Confessions of Old
Hessians
A mantra of my generation was 'rock and roll will never
die', also expressed as 'long live rock and roll' and otherwise. But now it seems that rock and roll has died, in that it does not have the
cachet or popularity it once did.
I think though, that rock and roll has been connected to
'coolness', and that coolness, originally a necessary posture of the sensitive
and honest person, has died. In the
ridiculous conservative culture that we now live in in the United States, no
one is really cool anymore. Ridiculously
cheesy people only knock off coolness, is the fact of the matter.
Those who adopted rock and roll as a motif and spiritual
center have always been in some important sense outsiders, and yet, gay males,
as outsiders par excellence, seem to
have adopted rock and roll spiritually and musically and culturally less so
than straight males, and I can only begin to wonder why this is so. When I look at gay males who are into rock
and roll, I find that I remember many who seemed especially troubled. But there are so many gay males who are quite
troubled but nevertheless did not adopt
rock and roll as a spiritual center and did not have rock and roll as a strong
musical preference. And so I feel that I might reject any thesis about gay
rockers that starts from the premise of our being generally more troubled than
other gay males. So what is it about gay
men and rock and roll? I mean, why is
the gay rocker such as myself, so solitary?
I suppose it is the case that even straight guys who like rock and roll
are in the minority - I mean straight guys who really like rock and roll and
have always had rock and roll music as a significant part of their music collections
and their lives.
Has gay preference been dictated too much by weak disc
jockeys at gay clubs, who, everyone seems to complain, never play music that
gay guys like? Though gay bar music is recognizable and predictable and
categorizable, all gay guys I speak to claim not to really like what is played
at the gay clubs (and by clubs I mean bars also) and yet this unwanted music
continues to get played, and almost always at the expense of rock and roll. This could be filed under the topic of how a false gay culture is fabricated by
media and upheld by non-critical and unvigilant (i.e. unaware and uneducated)
gay guys.
In any case, despite the lack of prevalence of the taste for
rock and roll, there ARE plenty of gay rockers out there. And in some ways the gay rock culture has
flourished even as coolness, its progenitor and concomitance, was dying.
The gay presence in the rock and roll world itself received
a boost when my friend Bill, in the late 1990's wrote a letter to Metal Maniacs magazine sizing up and
cutting down the heterosexism and homophobia in the rock world, especially in
the worlds of metal and death rock. Bill pointed out how pathetic and weak the
rockers who relied on the disparagement of LGBT persons to make themselves seem
right, strong, or cool, were. The
letter was valuable, but the flood of positive responses it received from
across the world was even more valuable, and also uplifting. The responses were overwhelmingly positive,
and many of them were from males who identified as heterosexual. This letter
was a watershed in the history of rock and roll queerness.
Another huge boost to the gay rock and roll world, and
perhaps its biggest ever, came when Rob Halford, the singer and front man for
the godband of metal, Judas Priest, came out as gay. Judas Priest had been, by
widespread agreement, the most liked and most emblematic and iconic band of
metal music, and thus a focus and spiritual center of rock and roll machismo.
Overnight, rock and roll sensibility and spirituality had proved itself to have
a queer core.
I think that the hard rock scene has always been homoerotic,
and has always been more equalizing than most non-rockers think. It has also been an early bearer of
transgenderism. My own experiences in
the rock scene bear this out. While
there was definitely some alienation as gay man, there was also a greater
feeling of equality than in many other scenes.
In the pit at a Motorhead show in Philadelphia, I was cared
for by lots of guys each time I would get banged to the floor by the wild
strength being exercised there. Guys who all seemed bigger than I somehow would
swoop me up from the floor and hold me for a second from behind, asking if I
was alright. They would sometimes protect me from a coming blow in the form of
the freight train like forward movement of a group of wayward pit monsters. The same in the pit at Napalm Death. The same
at a Dark Funeral concert. Once at a
Gwar show, I entered the pit dressed as a blue fairy, wearing blue panty hose
and wings made of nylon and metal. That show was rough, with one of the members
of the band even stopping the show at one point to tell people in the audience
to calm down, but I still felt less alienated there than I did later at a gay
club frequented by victims of the fashion industry. And when I went out to a very straight rock
and roll bar in Manhattan dressed in trashy hardrock drag[1],
the biggest problem I had was dealing with the jealousy of all of the
rough-and-tumble "straight" guys trying to compete to pick up on me
and buy me a drink.
Now, to take this examination of rock and roll back up to
the theme of the blog, I often ask myself the
question whether rock and roll is revolutionary or reactionary. The question has been asked of punk too, as a
sub-genre of rock and roll. I think that
'culture' for lack of a better term, overall, cannot be pegged as revolutionary
or reactionary, but that this may be changing since some theorists are
critiquing the use of the concept of culture in a way that sees the very
concept as reactionary, or as used to support reactionary ideas.
Whether or not we can specify how much a part of a culture
or a subculture is revolutionary, I know that rock and roll has at least one
element of revolution and that is its anger.
Rock and roll expresses anger in rebellion in general, and not just a
happy complacence or rah rahism. What
were the jocks and rah rahs supporting anyway, and what was it that rock and
roll was against when it stood against the jocks and rah rahs? Rock and roll was against the establishment,
and the establishment was against the revolution.
And, I remember rock
and roll from a time when it was ok and good to be angry and loud and defiant
and to dress in black, but more importantly, I remember when one's look and
attitude and even what one listened to helped to define one politically, and being against the
establishment is, in the end, a political
position.
Within our own rainbow community (I hate the rainbow flag by
the way), we have our own establishment.
According to this rainbow establishment, there are many
things that characterize the community of queers - of gays, bisexuals,
lesbians, and trans persons, but one of them is not anger. Even though
Stonewall was an angry revolutionary uprising, and not respectable or of the
establishment, establishment queers rest on its anger to advocate non-angry
approaches and non-violence and a whole litany of ineffective and
community-perverting approaches to justice.
Rock and roll reminds me, or, it is for me, the music of the
reminder that this is a struggle, and that the goal of queerness is to
overthrow the heterosexual political regime and to radically change society,
and not to assimilate into it and be accepted.
I think that we need to queer up the rock scene and
subculture even more, but also that rock and roll's historical character and
sound and tempo and culture should queer up the gay community itself, or at
least, those of us with ears to hear its musical and lyrical message of rebellion.
For me the interpretation of rock and roll was always
queer. I'm not very interested in
heterosexism in rock and roll or outside of it.
When I hear the crescendo of a rock and roll riff, I thank its creators
for getting me hyped ready for queer revolutionary action. All of the Christian-residual
establishmentarianism and rah rahism are what I know is not real when I hear
good rock music. Rock and rollers make,
as Judas Priest wrote about, a 'deal with the devil'. And the devil is not on the side of the
establishment.
I'm here I'm queer; I have the love and anger that
revolution requires.
Work me, Miss Halford!
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