They came in the tens of thousands to the hottest show of the year, teenagers squandering their allowances to see their heroes Green Day -- and listen to an opening band called Pansy Division that few had ever heard of.

Sixteen was the median age at those sold-out arenas throughout Middle America last summer, and plenty of even younger fans crowded the aisles. For most, it would be the first time they'd see what it looks like to be young, gay, proud and center-stage. For a few, that vision would be the kind of epiphany that can change a life.

When the ultimate odd-couple bill made its way to Oakland's Henry J. Kaiser Auditorium in May, for their first home-town arena gig as a team, a few stereotypes about gay life were yet again shattered into dust. Which is exactly what nouveau-punkers Green Day intended when they chose Pansy Division to open for dozens of shows over the past year.

In mid-1994, Green Day was exploding all over MTV and the record charts; they could have had their pick of opening bands to tour with them. But they chose "openly queer, in-your-face" rockers Pansy Division (vocalist/songwriter/guitarist Jon Ginoli, bassist/backup vocalist Chris Freeman and drummer Dustin Donaldson) to warm up their legions of avid fans.

Green Day's front-man, Billie Joe explained his thinking to the Village Voice earlier this year, saying, "As far as I'm concerned, I think that a band like Pansy Division saves people's lives. A lot of kids go through life just not knowin' what the hell they are, or what their sexuality is all about, and they just kind of go confused. But if someone has sort of the same ideas and feelings they do -- and a sense of humor thrown on top of it -- then it really helps."

That kind of openmindedness brought Pansy Division, standard bearers for the burgeoning "homocore/queerpunk" scene, to a new level of exposure. Suddenly, they weren't just musicians: they were role-models. When Jon Ginoli founded the band in 1991, he didn't set out to be a paradigm for teens confused about their sexual identity; he just wanted to rock.

He's certainly got the bedroom of a die-hard music fan, stuffed with crates of vinyl, shelves of CDs and posters plastered all over the walls. He pulls on a pair of pale-pink Converse All-Stars, then leads me into a sunny room at the other end of his San Francisco flat. It's not long after we sit down that he leaps back up again.

"I've got to show you something. I just got this today from the Green Day tour!" He runs back into his room, giddy as a kid with a secret, and returns with a fistful of letters. One is from Marcia, a 13-year-old from Philadelphia. She writes in green ink, with the careful scrawl of someone trying out different penmanship styles for size.

"So do you think you'll ever break out of underground and sign with a big lable [sic]. I think you should stay underground." Jon interjects, "The letters make me worry about the future of our American educational system." Marcia continues, "So does anyone bother you for being openly gay? ... p.s.s. I'm a girl and I'm 13."

"She's expecting a personal response and she can't spell very much. But that's typical of letters we've received from some of the younger Green Day fans who liked us," says Jon, smiling. "To be able to have people that age exposed to something that's gay-positive is really great."

And Pansy Division certainly exposes the minutia of gay life to the clear light of day; songs like "James Bondage," "Rachbottomoff" and "Cowboys are Frequently Secretly Fond of Each Other" are the tamer titles among their repertoire. The music behind the candid lyrics is straight-ahead punkish rock, with influences like the Buzzcocks, the Ramones, the Mekons and the Fall cited by members.

"Not a very prototypically queer musical aesthetic," laughs Jon. True enough -- the hackneyed assumption is that gay taste runs more toward Broadway show tunes (Judy! Barbra!) and '80s disco (Donna! Village People!) on the male end of the scale, and earnest, Birkenstock-wearing folksingers for the lesbian contingent. The only thing left for the younger gay/lesbian/bisexual crowd in the face of such tired musical options was to make some sounds of their own; that or listen to yet another round of "Somewhere Over the Rainbow" or (shudder) "At Seventeen."

Enter Pansy Division. With a unapologetic punk/pop sound that's heavy on simple hooks and onetwothreefour rhythms, the group's tone is dominated by Ginoli's vocals, which lean toward humorous lyrics that have a blatantly queer spin. Which is not to say that straights can't relate; who can't connect with a yearning to date someone with "Groovy Underwear" or deserved disdain for a "Negative Queen" who "thinks he's Oscar Wilde, but he's Paul Lynde"?

