Industrial Soundtrack To The Gender Wars: How To Navigate Queer Trans Identity In Subculture Spaces. Part 1, A Personal History.
This is a series of essays I am writing about my experiences in various subcultures as a queer transmasculine person. I will try not to curse as much this time. This is the first one, enjoy! ❤
It’s the summer of 1999 and I have just landed a part-time gig handing out flyers at Manray in Boston every third Friday, otherwise known as Hell Night. I don’t turn eighteen until February and the club is actually 19+, but who’s counting, right? The organizer of the event is a tiny ferocious wisp of a man in a giant plumed hat with heeled boots and wild blonde curly hair. He scares me a little but in an interesting way and when my parents ask me about him, I make him sound as wholesome as possible. As I write this, I am now two years older than he was when we first met.
He tells stories of hanging out with Christian Death and the time one of the guys from And One fell off the stage. And so it goes that once a month, I get free food and drinks and sometimes $20 to sit on a stool and hand out flyers for a couple of hours while I beam seductively at Boston’s finest selection of freaks in all their leather, rubber, and faux fur glory as they file in to a legendary (now defunct) goth/industrial/80’s club….the only one I ever tried to sneak into with my friends. Manray…it was my mecca.
The dress code is “wear black or wear nothing at all.” To my amusement, I occasionally spot irritated-looking men in Boston Red Sox caps and jeans, wandering away towards The Middle East and TT The Bears having been turned away at the door. I am excited that I finally have something to dress up for besides my classes at the private liberal arts high school I attend in Weston, Massachusetts, where I am known simply as “Goth Girl” thanks to my art teacher naming me after a t-shirt I wore one day. I’ve chopped the sleeves off my Bauhaus t-shirt and strategically torn my fishnet stockings just right. My hair is a brutally chopped, jagged halo of dyed black spikes. My eyes are lined in black and my face is powdered carefully in white.
In the front room I can hear strains of “Inquisition” by Skinny Puppy and see the silhouettes of black-clad rivetheads with their goggles perched in their nests of half-shaved hair, their fishnet-draped arms flailing. In the back I can hear “Nemesis” by Shriekback and see the familiar bleach-blonde head of the DJ up in the crow’s nest. I can smell the fog machine, a sweet, heady chemical rush tainted with the faint aroma of clove cigarettes and the yeasty tang of old beer soaked into the floors. In the basement, I sit on the battered couch with the performers for the night inhaling their ethereal clouds of perfume, glitter, and hairspray, hearing everybody’s feet stomping on the floor above me, so hard that the pipes rattle. By 9:30, I’m free to leave the rest of the flyers on the dressing room table and enjoy the night.
I venture upstairs and “Cuz It’s Hot” by My Life With The Thrill Kill Kult is pounding through the speakers, the groove relentless, the percussion like knives as the cage dancers contort and the fog hisses out into the air. While all my classmates are home watching TV with their parents or maybe playing video games with their friends, I’m hanging out with a scene that would soon begin to feel like a family.
It’s 2003 and I’m in Savannah, Georgia. I’m in the DJ booth at Club One, my headphones angled to one side so I can hear the monitors while cueing up the next song, which is a remix of “Windowpane” by Coil that I got as a promo. I watch my friends on the dancefloor and one of them hands me up a drink. It’s a short set, but when I’m done, I vault the quick distance out of the booth and twirl onto the floor to dance, my giant Illig octopus pants swooshing merrily around my legs as I stomp as hard as I can to “Temple Of Love” by the Sisters of Mercy…the ten-minute mix. Sometimes I forgo a shirt and wear pieces of black electrical tape over my nipples instead. I know everyone in the scene and they know me…I’m just me. Being a DJ and performer seems to have placed me in a separate category from the scantily-clad girls dancing in the cages. But we all respect each other regardless…it’s just how it is. I create chaotic sound design pieces with an ESQ-1 and collages of found sounds recorded from DAT machines and even make it onto an mp3.com compilation.
