Book Review: Mighty Real

From the underground dancefloors of the Seventies to the global charts of the Nineties, LGBTQ artists and audiences shaped music’s sound, style, and spirit. In Mighty Real, veteran journalist Barry Walters chronicles its LGBTQ history from the Velvet Underground to the 21st century’s dawn as he honors the artists who redefined gender, defied tradition, and dared to challenge sexual norms with the help of a record business that wasn’t as straight as commonly believed.

Drawing on his decades as a New York- and San Francisco-based music critic, Walters examines how LGBTQ musicians, music industry executives, and fans reshaped the mainstream. He connects the dots between David Bowie’s dazzling reinventions, Grace Jones’s androgynous glamor, Prince’s boundary-shattering sexuality, and the radical candor of the Indigo Girls to prove they’re all doing the same thing: fighting oppression.

With exuberance, insight, and encyclopedic knowledge, Walters brings to life the songs and society that filled dancefloors, bedrooms, and streets as he uncovers yesteryear’s coded LGBTQ messages that paved the way for today’s unabashedly queer hits. Mighty Real is a masterful love letter to the music that liberated generations, and it’s written in a page-turning, personal way that blurs distinctions between chronicle and memoir. This is the rare and revolutionary music history told to help you laugh, cry, and then rally against lingering inequality.

Mighty Real: A History of LGBTQ Music 1969-2000 by Barry Walters will be published May 12, 2026. Viking Penguin provided an early galley for review.

As a big music fan of all genres, this book was something definitely had to check out. While I knew it would cover familiar ground, I was hoping to learn some new things too.

And right out of the gate, I did. The chapter on Laura Nyro was a revelation for me. I knew many songs that she penned that other artists made famous, but this book sent me on a journey to discover her recordings as well.

I appreciated the insights that Walters brings to the topic, pulling from interviews he personally conducted with several of the artists discussed. I also like how it is structured with chapters focusing on artists primarily in order of when they debuted or hit career milestones. Finally, the discography at the end is a great resource for quick reference to all the music discussed in the earlier chapters.