Part of a sort of homocore trinity -- Team Dresch and Tribe 8 rounding out the Big Three -- that are widely credited with jumpstarting the queerpunk scene into high gear, Pansy Division's road trip with Green Day has moved the band into the next level of exposure. While any number of rockers have toyed with androgyny and blurred sexual roles over the years (David Bowie, Prince, k.d. lang, et.al.), overt gay lyrics in rock remain as rare as certain breeds of orchids.

The recently released "Pile Up" -- a collection of Pansy Division singles, compilation cuts and rare tracks -- packs 20 songs into just under 50 minutes. The hilarious "Smells Like Queer Spirit" closes the album, with a chorus of "Hello, hello, hello, homo" punctuating the familiar chords of Nirvana's breakthrough hit and an affirmative urge to "forget the closet, never mind."

Other songs on the CD include "Bill and Ted's Homosexual Adventure" ("they may not be too bright/ but they know what they like"), "I Can't Sleep" ("He looked good at the time/ I must have been out of my mind") and "Strip U Down" ("I'd like to take some time/ To let the mystery unfold/ Sometimes what's hidden/ Is sexier than what is shown")

. Subtle, these guys aren't -- but determined, they most definitely are. Pansy Division frontman and songwriter Jon Ginoli has doggedly pursued his dream of fronting a gay-positive punk band for years. In the beginning of 1991, he started shopping a nearly completed album to indie labels; it contained the very first Pansy Division song, "Femme in a Black Leather Jacket." The overwhelming lack of interest was less than heartening.

"A year later I still didn't have anything," recalls Jon. "I was pretty disappointed and surprised. I was hearing all kinds of bands and thinking that we really were something different. I thought somebody would pick up on that and think, 'We can sell this.'

"Then Maximum Rock and Roll, of all people, did an interview with us that came out in June of '92, and that got local interest up considerably. So we talked to a few labels and ended up with Lookout in the fall. The first single came out November of '92; which was the one with 'Femme in a Black Leather Jacket,' 'Smells Like Queer Spirit,' and our Christmas song, 'Homo Christmas.'" A full album, "Undressed," came out in March of 1993, and Pansy Division started to develop quite a following.

In the tradition of punk's do-it-yourself (DIY) ethic, no one quit their day jobs just because an album was finally in the stores. In fact, in order to tour, Ginoli had to get a one week extension on the yearly vacation allotted from his full-time job.

"We booked it ourselves and did an incredible amount of driving -- 8,000 miles in three weeks -- and went to the East Coast and back. That was all I could get off work." But that grueling schedule was definitely worth it. "The first tour was, by our standards, wildly successful. We didn't know if there was going to be anybody there to see us, but we had really good shows just about everywhere we went. The response was great and we didn't have trouble with people being jerks or people wanting to beat us up."

By DIY standards, that tour was an unqualified success. "We made money!," laughs Jon. "We each took home $500 after expenses, and that was after putting something away for the band. So we thought, 'Wow! By doing it real low budget, DIY, sleep on floors, drive your own van and book your own tour, we can do it!'"

Of course, then it was back to the daily grind at the end of the tour -- kind of crash-course in reality. "We thought, 'God, we're not going to be able to do this again for another year, that sucks!'" But Pansy Division developed a plan: to record another album in January of '94, and, hopefully, quit their day jobs in the fall. But then the phone rang, and everything changed.

"Green Day called us, pretty much out of the blue," remembers Jon. "And that's when [the song] 'Longview' was doing really great as a video. They were doing their own headline tours in smaller clubs, and it was starting to happen for them and get really exciting." Although the two groups at one time shared the same label (Berkeley's Lookout Records), they had never met.

"When I called their drummer, since I'd heard they wanted us to open for them, he was very distracted and stayed on the phone only a minute," recalls Jon. "He didn't seem very interested."

But apparently, he was.

"A month later, they called and said 'Do you want to go on tour with us for a month?' So we quit our jobs a little ahead of schedule, and went out during the summer. Since then, things have just kept going up and up gradually. It's like a stairway, we keep taking these steps. We haven't taken any giant leaps, but they just keep going up, up, farther up."

It hasn't been an unconditional love-fest streaming forth from critics writing about Pansy Division or fellow-musicians commenting on their new-found popularity. In fact, Matador Record top-honcho Gerard Cosloy seemed particularly mean-spirited when he called them "one of the worst bands in the country right now" in a recent Rolling Stone article. In the same piece, openly gay Roddy Bottum -- keyboardist for Faith No More -- found their hardcore insistence on explicit lyrics deliberately inflammatory, saying, "I hate to slag them; they're making a statement, even if it's a loud obnoxious one. But I expect more."

