Tranny

by Laura Jane Grace

  She became liberal with my drinking after that, saying that if I was going to do it, then she’d prefer I did so at home so I wouldn’t end up in fights or in jail. My bedroom, which had a separate entrance, became a hangout for all of my friends.

  By 1997, I was 16 going on 17, and was falling deep into the English peace-punk scene—the Mob, Zounds, Poison Girls, and, of course, Crass, who remain my favorite band to this day. I also took an interest in Profane Existence, a Minneapolis-based anarcho-punk collective which was associated with smaller, more politically vocal bands like Man Afraid, Civil Disobedience, Destroy, and State of Fear. I was going to shows, reading fanzines, and collecting records.

  My interest in these bands had as much to do with their sound and their look as it did with their do-it-yourself, or DIY, ethos and anarchist politics. It wasn’t about money for them. They sought revolution and freedom, and they approached making music as an act of political protest. These bands wanted to empower their audiences. I studied their lyrics, and, like them, I was fine with starving for my ideals. Fuck MTV and fuck major labels. Fuck commercial art. Fuck the whole capitalist system! I wanted nothing to do with any of it. All of these new records and cassettes I was discovering made music seem accessible in a way it had never been before.

  I’d had some experiences playing in bands here and there. Dustin had a guitar and a basement we could practice in—a rarity in Florida due to the state’s high water table—and my mother had bought me a Fender P Bass from a pawn shop for my birthday. We started a band called the Adversaries, playing our biggest out-of-town show in Gainesville, Florida, at the Hardback, a legendary punk dive bar that would close within months. After the Adversaries dissolved, I played bass in a grindcore band called Common Affliction, which was really just an elaborate excuse to eat tacos with friends.

  These bands were always just for fun and weren’t intended to go anywhere. But I wanted to take writing music seriously. I realized that since no one else was going to do it for me, I should just take it into my own hands. So I set a simple goal for myself: I would write and record 10 songs.

  At the time, I didn’t have an electric guitar. If I remember correctly, I had traded it to my old drummer for weed. So I recorded the songs in my bedroom using my acoustic guitar and an electric bass with a four-track my mother had given me and some stolen microphones. I designed the cover of the cassette, too: a cut-and-paste job of a Vietnamese prisoner of war with his arms bound behind his back. Across the top, I scrawled two words capturing my teen angst; words that would map out the next two decades of my life, words that would set the tone for my career in music and become inseparable from my own name. I called it Against Me!.

  After mastering the fine art of scamming free photocopies out of the local Kinko’s—a rite of passage for any DIY punk—I folded each up and inserted the booklets into the plastic cases of the cassettes I had dubbed until I had a small stack of Against Me! tapes. All my former bandmates hated the songs, and with good reason: they were fucking terrible. But I loved the process. I loved creating something. I loved putting something I made out into the world and being in full control of the art. This was mine alone. So on the high of this success, I set the next logical goal for myself: I would play one show.

  From my experiences with the Adversaries and Common Affliction, I already knew that performing in front of people with a band was nerve-wracking enough. The thought of doing it alone was downright terrifying. I figured I’d play one show and get over it. So I got myself booked at a vegan café in Fort Myers called Raspberries, a daytime show on an open-air patio. With a five-song set list, in front of 20 disinterested people comprising mostly the staff and other performers, no stage to stand on, one shaky chord after another… very unceremoniously, Against Me! was born.

  2. I WAS A TEENAGE ANARCHIST

  Kevin Mahon was a kid I’d met outside a movie theater where he was getting bullied, knocked around, and called a faggot. I stuck up for him, and we became friends. He was three years younger than me, which is a wide gap at 16, but there weren’t enough punks in the scene to be choosy about who your friends were. Even though he was young, I could tell that Kevin had vision. A fellow dropout, he also had ample free time during the day when everyone else was at school.

