Pansy Division – Fem in a Black Leather Jacket (1993)

Welcome to Queer Music Heritage, and this is JD Doyle. I’m heard every month as a part of Queer Voices on KPFT, and the song I opened with is by one of my favorite bands, Pansy Division. It’s from their first album, from 1993, called “Undressed,” and the song is “Fem in a Black Leather Jacket.” I’m very pleased this month because I get to share with you a special interview I did with Jon Ginoli, the founder of Pansy Division. And he’s been very busy lately. The band has just released their ninth full length album, and it’s called “That’s So Gay.” And a new documentary has been hitting the film festival circuit, called “Pansy Division: Life in a Gay Rock Band.” That’s out on DVD now. And Jon’s written a book, called “Deflowered: My Life in Pansy Division.” So he’s been travelling the country on a book tour. I’m very glad he stopped in Houston, as he was able to come by for an extensive interview.

Let me tell you how this show will be set up. My interview with Jon will be split into two parts, with a lot of it being in Part 1, the segment designed for broadcast radio. But if you know anything about this band at all, you already know that most of the joy of their music comes from the boundaries they’ve always gleefully leaped over. Their music celebrates gay sexuality, and they were one of the first to do so with such explicit lyrics. Many of their songs, well, I can’t even read the titles on this show. That’s where Part 2 will come in. That can be found on my website, as an internet-only version. Of course that’s at www.queermusicheritage.com.

But wait, there’s more. In preparation of this show I also decided that on QMH I’ve never really done justice to the punk music genre of Queercore. And the main reason why is the same one that’s prevented me from playing very many Pansy Division songs over the years. It’s the lyrics, folks. So as long as I’m extending this show to the internet I’m going to attempt the very daunting task of covering the genre of Queercore, focusing mostly on the early 90s. I’ll finally play such bands as Team Dresch, Tribe 8, Fifth Column, Go, God Is My Co-Pilot, Fagbash, and on and on, about five hours worth.

And if you’ve ever dug into Queercore at all, you’ve heard of JD’s Top Ten Homocore Hits. You’ll hear about that as well, because in a special segment I have a very interesting interview with GB Jones, who is credited with being one of the first influences of queercore, both for her work with the fanzine JD’s and in the band Fifth Column. So hold onto your seatbelts when you visit those segments.

But let’s get started with my Jon Ginoli interview. Pansy Division was not Jon’s first band. For several years in the mid-80s Jon led a band called The Outnumbered.

JG: I had wanted to be in a band, have a band since I was a kid, so throughout college I had the idea of wanting to do a band, and as college was finishing up I finally started writing songs and, I think I was 20, I started playing guitar, and writing songs. So The Outnumbered was my first band. You know, all the ideas of my childhood, my youth, building up, thinking, you know, what would I finally do if I got to have a band. So that was my first band. We were in Champaign, Illinois, and the band was successful. We were together five years. We made three albums and a single. We played over 200 shows, and went all over the country. The Outnumbered was…started when I was 22 years old and broke up when I was 27. And I just listened to a lot of The Outnumbered’s music again recently and just thought, wow, this is the music of a disillusioned young man who just got out of college. It’s the Reagan era, and things pretty much seemed to suck. I was working at Kinko’s. I wanted to try to play music. The music scene, you know, mainstream music just seemed really dispirited, really horrible. So I thought, I guess I’m just an outcast, and here’s me doing my music, and I’m just going to do it the way I wanted to.

I want to stop and ask about a particular Outnumbered song, “I Feel So Sorry Now”

JG: Yeah, that was actually the first really good song I wrote, and it really wasn’t about anybody in particular. I was just thinking about various things, thinking about what a relationship would be like, a situation I might find myself in, but it really wasn’t written from experience.

Was that the basis for “Homo Christmas”?

JG: A variation of that is what I used for the music for “Homo Christmas,” yeah, cause I wrote “Homo Christmas” in a hurry, and it was right before Christmas of ’91, and we were going to play a show, and it was the week before Christmas and that afternoon I decided I wanted to write a Christmas song, just for the show. And it turned out to be a really good song, but I pilfered, I stole from myself, to get the music in a hurry, cause I had to do it right then.

We’ll hear “Homo Christmas” on Part 2 of this interview, but here’s a bit of the song it grew from, “I Feel So Sorry Now.”

The Outnumbered – I Feel So Sorry Now (1985)

The band The Outnumbered released three albums. That was from their first, in 1985, called “Why Are All The Good People Going Crazy.”

I know this is a very well known fact, but as this is a history show I can’t Not ask how you came up with the name Pansy Division.

