Keep It Like a Secret

Hardcore is more diverse than ever, and more LGBTQ+ people are rightfully finding their homes here. But the idea that things were “always this way” is not only wrong, it’s erasure.

According to this essay, some of your record collections are already this queer.

I.

I knew I was gay in 1998, and by that point most of the people in my day-to-day life also knew. I was living in Chicago, in a two-bedroom apartment near Wicker Park, with Jason Gnewikow from the Promise Ring as my roommate. Jason was also gay, and by that point most of the people in his day-to-day life knew, too. To the hardcore scene where we came from, though, we were both still laying somewhat low—so low, in fact, that we’d only come out to each other the week after we moved in together.

If you don’t have a stigmatized identity that requires you to “come out,” this may not have occurred to you, but coming out is not a one-and-done event. One day it could be, “Mom and Dad, I’m gay.” A year later it could be, “I’m going to the Drug Church show with my boyfriend this weekend. You wanna go?” Coming out is an ongoing activity that demands you to make multiple mental calculations in an instant: Is it safe to come out at this time? Is it safe to come out to this person? Is it safe to be out in this community? Which is why some seemingly “out” people can choose to be not out to their family or their job or their church or even their local hardcore scene. Because according to their calculations, doing so poses too great a risk.

Sometimes the calculations that queer people make for ourselves are different from the ones that our well-intentioned allies think we should make. I was told a million times by friends that my family would still love me if they knew I was gay, but I knew they would instantly reject me and most likely disown me—which is what they eventually did when I told them at age 30. The few people who knew I was struggling with my sexuality during the first iteration of Anti-Matter and throughout Texas is the Reason also gave me assurance: The hardcore scene isn’t like that anymore! they said.

By “anymore,” they were certainly referring to the fact that there were more and more “out” LGBTQ+ hardcore kids making inroads in the early- and mid-‘90s: Mike Bullshit from Go!, who undeniably blazed the trail. Jason Roe from Kill The Robot fanzine. Sean Capone from Positron fanzine. Martin Sorrondeguy from Los Crudos. But “anymore” also references the fact that there have been historically valid reasons for why so many of us weren’t coming out. The situation with my band in 1996 was becoming too intense for me to believe that literally everyone would accept me, and this was a calculation I had to make. So I kept my sexuality mostly to myself until the band broke up, and even then, I stayed guarded.

The Promise Ring outlasted our band, though, and Jason was eventually given his opportunity to come out in 1998, on the record. One year later, in an article for The Advocate that seemed to posit a “trend” of musicians coming out in our scene—including Samuel singer Vanessa Downing and Burning Airlines and Government Issue drummer Pete Moffett—writer Steve Gdula describes Jason’s coming-out experience in this way:

Ironically, the revelation was spurred by rumors that the Promise Ring’s frontman, Davey von Bohlen, is gay. “He has this really heavy lisp, and people never asked him if he was gay, but they made a lot of assumptions,” Gnewikow says.

So armed with von Bohlen’s lisp as possible evidence, a zine [writer] cornered the band last year. “We were doing this interview, and this guy said, ‘I heard one of you was gay,’” Gnewikow says. “And I said, ‘Yeah, it's me.’ I think he was surprised.”

That admission didn't get picked up by the mainstream media, so the question was delicately broached again more recently this time to just Gnewikow—by a reporter for SPIN. His answer was the same.

What the article only covers in passing is the fact that the message board for the Promise Ring’s record label, Jade Tree, had been overrun with so much antigay vitriol targeted at Jason for coming out—sustained verbal abuse that went on for over a month—that the label felt forced to shut the entire thing down, only to replace the site with an essay raging against the scourge of homophobia in our scene. I know this because I was the one who called label owners Tim Owen and Darren Walters with the idea and I was the one who wrote that essay. I still didn’t tell either of them I was gay.

L-R: The Promise Ring’s Scott Beschta, Davey Von Bohlen, and Jason Gnewikow with Tim Owen (Jade Tree, second from right) in front of 243 Henry Street, New York City. Photo courtesy of The Promise Ring.

II.

As far as secrets go, being gay is the most profound secret I’ve ever kept. Over the years I’ve occasionally downplayed how significant of a secret it was, but make no mistake: I have suffered no greater pain in my life.

This week’s forthcoming interview with Geoff Rickly—where we speak in detail about the inspiration and feeling behind his debut autofiction novel Someone Who Isn’t Me—delves into the weight of keeping secrets as it pertains to the world of addiction and recovery, but there was one particular point that Geoff made in our conversation that reverberated with my experience the most.

“Every so often I’ve been in [recovery] meetings where everybody’s joking around and somebody says something that’s so real and so horrible that you're like, Damn,” he tells me. “Not only would you be canceled in the real world, you might go to jail for what you just told me. And you think, damn, that’s harsh for me to hear. But imagine how corrosive it is for that person’s soul to hold on to that and not tell a single other fucking living person. That stuff is just really bad for us—to hold on to that kind of secret.”

