Smells like queer spirit: How '90s punks Pansy Division blazed a trail as one of rock's first openly gay bands

When singer/guitarist Jon Ginoli and bassist Chris Freeman of pioneering San Francisco queercore band Pansy Division burst onto the scene with their debut album, Undressed, in 1993, there was absolutely nothing else like them. One of the very first openly gay rock bands, they formed in 1991 right in the middle of the AIDS crisis, and almost literally laughed in the face of tragedy with their sophomoric but ultimately unifying and healing humor. Their NSFW songs — imagine, say, a gay Blink-182 —over the years have included “Bill & Ted's Homosexual Adventure,” “Touch My Joe Camel,” “The C***sucker Club,” “That’s So Gay” “Dick of Death,” “Blame the Bible,” and a riotous cover of Prince’s “Jack U Off” and Weird Al-style Nirvana spoof brilliantly titled “Smells Like Queer Spirit.”

And while Pansy Division didn’t exactly win over the masses, the uncompromising pop-punk band quickly developed a cult following among queer rockers seeking an alternative to the Hi-NRG dance music pumping through SF’s gay clubs. (“It seemed like there were a lot of people waiting for something like us to happen,” says Ginoli; “We started this band because we didn't see what we created,” adds Freeman.) And they eventually, surprisingly won over thousands of fans across America when they were hired as the unlikely opening act for Green Day’s Dookie tour. They even inspired another LGBTQ+ rock trailblazer, Rob Halford, to come out in 1998, after he joined them onstage at a Pride concert for a surprise duet of Judas Priest’s “Breaking the Law.”

Much has changed over the past three decades, but in these dark and increasingly homophobic times, Pansy Division’s side-splitting lyrics and balls-to-the-wall powerpop jams are clearly still as needed as ever. (Freeman's side gig in GayC/DC, an all-gay live tribute to AC/DC, is also highly recommended.) To celebrate Pansy Division’s anniversary as well as Pride Month, Yahoo Entertainment spoke with the band's founders about Jon & Chris’s 30-year homosexual adventure.

Yahoo Entertainment: I feel Pansy Division ushered in a lot of change, and you've certainly witnessed and experienced a lot of change since your first album. Forming this band was a pretty bold thing to do in the early ‘90s.

Jon Ginoli: One of the things that's different now is there's medications for HIV, and prevention medicine. So, what was different back then was we thought we needed to launch a pro-sex, pro-safe-sex band at the height of the AIDS epidemic. We thought we could have fulfilling, happy lives as gay people — despite all of the prejudice, despite all of the bias — and we thought, “We're just gonna go out and show our best selves, and we're gonna do that by using humor and being defiant about the situation that we find ourselves in.” That was my initial impetus to start the band. And then I found this guy [Chris] pretty much right away when I started looking for musicians.

Chris Freeman: And then within a month after I joined, Freddie Mercury died — which sort of codified our mission, in a way, where we said, “OK, this should never happen. We do not want to live in a world where gay musicians can't be out.” Especially rock musicians. There were other musicians who were out before us, but in rock, that was the area people shied away from. … It seemed you could be anything in [rock] music except gay. You could sing about anything, except being gay.

Back in the ‘90s, there were campaigns on MTV to educate young people about AIDS and safe sex, like Pedro’s storyline on The Real World, or Salt-N-Pepa’s “Let’s Talk About AIDS,” or TLC pinning condoms to their clothes. But there was so much stigma, terror, and misinformation surrounding HIV.

Freeman: That was from the top down. I mean, we’d had a president [Ronald Reagan] that would never say [“AIDS”]. He would never say that word. Thankfully that changed relatively quickly, but that was also a big deal.

Can you elaborate on why you thought using humor in such a dark time was the right way to get your messaging out?

Ginoli: I feel like you don't get a lot of credit for using humor in music. Not all our songs are humorous, by any stretch, but we wanted to really enjoy what we were doing and have an audience that enjoyed it. Like, you could go to a show and it would be fun — because again, during the AIDS crisis, it was a really serious time. I thought, “I want to bring some joy without doing something that's mindless.” I wanted to do something that had content to it, that would really be meaningful to people.

Freeman: Right. I mean, just to get some context to it, we both had dozens of friends that died. I had five different boyfriends that died. We were watching people drop around us. That's why it was really important for us to get out there. But also, a lot of what we liked about punk was the funny aspect of it. The Dickies, the Ramones, Devo — they were all fun bands to listen to, and they made us laugh. That was part of it as well.

Speaking of early punk, since you covered Pete Shelley’s “Homosapien,” how big an influence were his band the Buzzcocks on Pansy Division? Pete was a queer punk icon to many.

