by Ann Powers
Fear and homophobia explained pop’s slow response to the epidemic. Even some gay men hesitated to acknowledge its reality, not wanting to curtail the sexual freedoms they’d achieved. Callen was an outlier, discussing his illness from the beginning, the opposite of bigger stars like Queen’s singer Freddie Mercury, who only confirmed that he had AIDS the day before he died in 1991. Hollywood also mostly kept quiet until the screen idol Rock Hudson “gave AIDS a face” just months before his death in 1985, though a few independent films did take on the subject, including the next year’s Parting Glances, which features future star Steve Buscemi as a musician struggling to come to terms with the illness and its disastrous effects on his career. With big budgets at stake and mainstream audiences to please, record labels and studios alike hesitated to explore the controversial subject of a “gay” disease.
The American Top 40 certainly wasn’t ready to hear frank accounts of life with AIDS, even as English New Wave acts like Frankie Goes to Hollywood and the Pet Shop Boys created danceable pop hits deeply informed by gay culture and eventually infused with knowledge of the epidemic. The musicologist Paul Attinello has pointed out that nearly all mainstream songs written about AIDS in the syndrome’s early years present the singer addressing a dead or dying friend. Even “The Last Song” by Elton John, who had finally come out as gay in 1988 after decades of living in a glass closet, is structured to make clear that John is assuming a character in order to deliver its first-person narrative. Attinello points out that this approach helped foster widespread empathy and make greater tolerance of homosexuality possible. Yet it also kept gay men silent and motionless, relegated to the safe space of the memorial. The fact that outside of dance music, AIDS memorial songs stood in for songs about queerness in general also obscured lesbian visibility; not until the country-pop singer k.d. lang and the rocker Melissa Etheridge emerged in the late 1980s as the most visible “dyke hopes” outside the women’s music community would that sensibility reach the mainstream.10
The epidemic’s realities did increasingly inform the music of scenes where gay men were more audible, from dance music to Broadway and classical. Men’s choruses, a fixture in gay communities since the early 1970s, focused their energies on both fundraising and memorializing. “I sing for two” became the informal motto of San Francisco’s famous touring choir, which lost 257 members to the epidemic. The theater world saw the confrontational AIDS! The Musical debut in Los Angeles in 1991; William Finn’s Tony Award–winning Falsettos trilogy took Broadway in 1992, and the blockbuster rock musical Rent, which showed the effects of AIDS on a mixed-race community of gay and straight East Village bohemians, had its first staged reading in 1993. Classical composers like John Corigliano and jazz musicians like Fred Hersch took on AIDS as a subject. Dying musicians pioneered a stark new practice: self-memorializing. “It was as if he were determined to tell the world about life and this was the way he wrote music and this was the way he could play the piano—a conscious culmination of the years of practice, the long hours of meditation, the genetic predisposition and family relations, the friendship, love affairs, joys and sufferings that sometimes, mysteriously, combine to make an artist,” critic Tim Page wrote of a concerto performed by its composer, Kevin Oldham, who would die two months after the event described. “It should have been Oldham’s first great triumph; it may well have been his last.”11
These works told the story of the epidemic. They were complemented by rituals of the dance floor, which remained a haven for those in the thick of the fight. People’s need to stay in touch with what made being alive matter to them pushed music into hyperdrive even as death pressed close. Disco had shifted toward electronics in the late 1970s, when Patrick Cowley and a handful of other producers took the synthesizer sounds popularized by European producers such as Giorgio Moroder to new levels, creating a sped-up wash of soundwaves that became known as Hi-NRG. While Larry Levan’s balance of the organic and the electronic in DJ sets that blended soul, funk, salsa, and New Wave into a new hybrid defined one 1980s approach, Hi-NRG dominated another, especially in clubs like the Saint, patronized by the white “clone” crowd.
