The gays in the band

Many musicians have no problems coming out, but a surprising number of local artists prefer the closet

by Christopher Muther

They may have some queer members, but don't categorize local rockers Chapter in Verse as a gay band.

"It's really a mainstream band," says the group's manager, Cindy Levine, while explaining why the band should not be a part of a story on Boston's gay music scene. "Yes, there are some gay members, but that's not their focus. This is really not a good time to have them in a One in Ten story. We've got a lot of record companies coming to a show. We want the focus to be on the music, not the personal lives of the band [members]."

Welcome to the bizarre world of gay music. Thirty years after Stonewall, monetary realities and fears of categorization -- not discrimination -- are keeping a host of local musicians in the closet. Even some local lesbian and gay musicians who are out find themselves carefully negotiating what they say publicly about their lives to avoid getting dumped in the "gay artist" category.

"We're just like any other artists," says Luke Cazwel of the local rap duo Morplay. "We want the things we work hardest for to be the center of attention, which would be our lyrics, our production, and our stage performance. Being gay is not something we've had to work hard for. It's just a gift from the gods."

Even completely out artists such as Mary Gauthier, a country-folk singer, and Catie Curtis, who rarely talks about her sexuality but has performed and presented at the Gay and Lesbian American Music Awards, walk a fine line to make sure they don't end up in the gay-music ghetto populated by Romanovsky and Phillips and the Flirtations.

"There are gay bands, and then there are bands that happen to have members who are gay," explains Gauthier. "For gay bands, the music is all about the experience of being gay. That's what their identity is based on. I write about more-universal issues that everyone can relate to."

For the most part, local bands have no problem talking about gay members, but they work very hard to deflect attention from sexual orientation. When Gauthier hired publicist Ellen Guirleo to represent her, one of the first things Guirleo did was go through Gauthier's press kit to weed out articles that emphasized sexuality over music.

"There is usually more concern that an artist is going to limit their audience rather than be ostracized," Guirleo says. "Especially with women. Cris Williamson battled that pigeonhole for years. So far it's been fine with Mary. When she first told me the title of her new CD is going to be Drag Queens and Limousines, I cringed. But now I'm not worried about it."

One local artist who asked that her name not be used says she has chosen not to talk publicly about her sexuality for fear that she will lose her audience.

"For some people it's no big deal," she says. "But for other people who may have a problem with it, they're going to choose to put their money down and go to another show."

That fear of missing out on a recording contract or losing an audience, whether warranted or not, keeps several local musicians in a career closet. Publicist Rhonda Kelley says two acts with queer members that she represents were not interested in being part of this story. She adds that most local publicists will keep a queer musician's identity under wraps (at the request of the musician), much the same way they wouldn't let on that a heartthrob was married.

Given all the potential obstacles, why would any up-and-coming band or solo performer want to come out of the closet? Music experts say that unless the performer is completely closeted, the news is likely to get out eventually in any case. By choosing to discuss the issue, a musician can easily shape his or her image by deciding where and how often to talk about sexuality. Playing hopscotch around the topic can be more dangerous.

Last fall, Chapter in Verse ran into problems when band members felt they'd encountered discrimination at the Joshua Tree, in Somerville. The owner of the club allegedly banned Chapter in Verse from future shows because the band attracted a significantly lesbian crowd to a November performance. Band members angrily publicized the incident and pledged to take their business down the street to Johnny D's. In the process, however, they meekly skirted the issue of their own sexual orientation by claiming to be protecting their audience from discrimination.

"We're not a gay band," singer Rachel Clayton told the Phoenix in response to questions about the incident. "We have a very mixed crowd in our audience. There are women who follow us because we have strong women up front and they think it's an attractive thing. So we never wanted to be the poster-child band for a gay audience, but this happened to us and we want to stand up for the people who were in the audience that night."

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For the new crop of Boston-based gay bands -- er, bands that have openly gay members -- the topic is still a bit of a minefield. Current up-and-coming local bands don't mind taking on the gay issue, but they're careful to point out that there's more to their shtick than rainbow flags and pride rings.

Morplay, the gay rap duo formerly known as Wordsworth, say they operate on the premise that people should hear their tag-team raps first, then find out that the pair are gay.

"The idea is to let people know you have ill skills before they find out you're gay," Luke Cazwel says. "If they already like you, they have to make a conscious decision not to listen to you simply because you're gay."

Morplay came together a dozen years ago, when Cazwel and Crasta Yo met at the Worcester Galleria as teenagers. Through their shared love of rap and cigarettes, the two formed a bond and became close friends. Eventually, Cazwel and Crasta Yo began rapping themselves, goofing around and emulating their rhyming idols.

"We just starting rhyming, just because we had things to rhyme about," Cazwel says. "We would rhyme about ourselves and how cool we are."

"When really good rap would come out, one of us would pick it up, and that would fuel the fire," adds Crasta Yo. "We'd come home and put it on the stereo and try to untangle every word they were saying."

The duo recently released their first, self-titled CD (available at local music stores or from http://www.morplay.com), a playful, Beastie Boys-inspired album that places an emphasis on feel-good rhymes.

Myke Weiskopf, the one-man band known as Science Park, has opted to take a universal approach in his quirky, jittery pop songs. Sitting down over coffee at Starbucks, he has no fear of talking about his sexuality. But his lyrics stick to more-general, third-person references to relationships. "My sexuality isn't the focal point of what I do," he says. "The songs are."