Freeman: To us, too! They're a good template for what we were wanting to do. In fact, when I met Jon through his ad, he mentioned three bands: early Beatles, Buzzcocks, and Ramones. So, there you have it.

Ginoli: I got to meet Pete Shelley and hang out with him. We’d done that cover of “Homosapien,” which was a real landmark song for me, and I told him, “You know, you are a gay hero.” And he said, “Well, I'm not gay…” And I said, “OK, how do you define yourself?” And he said he was bisexual. He’d had relationships with men and with women, and he ended up marrying a woman and having children later in his life. I said, “That’s fine. I'm not going to hold that against you!” [laughs] But I thought that “Homosapien” was a song that had a great message that took some daring to do. It sounds like a hit, but it wasn't, because the BBC wouldn't play it. And of course it wasn't gonna get any [radio play] in this country. So, it was good to talk with Pete and let him know that we were trying to follow in his footsteps.

Have you had conversations like the one you had with Pete, but with the roles reversed and queer artists telling you that Pansy Division inspired them?

Ginoli: We do have a really big fan in Rob Halford of Judas Priest. When Chris met him by chance and introduced himself, he said, “I'm in this band and we do this cover of yours,” and Rob Halford's answer was—

Freeman: “Oh, I've heard it, mate. It's quite good! Thank you for doing it. And as a gay man…” And I'm like, “Oh, wait. Did Rob Halford just come out to me?” Oh my God, I couldn't believe it. That was a great moment. I remember that like it was yesterday — and that was before he came out in public.

Ginoli: Chris met Rob said, “When are you playing again? And Chris says, “We're playing Pride in San Diego.” And Rob says, “Oh, I go to Pride in San Diego! It's next month.” And Chris says, “If you come see us, we'll play our cover of ‘Breaking the Law.’” And Rob said, “If I come, I'll sing it with you” — which he proceeded to do, two nights in a row.

And all this was Halford came out during a famous MTV interview. So, you were sitting on a scoop?

Freeman: It was actually going to be usinterviewing him, but I think his management said, “No, we just want to have the focus be only on Rob for coming out.” So, that was cool. We talked him into it, though. We said, “Come on, Rob!” He was in this band called 2wo, and we were like, “Is this really what you want to do, or is this just biding time?” And then he came out of the closet and rejoined Judas Priest. So, his life got better after coming out.

So, just clarify the timeline here: You had this conversation with Rob Halford in the mid-‘90s?

Freeman: Many conversations. I mean, we stayed at his house when we were on tour, and we talked about it. We just said, “Rob, I think it's time. Who will mind if you came out? Really, let's think about this.” And he said, “Could you be the people bringing me out?” And we said, “We'll do that if you want us to. But you've gotta do this. It's the right time. You're on a solo career path, and you're not really going to hit much farther bottom, if we're being honest.” I mean, look at the other people that have come out that we've met. Melissa Etheridge, the Indigo Girls, Michael Stipe, k.d. lang. All these people that we met over the years all came out. … You can come out and it not be a problem.’”

Your had conversations with these people about coming out?

Freeman: Yes.

Ginoli: I don't want to claim that we paved the way, but by being brash and out-loud and taking the brunt of a certain kind of attention, I think it made it easier for people, so they didn't have to be first. There could be someone they could point to and say, “Well, we're not quite like them [laughs], but OK, we'll come out!”

Freeman: A lot of it was thanks to Green Day, because we wouldn't have had access to that level of people without being on that Green Day tour, definitely, so that's really where we met those people.

You toured with Green Day at the absolute peak of their ‘90s heyday. Obviously, you guys were both once signed to Lookout! Records, so I understand why you were on Green Day's radar. But you surely weren’t on the radar of many of their fans. How did it go over when you were playing arenas and stadiums with Green Day?

Freeman: We did not go over well in some places! Some places, we went over really well. … Sometimes we'd see little pockets of things happening right in front of us — like, some people not liking it and then other people really liking it, and then they would look at each other and be like, “What?! Why don't you like this!?” We were seeing these little chain reactions going off in the audience, just by being there.

Ginoli: And remember, Green Day’s audience was mainly a teenage audience, and that was not who we set out to make records for! We were about 30 — pretty old to start a rock band. We thought we were going to be playing for a gay audience that wants something else besides dance music, and we'll be big in the gay cities and probably won't be that popular elsewhere. And instead, we got all these kids and a following from all over the place — including the gay crowd we first thought we would get, but a much wider audience than we expected. I'd say our show was really R-rated, and there were 8-year-olds at an R-rated rock show.

