Mommy’s Little Monster

How music’s freak scene helped save a family BY TROY JOHNSON

W hen that woman told me that my mother was queer, she made it seem like Mom’s eyes would eventually start bleeding and her hair would fall out. It was 1983, and I was ten years old. My jimmy was merely a pee courier; it didn’t yet partake in leisure activities. I didn’t understand what sexual meant, let alone the implications of its nifty prefixes. But it was apparent that this “homo” thing wasn’t very awesome.

Ronald Reagan—the president who would inspire an entire generation to form punk bands—had just stopped funding mental health care and canceled the White House’s subscription to The Advocate. From what I could tell, crazies,

gays, and Commies were the people beneath the bleachers of America, loosening the screws. There were no gay role models in the media. No Ellen. No Sir Ian McKellen playing a badass movie supervillain.

Rock’n’roll had some famous gays. But in grade school in the ’70s, we were taught that these people shared drug needles with puppy rapers. Freddie Mercury was a loon who ate children with those awful teeth. The Village People were harlequin homos—funny guys in funny costumes with a few hokey-pokey disco moves. I spent most of my adolescence listening to politicians and Pat Robertson types who said that weirdos like my lesbian mom were the reason tornadoes were ripping apart mobile homes in the Midwest.

Mom and I didn’t enjoy much quality time. I viewed her desire to French-kiss plump academic women as sabotaging my existence, which, I reasoned, was on a crash course to perfection. I banned her “lifestyle” in our house. There were a lot of places she could be gay—at her freaky girlfriend’s condo, on the streets, in Mexico—just not where I slept. I freely used the word “fag” in her presence and pretty much acted like “the whole homo thing” didn’t exist. My father was busy building a new life for himself with a fresh wife and a different family dog.

I blame Social Distortion’s third album for upending my world. Until its release, I was an MC Hammer/Falco/Ziggy Marley kind of guy. If music were food, I had a modest collection of Cheez Whiz. But Social Distortion—with the cover version of Johnny Cash’s “Ring of Fire” and that song about bad boys in faded blue jeans—exposed my crappy taste.

In a fruitless search to find the album that contained Social D’s “Mommy’s Little Monster,” I loitered in record stores with all the wry, disheveled workers who had apparently been hired to ignore people. They didn’t smile much, and they intimidated me. They had tattoos and irrational hair. They were outsiders, people deemed unfit for social gatherings attended by children. Since it was

essentially impossible for my mother to adopt children (even the ungainliest crack babies), she and the punks obviously had something in common.

I, however, was not hip like them. Because of Mom’s “otherness,” I tried excruciatingly hard to be normal. I was a surfer kid with nice teeth, a presentable face, and casual-conservative clothes. My aesthetic blandness got me laid. Like any good, confused teenager, I used sex as self-esteem replacement therapy. I didn’t want love; I wanted an active vagina attached to a girl who didn’t mind if I immediately told every single one of my friends about her.

Hours spent in record stores led me to Bad Brains, Digable Planets, Radiohead,
and Band of Horses. When I met Jesse, my first punk friend, I figured he
dismembered small living things
when he wasn’t cutting himself
for fun. Turns out he just liked the
Germs. At my first magazine job, the
graphic designer was a lesbian girl
who looked like Lisa Loeb and loved
Uncle Tupelo. She hadn’t turned gay
because an ex-boyfriend made love
like a jackhammer before running
off with her car. She just thought
girls were prettier. I befriended a
gay DJ who spun at Chico State’s
biggest dance club. He validated my
belief that gay men have atrocious
taste in music, but he was one of the
sweetest humans I’ve ever known.
Countless outcasts have found a
close-knit community in rock’n’roll. I
never have. For me, the rock scene’s
huge coterie of gays, lesbians, bisexu-
als, vegans, feminists, and puppeteers
were more like my sherpas up Freak
Mountain. I gently poked, prodded,
and pestered them with questions.
With their help, I finally recognized
my mother and her girlfriend—
decent people who loved and
dreamed and recycled, just trying to
feel their way through the world.
The rock scene is no utopia.
Like the clergy and the PTA, it
has its share of human detritus.
Homophobes enjoy the Drive-By
Truckers and the Dresden Dolls, too.
You don’t get a cure for intolerance
when you purchase the Gossip’s
spunky new album. But per capita,
oppressive dogma is much lower at the merch table than in line at the bank.

Eventually I apologized to my mom, attended gay rallies, and embarrassed girlfriends with my newfound devotion to Erasure. Homophobia’s not like Creed, something you can just drop the instant you realize it sucks. We come to terms one uncomfortable moment at a time. But it’s as a permanent rock’n’roll tourist—the unhip guy who’s always at shows and somehow knows the freaks—that I’ve been able to make it at all.

 

Troy Johnson is the author of Family Outing: What Happened When I Found Out My Mother Was Gay (Arcade).