Every act of becoming conscious
(it says here in this book)
is an unnatural act
-Adrienne Rich, from “The Phenomenology of Anger”
I was in the wooded hills of rural Kentucky, in a rented mini-SUV parked at a gas station, one of the rare sites in this terrain where reliable 3G can be found. I’m waiting on my mate to pick up some jerky; her protein levels are low, as she’s had only an enormous waffle for breakfast, and we’ll be spending the rest of the day in the northern reaches of a place called Red River Gorge, scrambling our way up cliff faces, navigating sandstone fissures with all the resources our bodies – queer, female-identified – have. I take this moment, alone in the car, to check the requisite social media, the email, and all seem to have blown up with news about Tom Gabel’s (now, Laura Jane Grace’s) transition. Two of my very best friends have emailed me links to the relevant Rolling Stone article; it was all over my Facebook feed – mostly supportive commentary about how amazing/wonderful/courageous/brave she is, with only a little commentary about how, to paraphrase, “she’s still a sellout” in relationship to riot-folk, anarcho-punk communities, the diy ethos.
There was other commentary, too, about what might happen to Against Me! during Laura’s transition – would they sound they same? Is her voice going to change? Are they still going to be as rough, aggro, ‘macho’ as they were? What about the fan base – are all of those (presumptively straight, white) angry young men still going to support the band? Underlying this line of interrogation is a set of presumptions regarding the motivation for listening to a band like Against Me! – it seems to have something to do with the resonant amplification of a rage that’s explicitly coded as maculine; one listens, then, to give vent – in a socially sanctioned manner – to the aggressive, violent, or destructive impulses typically cordoned off or curtailed; these impulses, in this set of wonderings, seem to be tacitly linked to some hackneyed, pseudo-Darwinian assumptions about testosterone and the masculine province of the aggro. This is, of course, bullshit. But it did get me thinking back to my own relation to some of those earlier Against Me! albums; and I feel it might be important, at this point in time – and by way of tacit refutation of the absurdly gendered assumptions at work in even the most ostensibly respectful, sensitive, and responsible journalism that has already, and will surely continue to, flood the screens of anyone attuned to the realms of music reportage or queer/gender politics – to write a bit about the resonances between queer lives and Against Me!’s discography.
At the forefront of my mind is this idea that knowledge of Laura’s transition somehow matters, maybe even vindicates the always-queered reading myself – and many other friends – had of particular tracks; there is a tendency to take this coming-to-light of a personal history of gender struggle and utilize it as a sort of hermeneutic key to the subtexts and intertexts of early Against Me! tracks, to prove the veracity and evidence of the queer desires generative of, and at work in, certain songs. But that seems reductive. What I can do is trace a little bit of the relationship I developed with certain of these tracks; think and write about why they were meaningful, and how, and what this might have to do with my own history of struggle with gender identity, queer desire, and economic and emotional vulnerability.
1) A particularly vivid memory:
Driving out to Uncle Sam’s Records in Lauderhill, FL, the kind of record store that knew how to cater to every relevant demographic in order to stay afloat, the sort of place where you could buy bongs, underground Miami bass, trip-hop imports, and the newest Dillinger Four album on vinyl. The year must have been 2002, just after the release of Reinventing Axl Rose, and, having listened to it and loved it I was stoked to get both the Acoustic e.p. and The Disco Before the Breakdown. Along for the record shopping adventure was my then-boyfriend, A., a queer Marxist with whom I spent a lot of time discussing class composition, queer politics, and the intricacies of desire. He was, at the time we met, gay-identified; I was a young boidyke just coming off of my first intense, long-term relationship; I had gotten used to validating erotic and gendered complexity by saying things “I identify as ‘lesbian’ for the sake of expediency, but I’m really a genderqueer pansexual”; utilizing these increasingly complex identifiers was, at the time, particularly important to me; now it’s less so. And that has, in part, to do with the moment I’m thinking about – getting into the car, using my keys to pry off the cellophane shrinkwrap, and putting the Acoustic e.p. into the cherry red Discman hooked up to the cassette deck. The first track, you might remember, is an acoustic version “Jordan’s First Choice,” with these lines:
The reality that you know/Is just behind your idea/Of a society, security, and self./Am I just fucked up?/’Cause I can’t remember/The last time any of this made sense,/ The last time I could stand up to myself.
I already knew the words, but was struck by the stripped-down vulnerability of this version, the plaintive caterwauling of “Am I just fucked up?” sandwiched, as it is, between what seems like a heavy-duty moral indictment of hegemony-writ-large and an infinitely more intimate moment of self-bifurcation, torn-ness, and indecision. Rage externalized and then involuted. It resonated, it was obvious – this moment, this set of lines, was about the mechanisms of internalized oppression, the intense self-scrutiny produced by being existentially at odds with, in resistance to, the metastructures of consent productive of social order.
