Jon Ginoli: Pioneers, Punk and Pansy Politics

:: 00:02:23

Jon Ginoli

You know, we were singing about sexuality. Today. Gender is more of an issue for people. I think maybe we're old school, that we're singing about sex, and that maybe people who are younger like that because they're not hearing it sung. The way that we sing about.

:: 00:27:05

Dan Hall

You. Hello and welcome to In the Key of Q, the podcast that celebrates great musicians and their stories. I'm Dan Hall, and by day I'm a documentary producer and director. But by night I fly the flag for the world's musical freaks and inverts. If you wish to guest on the show, please don't hesitate to call me in email.

:: 00:57:18

Dan Hall

y, formed in San Francisco in: 1991

:: 01:34:05

Dan Hall

40, 50. Pansy Division are known for their mix of pop, punk and power pop with lyrics that focus on LGBTQ issues, sex, and relationships. They've toured with iconic bands like Green Day and have released numerous albums that left an indelible mark on the music industry.

:: 01:58:11

Dan Hall

Inspired by a whole range of influences and driven by a passion for visibility and representation, my guests work is a testament to the power of music as a tool for social change and of course, for entertainment.

:: 02:16:17

Dan Hall

And personally, for me, I discovered that music in the late 19. I had never heard anything like this. And as a fan of the critical movement, it is my huge honor to interview onto the podcast. Jon Ginola. Jon, hello and welcome to The Gift two.

:: 02:32:24

Jon Ginoli

y much. It's great to talk to: 2020

:: 02:57:12

Jon Ginoli

And to me, it seemed like there was a kind of it's like, okay, once you get educated about what the gay community is and you know, and what it consists of, then you learn that certain things are considered not gay, even though you're gay and you're doing them. So I had this kind of alienation from the beginning that, that, you know, what I was doing was, was not gay enough for a lot of gay people that I met.

:: 03:28:20

Dan Hall

And so how did that feel for you being an outsider within a group that is already outsiders?

:: 03:34:23

Jon Ginoli

I thought, well, that's that's disheartening. I was a midwestern kid. I grew up in a subdivision a block from a cornfield, and, stayed in Illinois, went to college, had a band while I was in college that put out a few indie albums. They were called The Outnumbered in that band as the only gay member. And I thought, well, be kind of nice to sing about this stuff that I'm going through in detail, but I thought it really wasn't fair to the rest of the band who weren't gay for me to sort of be singing about all this gay stuff.

:: 04:14:08

Jon Ginoli

They had the idea for Pansy Division when I was still in Illinois, but I thought, nobody is. You know what is the audience for a gay rock n roll band? 13 people. So I thought, no, I'm not going to do that. So I got to San Francisco and realized, oh, yeah, there are, you know, I can envision my idea for this band, which seemed like it was going to be pretty fictitious to actually, you know, become reality there.

:: 04:42:21

Jon Ginoli

So, that was in the at the very beginning of 91, I thought, okay, I think I should, I should try to do this, but I thought, am I going to find gay rock musicians? So, found the bass player pretty fast after I put out an ad I'd done a few shows solo as Pansy Division. And then we search for drummer, found a drummer, borrowed him from another band that was active, and suddenly we had a band and we were playing around San Francisco, and, and, you know, we were an immediate sensation.

:: 05:48:04

Dan Hall

They've done to me. So, can you give us a bit of an idea of what the queer life was like in the early 90s for people listening to this who weren't even born then? What was a life like? What was what was happening? Why was what you were doing important?

:: 06:03:23

Jon Ginoli

You know, around the time that I was starting the band and I was trying to, you know, put this conception together. I, you know, it was the time of HIV and Aids, so, you know, and I moved to San Francisco. You know, it was really a crisis. People were dying every day. Seemed like. And, so I had this.

:: 06:28:05

Jon Ginoli

And, you know, this is, of course, under we're under right wing attack politically. For, just for existing.

:: 06:36:24

Dan Hall

And this is, of course, five years before combination therapy. So there's no effective treatment.

