Velvet Goldmine

A Kaleidoscopic Ode to Queerness, Glamour, and Melancholy.

“Velvet Goldmine” is a love letter to queerness, created long before non-binary visibility entered the mainstream conversation.

This wants to be a reminder that this movement was born in unsuspected eras that deserve to be rediscovered and understood by today’s younger generation.

There was a time when music meant belonging—a space where identity could be discovered and expressed before labels were so widely discussed—a reminder that expression itself once came before definition.

Directed by Todd Haynes, “Velvet Goldmine” (1998) is a musical drama set in Britain during the glam rock explosion of the early 1970s. It tells the story of fictional bisexual pop icon Brian Slade (Jonathan Rhys Meyers), who famously fakes his own death.

While clearly inspired by figures like David Bowie, Iggy Pop, Lou Reed, and Oscar Wilde (yes!!!), the film never aims to be a biopic. Instead, it’s a celebration of freedom and self-expression, portraying an era when music still throbbed with experimentation, creativity, and danger—whether you were on stage or in the crowd.

Glam rock has been woven into queer history since its glittering emergence in the late ’60s and early ’70s, born out of both decadence and disillusionment. It was a genre that merged muscular early rock’n’roll with erotic energy and unapologetic flamboyance.

It relished gender-bending, flirted with punk’s defiance, disco’s extravagance, and prog rock’s mythic indulgence.

Identity in “Velvet Goldmine” is always performative, always in flux—which aligns perfectly with the idea of queerness as art rather than a label.

Haynes masterfully fuses science fiction, fantasy, a movement, and drama, creating a tragedy.

A nostalgic lament for youthful abandon and freedom, a kaleidoscopic myth about what glam rock might have been, and an acknowledgment of what it truly was.

It still reverberates within today’s lgbtqia+ community, where the liberation to be whoever you are often feels buried beneath the noise of online discourse, where expressions of fluidity can sometimes feel more curated than lived.

And that’s precisely why this film still matters today and it should be a must-watch, to understand a cultural movement that was—and in many ways still is—seen as controversial. “Velvet Goldmine” celebrates a time when queerness thrived in ambiguity—when music, fashion, and art were acts of self-discovery, not labels.

Today, discussions around gender and identity are often more structured and politicized—a necessary evolution, but one that sometimes risks losing the spontaneous, artistic chaos that once defined queerness.

Haynes’s film reminds us that queerness once lived in gestures, in colour, in sound—not just in definitions.

For many, queerness in the glam era was both fashion and rebellion—a way to shatter the moral constraints of capitalism and gender conformity. It was indulgent, defiant, liberating—a queer revolution that stormed the stage in sequins, feathers and eyeliner, exploiting performance as much as it celebrated it.

But it’s a give and take. As our history of resistance faded into whispers, the glittered anarchy of those fabulous peacocks became the volume for the next generation to cling to—and perhaps still is.

“Velvet Goldmine” pieces together history amid myth. It captures the melancholy of a queer icon consumed by assimilation, the vanishing traces of queerness as something alien and transient.

It exposes that moment—and then turns it into a timeless tale of history and screen time.