You owe it to yourself to read this fabulous book or listen to the audiobook.  Over 40 years in the making, Barry Walters’ compendium of the popular music essential to the LGBTQ community has at last been published and released. The title aptly mirrors the name of Sylvester’s queer anthem “You Make Me Feel (Mighty Real).”

Mighty Real is a definitive social history of our culture and our lives at the clubs, the discos, the music festivals, or at home with our headphones. Broken into short chapters covering one or more artists, the book is eminently readable, and mercifully free of the dense academic jargon that curses so many writings on popular culture. Waters writes with intelligence but from the heart, at times unobtrusively inserting his own experiences into the narrative. I found that charming, and the book quite entertaining.

He also writes with kindness and compassion and stands up for performers who were vilified by so many for being different, or honest, or outrageous. He includes many women, both lesbian and not, for various reasons: performers like Bette Midler, Grace Jones, Madonna, and Cher, who may not be queer but centered much of their careers on “the gays.” He includes Sinead O’Connor, who paid the price for confronting the scandalous secrets within her own Catholic upbringing, long before they were acknowledged. He even honors Martha Wash, of “Two Tons of Fun” and “The Weather Girls”, as the voice behind many other great club favorites.

I found so much of my own history in these pages. When he speaks of the Indigo Girls playing at Atlanta’s Little Five Points Pub, I remembered my Durham, NC lesbian community heading over to Halby’s Delicatessen to hear them perform at around the same time. Before achieving fame, Melissa Etheridge came to the same space at our YWCA where I helped to DJ dances held by our TALF (Triangle Area Lesbian Feminists).  The theme song for TALF, “Women Loving Women,” was written by Teresa Trull, part of our community before she headed west to record for Olivia Records. When I moved to the East Village in NYC, I was a short walk away from The Pyramid Club, where one might find RuPaul and the Lady Bunny in the mix of people there.

From the Michigan Women’s Music Festival to the Pet Shop Boys, it’s all in here, and by the time I finished the book, I felt as though Barry Walters could be my friend. Walters was a critic for the Village Voice, so perhaps I was reading him and being influenced by him decades ago and didn’t know it. I’m glad he got it all down and got it right.