Queer Punk Icon Jon Ginoli Talks 30 Years of Pansy Division

Punk rock is getting gayer and gayer. Today, LGBTQ punk bands like Against Me!, We Are the Union, and Catbite have become somewhat commonplace. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, however, punk rock—and rock music in general, for that matter—was virtually devoid of queer content. Jon Ginoli, a queer musician who grew up in Illinois, wanted to change that, so he set out looking for other LGBTQ musicians to start a band with. In the days before social media, Ginoli placed an ad looking for members in a local San Francisco newspaper, and he and the band’s bassist, Chris Freeman, were shocked to find each other.

“When I started to look for musicians to form a band with, and found Chris, he said, ‘I’ve been waiting for that all my life,’” Ginoli explains. “And at that point, he was 30.” Ginoli had been in a band before but, being the only gay member, didn’t feel it was appropriate for him to write songs about his experiences as a gay man. But, now that he was ready to start his own band, he wanted to make it openly queer in a way he hadn’t really seen before. The resulting band was Pansy Division, who are now touring to celebrate the 30th anniversary of their debut album, Undressed, on Lookout Records.

Or, perhaps, make that 32 years. Before the band got signed to a label, they released their own DIY version of the album on cassette. In the days before independent bands could use Bandcamp to distribute their music, the queer California punks had to get creative. “I was looking to get a record out and had made a recording and didn’t think that that was the final version,” Ginoli explains. “...We really only sold it at our shows which, at that time, were just in San Francisco, and then or maybe a few other places in California… a gay bookstore, and then a record store in the Castro in San Francisco… But that was never the end of it. We thought, ‘It’s going to be a properly released album at some point.’…I think nine of those versions are on the final album.”

And does that all feel like it was three whole decades ago that he was doing that? “Yes it does!” says Ginoli with a laugh that betrays the years of hard work and exhaustion he’d racked up. “It’s been going on so long that I can almost not remember what it was like before I had that band… But we’ve still kept it going all this time. Except for COVID, we never really had a time where we weren’t planning things coming up.”

The idea of starting a queer rock band may have been novel at the time, but why specifically did Ginoli decide to make a gay punk band? “I really liked the fact that it was aggressive and fun,” says Ginoli. “And that there was fun in a certain amount of aggression. But not past a certain point; then it’s rough and isn’t so much fun.” As for how accepting the punk community has been of an openly (and, some might say, graphically) queer band, Ginoli says that’s been a mixed bag. “It depends on what part of the punk scene you’re talking about. Because there are bands that are much more macho and aggressive and where it’s difficult to be a woman… So I think it’s always been a refuge, but not everybody you could point to within that umbrella of punk is a safe place. So you have to be selective. But, overall, it’s been pretty safe for me.”

In fact, it’s because of that machismo and aggression that Pansy Division found themselves a bit uncomfortable with the punk scene, shying away from that word as a label, or at least as an exclusive label, for their band. “I do remember that there was a particular moment where punk had gotten popular enough that it seemed like it was being taken over by jocks and frat types, and that was hard for us to relate to,” Ginoli explains. “So we didn’t want to really be associated with that. But no, we’ve never run away from it, but we’ve never let it be the one way of defining ourselves because I feel like we’ve always been a combination of a punk band, and an indie band, and, in some ways, even a pop band. So we were feeling like that’s part of what we do, but it isn’t the entire story.”

Pansy Division’s original logo used the upside-down pink triangle, a symbol for the queer community based on the badges that gay men were forced to wear in concentration camps during the Holocaust. While that symbol was very popular within the community in the 1990s, it has been largely replaced by the rainbow in most places as the primary symbol of solidarity. Still, on their 2016 album Quite Contrary, Pansy Division still used the classic logo. “Given where it came from, the pink triangle, about Nazi persecution of gays and queer people, I thought, sadly, (it’s) still relevant nowadays,” Ginoli says. “And I wanted to allude to that, even if people don’t always get the connection.”

It is sad that that symbol still has to be so relevant in 2023, as a new rising tide of LGBTQ discrimination and hate seems to be sweeping the country. Ever the punk rocker, Ginoli offers words of hope to the queer community in this time of crisis. “We need to stand up for ourselves,” Ginoli says with the concern and wisdom of a queer elder. “And there’s a lot of different ways that we can do that. But we’re not going to roll over to these neo–fascists who want to roll back the clock.”

Pansy Division have a handful of tour dates coming up to celebrate the 30th Anniversary of Undressed. They have no plans to visit Denver in the near future, but Ginoli says that’s something he’s working on.

Picture courtesy of Pansy Division