Rebel Rebel: David Bowie went from queer icon to family man and an alien reborn

David Bowie’s had a vigorous afterlife since dying in New York 10 years ago.He conquered Billboard’s album chart for the first time in his career with the dark jazzy masterpiece “Blackstar,” released Jan.8, 2016 — just two days before his death.His best-known singles surged back into the top 100 on both sides of the Atlantic as well.

And in the decade since, his record company has kept Bowie’s name hard at work, with box sets, live discs, archival releases, rarities, remixes and reissues pouring forth every year.“At the record company meeting / On their hands, a dead star / And oh, the plans they weave / And oh, the sickening greed,” sang Morrissey, one of the many other rock gods Bowie inspired, in the 1980s.But Bowie himself — a shrewd businessman who once sold bonds backed by the rights to his music — planned out the exploitation of his catalog before his death.He was King Tutankhamun leaving instructions for plundering the treasures from his own tomb.Bowie’s not just of archaeological interest in 2026, though.He’s in the records, and the headlines, made by today’s acts, too: in the gender-bending themes and affected identities of a Chappell Roan, for example.Though as Miss Roan’s sudden renunciation of another 20th-century icon, Brigitte Bardot, suggests, today’s stars don’t necessarily know anything about those who came before.

Bardot, who died last week, was a sex symbol, feminist, animal-rights activist but also, to Roan’s dismay, a staunch supporter of the French hard right and opponent of Muslim migration.Is there a side of Bowie, too, that those who celebrate him as a queer pioneer might be shocked to discover?There are two, actually.The first is that this bisexual alien from Mars turned out to be a family man — when he got the chance to leave the hedonistic lifestyle he’d explored and chronicled throughout the 1970s, he took it and never looked back.He left the stage, never to return to touring, in 2004 after suffer...