The Saint, with its domed interior and a giant lighting rig that loomed like a spaceship over the dance floor, played a heightened role in the AIDS story—the syndrome was even known as “Saint’s disease” for a moment because so many regulars had contracted it. At the Saint, Hi-NRG music, which paired relentless electronic rhythms with processed versions of the warm African American vocals always prevalent in disco, sponsored a kind of mass ecstasy. Dancers retreated to the balconies and corners to have sex during DJ sets; others remained in plain sight, providing informal sex shows. Dance historian Tim Lawrence called the Saint’s dance floor formations “amoeba-like”: a seemingly interlocked mass of bodies cultivating synchronicity instead of the individualistic expressiveness on display at clubs like Levan’s Paradise Garage. “The goal was the moment of unity, the moment when everything disappeared, when time and space disappeared,” Saint regular Jorge La Torre said. “It was just pure energy. It was extremely welcoming and extremely powerful. Within it, everything seemed possible.”12
The shift from organic-sounding to mechanically driven dance music enhanced its role in providing gay men with a sense of order amidst chaos, just as the groupie system had helped heterosexual rock fans navigate erotic confusion in the early 1970s. Songs like Miquel Brown’s “So Many Men, So Little Time” and Hazell Dean’s “Searchin’ (I Gotta Find a Man)” expressed the unruliness of desire via gospel- and rock-based vocals provided by female singers. But the hard beats and repetitive sound effects transforming this human element created patterns and restrictions that made those “amoeba-like” dancers respond. Walter Hughes, who in 1992 wrote the first academic defense of disco, argued that submitting to disco’s rhythms guided men into a particular post-Stonewall gay identity—to accept their sexual outsiderness “with pleasure, rather than suffering.” Post-AIDS, Hughes argued, dancing to increasingly machine-dominated dance tracks helped men process the ways in which the epidemic had changed their lives. “The music that once taught some men to be gay can now teach them what all gay men must learn: how to live with AIDS. Like safe sex or ACT UP or the concept of sexual identity itself, this indispensable discipline enables them to submit without acquiescing,” he wrote. Hughes, a Princeton professor, died from complications of AIDS in 1994.13
The discipline of the beat engendered a prophylactic way of being gay. The young men of the AIDS generation weren’t always practicing safe sex, but many did project a more distanced and overtly puritan attitude toward desire. Mother Jones writer William Hayes noted the shift in 1990 at the legendary San Francisco club the Stud: “The lead dogs of the new generation are easy to spot. Tom Cruise and Charlie Sheen are their icons: clean-cut, clean-shaven, straight-jawed, white, all-American boys, wearing ripped and bleached Levi’s, t-shirts or starched shirts, tennis shoes or loafers, blue blazers or stressed leather jackets. These pristine boys, who appear to possess an inbred, heterosexual strength and immunity, are the clones of the new order. There are no more red bandannas, signifying that they are into fisting or fucking, in their back pockets. The look is antidrug, safe sex, perhaps even monogamous relationships, whether boys today believe in them or not.”14
Throughout the 1980s, this cleansed, streamlined version of eroticism would infiltrate the mainstream, especially within Madonna’s songs and videos. But within a gay scene becoming activist and, in a new vernacular, queer, it had a more openly confrontational counterpart. A queer punk aesthetic arose in league with AIDS street activism: performers, writers, and visual artists like David Wojnarowicz, Ron Athey, Vaginal Creme Davis, Dennis Cooper, and Kathy Acker expressed the far more in-your-face spirit of street movements like ACT UP and Queer Nation. These activists weren’t throwing fundraisers in fancy discos; they were threatening to dump the bodies of AIDS sufferers on the steps of federal buildings until the state responded full force to the thre
at.
ACT UP’s most resonant slogan—SILENCE=DEATH—was a call to clamor that echoed into the 1990s and changed the course of the epidemic. Its celebration of noise reflected a musical movement that challenged the long-established languages of eroticism. The music called “punk” exposed bodies as conduits of pain, disgust, and extreme vulnerability. It made room for pleasure, too, but that always came as a shock, like a boy’s first wet dream or a girl’s shiver as she rubbed against a rough sponge in the shower. If 1980s dance music helped gay men—and through them, the pop mainstream—relearn adult sex in the harsh light of AIDS, punk responded to the era’s sexual crisis with the inherent impropriety and moral certainty of a child. Punk reformed sex and rock and roll by making them dirty again, spitting on them, and wiping them clean.
