A Pride Month celebration from someone who has always belonged to both worlds.
I have been bisexual my whole life, and I have been a grunge, metal, and punk kid for most of my life, and for a long time those two things felt like they existed in separate rooms. The music I loved was loud and aggressive and built around a kind of outsider identity that should have, by its own logic, welcomed everyone who didn’t fit the mainstream mold. But the mainstream version of that world, the version sold back to us through magazine covers and MTV, was overwhelmingly straight and overwhelmingly male, and it took me longer than it should have to understand that the queer presence in these genres was never absent. It was just being erased in the retelling.
This month I want to spend time talking about the queer artists who built the music I love, who brought their full selves into spaces that were often hostile to their identities, and who made it possible for people like me to hear ourselves in their music. This is not every name that deserves to be here, because that list would be a book. But it’s a start, a love letter, and a correction of the record.
The Invisible Middle
Bisexual people are often invisible, not because we are hiding, but because the world insists on reading us through whatever relationship we happen to be in at the moment.
If I’m with a woman, I’m gay. If I’m with a man, I’m straight. The bisexuality itself disappears into the relationship’s perceived category, and with it goes a significant part of who I am. I have always lived in that in-between space, never fully claimed by the straight world and never fully claimed by the gay world, and at various points it has been made clear to me that my truth made others uncomfortable. I have been told that bisexuality was a phase or confusion, rather than what it actually is, which is just who I am.
I am currently married to a man who sees me fully, who has never made me feel like my sexuality was something to manage or apologize for, who embraces who I am as a whole person rather than asking me to reduce my identity to the relationship we’re in. That has not always been my experience. In past relationships, my bisexuality was met with jokes that weren’t really jokes, with mockery that was supposed to be affectionate but wasn’t, and even with anger and insults, and a consistent pressure to perform straightness because it was more convenient and clean for the person I was with.
I was never truly embarrassed by being bisexual. Not publicly, not to myself. But there is an exhaustion that comes from living in a space that other people refuse to acknowledge as real, from having your identity flattened by whoever is observing it at any given moment, from having to keep asserting that you exist even to people who claim to be on your side.
The music I’m about to talk about helped me feel less alone in a world that kept trying to tell me I didn’t quite fit anywhere. And some of the artists in it knew exactly what that felt like.
Punk Was Queer From the Beginning
Punk was never as straight as it was marketed. From its earliest days in the mid-seventies, queer artists were central to the scene, and the genre’s foundational ethos of rejecting social norms and refusing to perform respectability was, whether everyone admitted it or not, built from the same place queer experience comes from.
Jayne County, formerly Wayne County, was performing in the New York punk club scene before the Sex Pistols existed, and is widely considered rock’s first prominent transgender performer. She was doing drag, playing clubs, and being explicitly, unapologetically herself in an era when that came with real danger. She didn’t wait for the culture to catch up. She built the culture.
Pete Shelley of the Buzzcocks was bisexual, and he made it count in the work in a way that speaks directly to the invisibility I described above. Songs like “Ever Fallen in Love (With Someone You Shouldn’t’ve?)” were written in deliberately gender-neutral language, which was a quiet radical act in the late seventies, making those bruised and aching love songs available to anyone who had ever wanted someone they weren’t supposed to want. His refusal to write from inside a fixed identity, to let the longing be the longing regardless of who it was directed at, produced some of the most emotionally honest songs the genre has ever generated. He didn’t make his bisexuality invisible. He built it into the music.
Tom Robinson of the Tom Robinson Band was one of the first openly gay punk musicians, penning “Glad to Be Gay” in 1976, a song so direct and so defiant that it functioned as an anthem for an entire community that had been given almost no visibility in rock music up to that point.
Patti Smith, one of punk’s most revered figures, has spoken openly about her queer identity and relationships throughout her life, and her work has always challenged the boundaries of gender and desire in ways that influenced generations of artists who came after her.
Lou Reed, whose work with the Velvet Underground predated punk but whose influence on it is undeniable, was openly bisexual and brought queerness into rock at a time when that was essentially unheard of. Like Shelley, Reed lived in the complicated middle space, claimed and unclaimed by multiple communities depending on who was observing. Songs like “Walk on the Wild Side” named and celebrated trans and queer lives in 1972 with a casualness that was itself a form of radical visibility.
The Queercore Movement
By the late 1980s and into the 1990s, a generation of queer punk musicians had stopped waiting for the mainstream punk scene to make room for them and started building their own. The queercore movement, sometimes called homocore, emerged from zine culture and DIY spaces and produced some of the most politically charged music of the era.
Team Dresch, formed in Olympia and Portland in the early 1990s, were central to this movement. Founded by Donna Dresch, whose label Chainsaw Records also released early Sleater-Kinney albums, the band made explicitly queer punk that was fierce and personal and technically accomplished. Their debut album Personal Best opened with a track called “Fagetarian and Dyke,” which told you immediately and without apology exactly where they stood. They weren’t asking for acceptance. They were claiming space.
Pansy Division, a San Francisco queercore band formed in 1991, were so loud and so present that Green Day chose them as their opening act on their 1994 tour specifically to challenge the increasingly mainstream, straight-coded audience their MTV success had attracted. Jon Ginoli and the band brought unapologetic gay sexuality into punk spaces that often preferred to pretend it didn’t exist, and their influence on bringing queercore to wider attention was significant.
