Formed in 1991 by bassist/vocalist Chris Freeman and singer/guitarist Jon Ginoli, Pansy Division was one of the first rock bands to be brazenly, openly gay. Their 1994 album Deflowered, with its provocative and hilarious lyrics about kinky sexual encounters (“James Bondage”), catchy, silly refrains (“Groovy Underwear”) and touching intimacy (“Kissed”), presented their sexuality unapologetically—more than that, as though they’d never think to apologize for it. Their music is electrifying in its open, honest joy.
Deflowered pushed the band into mainstream prominence, touring with pop punk outfit Green Day in 1994. Now, 30 years later, the band returns to this early milestone for a six-city anniversary tour.
Xtra spoke with Ginoli about the legacy of Deflowered, what it meant to be a role model for young people at the tail end of the AIDS crisis and how queer artists can respond to the current political climate.
How does it feel to perform this album from 30 years ago?
It’s pretty unbelievable. I mean, we started this band without any kind of plan for the future except to do it as long as we could. We didn’t know that it would take off, but it did. So we have a lot of gratitude that people remember us, that people liked us and are still interested in us. We never stopped performing, though there were periods where we were fairly inactive, but until the pandemic I don’t think we ever went a year without doing some kind of show.
We all lived in the Bay Area, San Francisco, and then at the beginning of the 2000s we started spreading out. Now no one’s left in San Francisco. We are scattered all over the place. Because we just couldn’t do tours anymore like we used to—jump in a van and go out for a month or more—now we just fly places and play a weekend, or in this case, two weekends. But in between, we’re working remotely! That’s the reality for a band where, even though we all still love it, there’s just no way we can make music the main focus of our lives the way we did in the ’90s. So we just convene occasionally, and still have a good time.
A lot of this album is about sex; in a video on your YouTube channel, you called the album “dirty and sweet.” What made you want to write so much about sex? Was it a political choice?
I’m a romantic guy who also likes to have sex. But, at the time, it was still the era of AIDS, where there wasn’t a cure, where condoms were really the only thing you could do if you were having sex to prevent HIV. And because the right wing were making us out to be pariahs, I really wanted to assert that, yes, we can have sex, and do it responsibly and respond to the times, respond to a pandemic.
There was an argument you heard in the ’90s: were you pushing the boundaries, or were you trying to placate people? Like, “Be nice and behave and they’ll accept us.” I didn’t think that that was going to work, and I noticed from being in the group ACT UP, the direct action political group in San Francisco, how much was achieved by pushing the boundaries. I really took that into my thinking doing Pansy Division: what do I want to write about and how do I want to approach it?
In the music that I heard coming from musicians that I thought were gay, they weren’t open about it so they weren’t singing about it. And I thought, well, we’re going to be the gay band that actually sings about it.
You touched on the timing of this album, coming out of the AIDS crisis. On the original vinyl you had condom instructions and a list of youth resources on the album liner notes. Did you always see your role as musicians as connected to activism, or as role models for young gay people?
Yeah, I thought that that was a good role that we could play while doing music. I thought the music needed to have this component of, beyond just being a band, having an additional purpose.
On our first album, there are also instructions on how to use a condom. But we really thought, when we started out, that our band was going to be a band for people in their 20s and their 30s. We were not aiming for teenagers. We were already 30 years old when we started the band.
When we realized that we had all these kids listening to us—in part because Lookout! Records, our label, had such a teenage following—we thought, “For the second album, we have to give more information.” I knew some activists, and I got a list of every gay organization in this country, organized by state, so that you could call local resources to talk to somebody. And people did tell me that they called those numbers.
But honestly, we haven’t talked about the humour. I’m being very serious, because I’m a serious guy. But the records were really fun. We wanted to do something that was joyful, and it wasn’t propagandistic; we also had songs about loneliness, and it wasn’t all about fucking like bunnies. It was sometimes! That was good to have sometimes. But the humour also carried along the other songs. Because we just wanted a band that, when we played, people would have fun and enjoy us. We wanted to have some substance, and have some depth, but we also wanted to be really catchy and fun.
When listening to the album, I just kept thinking about the idea of “queer joy.”
Yes! That was really what we were offering, before that phrase really came into usage. It doesn’t mean every minute was happy, but there’s also a joy in just acknowledging what is real. And on the same album that has “Beercan Boy” and “Groovy Underwear,” is the song “Denny,” about somebody who’s dying of AIDS. And I thought that was a really important song to do. Because I figured we had to address the subject somehow. A friend had written a poem that I adapted, because it had the right tone. I thought especially on our second album, we’ve got all these teenagers listening, we’re singing about sex, well, let’s give it context. So a song like “Denny,” or a song like “Deep Water,” which is me trying to talk about how I felt in high school—which wasn’t very good—those songs sit alongside them. Alongside “New Pleasures,” a song about trying out dildos, because you’re lonely and you want to get fucked. So you know, it’s all mixed together.
But our songs, as much as they’re about sex, are really about desire, and I think even people who are not gay, though they’re not waiting to hear the validation of hearing that in a song, like gay people might, at the same time they can understand the universal thing of desire.
What are you working on now?
The band’s really not putting new music together. I have just found it too hard to work long distance.
Chris [Freeman, bass player] has this great band called GayC/DC, a gay AC/DC cover band, and they’re really good. Luis [Illades, drummer], who has never really been a singer or a songwriter, has written songs and has recorded a project, and Joel [Reader, lead guitar] has his band the Fatal Flaw in Boston that he’s been playing with for over a decade.
We’ve had two goals as Pansy Division over the past two decades: one is to get to 1,000 shows, and the other is to do another European tour. The European tour would have happened by now if it hadn’t been for the pandemic, but we’re finally set to go in June. And at the end of these six shows on this tour, we’ll have played 999 shows. So we’re going to go back to San Francisco in April and play our 1,000th show.
We’re in this strange moment politically, where in some ways the LGBTQ2S+ community has more acceptance than ever before, but there’s also been a rise in anti-trans rhetoric and legislation. The day before your Toronto show, there’s a march scheduled for anti-trans, “parental rights” activists. How do you feel about being a long-standing queer artist in this current political moment?
The backlash hurts. It’s so disappointing to have this backlash, whereas we had years of pretty noticeable incremental progress. The march of progress seemed to be in our direction. I think it still is. But the backlash is very disheartening.
I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised at this, but it actually makes our band more relevant, even after 30 years. Even if we’re not singing direct protest songs, just to be presenting ourselves unapologetically as we are is a statement.
The difference now is that there are just tons of gay, lesbian, queer musicians! In the ’90s, I used to walk around with a list. It had about 20 bands on it, 20 musicians. Maybe 30. And now there’s just no way to keep track! Which is a great evolution.
During the pandemic, we seem to have gained a lot of fans. What’s been interesting is so many younger people, like 18 to 22 (and younger, when we get to play an all-ages show, which isn’t too often), they come to our show and there are so many genderqueer kids who really love Pansy Division. I’m a little surprised at that, because we never really sang about gender. We’re singing about sexuality, mainly. But obviously, we’re allies. We always thought: “We don’t want people to tell us how to live and how to act,” so I’m not going to do that to others.
Pansy Division tours Sept. 19 to 28; you can find details here.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
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