What you should know about Scissor Sisters

By Joe Brown

Wednesday, Sept. 8, 2010 | 4:55 p.m.

They’re shameless. At least lead singer Jake Shears is: In the past month alone, he’s been seen duetting onstage with Kylie Minogue; posing shirtless on the covers of Instinct and The Advocate; and making out with Adam Lambert. In front of Katy Perry. On YouTube.

100 percent artificial sweetener. There’s nothing crunchy, “authentic” or jammy on the band’s latest album, Night Work (which, by the way, features male reverse-camel toe on its cover). It’s glossy, glittery and urgently catchy, cherry-picking the most ear-candied elements of overt influences Elton John, Queen, the Bee Gees, Giorgio Moroder and Duran Duran.

More homoerotic than Jubilee! Or Thunder From Down Under. Or UFC, even.

But not just for gays. Night Work, Shears has said, fantasizes about/manifests a world in which AIDS never happened, referencing the highly synthetic, circa-1984 sounds of Bronski Beat, Frankie Goes to Hollywood and hi-energy disco. “That music worked universally,” Shears recently told England’s The Guardian. It’s as if the party kind of stopped, and it’s no coincidence that happened hand in hand with AIDS … I think the trick is that sexuality, whether it’s gay sexuality or not, is a universal thing. I mean, everyone gets horny.”