  I had overcome the stage fright about playing solo, but realized it was more fun to play music with other people. I was itching to make another tape, this time with a drummer. Since Kevin didn’t have a full drum kit, we built one out of the few pieces he had and some pickle buckets found in a dumpster. I put an emphasis on not wanting to sound like any other band.

  “You shouldn’t play with any cymbals,” I told him. “What drummer plays with no cymbals? Besides, you sound better without them. I want only primal beats, and the cymbals drown out my acoustic guitar.”

  Kevin and I practiced every day, and we had chemistry like I had never experienced. It was as if we could read each other’s minds, and we always knew exactly what each other wanted in a performance. I would come up with an idea, and Kevin would make it better. I’d usually start with lyrics, filling up a journal page until I had enough for a couple of verses and a chorus. Then I’d string together a few chord progression ideas and bring it all to Kevin, and we’d shape a song out of it. Kevin and I practiced in my bedroom every day of the week, for as many hours as my mother could stand.

  There was nowhere to play in Naples, and we were considered a joke band at the few places there were, so we busked on street corners for spare change, two hippie punks with buckets and acoustic guitars. We didn’t care that no one got it. I was confident in our aim and our intentions, and knew that if there wasn’t an audience for us in Southwest Florida, we would find one elsewhere.

  Beyond our musical kinship, Kevin and I became best friends. Neither of us had many other friends, and once we found each other, we didn’t need any. We were an inseparable duo, like if Beavis and Butt-head were anarchist activists. Kevin became a constant presence at my house, free to come and go as he pleased. I had two beds in my room; one mine, one his. We both became vegan and started a local chapter of Food Not Bombs, a movement dedicated to sharing vegan meals as a means of protesting war and poverty.

  After practice, we’d hit the town on the warpath for destruction. In the name of class warfare we’d sneak into golf courses and tear the grounds up by digging into the dirt with our hands, rolling up the whole greens, and throwing them into the lagoon, leaving nothing but a dirt patch and a hole behind. When we needed money, we’d steal squeegees from gas stations and use them to fish coins out of the fountains around town.

  There was a sexual tension between us, too. When I first met him, he was a little goth kid, wearing black lipstick and fishnet sleeves, but after we started hanging out, he began to emulate my style and became punk. I thought he might have a crush on me. We were drinking in my room one hot summer night, and I stood up to flip the record on the turntable. I turned back to find Kevin had taken off his shirt and was opening and adjusting his pants, giving me a look that I interpreted as inviting. Maybe it was just wishful thinking on my part, but I thought Kevin maybe wanted to fuck me. I thought I maybe wanted to fuck Kevin back. This was confusing because we both liked girls, and it made me wonder if I was gay. There was an awkward silence in the room, and then, panicked, I turned back to my records, and nervously started talking about Crass. We both pretended like it never happened.

  With all the time we spent together, we were able to write enough songs to record another cassette. We titled it Vivida-Vis! And with that, we aimed to book our first tour.

  Since the internet and cell phones were not yet an omnipresent wealth of information for traveling bands, I relied heavily on pen pals I’d made through zines and my copy of Book Your Own Fucking Life, a resource guide published by the people at Maximum Rocknroll, a long-running and widely distributed monthly fanzine dedicated to the underground punk scene. I mailed Vivida-Vis! out to other punks throughout the country, asking for a plate
of food and a place to rest. I started hearing back and mapped out a month-long tour of the East Coast in the spring of 1999 for the two of us. Fortunately, my girlfriend at the time, Alana, a punk rock girl with SHIT tattooed across her wrist, had two things any broke, aspiring band needs: a van and a debit card. We were golden.

  The first place we ended up playing on tour was an open mic night in Decatur, Georgia. The other performers were your average singer/songwriter-types—think Jewel but less Alaskan, Jack Johnson but less surf—and then there was me and Kevin, screaming about anarchist politics in people’s faces. There was a bewildered silence after we finished, and we most definitely did not win that night’s prize money.

