A LOVE LETTER TO LEZZIE ROCK
Paying homage to Austin's pioneering queer punk.
You can be afraid and it's okay
'Cause I'm so in love with you anyway
I'm gonna take you to queer bars
I'm gonna drive you in queer cars
You're gonna meet all my queer friends
Our queer, queer fun, it never ends
“The Queer Song,” Meat Joy
May 7th, 2022, The Far Out Lounge, Austin, Texas: fresh-faced fans sporting spiked hair and tattoo sleeves mingle with seasoned punk veterans in the crowd for Bikini Kill, legendary instigators of the riot grrrl movement. To the tune of punchy power chords, the unapologetically feminist four-piece tackle sex, politics, and everything in between throughout their sweaty two-hour set. An amp emblazoned with a “The Future Is Trans” sticker lies center stage. In between songs, drummer Tobi Vail approaches the mic and poses a Texas punk trivia question to her audience:
“Do you remember a band called Meat Joy?”
Whoops and cheers reverberate through the crowd. Some fans nod fiercely in appreciative recognition; others clap politely, unfamiliar with Vail’s shoutout.
You can hardly blame them. Meat Joy, one of several self-proclaimed “lezzie rock” groups who found success in Austin’s flourishing ‘80s punk scene, remains criminally underappreciated in the music history of our city despite their musical fearlessness, explicit celebration of queerness, and massive influence on later, more palatable and therefore commercially successful groups. It’s time to recognize Austin’s lezzie rock musicians for what they were and what they continue to be: pioneers of punk who fearlessly queered the music of our city.
Singer-songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Gretchen Phillips is often credited as the defacto founder of lezzie rock in Austin for her quarterback-like role in forming the most prominent groups of the period: Meat Joy, Girls in the Nose, and Two Nice Girls. Phillips, a Galveston native, migrated to Austin in ‘81 and fell hard for her new home’s already-queer punk scene. Openly gay frontmen like Biscuit of The Big Boys and Gary Floyd of The Dicks inspired Phillips to organize and create music that placed the lesbian experience in the spotlight.
With guns blazing and freak flags flying, Meat Joy burst onto Austin’s music scene in 1982 with an aggressive and highly political brand of punk that quickly established them as one of the most exciting acts in town. The group incorporated sometimes strange but always entertaining performance art into their live shows, often breaking the fourth wall by handing out instruments to crowd members.
Their show "The Meat Joy Variety Hour'' aired on Austin's public access TV channel; one clip from the series shows the group performing their track “The Time Of Your Life” in full faces of zombie-like makeup. After winning Best Avant-Garde Band in the Chronicle‘s 1984 Music Awards, the group parted ways; their breakup, however, coincided with Phillips’ formation of two new lezzie rock groups, Girls in the Nose and Two Nice Girls. While the two groups ventured into wildly different musical territories, both preserved the high-energy, dykey punk ethos set into motion by Meat Joy. Other notable lezzie rock groups, like Power Snatch and Sincola, continued to find success well into the ‘90s, with the latter winning the Chronicle's 1994 Best EP Music Award. Lezzie rock found a home base in a Red River dyke bar called Chances - now known as Cheer Up Charlies - where straight and queer patrons alike gathered to drink, socialize, and most importantly, dance away the frustrations of the day to punk music.
Music history scholars recognize the contributions of these lezzie rockers in shaping the city of Austin as we experience it today. UT’s own Dr. Curran Nault, author of Queercore: Queer Punk Media Subculture, makes clear the ongoing legacy of lezzie rock: “Many folx associate punk with the coasts and with straight men, but the punksters of Austin absolutely set the queercore scene,” Dr. Nault asserts. “It was [lezzie rockers] like Meat Joy, Power Snatch, and Girls in the Nose that amplified Austin's edgy, outsider heart.”
“Even if folx don't know these histories today, the music scene in Austin is forever marked by them,” says Dr. Nault. Apart from their creative contributions, their emphasis on inclusivity has bled into the very character of our city: “They made Austin the haven for queerdos it is today, despite the challenges of gentrification and more.”
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Regrettably, there isn’t extensive archival documentation of the early days of Austin lezzie rock; in what photographs do exist, however, I see my friends, old flames, myself. In Meat Joy’s “My Heart Crawls Off” (“Every time you touch me/I see her in your eyes/And then a little, little part of me/Crawls off and dies”) or “The Queer Song” (“You can be afraid and it's okay/Cause I'm so in love with you anyway”), I hear an urgent aching to express both the painful and beautiful parts of the queer experience. Love and heartbreak, prejudice and community tangled together in a beautiful mess. In their hurt, they found their power, and in their power, they found song.
I had the pleasure of meeting Gretchen this summer to talk all things lezzie rock. When I ask how she hopes her past work will be remembered in music history, her answer is simple: “I would like to be remembered for being an out lesbian who sang about actual lesbianism. I was greatly inspired by the “women’s music” scene, but I wanted to be in a larger scene that also included men and straight folks because they needed to hear what I had to say, and because they were my friends too. I’d like to be remembered for being out the whole damn time and singing about it.”
“I hope that we inspired folks to play and sing their little hearts out about whatever subjects were dear to them,” Phillips continues. “I hope that we inspired folks to be crazy and have fun and be themselves.”
And inspire folks they did. I play guitar in a punk band called Abortion consisting of myself and three of my best friends, each of whom happens to be queer. We’re not the most musically gifted group in the world, but we certainly have a good time. It’s impossible to put into words how much these groups mean to us and how much inspiration we’ve found in their funny, vulnerable, unabashedly queer work. We aren’t the only band in town to benefit from lezzie rock’s broadening of our city’s music scene; from up-and-coming groups like Die Spitz or We Don’t Ride Llamas to well-established acts like Pleasure Venom, an ever-growing list of Austin-based artists, queer or otherwise, punk or otherwise, keep the gutsy, do-it-yourself spirit of lezzie rock alive today.
Nearly four decades ago, Phillips and her lezzie rock peers embarked upon a journey to broaden the definition of what a punk in Austin could look like, who they could love, what they could say. They created art that asserted that a lesbian was a beautiful thing to be; in doing so, they gave queer kids from Lubbock to Laredo and back the courage to be themselves. Their efforts, of course, remain a work in progress; our punk scene, our musical community, our city as a whole will never be a truly inclusive space until all LGBTQ+ and BIPOC citizen-artists possess the same opportunities as their white, cisgender, male counterparts. In the wake of recent threats to Austin’s 4th Street gay district, as well as nationwide attacks on reproductive justice that will disproportionately hurt BIPOC individuals, it’s clear that there’s a great deal of progress yet to be made.
But to know where we’re heading, we first must look back. To envision our future we must find strength, solidarity in our past. From our lezzie rock ancestry, we learn to replace the agreeable safeness of whispering with the often uncomfortable joy of shouting. To create space in what feels to be a vacuum. To riot even in the face of insurmountable odds.
To lezzie rockers past, present, and future, I salute you.
