Table Of Content

deflowered my life in Pansy Division deflowered my life in Pansy Division by jon ginoli Copyright 2009 by Jon Ginoli All rights reserved. Except for brief passages quoted in newspaper, magazine, radio, television, or online reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. Published in the United States by Cleis Press Inc., P.O. Box 14697, San Francisco, California 94114. Printed in the United States. Cover design: Scott Idleman Text design: Frank Wiedemann Cleis logo art: Juana Alicia First Edition. 10 987654321 Contents vii Prologue 1 Chapter 1: We Had to Come from Somewhere 17 Chapter 2: California and the Birth of Pansy Division 32 Chapter 3: The Band Takes Shape: Chris Freeman 46 Chapter 4: Finding a Label and the First Release 55 Chapter 5: Undressed 63 Chapter 6: First Tour 70 Chapter 7: Deflowered 79 Chapter 8: Green Day/Pansy Division Tour Diary 98 Chapter 9: Canadian Tour 101 Chapter 10: The Big Time: Second Tour with Green Day 118 Chapter 11: Pileup 124 Chapter 12: Down Under 129 Chapter 13: Long Hot Summer 140 Chapter 14: Touring Tensions 146 Chapter 15: Wish I’d Taken Pictures 155 Chapter 16: Next Stop Europe 164 Chapter 17: Plowing Ahead 168 Chapter 18: Luis and Patrick 182 Chapter 19: The Descendents Story 186 Chapter 20: More Lovin’ from Our Oven 190 Chapter 21: The One-Hundred-Day Tour 206 Chapter 22: Absurd Pop Song Romance 213 Chapter 23: Road Warriors 218 Chapter 24: France Is the Indiana of Europe: European Tour Diary 231 Chapter 25: At a Crossroads 239 Chapter 26: Drift and Renewal 247 Chapter 27: Total Entertainment! 255 Chapter 28: The Final Tour? 267 Chapter 29: Beyond and Back 275 Discography Prologue Our rental truck was packed and loaded, sitting at the cavernous loading dock inside Madison Square Garden. We started it up, drove down a couple floors of exit ramps, and headed for the Lincoln Tunnel. How the hell had we managed to get there? It wasn’t planned, that’s for sure. If we had planned to get to Madison Square Garden, we wouldn’t have taken anything resembling the path we took. We certainly wouldn’t have formed a gay rock band. The truth is we got there by not planning to get there at all. Not that we headlined, mind you—we opened for the massively popular band Green Day, then at their first peak of popularity. But it was being ourselves that got their attention in the first place, and led them to ask us to do a tour that changed our lives, changed our band, and provided a bird’s-eye view of how society was changing for gay people. But I’m getting ahead of myself here. Rock and roll has been around for more than fifty years. It’s one of the linchpins of modern American culture. From its controversial origins, which exposed the fault lines of race and class in America, it became a populist, mainstream music, becoming big business in the process. As a defining cultural moment, it set standards and expectations. As it became normalized, it was by default heterosexual, regular guy music; at the same time, rock and roll was androgynous. Think of Elvis Presley’s makeup. Little Richard’s flamboyance. The Beatles’s groundbreaking effeminate haircuts. David Bowie’s and Lou Reed’s taboo-breaking gender-bending. Freddie Mercury’s flouncing. Mick Jagger tongue-kissing Ron Wood on Saturday Night Live. The homoeroticism of ’80s hair metal bands, all that pretty, pretty hair, but with macho jerk attitudes. Morrissey’s seen-it-all-before jaded queen act. Prince, Judas Priest, Style Council, Soft Cell, Skid Row...a seemingly endless list of performers that gave off a gay vibe, toyed with effeminate or homosexual imagery, but weren’t gay, wouldn’t come out, or came out but then retreated into the closet. That was where rock music stood as it entered the ’90s. It was time for a gay rock band—so I formed one. I called it Pansy Division. This book tells how and why we started, and where we went. It’s a story about coming of age sexually versus coming of age culturally. It’s about punk and queer simultaneously going mainstream, and the meeting of gay subculture and the rock subculture. For years, when I’ve spun tales of my experiences with Pansy Division, people have often suggested that I write a book about them. Here it is. When we began, we were the first gay rock band we viii knew of, apart from some contemporaries appearing at the same time. I thought that as we carried on and met more people we might hear of earlier such bands too obscure for us to have discovered on our own. Though we didn’t hear of any entirely gay bands, we heard about a number of gay musicians. It reminded me that a lot of gay history is hidden and inaccessible, and that we should write our own stories ourselves instead of waiting for historians and fans to do the archaeology. As for the complete history of gay rock and roll, that’s another book, but here’s our story. IX