JG: It was a complete accident. I was working at Rough Trade Distribution, which was a wholesale independent record distributor, in San Francisco. And the left side of my desk was against a wall and on that wall was a bulletin board, and Rough Trade distributed releases and Rough Trade label put things out. So there was a list of upcoming titles that were being distributed. And one of them was a band whose record never came out, because Rough Trade went bankrupt, called Third Panzer Division. I don’t know what kind of music it was. I think it might have been electronic. So I could see the bulletin board out of the corner of my eye, cause it was to my left. If it looked forward I wouldn’t see it, but out of the corner of my eye to the left I would just glance at it, and I thought I saw the phrase Pansy Division, instead of Panzer Division. I thought, Pansy Division…that was right when I needed a name for this gay rock thing that I was contemplating doing…and I thought, wow, that’s a really good name. I thought, well, I’m going to hold onto that until I think of something better, but I was satisfied with that pretty quickly.
I heard the phrase pansy…it really wasn’t used where I lived, as a put-down, but it was on “Monty Python,” and on “Monty Python,” that’s how they would refer to the gays, as you know, “pansies, you bleeding pansy.” And I thought, I like that, pansy.

What did you want the band Pansy Division to be?

JG: I wanted it to be blunt, unapologetic and in-your-face, because I had moved to San Francisco, and had gotten involved with Act-Up and Queer Nation, especially with Act-Up. I was pretty active for a couple of years. And what that showed me was…it showed me a lot of possibilities, including the idea that a bunch of activists and radicals out on the edge, making a lot of noise, and being to some people unreasonable, were able to create a lot of space in society for other people to kind of follow in step behind them, people who don’t want to be first to draw all this attention, but once somebody else is able to make that point, they’re able to be there and agree and build on that. I saw from Act-Up how effective that could be. The experience of being involved with those queer activist groups made me think I could do something that was musical, but was still, instead of being like a political activist, I would be a cultural activist. I wanted to sing about sex, because I thought sex hadn’t really been talked about in, and celebrated in a direct way. It’s always couched in terms of something else. I thought, I will be blunt, I will be out, it’s the time of AIDS, the time of Jesse Helms and right-wing people attacking gays, saying we’re monsters. And I thought, instead of being…instead of trying to placate those people, who really couldn’t be placated anyway, I would just try to be as out and as direct and as unapologetic as I could be. I thought that would be something I think I can do nobody else is doing.

Not a lot of people know that before Pansy Division the band released its first album, “Undressed,” in 1993, Jon on his own had recorded a tape, also called “Undressed,” sold mostly in San Francisco record stores. It had the exact same track listing as the recording that came out later. He got some friends to help him out on the other instruments, but really there was no band. This was several months before he put an ad in local papers and found Chris Freeman. So I want to play for you the almost demo version of “Fem in a Black Leather Jacket” and get Jon to first tell us about the song.

JG: I had the idea to do a gay band, and I thought, this is what I want to do, what am I going to sing about? And “Fem in a Black Leather Jacket” was the first thing that I wrote, was the first song that I wrote for Pansy Division and it turned out to be one of our best songs. It’s actually a composite about several people. It was just about a kind of guy that I liked. I had always thought that even with Pansy Division or Outnumbered, my previous band, that I wanted to write a song that I could listen to that I felt like nobody else had done before. And that’s what that song was for me. I thought, what can I sing about, how can I sing about this that is different, that I can’t pull a record out from my record collection and say, ah, this satisfied that feeling. So that was my first impulse, to write about desire in an uncensored way, with the pronouns being correct.

Pansy Division – Fem in a Black Leather Jacket (1991)

So how did people react to your in-your-face lyrics?

JG: In San Francisco, pretty damn well. I was in the right place, at the right time. I went over really well, from the beginning. I remember the second show I did was a benefit I did for Queer Nation. This was when it was just me, I didn’t have a band yet, but I was calling it Pansy Division, just me and my electric guitar. And I played this benefit and all the dykes left the room, which I was pretty disappointed that that kind of cleared the room of women. So I was very happy that the very next show that I did, my third show, was actually at a queer cabaret called Klubstitute, which is kind of legendary in San Francisco. I was opening for Tribe 8, who I had not heard of. I think it was their second or third show. And suddenly here were dykes who were right on the same wavelength as me, but they had a whole band. And that was exciting to me, so after seeing them and playing a few more months on my own, I thought, alright, time to look for a band.

And as I said, an ad in local papers found him a kindred spirit in Chris Freeman, and with their first of many drummers they signed with the label Lookout Records and released the first album.

In the film you and Chris talk about how you didn’t expect your audience to be so young

JG: That is because we ended up on Lookout Records, and Lookout Records had as a label a lot of bands that appealed to teenagers, but the style of music we were playing was appropriate for what Larry Livermore, who started the label, was trying to go for. The first album came out and immediately we started getting letters from teenagers. We thought, okay, we’re not aiming at teenagers, we’re aiming at people like us who were in our 20s and 30s, cause that’s how old we were, thinking, okay, it’ll be people like us who don’t really appreciate the music in the gay scene and have wider variety of tastes than you’re supposed to have if you’re a homo. So then the record came out and we started getting letters from kids, not exclusively but way more than I would have expected. And that was really good, because Chris and I have said many times, the band we started was the band we didn’t have when we were teenagers, when we were kids. For us it’s satisfying that people that age can hear it.

