexuality has been written about in numerous biographies and there is mention of his attraction to his co-star. Davalos spoke about the homoerotic screen test in the biography, James Dean: Mutant King. "Jimmy and I got very close during the testing and did the black and white bedroom test to see how it would work. I stayed at Jimmy's house the night before that test so we could work most of the night. Sure the test we did had homosexual undertones, but no one has ever said it before, though some people reacted wildly to it when they saw the rushes. That's why it was never put into the film. During East of Eden Jimmy and I shared a one-room apartment over the drugstore across the street from Warner Brothers. And we were Aron and Cal to the teeth. It crept into our social life. He would do something and I would reject him, and he would follow me down the street about twenty paces behind.”
“Ask” — British actress Yootha Joyce is best known for her portrayal of Mrs. Roper in the sitcom Man About the House and later, its spinoff, George And Mildred. The show was later adapted into an American sitcom called Three’s Company. The concept of the show is about a straight man who lives platonically with two single women and pretends to be gay to avoid being evicted by their conservative landlord. Mr. Roper wouldn’t approve of their living arrangement because he doesn’t think that unmarried men and women should live together. Mrs. Roper knows that Robin (or Jack in the American version) is lying but protects him because her views are more progressive than her husband’s. Mrs. Roper has long been considered a queer icon. Every year, women and gay men dress up for the annual “Mrs. Roper Romp” to celebrate the fictional icon. The first Mrs. Roper Romp took place in 2013 when more than 50 people marched as the character in a parade during Southern Decadence, an annual gay party weekend in New Orleans. The Roper Romp Facebook group now has over 65,000 members.
“Girlfriend in a Coma” — “I’ve never made any secret of the fact that at least 50 percent of my reason for writing can be blamed on Shelagh Delaney,” Morrissey once said of one of his favorite playwrights. The lyrics of “This Night Has Opened My Eyes” are a retelling of the plot of Delaney’s most famous play, A Taste of Honey, using many direct quotations from the script. He also borrowed the words, “I dreamt about you last night, and I fell out of bed twice,” for the single, “Reel Around The Fountain.” Delaney wrote her first play in 10 days after seeing Terence Rattigan’s Variation on a Theme. Delaney was incensed because she felt "Variation..." showed "insensitivity in the way Rattigan portrayed homosexuals,” according to the book Modern British Drama: The Twentieth Century. A Taste of Honey includes a central queer character and centers around themes of class, race, gender, and sexual orientation. In the production's program, Delaney was described as "the antithesis of London's angry young men. She knows what she is angry about." Morrissey used photographs of Delaney for both the cover of “Girlfriend in a Coma” and the compilation album Louder than Bombs.
Morrissey may not have come out as “humasexual” until 2013, but he’s been sending up flares for the queer community from day one. He’s one of the most queer-coded artists in music history, flirting with and defying labels, creating a distinct space for queer interpretation in an era when LGBTQ+ representation in mainstream music was rare.
If you find yourself remarking, “Damn Jami, I didn’t know any of this. You brought the receipts on this piece of history,” please consider upgrading to a paid subscription.
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Really fascinating and informative essay, Jami! Was never on The Smiths at all, which matters little, but I've always been curious about all those 45s and album sleeves I'd see at the stores! I feel as Morrissey and I had a similar pop cultural attraction growing up (he's 4 years younger than I): In the early-'70s, in high school, I was reading all manner of rock press, including things like "Andy Warhol's Interview Magazine," and "hip" rock mags like CREEM and Hit Parader, all of whom seemed to cover the New York "underground" scene, and non-record-making artists like John Waters, Robert Mapplethorpe, Candy Darling, Wayne County (well, she recorded!), Dallesandro, Divine, and all those absolutely fascinating people who seemed so distant and different from the sedate, suburban Houston denizen I grew up in, and was used to!
When I'd see Smiths records, I was always curious as to why Morrissey (or whomever...at the time, I only knew that he was their singer) had all those people I'd read about (and recognized from mag pix) on his sleeves! Thanks again for this enlightening article!
Those covers were brilliant as both concepts and graphic design. They often sent fans down a rabbit hole of research and discovery.