The 22-year-old Weiskopf began writing songs at a young age, teaching himself how to play different instruments and capturing on tape the melodies he heard in his head. As a teenager, he released several tapes of his music. His latest album, Futurama, is a charming collection of light techno and New Wave songs that draw equally from experimental indie pop and electronic music.

One of Weiskopf's biggest influences is another locally based gay band that made a big splash two years ago with its debut album. Future Bible Heroes, fronted by New York-based Stephin Merritt of the Magnetic Fields and musically anchored by Cambridge-based musician/DJ Chris Ewen, released one of the best albums of 1997, the sparkling Memories of Love.

The band has been up-front about the sexuality question since its inception (Merritt and Ewen were both out and working in other bands prior to FBH), but Ewen clearly empathizes with bands that are unsure of how to handle the sexuality question. "I think it moves from a statement of liberation to a statement of constraint," Ewen says. "If you're viewed exclusively as a gay artist, it can really hamper your creativity. I don't think labels look at it as a wall to signing artists, but I think artists may think of it as a wall to having control over their creativity."

Thanks in part to Merritt's following from his work in the Magnetic Fields, Ewen says, Future Bible Heroes were not lumped into a musical gay ghetto. Ewen, who spins weekly at ManRay in Cambridge, was also a member of the '80s pop band Figures on a Beach. The trio is currently writing and recording a follow-up to Memories of Love that Ewen says will take the band in new thematic and musical directions. In the meantime, an EP, including four new songs, is slated for release this spring.

Folk-pop singer Faith Soloway decided to tackle the issue head-on when she started recording music. The first tune she wrote, "Lesbo Song," settles the question of being a queer musician. "Essentially, the song was saying, `I want to be a lesbian, but I don't want to be a certain kind of lesbian,' " Soloway says. "I want to sing a song, but I don't want to be a women's-music lesbian. I want a guy in a bar drinking a beer to like my songs as much as a topless woman at a women's music festival."

Soloway cut her teeth in show business with her sister Jill at the beginning of the 1990s by writing and producing a show called The Real Live Brady Bunch. The production, which played nationally to sold-out audiences, turned the classic sitcom into live, interactive theater and presaged the national Brady Bunch resurgence -- marked by two major studio films written in the same tongue-in-cheek style of The Real Live Brady Bunch. Soloway came to Boston when she started dating the sister of the woman who played Jan in the Boston production of the show, and stayed when she decided that music, and not television writing, was her true calling.

Hear them live Chapter in Verse will play at the Irish Embassy, 234 Friend Street, Boston, April 15 at 10 p.m. Call (617) 742-6618. The band will also play at the Paradise Rock Club, 967 Comm Ave, Boston, April 24 at 7 p.m. Call (617) 562-8800. Mary Gauthier will play at Club Passim, 47 Palmer Street, Cambridge, April 24 at 10 p.m. Call (617) 492-7679. Morplay will play downstairs at the Middle East, 472 Mass Ave, Cambridge, May 1 at 8:30 p.m. Call (617) 497-0576. The duo will also play at T.T. the Bear's Place, 10 Brookline Street, Cambridge, May 27 at 8:30 p.m. Call (617) 492-BEAR. Science Park will play at the Linwood Grille, 69 Kilmarnock Street, Boston, April 15 at 9:30 p.m. Call (617) 267-8644. Faith Soloway will play at Roger Williams University, Providence, Rhode Island, April 15 at 7:30 p.m. She will also play at the Kirkland Café, 427 Washington Street, Somerville, May 1 at 10 p.m. Call (617) 491-9640.

For Soloway, sexuality is "part of" her music, but she doesn't "want to make it [the] main aspect." Her work veers from comedy songs (live shows include hilarious rock operas such as "Jesus Has Two Mommies") to moody, sad tunes. Her goal is to combine her comedy-writing skills, love of pop culture, and music into a tidy, funny package.

Where Soloway uses laughs to deal with sexuality, the band 19 heads straight below the belt. Fronted by bisexual singer Hendrik Gideonse XIX (hence the name), 19 takes its musical influences from erotic poetry and creates gauzy, steamy songs that linger like smoke from a postcoital cigarette.

Gideonse, who writes all the band's music, is a former contributor to the erotic literary magazine Paramour; he quickly realized he could work a crowd by reading his poetry to audiences. He translated the sexy showmanship to the stage (although he confesses that his songs are not as raunchy as his poetry), and now the trio is quickly becoming known for its topless, touchy-feely stage shows.

"The touchy-feely aspect of it comes from watching '80s rock videos," Gideonse says. "Watching long-haired guys leaning on each other. These guys are wearing lipstick, eyeliner, they have really long hair, they have their shirts off and they're wearing spandex. It's totally erotic."

Gideonse says he opted to be up-front about his sexuality from the inception of his band, both to weed out a homophobic audience and to help those who might be questioning their own sexuality.

"I wanted to start from the bottom up," he says. "Plus, I really don't want people who dislike gay people coming to our shows."

For now, deciding whether to be closeted, open, or in-between remains difficult for many local gay rockers. But some see a point in the not-so-distant future when sexuality in music will be as irrelevant as skin color in music.

"I think what most of us really want to do is transcend the labels and move people, all people," says Gauthier.

Chris Muther has profiled Rob Halford of Judas Priest and Thalia Zedek for One in Ten. He can be reached at cmuther@aol.com.

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