:: 06:42:15

Jon Ginoli

Right. So back then, your only way of avoiding HIV when having sex was using condoms. So we sang about that and we on our first album, which just got reissued, by the way, on purple vinyl. We had instructions on how to use a condom inside the record on the inner sleeve. So from the beginning, we had this aspect to the band where it was more than just a band, where it had this, extra component to it that made it a play that that gave it, I think, more meaning.

:: 07:50:04

Jon Ginoli

I'm in the midst of all this other stuff. So I thought, well, I really wanted to have a band that was pro sex at a time when that was under attack and dangerous. So I thought how to do that. So we're going to sing about sex. I thought, we're going to sing about safe sex, and we're going to make it fun, because there's a lot of stuff that I just hadn't heard in a song that I wanted to hear in a song that was it wasn't just that there were gay musicians I wanted to be explicitly gay, and I knew that there were other gang musicians.

:: 08:22:08

Jon Ginoli

They weren't out.

:: 08:24:00

Dan Hall

Absolutely. And I've got to say, as a consumer of your music in the 90s, I was so used to having to interpret codes from other, other sexes. So hearing women sing about men and then sort of code switch into my own narrative. I was so used to just being invisible in music, and the only queer identity I could really have was through, people like Stockton and Waterman that I loved, or Donna Summer or.

:: 08:54:06

Dan Hall

And they're great artists. There's nothing wrong with them, but they're singing music that I love rather than music that feels like a mirror. And I felt absolutely invisible in the music that I was listening to. And I love music. So when I stumbled on your content, I mean, there was a there was a couple of bits of, of queer visibility.

:: 09:15:19

Dan Hall

You had people like Soft Sell and you had erasure, but even Erasure and Andy Bell, although he was very out. There was even a sense of coding in those songs about the queerness. The queerness was still codified. Whereas when I heard your stuff, it was just there and wonderfully, it wasn't there. Tub thumping. It wasn't there with the big victim thing around his neck.

:: 09:39:00

Dan Hall

It was just mischievous.

:: 09:41:05

Jon Ginoli

And, you know, you mentioned Andy Bell and, Marc Almond. You know, I remember, you know, I used to read the anime, I used to get it by post. It used to be cheap. And, I would read Mark almond absolute denials that he was gay in Britain. You had to maintain being pop stars who could actually be in mainstream media on the BBC.

:: 10:08:18

Jon Ginoli

You know, you could be on top of the pops. That was never going to happen for our band. Coming from America, the the Brits had more to protect themselves. You know, even Morrissey, you know, I can't remember at one point Morrissey ever saying I'm gay.

:: 10:28:22

Dan Hall

No. Although he couldn't stop either. He couldn't stop putting Rough Trade in his music videos, could they?

:: 10:33:14

Jon Ginoli

Now Morrissey is just beyond the pale. But back then I could not listen to Smiths records without getting mad at him because he was such a prick.

:: 10:43:14

Dan Hall

So what was it that annoyed you.

:: 10:45:12

Jon Ginoli

After you hear his records? After his moaning and ceaseless moaning, you just want to slap him? I just want to slap him and move on as like he was selling misery and I wanted to sell joy, and I wanted to to not just be a gay musician, but sing about gay life explicitly as gay. So that was my approach.

:: 11:12:06

Jon Ginoli

I thought, this is something I can do that's different. And, you know, two year, you know, a year and a half after our first single came out, we were out touring with Green Day, and that's because we did it our way as uncomromised as we could.

:: 11:54:01

Jon Ginoli

I you know, I was mistaken in one aspect. I thought, we're going to be popular in about five cities which have large gay populations of gay adults who can understand this stuff. And it turned out that it was way more, widespread than that and that we had so many more teenagers. We were not envisioning a teenage audience at all.

:: 12:19:05

Jon Ginoli

That turned out to be, for a while, a vast percentage of our audience because of Green Day. When we did that tour with Green Day in 94, we toured with them a couple different times during that year. There was no one over 18 at those shows unless they were a parent. Wow. It was like 12 to 18.

:: 12:40:09

Jon Ginoli

It was like middle school, high school kids. Those are the people who really got into that Green Day album, Dookie, which I think is a great teenage rock album. So I was really happy to be having this happen to us with a band who knew us because they used to be on our indie label, look out at the time.

