In the early 1990s Pansy Division emerged out of the post-punk grunge era and became the poster band for the queercore music scene. The band gained international success and were out loud and proud, representing us gays in a straight-dominated male arena. They inspired many gay rockers around the world and will remain immortal as a part of queer history. V-Rag chatted with Pansy Division frontman Jon Ginoli on Davie Street.
PANSY DIVISION: QUEERCORE LEGENDS
Interview by Michael Venus
You’re here, and you’ve got some really exciting things going on. I mean, you’ve been part of Pansy Division. You’re one of the founding members of the legendary all-gay band who were the poster people for queercore. And now you’ve got three kind of multimedia you’re promoting. Tell us about those.
First, I wrote a book called Deflowered: My Life in Pansy Division. And that’s a memoir I’ve been working on for a while. I started telling a lot of stories to people about things that had happened over the years, and they said “you should write a book”. So I wrote a book. It has some tour diary stuff in there, a lot of Canadian stuff in it. Um, and yeah. Canadian content.
Manada.
It talks about why we formed, the need for having a gay band and what it meant to have one, and what it meant to be really out and try to push the envelope in a milieu which, you know, alternative, punk, rock and roll... is pretty overwhelmingly heterosexual. So to be doing that, from our standpoint, where we’re really in your face, there’s a lot of good stories.
So you’ve been taking stories along the way, and then thought now is the time to put it together?
Yeah, I’d been writing it for a long time... I thought ‘well, I’ll finish it someday’. It didn’t really have an end-date on it. But at a certain point, I thought, it’s time to get it finished. But in the meantime, we got the album done that we had been working on for a while called That’s So Gay. Also during this period, starting a couple years ago, there was a documentary film done on the band called Pansy Division: Life in a Gay Rock Band. And that played festivals all over the place last year, but it did not play Vancouver’s festival, which was disappointing.
That’s wrong, damn it!
It was wrong! I know. But one of the things I’m trying to do on the book tour that I’m doing now is arrange screenings in cities where it hasn’t been shown, and try and get some folks out to see it.
You guys kind of came out of a time when there were no out gay rock-and-rollers at all, and you did the whole rounds of it. What does it feel like to have so many younger people be out and be able to do what they’re doing and look at you guys as icons and legends?
It’s great. I’ve heard other gay musicians say "well, I don’t mind being out, but I don’t want to be a role model". And I’m like, why not? I want to be a role model. Not that I want everybody to act like me, or that I’m perfect or anything, but I did something. And the reason I did it was because it hadn’t been done before. It was something I wanted to see. It was something I wanted to hear. So, if that inspires people, you know, great.
What’s the main difference between coming out now and being a musician to, say in 1991, when you guys first worked together?
Yeah, it’s a lot different, in part because of Pansy Division and other bands who came out from that time who um knocked down some walls, broke some barriers. But also, you know, we really sang about being gay. And that wasn’t something that all gay musicians do. A lot of them didn’t. I don’t think it’s a litmus test; I don’t think people have to, but I think it’s one of the things that makes us interesting. And as time has gone on, we’ve had more songs that I guess would have more universal appeal or at least are less directly about gay stuff. So it became more of a mix. We didn’t want it to all be gay gay gay all the time. Although at first, it was like, okay this? This is something new. Now that we’ve done it a while, we don’t really want to repeat ourselves. The album took a year and a half to put together, because we all live in different places now – two on the east coast, two on the west coast, no one in the same city. And the fact that it... it all seemed to be coming together about the same time, so we thought let’s just take all this stuff, and put it out at the same time to try and get the maximum exposure, because it’s hard to get people’s attention these days. So instead of spreading it out, we tried to condense it, so all three coming out in the same month!
To find out more about Pansy Division's brand new projects, check out www.pansydivision.com
Manada - Pansy Division
Homo Christmas - Pansy Division
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