Middle-Aged Queers Talk “Shout at the Hetero”

The Middle-Aged Queers have been one of the premiere queercore bands to come out of the Bay Area queercore scene. They burst onto the scene with their first album, Too Fag for Love, in 2020. Recently, they returned for their second album, Shout at the Hetero, on Say-10 records. OFM sat down with the band’s frontman, Shaun, and their guitarist, Fureigh, to talk about their new album.

So, you have the new EP out, Shout at the Hetero, I’ve been really enjoying it. What would you say your influences are particularly for this one?

Shaun: We started writing that one right before the pandemic happened. So the song “Satanic Mills” was probably the first one out of all of those that we started writing. And there was sort of something in the air; we knew stuff was about to get weird. I’d say that the majority of that record was actually written by me, or at least the skeletal components on a bass. I was listening to a lot of Black Fork, which was a band from out here. They’re kind of like X-Ray Spex meets Negative Approach. It’s a weird combo, but I think that they were delightful. And I was listening to a lot of Batallion of Saints. And looking back on it, I can hear that in at least the music I wrote for that record.

Maximum Rock ‘n’ Roll called one of the singles off of it “F.Y.P. on poppers,” which I think is hilarious and also, like, I definitely love some F.Y.P. and will occasionally write F.Y.P. songs thinking that they’re mine. And then I have to stop and rearrange stuff and make it sound not so much like an F.Y.P. song. So they called me out on that. But the themes that are in that record are definitely reflective of what we were going through for that first year of COVID.

So, you started getting into this a little bit already, but it is a bit of a darker record than the first one. So what do you think the reason for that was?

Shaun: I think all of us were kind of in a darker place. It was a pretty uncertain time. I mean, it still is, right? Like, we’re not post-COVID or anything. But it felt really glum and bleak then. There was an administration in place that was completely bonkers, unlike anything we’d ever seen. I felt like the general population had started meeting the level of distrust that many communities had towards law enforcement, and that’s reflected in the record as well.

Yeah, I just think it was just a very somber moment in time, and that came across in that recording as both angry and sad. Like, the last track on the record is very atypical of us, and it’s also like almost six minutes long which is really atypical of us. But I wanted to keep it that length because it fit a particular mood. A lot of people are commenting on that this record is darker and I really want to jump and be like “But the next record’s going to sound so poppy.”

Fureigh: Which is good or bad, depending on your perspective.

Shaun: Yeah, that could be good or bad, but we’re really going to take people on a see-saw with this one.

Fureigh: You can blame it on me.

Shaun: I mean, you and, I feel like I kind of brought in some poppiness to it. And maybe that’s because things are feeling a little more optimistic, I don’t know. Or maybe we just remembered we love pop punk; I’m not sure. But yeah, don’t expect us to do the same thing twice, I guess.

What do you think the climate is for the punk community for having a queercore band.

Shaun: Fureigh, do you want to take this? I can follow up, but I’d love to hear from you.

Fureigh: Well, I mean, it’s funny that you bounce it to me because I feel like I’m coming to this project from a different experience of having often approached booking especially but also other things with like a queer first, punk second angle. And so it is relatively new to me to be in situations where it’s more like punk first. I’m not saying that we are queer first, punk second or visa-versa. But I mean like a festival or a gathering or something has one or the other, or sometimes both, or more, of these things as unifying factors.

But Middle-Aged Queers has been more likely, in my limited experience so far, to be the clearly queer punk band on the bill with other punk bands than the queer punk band with some folk musicians and this and that. Which has been a common experience in other projects I’ve been in, where it’s like oh, there’s subcultural overlap, so like it might not make sense from a different programming perspective, but it’s absolutely working for this. Shaun has a more concise answer, probably.

Shaun: (laughs) Maybe, maybe not. I had a number of queer folks come up to me during FEST this past weekend and say how excited they were to see more queer people at FEST or more queer musicians just performing at FEST, and that that was really heartwarming for them and maybe something they had seen in such high quantities in the past. To Fureigh’s point, there’s always been queer musicians in punk rock. I mean you can take that as far back as The Dicks or a lot of the like late-’70s/early-’80s New York bands had queer members in them. But I think this idea of queercore isn’t really new, and it kind of had it’s heyday in the ‘90s.

Kind of related to that, you definitely chose a band name where you couldn’t go under the radar with the fact that this is a queer band. Was that part of the decision in naming yourselves Middle-Aged Queers?

Shaun: You know, that name came about because we kept explaining it to people as our middle-aged queer band. The idea of the band was to be like sort of older, washed up, ex-members of people who played in other punk bands that weren’t known for being queer, but we were, like, the queer members of those bands. So when it came time for us to play a show, we asked a bunch of friends what would be a good name for us. And we had all sorts of fun ideas. And the thing that kept coming back to us was “I thought your name was Middle-Aged Queers. Like that’s what you’ve been saying for the past couple of weeks.” So we stuck with it. We didn’t really factor in that there was this band from New England called The Queers.

(laughs) Who are not a queer band!

Shaun: Who are not a queer band. And I certainly don’t have any ill feelings towards them or whatever. Part of me is like “I’m waiting for that cease and desist letter from Joe Queer.” But there’s been tons of bands out there that have “Whatever Youth” or “77” or “The Dead Whatevers.” There can be more than one band that has a word in it. And certainly words can have different meanings. They have said for the longest time that their “queer” means “odd.” So OK, they can take that, and we’ll have the other meaning.

I wanted to talk about one particular song on the new album, “Size Queen.” I’m just curious what was the inspiration for that song? What was it exactly that you were thinking of when you came up with that one?

Shaun: It kind of came up—and I mean no disrespect when I spill the beans on this one—but it kind of came as a response to the Pansy Division song “Dick of Death.” Coming from a gay man who has had sex with men who don’t have penises, I don’t really fucking care about penises. And some people do. But it was sort of this take on, in America we want, like, Costco-size things of relish and mustard. So of course us Americans, even the gay ones, want ginormous, Costco-sized penises. And just how silly I thought that was.

And a lot of it came from scrolling through Grindr and seeing how many people were like “Don’t message me unless you’re over 10 inches” and me just being like “Okay, girl.” But that’s really the inspiration, just me thinking that people hung up on penis sizes is silly.