The Smashing Pumpkins Made Me Gay

The endless drags of a death rock (gay) boy

This post is part of a series of personal essays about the connections between pop culture and queer identity. Check out other posts on Fiona Apple and Blind Melon.

---

MTV was the adolescent addiction for millennials. The harmonious, electronic talkbox in the opening of 2Pac’s “California Love”; the intrepid acoustic pop of Alanis Morissette’s “Ironic.” These established the soundscape of my childhood. Similar to today’s iPhones, parents seemed to generally discourage music videos but didn’t actively ban them. My parents’ MTV ban was vague and half-hearted, so my sister and I often snuck videos. This was how I first encountered my favorite band: the Smashing Pumpkins.

When I was nine, I crept downstairs to peek into my sister’s sleepover with her three best friends in the basement. I could tell they were watching music videos because I heard music instead of movies. Their muffled voices were full of fast talking and occasional squeals.

After gingerly descending the stairs, I felt the cold tile floor of our basement on my bare feet. My dad had just installed a hard floor; we lived at the bottom of a hill and basement flooding was becoming a problem. I looped around to the other side of the stairway to the game room, where the girls were camped out.

The girls had propped open the door to a seldom used closet containing folding chairs and unused wall art: a trick we used when watching something we weren’t supposed to watch. The open door conveniently blocked the sight of the TV to anyone entering from upstairs. The door’s cover provided a bit of extra time to change the channel. When I saw that closet door open, I knew my hunch was right: MTV. I scaled up to the back of the open door. They couldn’t see me sneaking closer from behind it, like one of those signs on the back of a public bus: “if you can’t see my mirrors, I can’t see you.”

I peered into the crack between the hinges.

“No Diggity” by Blackstreet was reaching its climax, and the girls sang along quietly and gesticulated, as though their movements compensated for the voices they had to mute. After the video ended, they all kept dancing. None of them saw the video that came on next.

A screenshot of “Tonight, Tonight,” which debuted in May 1996. Imagine me making the grumpy moon’s face at my sister from behind the door.

The music video for “Tonight, Tonight” was inspired by the 1902 silent film A Trip to the Moon. It’s often regarded as the first science fiction film, depicting the adventures of explorers who board a rocket ship. “Tonight, Tonight” abbreviates and retells the film’s story. It begins with a crowd out of a silent movie gather to watch a woman smash break a bottle against a blimp. Everything looks obviously fake. A two-dimensional set made of paper flaps against the twitchy movements of the live actors standing in front.

I was starting to suspect an issue with the TV’s image quality, but my sister and her friends weren’t paying enough attention to fix it. I could barely hear the music—an orchestra?

Then, the strings cut off abruptly to a gentle tapping. When the band appears, each member standing in the clouds, I’d identify the tapping as the drummer smacking his sticks together. Usually, I’d heard the click of drumsticks precede an aggressive, adrenaline-packed song opening. But this was not a count-off for the band to kick in. It was a calm, gleaming soundscape produced by the hands of a ghostly, contented drummer boy.

The OG lineup, left to right: James Iha, D’Arcy Wretzky, Billy Corgan, and Jimmy Chamerlin. Hear all four of their lovely voices in the song “Farewell and Goodnight.”

Billy Corgan, the band leader, wears a white top hat, serenading early space explorers from a cloud, his bandmates behind him: D’Arcy, the bassist, delicately plucking at her stand-up bass; James, caressing a strange harplike guitar; Jimmy, a nutcracker with a snare drum strapped to his chest.

D’Arcy struck me the hardest.

Here I was, lonely and curious, banished to sneak outside of the fun my sister was having with her friends, just because I was a boy. I wanted to jump around with them; be scandalized by the same things as them. Frankly, I wanted to braid some goddamn hair. Or at least learn how.

I looked back and forth between the real-life girls and D’Arcy, annoyed that they weren’t even paying attention to this bizarre new video. Why couldn’t they be like D’Arcy? Why couldn’t I be like D’Arcy?

After that night, I began to quietly pay attention to The Smashing Pumpkins. I didn’t have the money to buy a CD. I was afraid to ask my parents, because the Pumpkins’ latest, Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness, their double-album that contained all the hits I knew, earned one of those black and white parental advisory stickers. I started to see the Pumpkins appear live on TV, the audience members erupting against each other violently in mosh pits. When they popped up on the car radio, my mom would plug her ears and grimace at Billy Corgan’s buzzsaw voice.

I felt like the world was placing obstacles between me and this band to which I was so mysteriously drawn.

---

By the time I was fourteen, old enough to make money and buy my own things, I’d been scouring the message boards and building wishlists of ebay bootlegs for years.

Finally, I picked up a copy of Mellon Collie for myself.

I’d suspected that the album was going to be heavy; that hits like “Thirty-Three” were radio candy and that most of the album would be screaming and guitar solos. I found almost the reverse was true. While intense bangers like “An Ode to No One” and “Tales of a Scorched Earth” would make my ears bleed occasionally, they felt like deeply earned spikes of catharsis in a diverse sea of strange and lovely sounds: the harps of “Cupid de Locke,” the fuzzy pop electronica of “Beautiful,” the cozy piano of “Lily (My One and Only).”

Before hearing the full album, I’d felt like others misunderstood the Pumpkins, and I was right. But after finally hearing Mellon Collie myself, I realized that I also misunderstood them.