JG: But that was how we ended up with a younger audience first thing. Then the second thing was the Green Day tour. So probably before we did the Green Day tour, our audience was probably, I don’t know, 80% gay, 70%, and after we did the Green Day tour our audience was probably 80% straight, because suddenly there were all these teenagers who discovered us through Green Day and got into our music, and a lot of them thought it was really cool and would write us letters telling how they said, “I saw you open for Green Day, I’m straight, but I’m a member of the Gay-Straight Alliance at my high school, and I think your music is fantastic,” and it really seemed like we connected with a lot of kids and that was a wonderful surprise.

Now that we’re talking about Green Day, tell us about that whole phenomenon

JG: We had been on the same label as Green Day, Lookout Records. Their first two albums came out on Lookout. Then they got signed to Reprise Records, Warner Brothers. That first album on the major label came out in the beginning of ’94 and was building up, and they were becoming popular, they were catching on. By the time that they called us to ask us to open for their summer tour their first video had gotten on MTV and was really taking off. So when we did the tour, by the time that tour began, which was almost two months after they called us, they had gotten huge, and all these places that had been booked were way sold out. They could have played 3, 4, 5, maybe 10 times the size of venues that we were playing on that first tour, so they had gotten popular suddenly.
They were very loyal to their old label. They had heard us and thought, alright, here’s our opportunity. We’re really getting popular, we want to do something that will show people what kind of values, what kind of people that Green Day are. And by having a band like us open for them made a statement about who they were. It was using the power they had, their sudden popularity, to put us up on the platform with them and say, here’s what we believe in, having this band open for us is making a statement, they’re a great band, but also they do something unique. I mean, Green Day weren’t political particularly then, but a lot of their songs were about personal politics and identity. So we matched well with them, and they were getting bigger and realizing that these kids coming to see them were just treating them like any other band. They were just this week’s new flavor, and they thought, no, we want to do something to differentiate ourselves from any other new band that’s out there, and having Pansy Division open for them made that statement.

In the film Matt Wobensmith said the biggest thing in the 90s for the queercore movement was you touring with Green Day.

JG: I think that’s true. Matt says this in the film. People were dismissive of the whole idea of Queercore, like in the press, there weren’t very many people who were covering us. So the fact that we were suddenly visible in a really mainstream setting, made people who might not have written about it, or thought it was too insignificant to warrant coverage, to suddenly take it seriously and give it a good look.

And pause a moment to tell my listeners who he is.

JG: Matt Wobensmith was the guy who founded Outpunk Records, and he also did Outpunk Magazine. When we decided that we would be the gay band, if nobody else wanted to be out, then we would be out. His idea was, well, if there’s going to be gay bands, I want to put out their records. So he put out Tribe 8’s first EP, and put out a Pansy Division single. And started to put out records by other queer bands that were starting to materialize about the same time.

Okay, we’ve kind of skipped a bit too quickly through the early years of the band, and they released an album a year through 1997, adding to their catalog ones called “Deflowered,” “Pile Up,” Wish I’d Taken Pictures,” and “More Lovin’ From Our Oven.” I want to cover some of those songs, but I admit some of ones I want to play the most, well, you’ll have to go to Part 2 for those.

From the list of ones I can play is one from the “Pile Up” album, from 1995 called “I Can’t Sleep,” which is…

JG: About my experiences trying to get laid in San Francisco, and how frustrating it could be.

Pansy Division – I Can’t Sleep (1995)

And from that same album is one I especially like, called “Cowboys Are Frequently Secretly Fond of Each Other.”

JG: This is a good story. The writer, Ned Sublette, is from Texas, West Texas, I think Lubbock, and the song, as I heard it, was actually the second version he recorded. I never heard the original. I’ve asked him but he doesn’t want to let it out. It never got released. When he was living in New York in the mid-80s, as part of the new music scene there, he had recorded a very odd version of this song, with odd instrumentation. And it had come out on a collection put out by Jon Giorno, the gay poet from New York, who had a label, which used to get arts funding grants, called Giorno Poetry Systems. And the Giorno Poetry Systems albums…a lot of it is spoken word. He had William Burroughs, Ann Waldman, Laurie Anderson…he put out these compilations, which would be a combination of spoken word, poetry and music. And on one of these albums was “Cowboys Are Frequently Secretly Fond of Each Other.” And I got it from the Champaign Illinois Public Library, and I think I got it in ’86. And I loved the song. I just thought it was so good. I had to return the album, so I taped it, on a cassette, which I still have, and when we started the band we did a bunch of covers, usually as the B-sides to singles. A lot of those songs were either songs that I thought were by gay people or suggested that there was a gay meaning to the song. That one was obviously clear, there was nothing hidden, and I thought that was a song that needed to be rescued, plucked off the heap of obscure songs. So I’m really glad to have dragged that one out there, and people hear it and they think, oh, that’s a song I wrote, but I didn’t. The guy who wrote it a hetero, and he told me that if you stand out as being the least bit creative in West Texas, you’re called fag, you’re called homo. Cause I asked him if he was gay, he said no, that’s what he was called as a creative kid in an uncreative environment. And so that’s what he wrote the song about. I think it’s a great song. And Willie Nelson’s version, because he does it kind of slower, more waltz-style, he omits the final chorus and the second verse, so our version is more complete. But I like Willie’s version, too, and I think it’s great that Willie did it.

