That’s Sean DeLear, pronounced like “chandelier”, born Anthony Robertson in 1964. You probably haven’t heard of him: DeLear was the lead singer of a band called Glue on the underground post-punk scene in Los Angeles in the 1980s and 90s. On stage, he performed in drag, singing punk songs dressed like a 1960s go-do dancer in cute little dresses. The band never landed a major record deal, and DeLear died from cancer in 2017. This sweet, scrappy documentary has been lovingly put together by his friend Markus Zizenbacher.
It’s not the first posthumous attempt at recognition for DeLear. In 2023, his teenage diary, written in 1979, was published under the title I Could Not Believe It. Extracts of this queer black memoir are read here on the voiceover – and they are glorious. Even aged 14 years old, living with his Christian parents in a conservative suburb of Los Angeles, DeLear was proudly, joyfully gay, though this was before the terror of Aids. The interviews in the film with his mum and brother, an evangelical pastor, feel a little bit thin; his family accepted his sexuality, they say, but not much else.
DeLear never had a proper job. For years he believed his band Glue would make it. A friend says the reason they didn’t might have something to do with having a black man in drag as lead singer, and tells the story of a Glue video being pulled from MTV by an executive. DeLear later moved to Vienna, joining a performance art collective, and lived like a celebrity, never thinking about where the rent was coming from. And celebrities loved him: when he walked into the women’s toilets at Kate Moss’s 21st birthday party, a gaggle of supermodels swarmed him, cooing over his dress. Does it matter that he wasn’t famous himself? Clearly he was a legend to everyone who knew him.
• The Life of Sean DeLear is on True Story from 2 May.
