What was Ziggy Stardust really like?
I was a high school graduate in 1971, and can remember the period of Ziggy Stardust very well. Your article runs the risk of rewriting history. I was also a Rolling Stone subscriber during that period and I remember very well a term they used to describe Bowie’s act. That term was “cock rock,” which was more a reference to his bi-gender appearance and homosexual behavior. Perhaps the writers at Rolling Stone lacked a science fiction consciousness that Bowie stimulated, but my observation is that all the other influences that our society offered during that epoch would have had far more effect. The achievements of NASA, Roddenberrys Star Trek and Kubrick were more than fresh on our minds at the time. In fact, Bowie’s movie The Man Who Fell to Earth was based on Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land and was poorly received it opened in the USA with very limited distribution and did not play in many theaters in the South at all. I only got a chance to see it on cable on Showtime in the ea