Pansy Division – Cowboys Are Frequently Secretly Fond of Each Other (1995)

And this is a good time to invite you to check out my website. If you visit it while you’re listening you can see the playlist and follow along, while looking at photos of the artists and recordings. I’ve always considered our music history as a visual as well as an audio experience. As I said, this is another one of my shows where I have much too much great material for just one hour, so you can find much more on my site, including more of this interview, an interview with GB Jones, and several special segments on Queercore music. Again, that’s at www.queermusicheritage.com, Also, for more very queer programming, please listen to After Hours with Jimmy Carper, every Saturday night/Sunday morning from 1 to 4 am, on KPFT; it’s Queer Radio, with attitude.

We’re up to the 1996 album “Wish I’d Taken Pictures” and it included an interesting song called “Vanilla”

JG: Chris had written “James Bondage,” and I thought, good, good for you. It was the first song he wrote for the band. I thought as an alternate to “James Bondage,” I would write “Vanilla,” cause Chris really wasn’t into the things he sings about in “James Bondage” so much. “Vanilla,” yeah, it’s fairly me. [I’ve never heard anybody write about that] Good, then we did something unique.

Pansy Division – Vanilla (1996)

Also from “Wish I’d Taken Pictures” is the song “I Really Wanted You”?

JG: That song was written and recorded for The Outnumbered. It was on the second Outnumbered album, and it was about a friend of mine who I used to hand out with who I didn’t know if he was gay or not, but who I was quite attracted to, but then one day he told me he had met this woman, and this woman just sort of sunk her claws into him, like really deeply right away. And I thought, oh, it’s something that I hoped might develop into something for me and him, and then it didn’t, so that’s kind of a lament.

Pansy Division – I Really Wanted You (1996)

Your book is subtitled “the inside story of the first openly gay pop-punk band,” your film is subtitled “life in a gay rock band.” How do you differentiate between those terms?

JG: I think my book publisher wanted to be more specific, and I had written the title of the book, and they came up with the subtitle, and I said, sure, that works. I kind of use the phrases interchangeably anyway. We’re an indy rock band, we’re a pop punk band, we’re a punk band, a rock band, a gay rock band.

So in more general terms, how do you differentiate between punk and rock?

JG: Punk is generally noisier, edgier, shorter songs. There’s definitely a punk rock sound that is rock and roll but at the same time specific, has a specific tone to it. Even though punk has a lot of wide parameters, people define it differently. I didn’t just want to call us a punk band because I think it doesn’t really describe what we do, it kind of narrows what we do.

What does the term queercore mean to you?

JG: It was first homocore. When I got to San Francisco in ’89 there was a zine called “Homocore,” but in 1990 that was the year, I think in retrospect, the year of the queer, where suddenly the word queer got reclaimed. I think it was by ACT-Up people, or activists in general, who were saying, you know, you want to call me queer? Yeah, I am queer, so I’m going to defuse that term for you. You call me queer I’m going to accept that. And that was when you started hearing the term Queercore. The funny think about Homocore, the magazine and the movement, is that they were starting to write about queer rock bands when there really weren’t any. There was a cassette tape that JD’s put out, Juvenile Delinquents Magazine, Bruce LaBruce and GB Jones, but a lot of the bands were on this tape, which I think was ’89, I can’t exactly remember what year, but it was definitely before Pansy Division, seemed like just a lot of adhoc groups, like bands that just got together to record a song, or something, but not a band that you could really go see, bands that for the most part didn’t make records later. So it’s kind of like the idea of homocore, or Queercore, or a gay rock band, people imagined it before it really existed.

But what is it? It’s edgy, noisy, blunt, and very in your face, rock and roll, punk rock. A lot of it’s funny, a lot of it is confrontational. There were a lot of people who just , said they were fed up and weren’t going to take it anymore, and they made this music that was sharp-edged.

So, was Pansy Division Queercore?

JG: Yes, we were poppier though than I think a lot of the other people who were associated with the term were. You know, I was aware that even though the fit wasn’t perfect for us, yeah, we’re a Queercore band.

