By David Bowie, Icon or Abuser?

WHEN David Bowie died after a very private fight with liver cancer, obituary writers churned out words like “icon” and “legend” and “subversive.” Despite a life of very fluid explorations of musicality and sexuality and spirituality, the Vatican newspaper L’Osservatore Romano celebrated Bowie as “never banal,” displaying an “artistic rigor” which seemed to contradict the sexually “ambiguous image” he presented to “attract the attention of the media.”

This star-struck eulogy ignored Bowie’s 2013 album “The Next Day.” His “artistic rigor” included a nasty anti-Catholic video, starring actor Gary Oldman as an angry priest. It begins with this priest punching a begging teenage boy in the face. He enters what appears to be a nightclub for priests (and a cardinal) who glance lasciviously at half-dressed women. Bowie “sings” (in this case, unmusically growls) “And the priest stiff in hate now demanding fun begin / Of his women dressed as men for the pleasure of that priest.” He offers only cynicism toward these set-apart, celibate men: “They can work with Satan while they dress like the saints / They know God exists for the devil told them so.”