Indie Rock and Homophobia

Spin magazine recently published a piece  on the often ignored problem of homophobia in indie rock. Though long-considered a bastion of progressive thinking, and despite having quite a few openly gay artists, indie rock, like everything else, has also dealt with its fair share of bigotry. Brontez Purnell and Adal Castellon, of the band the Younger Lovers, were beaten and taunted with homophobia slurs outside Okland's Club Paradiso, which Purnell recounted on his blog and at the Bay Citizen. Leisha Haley, frontwoman for Uh-Huh Her, was kicked off a Southwestern Airline's flight for sharing, she alleges, "one modest kiss" with her girlfriend. The latter was pretty well publicized, but most incidents fly under the radar:

In fact, if you ask most out musicians about their experiences with homophobia, you'll hear a story that will break your heart. I did, at least, when collecting anecdotes for this piece. Magnetic Fields' Stephin Merritt was pelted with bottles, rocks, and slurs outside a club in Philadelphia in the 1990s. Xiu Xiu's Jamie Stewart was called a "fag" and had lit cigarettes thrown at him onstage in 2003 in Austin, Texas. After Holly Miranda recently played her song "Pelican Rapids," about Proposition 8, the 2008 California amendment restricting marriage as only between a man and a woman, she was confronted by a "big, burly door guy" who said that "if I got with him, he would make me do a 360," says the singer-songwriter. "I was like, 'I think you mean a 180. You're more right than you know.'"

There is also the reality of being pigenoholed as a gay (as in "not mainstream, not marketable") artist. In his recently published memoir, Bob Mould talked about the sexual ambiguity in his songs -- not fully "outing himself" but still trying to write open and honest music:

[...] I played with outing myself in the new video [for "It's Too Late"]. I thought that most people knew I was gay, and this was a "wink, wink, yes I am gay," action without specifically identifying myself as a gay artist. This was the constant struggle at the intersection of my work and my sexuality, the same struggle that led to the gender-neutrality of my previous relationship-based songs. I never defined then as being about a man dealing with another man; they were always presented in a universal, non-gender-specific way. They could mean something to everyone, straight or gay.

I'm not so naive as to be shocked by any form of hatred, even the covert, harder-to-prove kind, but what's really disheartening is that it's so seldom mentioned. Indie rock is, historically, the music of liberal college radio, but by no means is it immune to homophobia..