Limp Wrist, fronted by Martin Sorrondeguy of Los Crudos, brought queer and Latinx identities into hardcore in ways that expanded the genre’s sense of what it could hold and who it was for.
The riot grrrl movement, while not exclusively queer, grew in significant part from and alongside queer punk networks. Kathleen Hanna of Bikini Kill, whose name is probably the most recognizable from this era, famously spray-painted the words “Smells Like Teen Spirit” on Kurt Cobain’s wall, a detail that places riot grrrl in direct creative conversation with grunge. The riot grrrl and queercore communities in Olympia overlapped substantially, and what came out of that was some of the most politically urgent rock of the decade.
Laura Jane Grace, the founder and lead singer of Against Me!, came out as a transgender woman in a 2012 Rolling Stone profile that sent shockwaves through the punk world, and then made the experience of being trans the subject of the band’s 2014 album Transgender Dysmorphia Blues, one of the most raw and honest records about gender identity ever put to tape. She didn’t just survive in punk. She used it for exactly what punk was supposed to be for.
Metal Wore Queer Aesthetics for Years Before Admitting It
The history of heavy metal does not always admit this, but the leather and studs and chains aesthetic that became synonymous with heavy metal in the seventies and eighties came directly from gay leather bars. Rob Halford of Judas Priest, who was closeted at the time, brought the look of British gay club culture onto metal stages worldwide, and an entire genre adopted it while often remaining hostile to the community it came from.
Halford came out publicly during an MTV interview in 1998, becoming the first major metal frontman to do so. He has spoken honestly about the years of drinking and self-medication that came with living a double life, about the isolation of being gay in a hyper-masculine genre, and about the relief of finally being able to exist fully in the world. The metal community’s response was largely supportive, which Halford himself has called meaningful evidence that the genre’s audience was always more open than the genre’s self-image suggested.
He was not alone, even if others took longer to say so. Doug Pinnick, the bassist and vocalist of King’s X, came out as gay in the early 2000s. King’s X had spent over a decade making some of the most forward-thinking rock and metal of the era, blending hard rock with soul and progressive elements, and Pinnick’s voice was the center of everything they did. Otep Shamaya, the vocalist of the metal band Otep, has been openly gay throughout her career and has made her sexuality and her politics inseparable from her music. Gaahl of the Norwegian black metal band Gorgoroth came out as gay in 2008, in a genre where that required a particular kind of courage given black metal’s history with some of the most aggressively anti-queer rhetoric in rock.
Sean Reinert, the drummer of Death, was one of the first openly gay musicians in death metal. He died in 2020, and what he left behind includes his extraordinary drumming on Death’s landmark album Human and the fact that he was visibly, unapologetically himself in a space that had almost none of that.
Grunge and the Queer Thread Through PNW
Grunge’s relationship with queerness is complicated and often underacknowledged. The Pacific Northwest scene that produced Nirvana, Soundgarden, Pearl Jam, and Mudhoney was directly adjacent to and in creative conversation with the Olympia queercore and riot grrrl communities, and that proximity shaped the music even when it wasn’t named.
Kurt Cobain spoke openly about his fluid sexuality throughout his life. In a 1993 interview with The Advocate he said directly: “I’m definitely gay in spirit, and I probably could be bisexual. If I wouldn’t have found Courtney, I probably would have carried on with a bisexual lifestyle.” He wore dresses. He spoke out against homophobia at a time when most rock stars didn’t, including in the liner notes of Incesticide where he directly addressed homophobes and racists in the fanbase. He also lived in a version of the invisible middle, someone whose sexuality was real and documented in his own words but consistently categorized away by a world that needed him to be one thing or another. His friendship with Kathleen Hanna, his closeness to the queer punk community, and his refusal to perform straightness as a prerequisite for credibility made him meaningful to queer listeners, and especially to bisexual listeners who recognized the experience of being seen by some and erased by others.
Dave Grohl has consistently and publicly supported the LGBTQ+ community throughout his career, and the Foo Fighters have been vocal in their opposition to anti-gay groups.
Chris Cornell was an outspoken ally who addressed sexuality and identity in his work throughout Soundgarden’s career, and “Black Hole Sun” has taken on particular resonance in queer communities as a meditation on outsider experience.
The connection between grunge and queerness runs through the music itself as much as through the individual artists. The vulnerability, the willingness to sit with pain and shame without resolving it neatly, the refusal to perform the aggressive masculinity that defined so much of what came before it, those qualities made grunge meaningful to queer listeners in ways that went beyond any single artist’s stated identity.
Why This Matters Now
We are living through a moment where queer identity, queer visibility, and queer rights are under sustained, coordinated, political attack. The same administration that has gutted federal agencies and started an unauthorized war has also systematically targeted LGBTQ+ people in policy after policy, from the erasure of trans identity from federal recognition to the targeting of drag performers and queer educators as threats to children. The rhetoric being used is old and deliberate and designed to make queer people feel unwelcome and unsafe in public life.
Music has always been one of the places where that belonging got asserted anyway. Where the queer kid in the small town who found a Husker Du record or a Pansy Division tape or a Judas Priest album understood that there was a world where they could exist fully and loudly. Where the bisexual girl growing up surrounded by punk and metal could eventually understand that the music had always been speaking to her too, even when the culture around it was telling her otherwise.
They were always here. In every genre we claim as ours, in every sound that felt like home, there were queer people who built it, who shaped it, who gave everything they had to it.
Happy Pride.