:: 12:59:02

Jon Ginoli

And so they're like, okay, we're getting big. People think we're just a band, another rock band like Guns and Roses. Let's get Pansy Division to open for us. We will show people the kind of people we are and the kind of values we have. So Green Day turned out to be this tremendous gift. It's one of the reasons we still have, a band today, 33 years after the start.

:: 13:22:11

Dan Hall

Wasn't that risky for them? No, because for, heterosexual majority aimed band to be associated with gay guys. I still remember people coming up to me saying, are you nervous? I still do this. Now, aren't you nervous wearing a red ribbon in case people think you're HIV positive and you just think, wow, I think it shows. Good, good.

:: 13:48:20

Dan Hall

Good emotions from Green Day that they didn't feel that there was that danger. But surely there must have been a commercial danger for them to be associated with you.

:: 13:57:03

Jon Ginoli

But you know, I'm sure there were people behind them saying, oh, you shouldn't do this. But they weren't big yet. They were getting there. But I think they thought that it was an illustration of their two cells to have a band like us out there and that that would be down to their benefit. And I think it did.

:: 14:16:02

Jon Ginoli

It got them good publicity. It got us a lot of publicity. And, I think it worked out really well for both of us. And, you know, I, you know, applaud them for taking that chance.

:: 14:28:23

Dan Hall

I remember in the early to mid 90s, that was when I was at college listening to bands that I thought were out gay bands such as eraser, who I, who I love and and even Communards and and Jimmy Somerville who were fantastic and you know, because he sang with Small Town Boy and a number of his other singles, these iconic queer songs.

:: 14:53:02

Dan Hall

But I sort of thought there was a lot more queerness in a lot of the music I was listening to than there actually was. And it wasn't until I heard Pansy Division and also a lot of Chumbawamba stuff that I really felt this isn't that weird way that you don't realise something's absent until you suddenly hear someone doing it, and then you look with a different lens through all the other stuff you were listening to, and you just think, oh, it's all a bit hollow now.

:: 15:18:21

Jon Ginoli

You know, I, I'm glad you mentioned number one, the because, we got to play with them once, actually, at San Francisco Gay pride. They, you know, they were important band to me, too. You know, before Tom something. And, and in America, they get no credit. They have one song, that's it. But, but, yeah, they they were, they were an important band to me, too, in the early 90s.

:: 15:45:24

Dan Hall

Why were they important to you?

:: 15:47:21

Jon Ginoli

's like, oh yeah, that's very: 1987

:: 16:10:24

Jon Ginoli

I didn't want to get trapped like that. So, so I thought, I'm going to put it in a sociopolitical context as opposed to, you know, here's a political song because I can write political songs. I have them, but I really almost never put them out.

:: 16:58:04

Dan Hall

Now I very much feel that we live in a time now where there is a certain type of music that is queer audiences. We're supposed to be listening to. And I might have this totally wrong. It might be that how I'm 51 years old? Or do I know? But I do feel like there's a sort of stable of artists and a stable of types of music that queer people are supposed to be listening to.

:: 17:20:11

Dan Hall

And I miss this period in the 90s when to me, the the queer scene felt very, very alternative. If you wanted to dance as I did sometimes, if you wanted to dance to a Kylie remix, you could go to this club. But one of the biggest clubs that we had in London was called Pop Stars, and I miss it dearly.

:: 17:41:00

Dan Hall

And at pop stars, they would be playing huge amounts of Brit pop. They'd be playing your stuff. They play, Chumbawamba and not tub thumping, you know, some of the earliest stuff. And and then I would go to the garage and I've been listening to and for this month, the queer Cool nights. And what happened to that? What happened to that diversity in our music scene?

:: 18:04:01

Jon Ginoli

I don't know, I loved I mean, we only toured Europe twice. We played London, played England in 96 and in 98, and both times we played the garage.

:: 18:17:04

Dan Hall

No. Really?

:: 18:18:16

Jon Ginoli

Yeah. Oh, God. Was wasn't like that. And those were two great nights because the crowd, I mean, the crowd was really mixed. But afterwards it's like, okay. I mean, which which year was it? And one of those times we played every corner, you know, as soon as we were done, the next thing I heard was, do you remember the first time by pulp?

