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Bob Dylan turned 80 on Monday. Lionized, denigrated, dismissed, and reborn, he was finally celebrated properly, as a great poet, in 2016 with the Nobel Prize in Literature. But on the occasion of his birthday, I would like to offer him one more unlikely honorific: queer icon.
To be clear, I’m not suggesting that Dylan is gay. In his autobiography he celebrated his devotion to the “eclectic girls … non-homemaker types” whom he met when he first arrived in Greenwich Village, and that passion has never wavered. But there’s something else about Dylan that hasn’t wavered either, something that I sensed when he first strode out onto the stage of the Royal Albert Hall in 1965 and have followed as he went electric the following year, as we spoke for my first book on 1968, as I imbibed all of his words and music ever since. What made Dylan special, made him a queer icon and ally, throughout all that time is this: Comfort with queerness doesn’t require a particular sexual ori