David Bowie

Personal context

Summary

David Bowie was a British musician and actor whose screen roles included The Man Who Fell to Earth, Labyrinth, The Last Temptation of Christ, and Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me. His work often used shifting personas, theatricality, alienation, and challenges to gender and sexual conventions. In a 1983 MTV interview, he pressed the network over its limited airtime for Black artists, and in 2007 he donated to the NAACP’s Jena Six legal defense fund. In the 1970s he made remarks supporting fascism and later disavowed them; he publicly identified as gay and bisexual, then later described those declarations as a mistake and called himself heterosexual.