The Width of a Circle
Song Meaning

“The Width of a Circle” brings gay sexual imagery into a surreal narrative of self-discovery, with religious and infernal encounters carrying both erotic and psychological meaning 1. The male figure’s seduction can be read as a sexual encounter within the story as well as a symbolic confrontation with forbidden desire. Bowie called the song autobiographical across a period of his youth, while commentary on the song explicitly identifies allusions to gay sex 1.

The meaning

Bowie framed “The Width of a Circle” as a span of personal history rather than a fictional story: “’Width Of A Circle’ covers a period from when I was about 17 to just before I recorded this album” 1. That places the song’s imagery, however strange, as rooted in his own adolescence and young adulthood, a compressed emotional autobiography stretched across roughly half a decade.

The opening verse’s meeting with “a monster who was sleeping by a tree,” only to realize “the monster was me,” reads as the clearest expression of that self-confrontation: a young man recognizing an unfamiliar, unruly part of his own identity. From there the lyrics escalate into overtly religious and cosmic territory (“God’s a young man too,” being taken by God “for a ride”), which lines up with commentary describing the song as full of “Biblical lyrics which alluded to gay sex, end times, mysticism and madness” 1.

The later encounter is erotic in its own narrative terms: a male figure displays his belt, the narrator reacts physically, and the scene develops into repeated seduction. Commentary identifies gay sexual allusions in the song’s biblical imagery 1. Reading this as a sexual encounter and reading it as psychological initiation are compatible; the mystical setting does not dissolve the sex into an abstract metaphor.

Taken together with Bowie’s own timeline 1, the song’s shifting cast of monsters, gods, and devils reads less as a fixed morality tale and more as a young man cycling through identity, faith, and sexuality all at once, using apocalyptic and biblical imagery 1 as a vocabulary big enough to hold that confusion. The circle of the title, with no clear start or end, mirrors that lack of resolution: the narrator is left “seething, breathing deeply,” still caught inside the experience rather than emerging from it.

Last updated 2026-09-08