Laura Jane Grace first rose to fame in the 2000s as the lead singer and founder of Against Me!, but little did the public know that she was a closeted trans woman, privately navigating gender dysphoria as she seeped deeper into her songwriting. Now the punk rocker is reflecting on her journey in Black Me Out, a new audio memoir released September 2.
The memoir follows a number of releases Grace used as an avenue to share her trans experience: 2014’s Transgender Dysphoria Blues and 2016’s Shape Shift With Me, along with her debut memoir, Tranny: Confessions Of Punk Rock’s Most Infamous Anarchist Sellout.
The new release is narrated by Grace and blends the structure of a conventional memoir with stripped-down recordings of the Against Me! songs that followed her transition, like “I Was A Teenage Anarchist,” “Walking Is Still Honest,” and “The Ocean.”
A clip from the audio memoir recalls Grace’s experimentation with “cross-dressing” before 2012, well after Against Me!’s debut, which had Grace fearing that being her true self would impact the career she had worked so diligently to build. At the time, she also didn’t have a full understanding of what this desire of feminine presentation even meant.
“I thought, ’I’m a cross-dresser,’ or, ’I’m a tranny,’ or—I didn’t fucking know,” she remembers. “’Am I gay? I don’t fucking know.’ But I knew there was something different, something in my head, and I knew that I wasn’t being fucking honest with myself.”
She distracted herself with her rockstar lifestyle, though she could only stall for so long. When she could no longer ignore the truth, she allowed herself to start toying with her gender presentation secretly after band practice.
Grace said the experience had a “little bit of danger,” in that, at any moment, one of her band members could have walked in and seen her “in full femme,” effectively outing her before she was able to adequately explore and claim her gender for herself. She said it was like living a double life, though in those moments of solitude, Grace began to find her authentic self.
You can find Black Me Out in full on Audible.
Photo courtesy of Laura Jane Grace and Audible