  We showed up hours late to our second show, a punk house in Asheville, North Carolina, called the Pink House. The organizer, Aaron Cometbus, scolded us and said we could only play six songs to make room for the many other bands on the bill, which was fine with us because it didn’t even cut our set list in half. We played through a busted PA and a crappy amp, but we rocked the shit out of those six songs. The people watching us went off, dancing and clapping along. This was the first time that people had ever danced or sung along to us while we played. What a high, what a rush. It felt like our music was actually connecting with people. We hung out with everyone afterward, drinking 40-ounce malt liquor, the preferred drink of choice in punk culture after Rancid popularized it in their “Salvation” video, and also because it was incredibly cheap. We felt like we’d truly arrived.

  Most of the other shows on the tour fell through. The places we did end up playing were squats, houses, and garages. We brought a boombox with us, and after every show, we dubbed more copies of the demo tape for anyone who wanted one. We started to catch on, especially in Florida’s political punk scene. We ended up making a thousand copies. We also killed Alana’s van and drained her bank account in the process. She dumped me shortly after the tour ended.

  I loved being on the road because it kept my mind away from feelings of dysphoria. This would become a common theme throughout life—binging and purging. At home, boredom and curiosity led me to sit around in dresses, but on tour, I could forget about it and avoid temptation for weeks at a time. Then I would return home, and the urge would hit me all over again.

  The touring experience galvanized us, and when we got back, Kevin and I immediately started work on another EP. One of the pen pals I’d made was this crusty punk rock Jewish kid named Jordan Kleeman, from Pikesville, Maryland. Jordan was part of a collective of fellow anarchists that ran a small DIY punk label called Crasshole Records. Before actually meeting them, I imagined them as hardened class warriors, living on the fringes and smashing the state. In reality, they were smashing the state from Jordan’s mother’s living room couch while drinking sodas and eating Utz potato chips from her pantry. Like us, they loved the band Crass, and, also like us, they were assholes—thus the label’s name. Eventually, he changed the name to Sabot, in reference to the wooden shoes that French factory workers threw into gears to sabotage production during the Industrial Revolution.

  The label put out our first vinyl release, a 12-inch EP. They printed 500 copies, and, due to a recording error that went unnoticed before going to press, it ended up sounding like complete shit. Bands in this scene were known for having a lo-fi feel, but this sounded like it was coming out of a speaker that had been taken out back and beaten with a sledgehammer. We had no choice but to sell them, though, since we had to recoup the money for the pressing. I absolutely hated it. Still, some people out there will tell you it’s the best thing we’ve ever done.

  One of the copies landed in the hands of James Bowman. I had met James on the first day of freshman year at Naples High School. Sporting a Gwar T-shirt and a green mohawk, he went running past me down a hallway, being chased by two rednecks. “Who the fuck was that punk?” I thought. By lunch, we were good friends.

  We had lined up a second tour, and James offered to buy all the guitar strings for us, so he was in. Always ahead of the curve when it came to gear, James owned a Gibson Les Paul and a Marshall amp, literally amplifying our sound. He also had a girlfriend, Jenny, who he surprised us with and brought along for the ride. For the next month and a half, my Buick was a cramped traveling home for the four of us: Kevin, James, Jenny, and me. That car rolled down the road on a cloud. It was a boat. Tons of trunk space, but not great on gas. It did, however, have a working cassette tape deck and a CB radio.

  The tour varied from city to city. In Chicago, we were humbled to play the legendary venue Fireside Bowl, where we felt like a legitimate band. Then the next night, we’d end up playing in Des Moines in some kid’s parents’ guesthouse where the audience ran at full force and launched themselves into the walls while we played.

  It was the tail end of the 90s punk scene, where activism and anarchist politics were still prevalent. In a couple of years, Homeland Security would strike fear into the hearts of punk protesters after 9/11. After that, the scene forever changed and became more complacent. Really, it was the perfect time for our songs like “Baby, I’m an Anarchist” to connect with people.