:: 18:41:05

Jon Ginoli

And I'm like, yeah, that would never happen in our club in America. And, you know, people stayed and dance and I thought, that's fantastic. Back in the 90s, if I heard about I used to keep a piece of paper in my wallet, and if I heard about a new queer band, I would write it on this list, and I could have it on one short piece of paper in my pocket.

:: 19:04:12

Jon Ginoli

And later it just became so, so many people came out. So many people started forming bands. There's just, you know, every subgenre now has queer musicians in it. So dig a little more. It's out there. I still, you know, I mean, three of my favourite artists right now are queer trans artists, like Ezra Furman, like RVD, G this great band from Melbourne, Australia.

:: 19:38:24

Jon Ginoli

They're about to put out their fourth album. And, who else is gone? And Laura Jane Grace, and against me. So, you know, there's a lot of queer stuff.

:: 20:12:18

Dan Hall

Why is it important that we have aural spaces, these music spaces where we can see ourselves reflected? Because is there not an argument that says we're just categorising ourselves? And how can we want to have inclusion in a heteronormative society when we're creating rock bands with only gay people in them? When we're releasing records that just talk about shit that gay men will, gay people will understand, are we not just trying to have it both ways?

:: 20:40:24

Jon Ginoli

There's an argument to be made against identity politics because you want to have a coalition, but I think you need those identity politics to those more, you know, to shine a more specific light on a certain area because people feel underrepresented. So, I mean, I think it cuts both ways. I don't want to ghettoised myself. I also don't want to make myself invisible.

:: 21:10:14

Jon Ginoli

You know, gay people have made queer people made great strides since we started. But, you know, now we're facing that inevitable backlash and especially over trans issues. But, you know, I feel like I feel like I did something that our band did, something that, you know, was was socially useful to people and very helpful.

:: 21:40:18

Dan Hall

I think that what you were doing and what Pansy Division were doing was incredibly important. It's easy to to dismiss it and just write right. You offers just to be in the indie band. But this is at a time before in this country and in your country, we have gay marriage. We have we don't have so many of the rights that we have now.

:: 22:01:11

Dan Hall

We were demonised as being unclean, as being unhealthy. Adoption and all those things were pretty much out of the question. And I do think it's through artists such as yourself that start to turn those political wheels. And it's and I'm not blowing smoke up your ass for that. I genuinely think that this is how change starts to happen.

:: 22:24:21

Dan Hall

It's people like you, people like Chumbawamba, that are the beginnings.

:: 22:29:05

Jon Ginoli

We did our part. We are small cog in that wheel of progress. I think.

:: 23:19:23

Jon Ginoli

That boyfriend. When we started playing shows again after the pandemic, we realised that we had suddenly a whole bunch of young fans, you know, late teens, early 20s, that over the past decade before that, we really didn't have. It's like new, younger people weren't hearing about us. Somehow during pandemic, people heard about us. So suddenly there's a much younger element in our shows, which is great because I remember one of our first shows after pandemic were playing in Chicago, and there was somebody who was almost 80 at the show, and then there was someone who was 17 at the show, and it's a lot of these very shy, very timid, gender queer kids who

:: 24:09:12

Jon Ginoli

,: 1976

:: 24:41:17

Jon Ginoli

So I started reading. I heard that record because a friend, brave, forward thinking friend had bought it and I was like, oh my God, this is this is weird. This is great. And so I started following punk rock, and I had read about this single anarchy in the UK by the Sex Pistols. Couldn't get it in my town, but I found a place to mail order so I mail ordered it the original MI 45, and I remember listening to it once and going, I don't know about this.

:: 25:17:23

Jon Ginoli

So I played it again and I thought, oh, there's something going on here. By the end of the third time I listened to that single, I was like, oh my God, oh my God, there's this whole world out there that I know nothing about.

:: 25:31:24

Dan Hall

But what did you feel that that world was promising you? What were you seeing through that crack in the door?

:: 25:38:09

Jon Ginoli

A different experience than I had. I mean, if you listen to the lyrics to anarchy in the UK, you know, it mentions there's like political organisations or, you know, things that I didn't understand at the time. I knew what the IRA was, but I didn't know what the other organisations were that they mentioned in the song.

