Table Of Contentdeflowered
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
