The Erotics of an Oil Drum: Queercore, Gay Macho, and the Defiant Sexuality of Extra Fancy's Sinnerman

Abstract

IN 1996 ATLANTIC RECORDS RELEASED AND almost instantly abandoned an album that asserted uniquely aggressive, macho gay male identity. The songs of Extra Fancy's Sinnerman deal with sadomasochism, violent retribution against gay-bashers, and life with HIV in punk-inflected style that musically reflects the intense aggression of their texts. Extra Fancy first released Sinnerman on the independent label Diablo Musica, but Atlantic immediately picked it up, hoping to use it as catalyst for their new gay marketing division. Eight weeks later the band, along with the division, was dropped, rais[ing] eyebrows among the alternative rock community. (1) Despite Extra Fancy's explicitly homosexual-themed lyrics, only the lead singer of the band was openly gay. Brian Grillo's intimidating muscular body, aggressive stage presence, butch clothing style, and shaved head presented radical gay male image that foregrounded an enraged machismo. His gritty vocal style demonstrated indebtedness to the hardcore-grunge-alternative masculinity of Henry Rollins, Kurt Cobain, and Eddie Vedder as he strutted imposingly on stage, shirtless, banging on fifty-gallon oil drum. Nine years later Extra Fancy was virtually canonized in David Ciminelli and Ken Knox's celebration of the queercore movement, Homocore: The Loud and Raucous Rise of Queer Rock, even as the authors observe that Grillo never had desire to be anything other than performer who rocked--regardless of his sexual orientation. Indeed, in their interview with him he clearly distances himself from the book's subject. Nevertheless, for Ciminelli and Knox, the members of Extra Fancy were once messiahs of the queercore movement. (2) This dissonance invites close consideration of Extra Fancy's constructions of queer identity. The term queercore or homocore can be used to describe number of subcultural and musical practices, but its most common usage--a usage I have found prominent during my localized ethnographic work with Homocore Minneapolis--refers to the channeling of the underground, do-it-yourself ethics associated with punk music and style and their offshoots in order to challenge both heteronormativity and more mainstream images of LGBT life and culture. Despite Grillo's reluctance to associate himself with the queer punk movement, Sinnerman's lyrics explicitly and often graphically address male homosexuality, while its music demonstrates particular variant of the hardcore legacy of queercore style. Still, the privileged place Ciminelli and Knox claim for the band within musical subculture that is in large part defined by fluidity of gender and sexual identity presents significant issues of representation and authority. As Susan McClary notes, the various cultural and artistic discourses at work in society do not simply represent preexisting notions of community and identity but are where the ongoing work of social formation occurs. (3) Extra Fancy challenged some of the most culturally prevalent perceptions about sexual identity and musical gendering during the time in which they were active. This article in part constitutes an attempt--largely driven by Judith Halberstam's call for archiving queer subcultural production, which is frequently and necessarily fleeting--to recover this underappreciated cultural moment, one whose transgressive potential warrants examination. (4) Halberstam describes her conception of queer archive as not simply collection of documentary artifacts but a discursive field and structure of thinking and a theory of cultural relevance, construction of collective memory, and complex record of queer activity. (5) While I wish to place Extra Fancy within the queer archive, I also recognize that this essay necessarily constitutes an initial foray into the explication of the discourses and social structures surrounding the band. Therefore, I primarily approach Extra Fancy from two contextual angles. …