:: 26:04:22

Jon Ginoli

And I thought, oh, this is political in a way that I'm just not getting. And music. And it made me want to explore the wider world. It seemed like there was something urgent here, and, you know, in America, it seemed like everything was kind of post hippie and, you know, everything was mellow and soft rock or like endless solos.

:: 26:32:20

Jon Ginoli

So this compact, crunchy song that had this political component to it and obviously, you know, was antisocial in a certain way. I heard this and I thought, oh, I'm I mean, I thought openly, I thought consciously, this record is a path to something else. And as unpopular as I already am at my high school, if I follow music, if I follow this path, it's going to make me more unpopular.

:: 27:09:00

Jon Ginoli

You or more invisible. But I'm going to follow it.

:: 27:54:16

Jon Ginoli

I didn't have a lot of money at the time that punk came along, so I didn't buy nearly as many records as I wanted to. I had to order a lot of them through the mail. But I don't know, it. It wasn't an explicit it was not an explicitly gay thing, but it pointed towards something that I, that I felt was important that, you know, then I ended up having a gay punk band or a gay, queer indie punk band, you know, that's that's where it started for me.

:: 29:04:23

Jon Ginoli

It's so in some ways punk rock skips over the progressive rock soft rock from the 70s and takes it from as good about the 60s and did it a different way. So, you know, those are my timing, really.

:: 29:55:23

Dan Hall

What do you think, Jon? Your 15 year old self would think of you now and what you're doing now with your life?

:: 30:01:11

Jon Ginoli

He. Because I could not imagine that. I couldn't even figure out what it was like to be if I was going to be gay, what it was going to be like. I just could never see very far ahead. Like when I was 20, I could not see what I was doing 30 when I was 30, I could not see what I was doing.

:: 30:19:03

Jon Ginoli

At 40, it took until I was 50 that I could see what what things might be like in ten years. So, you know, I lived in San Francisco for 33 years. I now live in Palm Springs. It's much cheaper. It's also very gay. It's also very old. It's it's where. It's where people my age who are gay and single moved.

:: 30:48:12

Jon Ginoli

But now I have a boyfriend, which was hard to have in, even in a gay Mecca like San Francisco. So I think my my 15 year old self would be surprised at how happy I am in my personal life. At the same time, the world seems like it's going to hell, so it's harder now to figure out how to how to deal with that.

:: 31:16:16

Jon Ginoli

But you know, on a personal level, yeah, I would have I, I really outdid what I thought maybe was possible back then. I just wasn't an adult yet. I didn't know.

:: 31:30:00

Dan Hall

A lot of people listening to this podcast won't have heard your music, and we've been listening to some of the songs throughout this episode. But if there was once song in your catalog that acted as a perfect gateway into your catalog for someone who really doesn't know anything about you, what would that song be? And we'll use it as our play, our track.

:: 31:51:17

Jon Ginoli

It's the first song I wrote for Pansy Division. It was our first single and it was on our first album, and it's a song we still play and that's femme in a black leather jacket. It's not a sexy song, but it's a song that is sexual and you know, it talks about desire. Desire is really one of the things that that I've written a lot of songs about, that I think people really can relate to.

:: 32:19:05

Jon Ginoli

You sing about sex, and maybe people can't always relate to that. Some of the songs I've written are pretty blunt, but. But you know, the song like that about desire, I think is really easy to understand.

:: 33:55:15

Dan Hall

Jon Ginoli from Pansy Division. Thank you very much for coming on. It has been for me an absolute joy to speak with you because you've been such an inspiration to me. So thank you so much for all the pretty good stuff.

:: 34:09:24

Jon Ginoli

Coming up on the show. Thank you Dan, I really appreciate.

:: 34:25:18

Dan Hall

Thank you everyone for listening. And if you enjoyed the show, please do give us a five star rating wherever you listen to podcasts.

:: 34:34:20

Dan Hall

And financial assistance is always gratefully received. Details on how to support production can be found in the show notes as, of course, can the link to our Spotify playlist. The in the KFC theme tune is by Paul Leonidou at Unstoppablemonsters.com, and many thanks go to Moray Laing for his continued support. Everybody keep peddling your gay agenda and I'll see you next Tuesday.