LOVE COMES IN SPURTS
On an ordinary East Village night in 1976, Stiv Bators of Cleveland’s Dead Boys got a blow job onstage at CBGB. Unlike the all-male sexual explorations occurring blocks away at the baths on St. Mark’s Place, Bators’s oral trip was an act, not destined for completion. The Dead Boys were new in town and had recently met Genya Ravan, a pioneering female rocker of the 1960s, then breaking into production. The Dead Boys had a song called “Caught with the Meat in Your Mouth,” and Ravan saw it as an opportunity for the group to up its showmanship. She goaded a waitress to jump onstage, extract Bators’s member, cover it with whipped cream, and suck. “The waitress didn’t fellate Stiv to the point of coming, because the guy had to sing,” Ravan later said. “I didn’t want him to go off-key. So I said, ‘Don’t go that far.’ Poor guy.”15
An unfinished blow job: in many ways, that was the spirit of punk. This subculture’s erotic energy was fitful, frustrated, and deliberately crude. Originating on both sides of the Atlantic in the mid-1970s as a grittier take on glam and art rock, punk stood in opposition to the excesses of both disco and hard rock. Its main stated target was “pathetic hippie crap,” the idealistic haze that had obscured not only the sexism and racism that no amount of free love could overcome, but also the frustration, awkwardness, and pain endemic to human intimacy.16 Often punks actually seemed to resent sex. “I don’t believe in sexuality at all,” said Sid Vicious of the Sex Pistols, the British band that made punk an international sensation, in 1976. “People are very unsexy. I don’t enjoy that side of life. Being sexy is just a fat arse and tits that will do anything you want.”
From its bloody 1970s birth onward, and even within the commercialized versions sold today in mall stores like Hot Topic or on the annual Warped Tour, punk’s take on sex has remained committedly awkward, even resistant. “It wasn’t about hot-wiring the body,” remarked the essayist James Wolcott, who hung out at CBGB at the club’s height, though he did note that “there was a sex chart in the ladies’ room peter-metering [that is, measuring the penis sizes of] the top contenders on the scene.” Sex Pistols road manager Nils Stevenson echoed Wolcott’s unromantic view from the English side: “Sex was often sordid, not particularly good, just lots of it,” he once told oral historian John Robb. “In club toilets in London, Birmingham, Manchester. We weren’t getting into the pervy, interesting sex—the masks and that sort of stuff. There wasn’t time. It was a biological function.”17
Yet punk was also one of popular music’s most sexually explicit genres, going well beyond the pleasure sounds of Donna Summer and Robert Plant to incorporate every unappetizing squish, sticky slap, and stifled fart that issued from bodies en flagrante. “Love comes in spurts,” yelped Richard Hell, one of punk’s first frontmen, and, with his pouty lips sneering beneath dark-circled eyes, its emblematic sex symbol. “Oh no, it hurts!” He sounded like he was masturbating, possibly for the first time. Punks like Hell uttered what was both obvious and improper, and, onstage, did what was both indecent and irresistible. Sex Pistols manager Malcolm McLaren’s famous manifesto for punk began with the phrase “Be childish,” continuing, “be disrespectful, be irresponsible, be everything this society hates.” The irresponsibility of the child is different than that of the criminal or even the morally questionable adult: it denotes a certain clarity of vision and an uncorrupted heart, the ability to see the basic preexisting truths that social niceties obscure.
Making those noises that people are taught from babyhood to keep private, not prettying them up the way porn stars might but including ugly grunts and creepy shouted fantasies, punks declared that 1970s music had gone far enough in its sensual pursuits. This music stripped everything down to the basic urge; “I just can’t get wise to those tragical lies,” Hell sang, spitting on old ideas of romance. Though there is such a thing as punk crooning, usually performed off-key with an eye roll, punks generally hated that lovey-dovey stuff and the glorification of privacy that went with it. Like kids walking in on their parents fucking and flipping on the light, these truth seekers demanded that sex be naked and exposed.
