Serbian Stiletto Man

oliver mandic

Nice legs

How naïve I was as a young teen. No homo is ever gonna pull wool over my eyes again. No Siree. Now I’m more qualified to judge these kinds of dudes.

That aside, at age eleven I had no idea that this record by Oliver Mandic–(yes: Man Dic) which is his real name by the way–contained any gay references. Cross dressing is a peculiar thing. In some cultures they’ll make you walk up to the gallows for walking in high heels. In others it is seen as a benign expression of male creativity. A proof that “real’ men can be as whimsical as err, gay men.

My culture must have been the latter. Or maybe it was just me not fully appreciating a difference between a skirt and a pair of pants. This record cover didn’t warp my mind though. It didn’t make me reach for my Dic and desiccate my gonads. It didn’t rearrange my hormones and make me grow tits in place of a beard. In fact it didn’t do anything at all.

Thinking in retrospect, it should have done all of the above. I am sad that this cover went underappreciated by me until recently.

Oliver Mandic was a new wave guy from Belgrade, Yugoslavia. He was quite good. This 1981 record called “Try Me” had a number of memorable songs. The music video for “My Dear Loves Kurosawa” is something else. In it Oliver Mandic wears poor-man’s-Klaus-Nomi costumes including the outfit from the record cover. The song is wonderfully layered as Kurosawa’s name combines both parts of word “kurac” (dick) and “Sava” which is a common Serbian name.

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