When Josie Cotton released the song "Johnny are you Queer?" in the '80s there was backlash from all sides. Now she's decided to re-release it on her new CD, Pussycat Babylon, so Windy City Times talked to her about the controversial song and what she really meant by it.
Josie Cotton: I fell in love with [ Chicago ] when I was there a few years ago.
Windy City Times: Yeah, it's a great city. So, why did you decide to re-release "Johnny are you Queer?"
JOSIE COTTON: I was tortured and beaten and put in an iron box until I relented. I was not thrilled with the idea. I resisted it. I protested it. I became frightened and all kinds of emotions entered into my brain. But, I finally saw the advantage of doing it from a PR perspective. It was kind of perfect timing if I was ever going to re-release the song—this would be the moment with what is going on in dance music and this incestuous love for '80s music right now.
WCT: Where did the idea for the song originally come from?
JOSIE COTTON: Originally it was half of a punk-rock song that was written and performed by a band called Fear, who was really hardcore. You really were frightened when you saw that band. They had a song—it was basically just that line, but it was screamed really angrily over and over. My [ subsequent ] producers reworked it into a pop kind of medium and pretty much rewrote the entire song except for that one line, which seemed to have a huge reaction in the crowd it was circulating [ through ] in Los Angeles.
WCT: How do you think that song impacted your career?
JOSIE COTTON: Well, that's the million-dollar question. In my universe I think that it had a gigantic effect on it. I was offered record deals if I dropped the song. At the time, IRS Records was a really great label to be on; the Police were on there and the Go-Go's. They knew about the song. They knew I'd recorded it. They just insisted I not do it and that was a turning point in my career. Of course, you always wonder about those things—about roads not taken. I just thought it was a really lousy way to start my career—compromising something that I thought was really funny shit.
WCT: It seems like half the gay community loved you for the song and the other half hated you for it. Why do you think there were such diverse reactions?
JOSIE COTTON: I've thought about this at length and the best that I can come up with is that this song; it combined a tremendous amount of elements that, until that point, had not been put together. One of the elements was comedy and it took people off-guard to hear that word, which was pretty much an obscene word at the time except in the gay community. It's a very brutally honest question in pretty much a story of unrequited love. So, it's pretty much all of those elements together, people were taken back.
They really didn't know what had hit them. Most people I knew laughed, including the gay people I knew and truck drivers and every walk of life; they didn't know how to react and laughter happened. It was a very liberating kind of feeling. You didn't know what had hit you. I think that some people didn't understand the intent of the song or just the pure, innocence of this character singing it. It was fascinating to observe.
WCT: What did you think when The Advocate and the Village Voice reacted very negatively to the song?
JOSIE COTTON: That was really kind of devastating to me, personally. I felt very misunderstood. I felt attacked. I really did. It didn't make sense to me. They didn't know what side of the fence I was on in that topic. I thought it was funny. The religious right was so adamantly opposed to [ the song ] ; I just thought it was hilarious. I realized that those two factions kind of came together against me. It was just the height of irony.
WCT: So you've performed at some gay-pride parades. When and why did you start doing that?
JOSIE COTTON: I started doing that about 2006. The first one I did was at San Francisco pride and that was great. It was wonderful. I performed at L.A. Pride a couple of times now. I was in New York during Pride Week and hit it hard that week—putting out the new "Johnny" single. It was pretty wild. It was amazing.
WCT: Any plans to come to Chicago?
JOSIE COTTON: I really want to hit Chicago. I'm talking with my people about organizing a series of shows and Chicago is way up on my list. I've been kind of courted to come there for quite some time and I've never played there, I'm sad to say.
Cotton's new "electro-pop" CD, Pussycat Babylon, will be released Sept. 21.