Also like children, punks would put anything in their mouths. Dead Boys guitarist Cheetah Chrome complained decades after the group’s glory days that most people didn’t recall how tight and melodic the group’s high-octane rock could be, but they’d always mention the onstage head that became the band’s shtick, or “Stiv blowing his nose on bologna and eating it.” Marky Ramone, the original drummer for early punk’s best-known quartet, was notorious for taking dares to scarf down anything from roaches to cat food. The Ramones also had a singer with a weirdly distended mouth, Joey (born Jeffrey Ross Hyman to a very nice Queens couple), who crooned in a style derived from the girl groups—except his dreamy dreams were about eating refried beans. “Handsome” Dick Manitoba of the Dictators preferred burgers, even though, as he sang in the satirical “Master Race Rock,” they made him throw up every day. The binge and purge was “the best part of growing up,” he claimed. Taking in whatever came next, punks also made a show of getting it out: gobbing, as it became known, was the trademark of punks and proto-punks from Patti Smith to the Sex Pistols’ Johnny Rotten to Manitoba, who perfected a drawn-out saliva ball–expulsion technique he called “the spit trick.”18
Punks were also famous for exposing themselves—especially their mooned derrières—and wearing ripped, stained, or otherwise trashed clothing, often bearing confrontational slogans written in indelible felt pen. The movement intersected with fashion in New York boutiques like Trash and Vaudeville, and in the London shop called Sex, run by the Sex Pistols’ manager Malcolm McLaren and his partner, the designer Vivienne Westwood. Sex was where the Sex Pistols originated; the store sold gear favored by bikers, gay cruisers, and bondage fetishists. Punk fashion wasn’t childlike, but it did have an unmistakable aura of dress-up—not the cute kind that parents catalog in photographs, but the kind that feels just wrong, inappropriate, aesthetically displeasing. In his topography of punk, Lipstick Traces, which connects the music to other art movements such as Dada, critic Greil Marcus wrote: “Today, it’s hard to remember just how ugly the first punks were. They were ugly. There were no mediations. A ten-inch safety pin cutting through a lower lip into a swastika tattooed onto a cheek was not a fashion statement.”19
Punks cultivated immaturity as a method of refusal. They practiced what Marcus has called “negation”: not the narcissistic blackout of the nihilist, but the truth teller’s curtain pull, revealing that the world is not as it seems. When it came to sexuality, punk childishness was textbook Freud—a celebration of oral and anal fixations that spread scat and cum all over those pretty line drawings in the 1970s sex manuals. The groupie system had encouraged young girls and some boys to behave as if they were adults; as punks, they could reclaim their bodies as their own juvenile domain. Writer Carola Dibbell captured punk’s gift to young women in her description of what one of its founding mothers, Patti Smith, presented to her fans: “What this skinny weirdo offered wasn’t androgyny per se but a new use for it: to cut a niche in the music that was neither sexual invitation nor sexual confrontation, like, ‘Hi, I’m Patti Smith. I’m going to be charismatic. But not sexual
ly charismatic! That way we can be friends.’”
Some prominent punk women competed with each other for time with men in bands—there were still groupies, the most tragic being Sid Vicious’s girlfriend, Nancy Spungen, whom he stabbed to death in 1978. But for the first time in any number, women were also in bands. In New York, there was boyish Tina Weymouth, playing bass in the Talking Heads, and womanly Debbie Harry, a former Playboy bunny who made sex symbolism comical as Blondie’s frontwoman. The West Coast had Alice Bag and Exene Cervenka in Los Angeles and Penelope Houston in San Francisco—“violence girls,” as Bag called herself, in thrift-store rags and combat boots, determined antidotes to the tanned, willing California beach baby. Southern anti-belles in bands like Pylon and the B-52s entered the scene and introduced an accented and regionally rich vocabulary into rock singing. Punk women managed bands, put together fanzines, ran clubs. “Punk was the right metaphor for us, with its emphasis on meaningless threats, on weakness and chutzpah and the relativity of size,” Dibbell writes. “We were the right metaphor for punk, with our ungaugeable ability, our nerve, and our joy at just being there at all.”20
The idea that women could be loud, aggressive, and even disgusting contradicted both conventional views of femininity and the common feminist notion that women were essentially peace-loving and gentle. How could punks acknowledge gender difference without reinforcing inequality? Mostly, they didn’t. Instead of taking glam’s femme-leaning androgyny fix, punks insisted they could breach the gendered divide by stalling the processes that fed it. In the punk filmmaker Alex Cox’s 1984 comedy Repo Man, two petty thieves, Duke and Debbi, struggle to define their relationship; at one point, Duke says, “Don’t you think it’s time we settle down? Get a little house. I want you to have my baby . . . Everybody does it.” Debbi replies, “Asshole!” and the two continue on their trail of mayhem. Duke’s daydream of ordinary family life is presented as the most ridiculous idea either has ever entertained.21