  Shows fell through all the time, and there was a 50/50 chance that anyone would actually show up to the ones that didn’t get canceled. We didn’t care either way. Touring was about travel and adventure, going to places you had never been and learning who you were in the process. We were green as a touring band, and I hated being green. I was determined to change that.

  We slept on floors or outside under the stars. For money, we begged for spare change outside shopping malls, or expensive camera batteries were stolen from Walmart and returned to buy tents with the money. We picked up hitchhikers and forced them to listen to our punk cassettes. When a block of shows fell through after Fargo, we spent a week camping in Montana in the woods outside a mining ghost town. When another stretch of shows fell through on the West Coast, we spent a week sleeping on the beach outside Santa Cruz in a hut made of driftwood. We had driven overnight to reach the coast. It was my first time that far west. I wanted to touch the Pacific. I slept on the hood of the car, and woke with the sunrise to see the great blue ocean expanding before me.

  The only way we ate was by begging for food. Specifically, we had discovered that Kentucky Fried Chicken had a store policy that if you went to the counter and told the cashier you were hungry and had no money, they would serve you at least some biscuits and gravy on the house. Most of the time this approach worked. We found it to be successful in other restaurants, too. Maybe it was because the employees realized that if they didn’t feed us, we weren’t going to leave, and then they’d have a bunch of smelly punk kids to deal with.

  We were selling a few records, however awful they sounded, and it seemed like everywhere we went, we picked up at least a couple fans. Whatever money was made was put into the gas tank to get us farther down the road.

  The Buick’s engine blew up on the drive back to Florida after the last show of the tour, loyal to the last mile. We came back from our conquest of the United States penniless, jobless, and homeless, but we’d had the time of our lives. We all scattered in our own directions to find places to live. Kevin moved in with his girlfriend, and James went to visit his sister in St. Petersburg one weekend and never came back. The future for the band looked bleak.

  My mom said I could come back home and stay for as long as I needed, but moving back to Naples wasn’t an option. I had made it out alive; there was no way I was going back. I would make Gainesville work. Somehow I was going to make the band work, too. I started crashing at a termite-infested punk house in an industrial area just south of downtown Gainesville dubbed the 911 House as the address was 911 SE 4th Street. By punk standards, it was a mansion. All available space had been converted into bedrooms, so on any given night, there would be 15 to 20 people sleeping under the roof, and sometimes even a few people on top of it. The house had an open-door policy for touring bands, train hoppers, drifters, and travelers. All wayward souls were welcome t
o crash. To kick in my $100 share of the rent, I sold my plasma at the blood bank and picked up part-time work as a screen printer, making shirts for bank fundraising events or kids’ soccer jerseys. On my lunch break, I would walk over to the college, where Hare Krishnas served food in exchange for donations, which to me meant a free lunch.

  Every night was a drunken party in the 911 House. We ran a bowling lane down the hallway and smashed a bowling ball into beer bottles at the other end. Bonfires raged in the backyard. Punk bands played in the dining room. If there was ever any food in the kitchen, it had been found in a dumpster or stolen. It wasn’t uncommon to find someone drunkenly fucking or masturbating in the living room, or passed out naked on the couch. Scabies outbreaks happened regularly. One of the three people I shared a room with kept a small arsenal of assault rifles and handguns in the closet, which were taken out on only the most drunken occasions and fired at the metal sign posted in the field across the street, which warned: DO NOT COME IN CONTACT WITH PLANT OR ANIMAL LIFE. EXPERIMENTAL TOXIC WASTE SITE.

  Gainesville is a college town. After the bars let out and the crowds of drunk meathead jocks had gone back to their fraternity houses, I would wander the downtown streets, staring longingly at the dresses on display in storefront windows, wishing that they were mine and that I had the body to fill them. All I wanted was to be one of the pretty college girls I saw around town. I started stealing a roommate’s birth control pills and taking them to see if they would affect my dysphoria, but all I got were violent stomachaches. That, and the realization that I would have no idea what to do if breast tissue were to actually develop made me discontinue use.