The idea that you could hold onto a secret that would get you “canceled in the real world,” or one where you “might go to jail,” can sound very extreme until you remember that these were both very real and valid concerns that have followed LGBTQ+ people around for hundreds of years. Depending on where you are in the world, these are still very much valid concerns. Let’s not forget that sodomy laws in America were actually upheld as Constitutional as recently as 1986 and were not fully repealed by the Supreme Court until 2003. Let’s not forget that when Jason and I moved in together, being gay was technically “illegal” in at least fourteen American states.

But I also want to single out the word Geoff uses here—“corrosive”—because that image is useful in this context. It speaks to a gradual deterioration, the formation of rust, and a slow march towards obsolescence. I can’t give you a better analogy for what living inside of a closet feels like.

III.

I was listening to a podcast last week; it’s not important which one. There was a moment in the conversation where the host was seemingly trying to make a point that while hardcore might appear to be more diverse than ever right now, it has always been diverse (which is arguably true). But then shortly thereafter, he dismissively waves away the idea of a “gay hardcore singer” as not particularly noteworthy, almost as if it were a common occurrence—as if a fraction of a fraction of less than 1% of singers throughout hardcore history is somehow common enough. I can’t stop thinking about that part.

What we need to understand is that there is a difference between diversity and inclusiveness. Diversity describes the demographics of a community, while inclusiveness describes how fully welcome you feel to be exactly who you are inside that community. This distinction is important. Often, when we are living inside of the progress made, it’s difficult to imagine—or perhaps, admit—that it wasn’t always this way. But I need you to know that it wasn’t.

“The army’s credo was ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’; in hardcore, it was ‘don’t advertise, don’t worry,’” recalled Bob Mould in a story for the Guardian in 2020. “Though when Bad Brains stayed at [Hüsker Dü drummer] Grant [Hart]’s parents’ house when they played Minneapolis, they left a note reading, ‘Die, faggots, die.’”

That version of history resonates more with mine. Because I grew up in a scene where hardcore kids talked about “fag-bashing” the way they talked about grabbing hot dogs at Gray’s Papaya, where songs called “Faggot Stomp” were real and generally uncontested, and where even the “emo kids” snapped when they found out the guitarist for the Promise Ring was gay. I spent an entire decade between 1987 and 1997 spiraling inside of a lie, inside of a scene, holding onto a secret that corroded my capacity to love myself. To be honest with you, I don’t want to keep talking about this part of my life, because it’s embarrassing and it’s painful. But I also know that if I don’t keep telling my story, and the stories of others who shared this experience with me, we will be erased—and that cannot happen. We must know where we come from.

Which is why it’s simply unjust that while most of us know about Hüsker Dü’s Bob Mould and Grant Hart, or Randy “Biscuit” Turner of the Big Boys, or Gary Floyd of the Dicks, other incredible LGBTQ+ contributions to hardcore history remain almost willfully obscure. For example, why do we not revere Patrick Mack, the openly gay singer of the Stimulators—one of the first bands we talk about when we talk about the birth of New York hardcore—at least as much as we do their drummer, a then 12-year-old Harley Flanagan? And why shouldn’t it be common knowledge that Donna Lee Parsons, founder of Rat Cage Records—the seminal hardcore label responsible for releasing Agnostic Front’s Victim in Pain and the first Beastie Boys records, among others—came out as a transgender woman in 2001? (Ironically, Parsons also designed the artwork for the Bad Brains’ ROIR cassette—including their iconic “lightning bolt” logo.) When I talk about my own queerness, I’m also doing it to make sure the stories of our LGBTQ+ hardcore predecessors aren’t erased.

On tour with Texas is the Reason and The Promise Ring. January 1997. Jason Gnewikow in white sunglasses, myself right above him.

IV.

While I was writing this, I texted Jason Gnewikow. We talked a little about that period of time for him, and how he processed the scene’s response to his coming out.

“It’s weird,” he wrote. “I think I mostly blocked it out. Like, I have a memory of it happening but very little specifics. I wonder if I was totally depressed by it.”

Thinking about it now, I realize that, for me, the entire episode triggered an opposite reaction. That blowback—which I still remember in vivid detail—compelled me to finally come out to everyone, and begin the work towards integrating my life fully, in all aspects. I felt angry, and even betrayed, but that anger also brought me to the understanding that I could no longer compartmentalize my life for the comfort of other people. That means the Norman Brannon you get with Anti-Matter is the same Norman Brannon you will get on the street, at the hardcore show, or in a gay bar. I will never let a secret cut me up like that again.

I’m not mad that it took this long to see the progress we’ve made in this scene. If anything, I am so fucking happy to still be here to see it. We’re closer to the promises made on every classic hardcore record than we’ve ever been. All I ask is that we never trivialize how many potholes there were on the road we took to get here. Many of us sustained injuries along the way.

Coming on Thursday to Anti-Matter: A conversation with Geoff Rickly.

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