An unlikely Texas
queer rock fest draws hipster gender-benders of all
persuasions.
Shaggy hair.
Wispy goatees. Tight jeans. Strange forearm tattoos. No,
it’s not Brooklyn or Echo Park -- it’s a party
in a huge, shabby backyard on a sleepy residential
street on the far east side of Austin. And those cute,
shaggy, tattooed rock-and-roll boys dancing around in front
of the stage? They’re actually girls. Or, more
accurately, they’re somewhere in between.
It’s the
last day of the annual mammoth music festival known as South
by Southwest, but this grassroots rock show is called
GayBiGayGay, a simultaneous nod to and dig at the
mainstream festival that takes over downtown Austin a
few miles away. Good vibes are flowing as freely as the
all-you-can-drink beer ($10 for a refillable cup with your
name on it in black marker), oversize sunglasses are
everywhere, and a couple hundred pretty, gender-queer
young things are busy flirting and dancing the
afternoon away.
“GayBiGayGay is a queer music festival in the
woods,” explains Silky Shoemaker, 25, who,
together with Hazey Fairless, 27, organizes the event,
now in its third year. “It’s a free, all-ages,
all-day-long gay band event with an emphasis on being
out of doors, lawn chairs, festive decor, DIY, nudity,
satin, the utopia, and rock 'n' roll.”
There’s
also an undoubted emphasis on disrupting binary gender norms
-- it seems that we’re not supposed to be quite
sure who’s doing whom when the femme,
polka-dot-sporting lead singer of local band the Hot as
Shits sings, “I love the feel of the wind on my
tits / I can’t get enough of your ass on my
clit.” But everyone cheers anyway.
That ambiguity is
part of the point of GayBiGayGay, a festival that
reflects a growing population of visibly gender-queer (or
otherwise nonidentified) youths across the country. In
fact, it seems that most of the people here have a
problem with strict labels and, when pressed, claim
“queer” as the only term that accurately
describes them -- if you have to go there.
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Cho is an Austin-based freelance writer who studies
race, gender, and sexuality at the University of Texas
at Austin's media studies program. All photographs
by Kevin Hauser.