In 1997 the band released their album called “More Lovin’ From Our Oven” and it included Jon’s salute to Canada, called “Manada”

JG: I had been curious about Canada, and had never been up there until Pansy Division first got to tour, in ’94. I always thought that Canada would get overlooked. People in this country, I think in general, think America has all the answers to everything, and that we don’t look around at what the other countries are doing to solve some of the same problems that we have. Having that attitude made me more curious about Canada, so I was really happy when we started to go up there and started to get popular up there. And the experience of being up there, and getting laid frequently, caused me to write the song, as both a tribute to the men, the men of Canada, and the country itself, which I think is a great place, gets overlooked.

Pansy Division – Manada (1997)

They also recorded that song in French and how many of you noticed that about half way through I switched to that version.

Over the years Pansy Division has become well-known for their cover versions, and they did a very fun one of the Josie Cotton song, “He Could Be the One.”

JG: From “Valley Girl” soundtrack, ya know, just a song Chris liked, wanted to do, thought it would be a good one that we could do without having to change the lyrics.

Pansy Division – He Could Be the One (1997)

“Absurd Pop Song Romance,” from 1998, had a different sound and was lyrically broader. Talk about that, and how was that album received in contrast to the ones before it?

JG: We took a different approach on “Absurd Pop Song Romance” for several reasons. One was that it was our first album with Patrick on lead guitar, Patrick Goodwin. He had joined our band right after “More Lovin’ From Out Oven” came out, our fifth album. “Absurd” was our sixth album, and having him aboard gave us the ability to have a broader range of sound. But as far as the lyrical content goes, we had reached a point that we thought that if we continued doing what we had been doing, that we would be repeating ourselves. I realized that and sometimes I’d show Chris new songs that I’d written and he’s kind of like, you know, that’s kind of like this song that you already wrote before, or this lyric is similar to this and that. I’d felt like we’d reached a point where we wanted to evolve, but also felt like we needed to evolve. And one of the things I had always wanted to do from the beginning of the band was in every song, somewhere in the lyric there had to be something that was overtly queer. Like, whether it uses the word “gay,” or uses the word “he” if I’m talking about a love or sex object. And I got to the point where I realized, people know about our band now. We’ve made five albums. We don’t have to spell it out all the time. People now get the context that we’re in without being needed to be reminded of it constantly. So on that record, that was when we shifted to making some of our songs, either without any gender being mentioned, or maybe addressing more universal situations.

How was it received? It was actually received very well, however, it came out at a time when the scene that had propelled us, the sort of post-Nirvana, post-Green Day, alternative/punk scene, was kind of fading. None of the bands on our label, for example, were selling as well as they had had. So, bad timing. We had really good timing in so many ways, but when we made our, we made what we considered a career move…like here’s a record that will, like, start a second career for us, reach a whole bunch of other people who may not have been into the punk stuff so much, or into the humorous stuff so much. Here’s a more serious record. Here’s a record with more musical chops. But it didn’t reach the people that we thought and hoped would appreciate it. It’s still probably our best record, but we thought we’d done our best shot, and had sold less than our others, but I think that whatever record we would have put out at that point would have sold less than the others. I don’t chalk it up to that record in particular.

You had 6 albums of new material in the first 6 years and then 2 in the last 10. Talk about that change in frequency.

JG: After we did “Pop Song Romance” we stopped doing the band full time, and we had done it full time since ’94, five years, so in ’99 we did a tour that year but we had all gotten jobs, and after that, with the experience of “Pop Song Romance” not taking off like we’d hoped, and the fact that we had other jobs we needed to do, we were less inclined to just get together and make music. So when we finally did, it was actually not that fun a process. But we did get “Total Entertainment” done and I think it’s a real good album, but at the same time it wasn’t as much fun at that point as it had been earlier. So after “Total Entertainment” came out we did a tour, and then Chris went to school, which really detracted from our availability. He did a four-year film degree in three years, so he was not available most of the time, but it was a good time for him to do it, because we really weren’t sure how much activity we wanted to do anyway. So it had gone from being our whole life, or at least most of our time and energy, to being something that was a hobby that we got to indulge in every once in a while, and it was fun doing it that way.
But after that, people started spreading out. Patrick quit the band in 2004, but with Chris being in school there wasn’t much reason to be too active cause we just couldn’t do much, so we kind of went a while without a guitar player. I had hoped that we would make another record someday, but by the time I finished my book a couple years ago, it looked like that wasn’t going to be the case. So I had a couple songs that I wanted to record, and it was hard getting everybody together. Chris was in Los Angeles. Luis, Joel and I were in the Bay Area, but Luis was making plans to move to New York, and Joel eventually moved to Boston, so now there was four us in four different cities on two coasts. However I wanted to record a couple songs, and when we went into the studio to do them we had such a great time that I thought, we’d do these songs, I think they’re great songs, I guess if Pansy Division is not going to make another album, we’re not going to record them. I thought, let’s just put them on the website, you know, maybe we’d put out a single or something, but they’re I thought just really good songs. And when we did them, we had such a good time that we decided, no, the results were so good and we had such a good time doing them we thought, let’s make another album. But since we’re all living on different coasts it took a year and a half to get the album done, and another six months to get it released. So we began working on it in April of ’07 and it came out at the end of March ’09. “That’s So Gay.” The new album.

