Holding out for a hero, and finding one in Bonnie Tyler

There are some celebrities whose deaths you take personally, as if you knew them or they were connected to something deeply important in your life. That's what happened when I saw the news this morning about Bonnie Tyler's death.

Not the kind of grief you feel for someone you knew, but the kind you feel when a piece of your own history comes to an end.

I have spent more than forty years with two of her songs. "Total Eclipse of the Heart" and "Holding Out for a Hero" are still in my workout rotation. When I'm dragging through a set at the gym or trying to find the last reserves of energy to sprint the final mile of a run, those songs go on loop.

In one of my conversations with Adam Lambert, I told him I kept his version of "Holding Out for a Hero" on repeat because I loved the song so much. We talked about how much Tyler's music meant to us. You didn't have to be a gay young adult coming of age in the 1980s to understand its impact. The younger Lambert understood it as much as I did.

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That impact wasn't just about the propulsive rhythm, soaring melody, or stirring lyrics. Those qualities still make the songs motivational, but as I've gotten older, it's more about where they take me.

They take me back to the early 1980s, to a teenager painfully figuring out he was gay in a world that offered almost no good language for it. I had a Sony Walkman and a cassette of Faster Than the Speed of Night, and I played "Total Eclipse of the Heart" over and over, rewind, stop, rewind, stop, in that laborious pre-digital way until the tape eventually wore down and tangled in the spool. Those of us of a certain age remember the horror of that.

"Holding Out for a Hero" arrived on the Footloose soundtrack not long afterward, when I was in college, and it became its own kind of anthem. There's a reason for that. It's a song about waiting for someone strong enough, fast enough, fresh from the fight, to finally show up.

When you're hiding something as central as who you are, that longing for a hero — for a guy to rescue you, for someone who will make the fear and pain disappear — feels very real. My contemporaries and I were all holding out for that hero.

And I dare say those words, and the desperate way Tyler sang them, still resonate today. We all want our hero.

I remember the first gay bar I snuck into underage in Pittsburgh: Pegasus. When I interviewed Pittsburgh’s first out gay police chief, Larry Scirotto, who is about my age, we shared stories about visiting that same bar as teenagers while coming to terms with being gay.

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Tyler's unmistakable voice surely roared over the speakers there. I remember moving to Washington, D.C., in my twenties to work on Capitol Hill and slipping away from friends who didn't know my whole story so I could dance at a gay club, screaming "Turnaround, bright eyes" with a room full of strangers who somehow understood exactly what that scream was for.

Tyler's voice, that gravelly ache, held the two things a closeted man needed at once: the release of joy and the release of pain. You could dance to it and feel free. You could scream the chorus and let out everything you couldn't say anywhere else.

Then the AIDS crisis came, and grief poured into that same music. The songs became a place where loss could be wailed out loud. God, there was so much pain and so few ways to release it.

It turns out I wasn't imagining a private connection between Bonnie Tyler and gay life. She was, by any honest account, a genuine icon in our community, one whose catalog reads like a chronicle of queer heartbreak, resilience, and camp glamour.

She played New York's legendary gay club The Saint and spoke fondly of its crowds. "Holding Out for a Hero" became a fixture in gay clubs on both sides of the Atlantic. She once said her nephew told her it never stopped playing on the dance floor.

She was warm and unequivocal in her support for LGBTQ+ equality and spoke openly about the LGBTQ+ members of her own family. None of that surprises me. It only confirms what I felt on dance floors decades ago and still feel today.

She was one of ours, whether she fully knew it at first or not. Eventually she did, and she embraced it.

There's a particular grief that comes with losing an artist whose music has remained so present in your life. As long as Tyler was alive, there was a living thread connecting you to the scared young version of yourself who somehow found hope in a worn-out cassette tape.

Now that the metaphorical tape has finally broken, it feels like losing a small piece of your own youth along with her.

Tyler's voice has been the soundtrack to so many moments in my life, and her influence on me has never faded. Her music has always reminded me that the songs that shape us never really leave us. Somewhere just beyond my reach, I like to think there's still a melody reaching back for me, and it will always sound a little like Bonnie Tyler.

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