I've tried to concentrate here on the song rather than the singer. Dusty Springfield's sexual preferences don't automatically make The Look of Love a gay song, any more than Suede's The Drowners stands or falls on who Brett Anderson slept with. Anyway, sexuality, as the openly gay yet fortunately un-typecast Michael Stipe has said, "is a really slippery thing".

That said, I've tried to avoid contested meanings, like whether or not the impotent husband in Freda Payne's Band of Gold is secretly gay. Also out: anything historically significant but musically negligible, whether it be Tom Robinson's clumpy, dated Glad to Be Gay or the Tornados' 1966 curio Do You Come Here Often?

So what does that leave?

1 Jet Boy, Jet Girl, Elton Motello
2 Michael, Franz Ferdinand
3 Homosapien, Pete Shelley
4 Can You Forgive Her?, Pet Shop Boys
5 BD Woman's Blues, Lucille Bogan
6 Damn I Wish I Was Your Lover, Sophie B Hawkins
7 The Man That I Am With My Man, The Hidden Cameras
8 Breathing Fear, Kitchens of Distinction
9 What Makes a Man a Man, Marc Almond
10 I Was Born This Way, Carl Bean