the most infuriating part of this is that the skirts and heels aren’t even the most important part of my chem’s long, long history with queerness.
gerard way is deeply literate in queer media and culture. they’re part of a queer comic writer’s anthology. he was interviewed for and included himself under an article titled ‘queer innovators’ in 2018. they’ve spent this whole tour referencing fright night and camp films. he’s personally called in to drag shows just to tell trans people who were originally inspired to transition because of him that he’s proud of them and everything that they are. they formed their musical identity based on sapphic riot grrrl scenes. they were first drawn to bowie and nirvana specifically because of their bisexuality and gender nonconformity. they’re obsessed with rocky horror and drag culture in general. they deliberately curated their audience to center women and lgbt folks, using visible queerness to dissuade violent rock dudes from even wanting to attend their shows. they wrote personal narrative songs about gay sex in an era where having long hair made you a target for a hate crime. he made out with his male guitarist in front of an entire crowd of rowdy rock fans just to piss them off and decry homophobia in the early 2000s. they wore passing drag when they were in college because they wanted to see what it was like to live as a woman. good fucking god he spent two entire years openly and almost ravenously discussing his own lifelong struggles with gender incongruity, how they wished they’d had access to gender-focused therapy when they were younger, how when they, as a teen, learned what transgenderism was, they immediately understood themself as ‘more of a girl’, and how they felt like a light switch went off in their head when they read what laura jane had written about her experience with dysphoria, something that affected them enough they explicitly wrote about transfemininity and transphobia in a personal solo album where they only referred to themself with she/her pronouns. and this isn’t even fucking half of it! they tweeted their goddamn pronouns seven years ago! gerard is deeply, deeply rooted in queer culture, and he has been so despite extreme personal hardship.
god, it’s not just about gerard, either. the way people treat my chem’s queerness is infuriating as well.
mcr has always been a queer band. ideologically, identification-wise, politically, artistically, whatever you want to call it, they have always, always been a queer band. gerard wearing eyeshadow and deliberately presenting femininely during revenge was a declaration. frank pasting ‘PANSY’ in the biggest letters he could on his guitar was a declaration. gerard’s speeches against homophobia in the early days was a declaration. and these statements weren’t just political, they were personal. gerard has gone on record saying that they looked the way they did in 2004 because it was affirming to their femininity and gender identity! the reason they made those anti-homophobia speeches in the early days was in direct response to being called faggots backstage at that gig! my chemical romance has always been a queer band by queer people writing queer music for a queer audience and somehow people have managed, by some godforsaken feat, to twist that queerness into being purely coincidental.
during the breakup, mcr somehow became a ‘gay band’ the same way that hozier was ‘gay music’ or mushrooms were ‘gay culture’. people suddenly decided mcr was queer not because presenting that way was an extremely deliberate decision by the band members, but simply because gay people liked them. just like how mother mother became ‘enby music’, my chem became queer only by association. and what utter bullshit that is. after all they went through, after all they’d done and sang and spoken and curated, for their queerness to be reduced down to a simple coincidental aesthetic.
look. i get it. we don’t want to overstep. but this has bridged into complete overcorrection. the fact that all of this history has been capped off by a world tour where gerard has been, and i’m gonna say it, completely, undeniably, and wonderfully queer, out in public without any restrictions for the first time in their entire life, and people have STILL managed to raise their hackles at the thought of calling them and their band queer is…somewhat offensive to be honest! we’ve lost the language of flagging and subtlety (though i wouldn’t call any of my chem’s history with queerness subtle), and have overcorrected to the point of forcing people to come out with a pleasantly packaged and explicit label before they can ever be included in the political sphere of queerness. what happened to ‘cishet isn’t the default’ and ‘coming out on life magazine isn’t a necessity to be lgbt’?
this band has done so fucking much to find hands to hold, not just for their audience’s comfort, but to connect with people they can identify with. what a gift that is. if you look at mcr’s entire discography, everything the band has said about not fitting in and being bullied for being faggots, everything gerard’s said about their own gender identity, everything they have ever aligned themselves with, everything that has happened onstage these past five months, everything, and i can’t believe i’m saying this, including gerard yanking a trans pride flag out of the audience pit and literally waving it around onstage, and your conclusion is ‘well i don’t want to assume…’, you’ve missed the point in its entirety.