It’s 2007 and I’m in New York City at what used to be The Batcave, then became Albion, and by the time I left the city, was known as Rebel before it closed for good. It turns out I know one of the DJ’s from the Boston scene at Manray, so I say hello and then I step out onto the floor. “Dream Aid” by Haujobb is playing. By day I’m a camera assistant in the film and television industry, wearing khaki cargo pants and Panavision t-shirts, on hiatus from the music business…but by night I can enter this world again…and I’ve forgotten how much I love it. By the time “Headhunter” by Front 242 rolls around, I’m excitedly planning ideas for my own music because I’ve just gotten a copy of Ableton. That night, I can barely sleep because I’m so energized.
It’s 2010 and I’m at Santos Party House on the Lower East Side. 16Volt, Chemlab, and Left Side Down are playing. Jared Louche gives me a sweaty hug and scribbles a doodle in my sketchbook. Steve White winks at me and I pretend to be scandalized. The show is wonderfully sincere and energetic. The following week when I take the stage for two separate gigs, I feel galvanized and inspired. I hustle our songs and talk us up on social media. I even land a couple of remixes for other artists.
The scene continuously meanders back into my life in bits and pieces, even if it’s just me literally crossing the street just to tell a random guy that I love his Einsturzende Neubauten shirt, or quoting KMFDM lyrics and seeing who gets it. But it’s always there. After all, it made me who I am, both as a musician and a person. What can I say, I tried applying dark brown eyeliner like a normal person, and I’m just incapable. I tried wearing bright colors and more conventional clothing choices, and it always felt like I was dressing for somebody else, so I stopped.
The goth/industrial scene was technically dead before I arrived, dying as I was entering middle school. I was fortunate enough to catch a sort of all-ages punk renaissance while I was in Boston. I saw a few legendary punk bands while I was living in New York. Here in the Bay Area, the punk scene is all around me. And thus, I’ve continuously surrounded myself by subculture, because the mainstream has never interested me. I tried it…and it was boring. It also stunted me as an artist and musician…I was constantly fighting to remain versatile because I didn’t know how else to appeal to people who ultimately didn’t really “get” me as easily.
Now that I’ve plunged helplessly into another rabbithole somewhere deep down Memory Lane, I can only arrive at the simple truth that by burying myself in various subcultures, I was able to perform my gender on my own terms and blatantly ignore what society was trying to get me to do instead. As heavily gendered as the goth scene in particular seemed, somehow I was able to find a place for myself that worked for my personal aesthetic.
The men in these scenes were my idols. I lusted after some of them just like many women did, but the difference for me is that it was a more complicated relationship that I think other trans and queer people might face too (I can’t speak for all of us, though!). You see, I not only wanted to be with them (some of them!)…I wanted to be them. From Nick Cave’s sinewy, oily swagger to Nivek Ogre’s menacing shriek to Raymond Watts towering onstage in black vinyl with his dark hair cascading into his eyes, crooning the lyrics to “Dis-Obedience” in a seductive baritone. From the dynamic duo of stubbly, slick-haired Dave Gahan and pretty boy blonde Martin Gore. Even Duran Duran with all their glossy 80’s showmanship, or Bowie, or Prince…I mean, shit. Trent Reznor with those fucking black gloves he wore in the “Closer” video. Daniel Ash in all his feather boa glory. This roster of alterna-studs, like some sort of bizarro music festival lineup, was also a mashup of my ideals and inspirations as I was dragged kicking and screaming through female puberty. Siouxsie Sioux and Poly Styrene and Ariana Up and Android Lust…the handful of women in those subcultures were beautiful with gorgeous voices and I loved listening to them, but I didn’t identify with them the same way because I guess I needed somewhere to channel my masculinity. I needed a true escape from whatever the fuck I was supposed to grow up into.
And escape, I did. Over and over again, yet I kept coming back to the world I know the best. As the disconnect between what I see in my mind’s eye and what I see in the mirror, starts to slowly mend, as the years go by and all the old Wax Trax! stuff skyrockets in value on eBay while many of my heroes try to adapt and sell their music on Bandcamp and Spotify, I feel and hope that I’m finally arriving…that it can be my time, now that my mind is a little more free to work on my music and dysphoria no longer fogs me in. Plus, what’s more punk rock than injecting yourself in the leg every week, right?