A. and I had both gotten a lot of flak, speculation about our relationship – one that seemed, at first blush, to be taking place between a dyke and a gay man, one that seemed to be a logical impossibility for those whose realities were structured by neoliberal identity politics. Those realities, though, increasingly had no purchase on the spaces and bonds I was developing, wherein intimate resonances occurred between all manner of corporealities, and what took primacy were structures of feeling – for instance, a sense of shared rage – rather than the specificity of sexual objecthood. A. and I both loved this album, this song, and would spend a lot of time screaming along to it. It became a vindication of desires that violated neoliberal rules of erotic comportment; it helped me realize that what mattered, for me, in any engagement was a set of (anti)political inclinations, empathic understandings of the both the traumas and attendant joys of marginality. I was coming to realize that being queer, for me, had nothing to do with not sleeping with men because I preferred women, but rather with not sleeping with liberals or capitalists because they disgusted me.
And we rock/because it’s us against them/we’ve found our own reasons to sing/And it’s so much less confusing when lines are drawn like that, when people are either/consumers or revolutionaries/enemies or friends/hanging on the fringes of the cogs in the system/it’s just about knowing where everyone stands…”
It was a pretty Manichean arrangement, but one in which queer solidarities of all kinds flourished. I needed the insularity provided by these clean lines of complicity and hatred, needed them to begin to build some alternative ways of being in order to move past that internalized skepticism and mistrust, that self-bifurcation Gabel indexes – “am I just fucked up?”
2) And then there was the album cover for…As The Eternal Cowboy, the beautiful denimed torso, the jacket with the “Zapatista Gun Club” patch and the other one that ended in something about “the phenomenology of our anger.” The playing around, in a post-leftist register, with a sort of iconic, Springsteenish masculinity – this was something I did, continue to do. It’s about claiming aggression, claiming swagger, claiming a certain self-possession as specifically queer, female. That was what I loved about this image – this intense self-consciousness around masculinity, the ways in which this awareness effectively queered the image presented, worked as a send-up of rockandroll machismo and its links to colonizing frontier fantasies, destabilized by the Zapatista reference. Also, the intertext established – perhaps intentionally, perhaps not – with an old Adrienne Rich poem entitled “The Phenomenology of Anger,” an important poem, part of a corpus that help solidify another long-lasting queer bond that’s been formative, an intimate friendship that developed, in part, over late-night readings of Rich’s work aloud to each other, not parsing the words, but absorbing them. These were poems we lived with, poems that gave shape and sense to pre-articulate longings, dissatisfactions, and – yes – angers. Posthumously (though never much, as far as I was aware, while Rich was alive), much has been made about Rich’s ties to the profoundly transphobic lesbian sep Janice Raymond, and it’s been a difficult process reconciling a history of connection to transphobic political spaces with the intensity surrounding my relationship to her oeuvre; but really – I’m not, never was, connected to Rich herself; we probably wouldn’t have even liked each other. Words have afterlives and redeployments, they aren’t fixed in the web of meaning out of which they emanate; they travel, they become otherwise than they were at their point of inception. Rich knew this; it’s a centerpiece of the poem “North American Time”:
Everything we write
will be used against us
or against those we love.
These are the terms,
Take them or leave them.
Poetry never stood a chance
Of standing outside of history.
One line typed twenty years ago
can be blazed on a wall in spraypaint
to glorify art as detachment
or torture of those we
did not love but also
did not want to kill.
Does it matter to me that Rich had connections to an infamously transphobic writer? On some level, yes, absolutely. Does it matter to me that the frontwoman of Against Me! has penned lyrics critical of anarchist scene politics, has – in conjunction with the rest of the band – released records on majors? Again, on some level, yes. But the artifacts produced by these folks aren’t reducible to their biographies; we have all sorts of complex relationships with art objects, they move and inform us in multivalent ways. This is why it’s important to place them in a queer register, to recuperate them from a false narrative that limits their relevance to only, say, straight white dudebros – in the case of Against Me! – or essentialist lesbian womyn, in the case of Rich.
But, additionally – and this is perhaps an inquiry for a different moment – can we understand Laura Jane Grace’s criticisms of anarcho-punk scenes differently now, given the emergence of her long experience of gender dysphoria (not a term I like to use, but that’s the way she seems to be framing it)? I remember writing in an old journal, around the age of 22, about my own skepticism with the phenomenon of straight white kids from middle and upper-class backgrounds, some fundies, some not, dedicating their early adulthood to getting free. It seemed too easy, too naïve, too pugilistically posi; it didn’t tarry with the forces of negativity and nihilism in a way that I felt was necessary. Rather, I felt you couldn’t understand a queer life – or queer joy – unless you understood a little bit about trauma, coping, depression, abuse. For this reason, I identified with Gabel’s skepticism, while presuming it came from a different source – but what that source was didn’t particularly matter; what mattered was the resonance of the structure of feeling that engendered the skepticism. Knowing, now, that the taproot of criticality may be similar is interesting. It could perhaps prompt a reconsideration of the interplay between anarchist and trans*, queer, and gender non-conforming spaces, some further thought on how to develop queer anarchist collectivity. For certain, Laura Jane Grace isn’t the only one who felt disenchanted with the casual transmisogyny and queerphobia that sometimes circulates in avowedly rad and/or punk spaces; the response to her transition might be a good barometer for rad queers to gauge the difference between rhetorics of tolerance and support and real collective inclusivity.
–HJM
Filed under: Everything's Political, Gender Thangs, Love Letters, Against Me!, anarchism, Laura Jane Grace, queer, Tom Gabel, trans issues, Transition
