Who are Pansy Division?
And personal favorite:
These guys are a totally gay punk rock band. They are a tight operation, they rock out, they're funny...they even toured with Green Day right when Dookie was making it big!
So why haven't you heard more about them? Because America is run by assholes who hate you. How else to explain Top 40?
Deflowered briefly discusses Jon's childhood and adolescence, which was very normal and boring: no heroin abuse, no being locked in the attic until the age of 13, or any of that usual memoir crap. Jon was raised in the Midwest, and the wildest thing he did as a teen was dress like Patti Smith. I can totally get behind that, and have been tempted to do so myself.
The story continues in the gay bars of the 1980s, which played the same shitty dance music they do today. In fact, while reading Jon's complaints about the San Francisco scene, I was very much reminded of walking into The Stonewall Inn on New Year's, and leaving 15 minutes later, because I can not stand that disco bull shit. Seriously. Jon and his friends in Tribe 8 worked very, very hard to give queers RAWK; why can't we give them some props at the bars instead of waiting for Riot Grrl theme night (if we even get that)?
Because Jon, 20 years ago, was frustrated by the lack of queer punk rock, he did the punk rock thing, and formed a band himself. He notes that there were queer punk zines before the music had arrived yet, which I found quite interesting. There were also some dyke bands forming, such as Tribe 8. The riot grrl scene eventually brought a lot more of them, but by the late 1990s the status quo had its revenge and we were subjected to Gay Pride favorites, The Spice Girls. Girl Power!
Most of the book consists of tour diaries. They got picked to tour with Green Day in 1994 because the drummer of that band, Tre Cool, wanted to rile up the frat boys that began to come to their shows as they got MTV airplay. The boys in GD genuinely liked the band, though, and they toured with them twice. Pansy Division even got some MTV airplay themselves in the form of an interview on 120 Minutes.
Some audiences, like the ones at Squeezebox in New York, or the venues (squats) in Italy, were very positive. Others, like some of the Green Day audiences as the band got huge, were absolute assholes. The band gossip Jon relates, concerning certain of the pop-punk scene, I really relished, since I grew up in the late 90s and had to go to class with the same alternateens that worshipped those pricks.
The tour diaries are fascinating at first, but they can get repetitive. I wish Jon had talked more about the transformation of the punk scene, though hearing about Tre Cool smearing mustard on electrical outlets was kind of great. They toured so much maybe it was hard for him to make a clear observation of what was going on. He was also in his 30s at the time and not really part of the punk "lifestyle" even as a teen, so he was kind of on the fringes despite being in a band.
However, the problem with the diary entries is that they don't have a lot of meat on them, so it all kind of blurs together and I wound up skipping parts. Discussions of band promotions, like making a video parody of Bill & Ted are a lot more fun to read, but fewer and far between.
Deflowered gets 2 and a half stars.
1 star for "attempting to make music at Pride less horrible"
1 star for "Beavis humping Butthead, Bill humping Ted, et al"
And 1 half star for "mocking Blink 182 and Bon Jovi" (it's only half because it's too easy)
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