A Film Canon

The greatest single statement that popular music has not made about homosexuality, the Pet Shop Boys' masterpiece elaborates their mnemosexual apotheosis - the moment after you come out, and realise that you still haven't come out; or, alternatively, the moment at which society's investment in maintaining homosexuality as an open secret, rather than merely oppressing it, becomes most tangible. As Neil Tennant's 'coming out' album, then, it alternates between euphemistic celebrations of heterodoxy and liberation ("Liberation", "I Wouldn't Normally Do This Kind Of Thing"), and suggestions of an unspeakability, a necessity for strategic latency, that has only been concentrated by this apparent liberation ("To Speak Is A Sin", "Dreaming Of The Queen"), and is ultimately equated with the past, whether in a personal ("Can You Forgive Her?"), historical, ("The Theatre"), or communal (again, "Dreaming Of The Queen", possibly the album's finest moment) register. Combined with Trevor Horn's magnificent production, this evokes the archetypal mnemosexual space as a dancefloor on which differences can be (collectively) remembered, but never (individually) articulated - the mere supplement to a society prepared to remember, but not tolerate, homosexuality, thereby keeping it in a state of perpetual infantilisation. This temporal slippage is epitomised by "Young Offender", the other contender for best track, in which Neil addresses a lover both older and younger than himself ("...I've been a teenager since before you were born"), or perhaps his past self, as if to suggest the structural, societal basis of homosexuality's supposed narcissism. However, the album climaxes in the aftermath of "Go West", the final track. Here, the deliberate, melancholy undercutting of the Village People's fairly underwhelming utopia is followed by several minutes of silence, and, finally, a short, eulogy for lost love ("...the times we've had, just you and me") sung, uncharacteristically, by Chris Lowe, as if the most honest mode of coming out were a purely private utterance, or an utter disfigurement and defamiliarisation of it's mouthpiece.