John, Paul, George and Ringo’s 1963 LP, featuring Twist and Shout and I Saw Her Standing There, is ranked alongside records by Abba, Elton John and Boy George in a gay pop pantheon published by Attitude, a gay lifestyle magazine.

“That summer it was the gay album,” said Simon Napier-Bell, the former manager of Wham! who nominated the record. “Every party, every club, everywhere you went, Please Please Me blasted out. George and Paul singing into one microphone, their cheeks touching, was the gayest thing we’d ever seen.”

The Beatles rarely wrote about homosexuality, although You’ve Got to Hide Your Love Away is thought to have been about Brian Epstein, their gay manager.

But the magazine claims the Beatles’ first album, ranked 30th in the list, represented “a turning point — the beginning of the modern gay era”, because it embodied a sense of sexual freedom and tolerance.

The top 50 includes Barbra Streisand, Take That and the Pet Shop Boys, but only one album dates back further: a 1961 recording at the Carnegie Hall in New York by Judy Garland, a gay icon whose role in The Wizard of Oz gave rise to the term “a friend of Dorothy” to mean a gay man.

The list is topped by the eponymous debut by Scissor Sisters, the New York band. Their success coincides with a boom in gay music.

“It has become fashionable to listen to gay music whether you are gay or not,” said Peter Tatchell, the gay rights campaigner. “Gay culture is seen as the cutting edge of all kinds of invention, not just in music, but also fashion, art and design.”

For Boy George, who nominated David Bowie’s 1970 record The Man Who Sold the World, the days of gay musicians portraying themselves as straight are over.

“Now lots of straight boys in rock bands paint their eyes and exude camp,” he told Attitude. “I say ‘God bless ’em!’”

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