Lesley Gore, You Don’t Own Me

The Readers Wifes tenth choice of song with LGBT significance. For 2012 LGBT History Month.

Tears, tantrums, traumas … can’t you just hear the mascara sliding down?

Pete Shelley, Homosapien

The Readers Wifes ninth choice of song with LGBT significance. For 2012 LGBT History Month.

And if a fruitier line than “Homosuperior… in my interior” has ever instigated such a clutching of pearls and a wringing of hands at Auntie Beeb then we’d seriously love to hear it.

The Kinks, Lola

The Readers Wifes eighth choice of song with LGBT significance. For UK LGBT History Month.

Lola’s exquisite vignette of a confusingly enjoyable tryst with a Soho transvestite was one of the band’s biggest hits

Bronksi Beat, Smalltown Boy

The Readers Wifes seventh choice of song with LGBT significance. For UK LGBT History Month.

‘Smalltown Boy’ declared itself to be an era-rattling slab of atmospheric, immaculate, pumping hi-NRG pop over which soared a tortured falsetto vocal that barely seemed of this world.

Elton John, Someone Saved My Life Tonight

The Readers Wifes sixth choice of song with LGBT significance. For UK LGBT History Month.

Back in 1969, and unhappily engaged to be married to then girlfriend Linda Woodrow, the pre-fame singer-songwriter was so messed up in the head he was seriously contemplating suicide.

Sylvester, You Make Me Feel (Mighty Real)

The Readers Wifes fifth choice of song with LGBT significance. For UK LGBT History Month.

Underneath all his satin and tat, the one and only Sylvester James McCoy exhibited bigger balls than the whole lot of rock music’s supposed “revolutionaries” put together.

Some Of Your Lovin’, Dusty Springfield.

The Readers Wifes fourth choice of song with LGBT significance. For UK LGBT History Month.

Prejudice, alcoholism, struggles with her sexuality and all that industrial strength hair spray would have left their mark on anybody.

Useless Man, Minty.

The Readers Wifes third choice of song with LGBT significance. For UK LGBT History Month.

There were to be no scruples for fashion designer, club king, walking work of art, notorious cottager and all-round one-off genius Leigh Bowery’s indie art collective Minty

Janis Joplin, Me & Bobby McGee

The Readers Wifes second choice of song with LGBT significance. For UK LGBT History Month.

Joplin inhabits the song’s masculine narrative trousers so completely the genders feel blurry and it barely matters, in fact, whether the ambiguously named ‘Bobby’ in question is a boy or a girl.

Morrissey, Piccadilly Palare

The Readers Wifes first choice of song with LGBT significance. For UK LGBT History Month.

The 1990 single ‘Piccadilly Palare’ sees the bard inhabit the tragic-comic lives of 1950s rent boys in the seedy West End of the capital’s good old bad old days.