Holding out for a hero, and finding one in Bonnie Tyler

There are some celebrities whose deaths you take personally, as if you knew them or they were connected to something deeply important in your life. That's what happened when I saw the news this morning about Bonnie Tyler's death.Not the kind of grief you feel for someone you knew, but the kind you feel when a piece of your own history comes to an end.I have spent more than forty years with two of her songs. "Total Eclipse of the Heart" and "Holding Out for a Hero" are still in my workout rotation. When I'm dragging through a set at the gym or trying to find the last reserves of energy to sprint the final mile of a run, those songs go on loop.In one of my conversations with Adam Lambert, I told him I kept his version of "Holding Out for a Hero" on repeat because I loved the song so much. We talked about how much Tyler's music meant to us. You didn't have to be a gay young adult coming of age in the 1980s to understand its impact. The younger Lambert understood it as much as I did.Related: Adam Lambert on Becoming the Voice of London Pride, Nail Polish, and QueenThat impact wasn't just about the propulsive rhythm, soaring melody, or stirring lyrics. Those qualities still make the songs motivational, but as I've gotten older, it's more about where they take me.They take me back to the early 1980s, to a teenager painfully figuring out he was gay in a world that offered almost no good language for it. I had a Sony Walkman and a cassette of Faster Than the Speed of Night, and I played "Total Eclipse of the Heart" over and over, rewind, stop, rewind, stop, in that laborious pre-digital way until the tape eventually wore down and tangled in the spool. Those of us of a certain age remember the horror of that."Holding Out for a Hero" arrived on the Footloose soundtrack not long afterward, when I was in college, and it became its own kind of anthem. There's a reason for that. It's a song about waiting for someone strong enough, fast enough, fresh from the fight, to finally sho