Pansy Division was an openly gay rock band at a time when the very notion of an openly gay rock band seemed shocking and political. And the early ’90s weren’t even that long ago. Pansy Division is still a gay rock band—more accurately, a pop/punk band befitting its Lookout! Records/Gilman St. heritage—and have just released eighth album That’s So Gay (Alternative Tentacles), which retains the group’s signature melodic songs and humorous, homo-tawdry lyrics. Frontman Jon Ginoli, who recently published the book Deflowered: My Life In Pansy Division, tells his story:
In 1988, I’d quit playing music. After attending the University of Illinois in the mid-’80s, I’d formed a jangly guitar band called the Outnumbered. Living in Champaign, Ill., we made three albums. We played a couple hundred gigs, toured a little bit and finally wound down and split up. My band had some minor success, and I felt like I’d given music a try, so I gave it up and moved to California.
After moving to San Francisco, I became involved with activist groups such as ACT-UP and Queer Nation. A lot of the art being made in these circles was necessarily dark, shrouded in pain and cathartic; large numbers of people were dying tragic, premature deaths from AIDS. This was the moment, in 1990, when the word “queer” was transformed from an epithet into a weapon. That use of the word was a brash move, a good example of making a positive out of a negative. I thought, “What if someone did songs like that?” It didn’t take long to figure out that if I wanted to see that happen, I’d have to do it myself.
A lot of the Outnumbered’s songs, though poppy and catchy, were fairly bleak lyrically: an emotional response to the Reagan years, a reflection of how much worse things had gotten since the optimistic ’60s. Though I wanted to be as honest and sincere as possible in those songs, playing them meant reliving that frustration with each performance, and if it got me down, what was it going to do for the listener? If I was going to make music again, I wanted to make music that would uplift an audience, make them smile and make me smile, too.
None of the musicians we now know to be gay—such as the Pet Shop Boys, Michael Stipe, Bob Mould, Rob Halford, kd Lang, Melissa Etheridge, Marc Almond—was open and out back then. Some were pretty obvious, but when asked, they would still deny it. We thought that if no one else will step forward and do it, we’ll have the territory to ourselves! In the early days of Pansy Division, we felt like our subject matter was unlimited. We weren’t just gay rock musicians; we wrote songs with specifically gay subject matter: songs about our gay bar experiences, sexy songs without vague pronouns, songs about liking curved dicks. Songs with titles such as “The Cocksucker Club.” We also wrote songs about how we didn’t fit within the confines of the gay subculture—about the triumph of the superficial and about disliking Judy Garland, disco and the sometimes nasty and bitchy underside of gay life. We dared to push ourselves. What do we really want to say? What can we get away with? We were cracking ourselves up, thinking, “Wait until people hear this.”
“Twinkie, Twinkie Little Star” from That’s So Gay (download):
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