And that very quickly brought us up to date. We’ll hear about several of the songs from the new album, and whole lot of songs from their whole career on Part 2. And we’ll also go in depth about why Jon wrote the book.
What do you see as the future for Pansy Division?

JG: It will I think go back to being an occasional thing. We are doing a tour in ’09 but our tour is shorter than I’d hoped for when we discussed it originally, because of people’s life obligations. So I think in the future we’ll probably…I mean, the way that we worked on this album, doing demos and then working on them from a distance, and then getting together and then suddenly just whipping them into shape and recording them. That’s the way we did it this time. We’d like, do our demos, get together one day to learn the song and record it the next day. I would have never in the past thought that we could have done that and had such good results, but the fact that we did means it’s a template for further activity. So I think we’ll probably make more records, but not right away.

Looking back, what do you think is the place in gay music history of Pansy Division?

JG: In our film, Chris says that one of the things that we’re trying to show by our band’s mere existence is that the gay experience is a lot of different things to a lot of different people, and I think that we really helped expand the idea of what the gay experience is by having the band that we had and doing it the way that we have.

I agree, but I want to go a bit further than that, and I couldn’t say it much better than Tom Robinson. His assessment is, and I quote, “Few bands outside the mainstream ever write songs so striking that listeners will rush out and buy them on first hearing, but I think Pansy Division is one such band. To this day, their back catalogue remains hugely liberating for any gay music fan who’s grown up immersed in the het pop, macho rap, and metal posturing of Western youth culture. The songs are also tremendous fun. Their riotous celebration of male-on-male sexuality remains a unique achievement in pop music history.”

I’m down to the last song. This went way too fast, and I want to thank you all for listening, and Jon Ginoli for the wonderful interview. You can find out more about the band at www.pansydivision.com, and much more of this show at my site at www.queermusicheritage.com. And, as always if you have questions or comments about any of the music I’ve featured, please write me at [email protected]. This is JD Doyle for Queer Voices on KPFT in Houston.

I’m closing with one of their most popular songs, and it’s from their 1998 album “Absurd Pop Song Romance.” It’s “Luv Luv Luv.”

JG: It was from the idea that pop songs lie to you about love, and set unrealistic expectations in our lives as to what love will be like someday when we grow up. I’m just pointing out something that’s already there.

Pansy Division – Luv Luv Luv (1998)

What is the most popular Pansy Division song?

JG: “Bunnies,” followed by “Luv Luv Luv.” After that…”Bunnies,” “Luv Luv Luv,” “Femme in a Black Leather Jacket.”

And are you basing this answer on sales, audience response?

JG: Audience response. That’s what people yell for, and that’s what people request, like if I run into somebody before a show, they’ll say “are you guys going to play ‘Bunnies’ tonight.” That’s often what people will say.

Pansy Division – Bunnies (1993)

Welcome to the July 2009 edition of Queer Music Heritage, and that song sets the tone and gives a very energetic start to Part 2 of my Jon Ginoli interview. This is where we’re going to talk about a whole lot of Pansy Division songs that I just can’t play on broadcast radio, obviously like “Bunnies,” taken from their 1993 album “Undressed.”

How has the subject matter of your songs evolved over the years?

JG: Well, let’s look at those songs I just mentioned. “Bunnies” and “Femme in a Black Leather Jacket” were songs about desire, about a guy desiring another guy. “Femme” is about a guy, you know, somebody’s he’s attracted to. “Bunnies” is about getting it on. The other song in that trio is “Luv Luv Luv” which came five or six years later, and “Luv Luv Luv” is much more cynical, and kind of worldly. It’s like, here’s how the world works. The idea that we grow up with pop songs…from the music we hear as kids we get ideas about what love is going to be like, what life is going to be like. What is it like to be in love, and I think that because pop music is made to sell you songs, it’s a distorted picture, so you get to a certain point where you realize all these ideas you had about what love is going to be like are pretty inaccurate. In the beginning of the band we were trying to be more celebratory, because that’s what we felt hadn’t been done…celebratory songs about gay sex, about gay love…and by the time we got around to “Absurd Pop Song Romance,” five years later, I felt like it was time to show the other side of the coin. Instead of always getting the guy, or feeling like the guy is attainable, we turned and showed some disappointment. And that was I think…”Luv Luv Luv”…a good distillation of trying to evolve but at the same time doing something that people could still recognize as Pansy Division.

Okay, you want evolving? Here’s that same song, “Luv Luv Luv,” done very differently.

Common Thread Community Chorus – Luv Luv Luv (2009)

Now that was something I would not have expected, and it was just uploaded to youtube from a May 30th performance by the Common Thread Community Chorus of Toronto. Further irony is that it was recorded at a performance at the Holy Trinity Church. Yup, plenty of contrast on this show, as you’ll continue to see.