Ginoli just shrugs at comments like these, which he sees as the inevitable result of the band's rising visibility. If the minuscule number of openly gay rock musicians insists on dismissing Pansy Division as a one-note novelty act, so be it. At least someone's paying attention.

And the fans don't seem to care if a few self-proclaimed members of the hipster P.C. police sneer at the group's homoerotic slant. For example, Brian from Houston has a markedly different perspective; the letter writer seems a bit older than the usual scribbler of fan-letters. For one thing, his spelling is impeccable.

"Pansies: You guys are living my dream. For pretty much all of my life it seemed like I was the only fag on the planet that understood the universal oneness that can be achieved through patterns of sonic waveforms ... It's great to see someone doing what I've always thought I could if I could just find some out queers who like music with real animal substance."

Letters like these that prove that Pansy Division, by its very existence, is a political band. "At one show, we had a guy who was 60 come up and say, 'I really like the words. You put the words in that everybody else leaves out.'" says Jon. Clearly, it's not just 13-year-olds hoping to get a cool t-shirt or a personal note who respond to the sight or sound of these gay rockers. For some listeners, discovering Pansy Division is to realize that they're not alone.

Tim K. writes, "Thanks for filling the void. Remember -- sometimes a kid just needs that one glimmer of hope to keep him from putting his head in the oven. You're saving lives! There's no doubt about it!"

The exuberant fans filling stadiums during the Green Day tour brought the band exposure beyond their wildest dreams. "It was really a great experience having access to that many young ears," admits Jon. "I didn't expect we would have such a young audience when we began." And, with a wider audience comes greater responsibility -- a tip that more than a few more mainstream rockers might do well to take note of.

"We didn't set out to be role models," Jon says slowly, deliberating. "But it's sort of inevitable when you're put in that position to play to people that age and you have a message like we have. It feels like we're nipping homophobia in the bud.

"If a group of kids goes to see Green Day and gay topics come up in conversation, there's usually someone there to defend us. We hear about this kind of thing all the time. It comes up for discussion because we're present and making the issue come out into the open. We hear from kids who are gay who haven't talked about it to anybody else and they write us and ask for advice."

While Pansy Division songs can be explicit ("Reciprocate," "Anonymous"), the sex that takes place is usually of the safe variety. Condoms are typically referred to before the hanky-panky gets underway; it's an obligation that Ginoli accepts along with the spotlight. "People write us with sex questions because they don't know who to ask," he says. The liner notes to the album "Deflowered" include an explanation of safe sex, complete with diagrams and a list of "les/bi/gay youth groups."

"This is the kind of sex education that kids are not getting in this country. They write and ask pretty basic questions. It's sort of nice that people feel comfortable writing to you, but it's sad that they have no one else that they can go to for such basic information."

In the midst of all this serious talk of role-models and responsibility, Pansy Division leaves plenty of room for fun. "The idea of the band is a celebration of gay sexuality, which doesn't mean that we don't critique it," Jon says. "Just being a band at a time when the right wing is using homosexuality as their major whipping boy makes us a political band. But we're fun. People come to our shows and have a good time."

Just ask Brett from Georgia, who writes, "I was impressed by the sincerity of your show. You seemed to be having more honest fun than any band I've seen ... remember that there are still heterosexual people like me who understand and support what you do."

Still, there's room for reality to creep in here and there in Pansy Division lyrics. The song "Denny" off of "Deflowered" is a poignant portrait of a man who's "got HIV+ tattooed in black/ In six-inch letters on his back/ He said, 'I want them to see/ What they've done to me.'" With few of the songs devoid of sexual content, and relentless references to gay sex, it's unlikely that Pansy Division will be snatched up by a major label anytime soon. At least, not until mainstream attitudes about homosexuality change dramatically.

"I don't think we're going to end up signing with a major," says Jon, who doesn't seem all that sorry. "The odds are against us being able to do what we're good at in that forum. We'd just be fighting them all the time."

And Pansy Division clearly has at least two things they'd rather do than fight. One of them is playing music.

This article originally appeared in the San Jose Mercury News.

Julene Snyder is a San Francisco-based freelance writer. E-mail can be sent to julene@well.com


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