As a teenager, he worked as a paperboy, babysitting, mowing neighbors’ lawns, as a waiter, in a bottle factory, and in a video store; his goal was to save as much money as possible to pay for college. An A student, David enrolled at the University of Western Ontario. In her second year she began to have relationships with men, and at the age of 21 she decided to tell her mother over the phone.. It was a conversation, in his own terms, “heartbreaking”. “I remember my mother saying: “I love you and support you, but all I see is a life of unhappiness, isolation, prejudice and disease.. My greatest joy in life has been having children… I think you would make a wonderful father and it breaks my heart to think that you will never be able to. And you could die of this disease that is killing all those gay men in New York and San Francisco.”
It was HIV, AIDS, of course. When it broke out in the mid-1980s, the virus created such a seismic shock around the world, especially in homosexual circles where cases began to be reported in the United States, that it substantially changed the attitude that thousands of people had toward themselves. and sex. A twentysomething David was no exception: “I went back to the closet. I stopped having sex with men.”. Between that and his mother crying for a week after he told her he was gay, David made a point of dating women. “I thought at the time that maybe I just hadn’t met the right girl, or had the right sexual experience, where I would have felt more comfortable in my own skin instead of feeling awkward and embarrassed.”
To no one’s surprise, it didn’t work. The schizophrenia of the situation made him, at the age of 27, make the decision to go to London and get away from his family in order to be himself: “When I left Toronto, I really was living a double life. I had two sets of friends, gay and straight, and they never crossed paths. She had a girlfriend, I left her on the floor and then I went to have sex with a man. It was not the most honest, healthy and happy way to live your life. Four years later, dinner unexpectedly arrived on Halloween eve at Elton John’s house. If David was initially reluctant and uncomfortable in the star’s company, it was because, of course, Elton had a reputation, and it wasn’t limited to his ability as a songwriter and singer.
Even in a world as extravagant as rock and a scene as fond of sequins and excess as the 70s, Elton had stood out for his extreme looks that screamed look at me. He had dealt with how to deal with his shyness, his hang-ups, his lack of self-confidence, his sexual timidity, and then his baldness. With the inescapable collaboration of his lyricist bernie taupin, Reginald Dwight, the working-class kid raised in a poor neighborhood rental house, the apprentice musician who covered blues and played supporting artists of higher status, had become Elton John: a genius of the successful music, multimillionaire, wasteful, excessive and with a devilish character that made his fights legendary. That is to say, the epitome of the rock or pop star, or what they were considered to be in his time. But there was something else, then considered much less frequent: Elton was gay, although he came from such a repressive upbringing and from a time when sexual diversity was so little visible that he himself was not aware.
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