On this segment we’re going to cover four songs from the “Undressed” album. We started with “Bunnies” and next is “Cocksucker Club”

JG: I had a friend in San Francisco, he’s still a friend of mine actually. We were talking about a guy who we thought was gay and I wasn’t sure, and I said, is he? And my friend said, “well, he’s in the club.” And I thought, well what club would that be? And then I immediately thought, well, the cocksucker club. You know, are you gay? Well, if you’re sucking dick, you’re gay, or you’re bi, or whatever. And the song says, he might be bi, he might be gay, that’s one of the lines. So I thought, that’s where the…that’s the club we’re in. [it’s where the rubber meets the road] Yes, so to speak.

Pansy Division – Cocksucker Club (1993)

Tell me about “Anthem”

JG: The chorus of “Anthem” was actually the first thing that I wrote for Pansy Division. It’s an anthem, of course, given the title…the lyrics, “we’re here to tell you, you better make way, we’re queer rockers in your face today.” That’s what my initial impulse was to do with the band, and you know, to sort of draw the line in the sand…”we can’t relate to Judy Garland, it’s a new generation of music calling”…to say, this is different than what queer culture normally is.

Pansy Division – Anthem (1993)

“Rock & Roll Queer Bar”

JG: I had been a DJ at a club of the same name in San Francisco, along with Don Baird, who’s been a columnist for the queer biweekly magazine in San Francisco called “San Francisco Bay Times” for almost 20 years, I think. He and I started a club together because we wanted to have a queer rock club. And it happened right as I was starting to record Pansy Division’s stuff in ’91. So when I went to do the first recording session for Pansy Division, I recorded that song thinking “ah, it’ll be the theme for my club and then I can blow people’s minds with, by playing that at my club. But the club only lasted a couple more months after that, because the club we were doing it in shut down, and then I got busy with the band.

And this time I’m going to share another early version of the song, from Jon’s 1991 cassette tape, “Undressed,” here’s “Rock & Roll Queer Bar.”

Pansy Division – Rock & Roll Queer Bar (1991)

When Pansy Division formed what other openly queer bands were there?

JG: Well, when we formed, when I had the idea to do Pansy Division I knew of no one. As it turned out the one band that was together…the records were impossible to find at that point, was Fifth Column, from Toronto. They were the only band that were all gay, and singing about gay stuff before. So they were like a year before us, maybe a year and a half, couple years [note: Fifth Column’s first recording 45 was actually in 1985 and LP in 1986, but would have been as Jon said, very difficult to know about or find]. I forget when their first album came out. It was pre-CD, it just came out on vinyl, and has never been on CD. They were very obscure and I only knew about them because of “Homocore” magazine, and “JD’s,” Bruce LaBruce’s old fanzine, “Juvenile Delinquents,” that he did with GB Jones from Fifth Column. Apart from that, like I say in the intro to my book, there were, you know, there were gay musicians who were around before that, some of whom were out. But mostly it was people who rumors were about, or it was about people who were dance acts.

JG: So when I talk about who was out in rock before us, we started at the exact same time as Tribe 8 in San Francisco. Glen Meadmore in Los Angeles was around about a year before us. There was an article in “Option” magazine, which is a music magazine, in ’92 where they were talking about queer musicians. It was mostly about Glen Meadmore, queer musicians playing rock, and at that point Pansy Division had recorded but had not gotten anything released yet, and I was chomping at the bit to get something out there, cause I thought, yes, the time is right for this, maybe somebody’s going to beat me to it, but there was room for plenty. But to answer your questions, who was out before us? Almost no one. I think there were a lot people you could point to that may have done something before we did, but not a whole band, and trying to go about it like we did, or Tribe 8 did. I mention Tribe 8 a lot because I think they are really the good, a good comparison to us…same time, same place, a lot of the same issues, but their approach was very different, but I think they’re a really good parallel to us. Put the two of us together, covers a lot of ground.

In 1994 the band released their album called “Deflowered,” and without revealing too much about myself, I’ll say that I was anxious to hear Jon talk about one of my two favorite Pansy Division songs of all time, “Groovy Underwear.”

JG: Yeah, it occurred to me one night, as I was laying down to go to sleep, that I couldn’t think about any good songs about underwear, and I thought, really? I couldn’t think of any, so I thought I’d better write one, and that’s what I came up with. I stayed up until like three in the morning. I thought, this is pretty good.

Have you gotten responses from people with underwear fetishes on that one?

JG: A few…that is another one of our favorites, people are always asking for that one.

Pansy Division – Groovy Underwear (1994)

And from the next year, and the “Pile Up” album, comes my other favorite song of theirs, “Homo Christmas.”

JG: I wrote it in 20 minutes before a gig the week of Christmas, and I had come up with the idea, wrote the words pretty fast and, and I thought, if I want to rehearse this song tonight, and play it tonight…cause we had a rehearsal before the show we were going to do, it was like a Saturday, and we were going to rehearse for an hour at four, and at five we were going to take our gear over to the club. So I thought I better write this in a hurry, because if I want to do it tonight I can’t spend a lot of time trying to worry about the music, so I pilfered an Outnumbered song, and adapted that and added the lyrics to it. The music’s similar but not quite the same, and it was an instant hit.