Freeman: There weren't many 8-year-olds; it was mostly like 12 to 18!

Ginoli: The car ride home with the parents would've been very interesting! [laughs]

I imagine there were some parents who were uncomfortable, but I bet you've been told by many millennials or Gen-Xers that you sparked an awakening for them — whether it was regarding their own sexuality, or just making them even aware of homosexuality at all.

Ginoli: What was really important, I think, was that we were present in a milieu where gay people [were usually shunned]. You know, a rock concert in a stadium was not a gay-friendly place. So, for us to be there legitimized what we were doing, with a bunch of kids who were like, “They're really gay, aren't they?” They'd actually come up to us at our merch tables and go, “Are you really gay? Wow! That's so cool!” [laughs]

Freeman: Yeah, we got that a lot. I feel like kids get a lot of propaganda against whatever you want to call it, the “gay lifestyle,” so actual gay people talking to them and not censoring ourselves, I felt like that was important.

That Green Day tour gave you a taste of what it would be like to be big, mainstream rock stars. As you mentioned, that was not the crowd you were aiming for. But did you ever think to yourself, “You know, if we just tone it down a little bit, and be PG-13 instead of rated R, we could sign to a major label and maybe be as huge as Green Day”?

Freeman: Those options were being discussed. We would hear rumors that people from record companies were sniffing around. But we weren't interested, because we knew people in the business that we asked about this.

Ginoli: The guy who signed Green Day, Howie Klein, he's gay, and I remember asking him, “What do you think our future would be like on a major label?” He said, “Don't do it. Where you are, you can say what you want, do what you want. [Warner Bros.] is gonna put warning stickers on everything you put out. It probably will not go into the chain stores, because they probably won't carry it. So, you'll basically be buried.” And you know, if you're at the bottom of the totem pole on a major label, you get no attention. You get on a major label to get on the radio, and we were not gonna get played on the radio without compromises that we were unwilling to make. So, we thought we might have a better and longer career staying independent. And we were right.

You mentioned that you wanted Pansy Division to be an alternative to the dance music that usually dominated gay bars and clubs. How do you think you guys filled that niche, or even smashed stereotypes about “gay music”?

Ginoli: I think just by putting it out there, and just showing that we were individuals. As much as we're proud to be gay, we didn't want to be too horned into stereotypes — even within the gay world. I mean, Chris and I grew up loving rock music; we loved rock music before we even realized we were gay. So, it seemed that to be true ourselves, we should pursue this way of doing things and be as upfront about it as possible.

Freeman: What people don't realize is that when you come out and join the gay community, there's a whole different set of restrictions and rules about what you can do and what you can't do in the gay community, or what's acceptable in the gay community or what's normal. But we bucked those trends as much as we could.

Did you ever feel ostracized within the gay scene because you were playing rock? Or were there people who embraced you, because you offered something different?

Ginoli: Definitely, both. I mean, we did Pride events, like one in Madison, Wisconsin, where we played to maybe 20 people — and then over there in the disco tent, where they're listening to “Y.M.C.A.” again, there's a thousand people, right across the field from us. We were very much aware of the divide. [laughs]

Pansy Division are often credited with being the first openly gay rock band.

Ginoli: Well, there were other bands who came out at the same time as us who were not well-known and didn't make it as far as we did, so our appearance came at a certain moment where it seemed like there were a lot of people waiting for something like us to happen. There was a band who were not very well-known from Canada, called Fifth Column, who preceded us, but we actually didn't know they existed until we started.

Freeman: The one other band that started exactly at the same time as us in San Francisco was a dyke band called Tribe Eight. … But when we started the band, the internet wasn't available, so there was nothing you could do to find out, “Are there any other gay [punk] musicians?” I mean, Gary Floyd from the Dicks was out, but I didn't know that. … So, we can't really take credit, but I think we're probably the most visible of all of [the early LBGTQ+ punk bands]. We don't wanna be selfish about it. But the whole reason we started this band was because we didn't see what we created. … And then we got to open for Green Day and play arenas in front of teenagers. That was not part of our plan, but because I think we had an original idea and executed it well, people were able to get on board with us.

And now here were are, 30 years later! And to think, there was a time when people thought Pansy Division were a novelty act.

Ginoli: Oh, I don't think that time has ended! [laughs] I think people still consider us a novelty, depending on your standpoint. But it's like, we're heroes to other people, so we don't sweat it.

The above Q&A is edited for brevity and clarity and taken from Pansy Division’s interview with Yahoo Entertainment’s Lyndsey Parker on the SiriusXM show “Volume West.” Full audio of that conversation is available on the SiriusXM app.

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