“I Feel So Sorry Now” was the song by The Outnumbered, and I played a little of it on Part 1, and I think the transition to “Homo Christmas” is apparent. So I want to let you hear them back to back.

Outnumbered – I Feel So Sorry Now (1985)/Pansy Division – Homo Christmas (1995)

I want to backtrack just for a moment, as I had asked Jon a couple of questions about the band Outnumbered that time-wise just didn’t fit in Part 1 of the interview.

I’ve seen that band referred to as an all-male feminist band.

JG: There’s a couple songs that we did that were pretty blatantly feminist. The one high-profile review that the band got was in “Spin Magazine,” when our second album, “Holding the Grenade Too Long” came out, and that write described us as a feminist garage band. And I thought, that’s pretty good. Cause garage rock, 60s style garage rock, you know, it’s all about how the girl done him wrong, and to come out and sort of do a version of that that is sensitive about women and feminism, I thought, alright, I can accept that, it’s cool, it’s not going to make us sell many records

How does the music of The Outnumbered compare to that of Pansy Division?

JG: Funny thing about that is that as Pansy Division has gone on it started to sound more like The Outnumbered, especially after “Absurd Pop Song Romance” and after. Because The Outnumbered were power pop, indy rock, a lot of 60s influences, garage rock. Pansy Division has more punk rock in it. It blends those same kinds of things. So I think there’s a parallel to the way that Pansy Division sounds now, especially with the new album, compared to The Outnumbered’s stuff. It’s comparable in certain ways.

Can you tell us about the song “Fuck Buddy”?

JG: I still think that’s one of my favorite Pansy Division songs, even though it’s not on our “Best Of.” It’s always been a favorite of mine, and I wanted to write about having a fuck buddy because I thought that is one of the things that is more commonly accepted in gay circles, rather than in hetero circles. So the idea of having a fuck buddy, someone who you just get together and hook up with every once in a while, was something that I hadn’t really heard talked about in a song. I thought, this is really not such an obscure concept but I don’t really hear it mentioned. I thought, that’s a good idea. I like the phrase, fuck buddy, to have a fuck buddy. So I thought here’s something that we can document that is unique but at the same time people will hear it and go “oh yeah, I want to have one of those.”

Pansy Division – Fuck Buddy (1995)

I like what you did with “Real Men.”

JG: I used to think that Joe Jackson was gay, turns out he’s not. I ran into somebody at some point who told me he knew his wife. But yeah, I always hated the idea of “real men,” cause it was always this sort of impossible thing to live up to, and I thought a false concept anyway. So I thought we’d put the Pansy Division treatment onto this song.

Pansy Division – Real Men (1995)

Next up is “Bill & Ted’s Homosexual Adventure”

JG: That is pure silliness. That and “Touch My Joe Camel” are probably the silliest songs that we did, just for fun, but I love the video for “Bill & Ted’s Homosexual Adventure,” it’s just…so ridiculous.

Pansy Division – Bill & Ted’s Homosexual Adventure (1995)

By the way, “Bill & Ted’s Homosexual Adventure” was on the very first Pansy Division 45, released on the Outpunk label, prior to the band signing with Lookout Records.

From the 1996 album “Wish I’d Taken Pictures” came the song “Sidewalk Sale”

JG: Written after…we’d played in Portland, Oregon, and we ended up at this gay bar there after the show, and just standing around outside at the end of the night, the phrase popped into my head, and I went home, where we were staying in Portland and wrote the lyrics.

When I was hitting the bars, years ago, I used to have a rule for myself: leave at 1:30am, cause you make not so good decisions after that.

JG: Yeah, that’s good.

Pansy Division – Sidewalk Sale (1996)

“Sidewalk Sale” was so short that I threw in two more, both from the Pansy Division website. “Hibernia Beach” was done in 1996 as an opening theme for a San Francisco gay radio show by that name. And the name was taken from a corner on Castro Street where the Hibernia Bank used to be. That corner became a cruising, or at least, posing area and I understand that while the bank changed names years ago the name Hibernia Beach has continued.

And after that of course was a cover of the Dusty Springfield song “Son of a Preacherman.” This was considered for the “Wish I’d Taken Pictures” album, but then was not included.

But one song that did make the album that I can’t leave out is “Dick of Death.”

JG: We did one tour of Australia and Chris picked up this guy, who he said had had the biggest one that he had ever seen, and I said, well, you should call the song “Cockadile Dundee,” but Chris called it “The Dick of Death,” and you know I thought that was fine, but I remember at the time thinking, some people think, or are going to think, this is a song about AIDS. But I thought, I’m not going to let what someone might think the song might be about, I’m just going to put my meaning on it.