I loved them even more than I’d suspected.

As early 2000s rolled in, the Pumpkins were appearing in DJ sets with nu metal: Korn, Staind, Evanescence. Though I’d never complain when they relieved me from a sea of bad music, I felt offended by the association. A band like System of a Down uses distorted guitar like a bluntforce weapon. The guitar simply slams you with sound. Even in the Pumpkins’ heaviest songs, guitars are richer and more textured. They seem to be reaching for a melody through the noise.

Billy Corgan often describes his music as an emotional experience. The goal is never noise or badassery or superiority. The purpose seems to be the search for a feeling.

In “Here is No Why,” Corgan sings about deep holes of depression and the futility of trying to fill them with shallow flair:

The useless drag of another day;

The endless drags of a death rock boy.

Mascara sure and lipstick lost,

Glitter burned by restless thoughts.

I’d been familiar with rockers who wore makeup and dresses (for more, see my essay about Blind Melon). Corgan seemed to be critiquing a disavowal of gender norms as an easy solution. For him, even the shock factor of macho rockers in dresses wasn’t enough. Nothing worked; not the death rock, not the glam, nothing. The search, therefore, was still active. The emotion hasn’t been named yet.

The tongue-in-cheek, hyperbolic solution the Pumpkins offered is a full immersion into a never ending depression. The album is about melancholy AND the infinite sadness. The title’s playful redundancy suggests that Corgan’s monasticism is not dreary; it’s imaginative and rich.

This message reached me, buried deep in the closet, enjoying my own self-imposed alienation. There were treasures to enjoy where I was.

---

One day, at Half-Price Books, I found a CD I’d never heard of on any message boards or fansites. On the cover, Billy Corgan sang in dark blue light; on the top, a vague description of its contents: “fully-illustrated book and interview disc.” The publishers, I suppose, poorly predicted that “interview discs” would become a thing. I’d misunderstood and assumed that because it was a CD, it would contain music, but it did not. Just talking.

But this interview helped solidify my love for the band more than a random live show might have. In it, Corgan describes his music as coming from a “feminine” perspective:

It's very easy to cock-rock and posture. I can't help but wear my heart on my sleeve—I'm like nerve endings. That's just the way that I am and, to me, that's very female because it's not a male thing to do. A male thing to do would be to fuckin' posture.

While I’m skeptical of the binary he creates in this quote, I enjoyed his derision of masculine “posturing,” which had antagonized me so much in my own youth. Corgan rejected that nonsense. He has the noise, the aggression, the intensity, but rather than dramatize and celebrate his bigness, he chooses to glance away coyly, like the woman on the cover of Mellon Collie.

The girl’s face is from a work by French painter Jean-Baptiste Greuze, collaged by Pittsburgh artist John Craig. I always found her facial expression to be reluctant or coy. Of course, when interpreted as “ecstatic,” other explanations have been explored.

The aesthetic contrast between fragile coyness and fraying, aggressive guitar felt like rehearsal for coming out. I precariously stood in the doorway of the closet, unsure about how the world would react. I was slightly off, crookedly, performing indifference to how I’d be perceived.

I came out around the same time I started playing music myself. There’s something about being part of a rock band that obliterates the perceptibility of sexual or gender identity—David Bowie, Freddy Mercury, Morrissey. They were queer and have shown that a queer guy in a rock band is always in danger of being mistaken for straight. Luckily, we’ve all done our homework and know now that they weren’t.

One of these days, I’ll get around to writing about that rock band era of my life. For now, I’ll just say that in my band, I couldn’t tell if I was trying to suppress or expand who I was. Oddly, both paths led to the same end.

In the poem “Loud Music,” Stephen Dobyns writes that loud music “wipes out the ego,/ leaving turbulent water and winding road,/ a landscape stripped of people and language-/how clear the air becomes, how sharp the colors.” Loud music somehow obliterates identity and individuality without feeling like erasure. Increasing the volume doesn’t drown out anything; it blows it all up: the ambiguity, the distress, and the ecstasy.

---

Last week, I saw Billy Corgan on tour with a backing band, which he assembled to play some of the Pumpkins’ deepest cuts. It’s a tour made for the pumpkinheads (which we affectionately call ourselves), who likely know most of the band’s full archive better than the band members themselves. Corgan played songs from the unreleased album Machina II: Friends and Enemies of Modern Music, which contains (I’d argue) some of their weirdest and funnest songs.

I expected a pretty relaxed show: small venue, aging crowd, Monday night. Of course, almost immediately, a mosh pit opened up, and I remembered what it felt like for the air to clear and for the colors to sharpen around me.

“Jenna has a cat and a witches’ coven to go home to,” Corgan says, referring to the bassist to his right.

At a Pumpkins concert, moshing is not the baseline experience; instead, bouncing off of your neighbor during the right songs heightens the moments of intensity and contrast. I looked up onto the stage and saw the strange assortment of people Corgan assembled for this tour: a woman in latex, a man with a broad beard and shoulders as wide as he is tall; a witch with shock white hair. I’d never felt more safe than I did there, lost in a vast ocean and blaring music, standing at attention, ready to intercept flying elbows (bad mosh etiquette, but they happen). My friend Levi brought me earplugs, but I kept tearing them out. While the music’s grinding wall of static might have stripped me of my individuality, I felt queerer than ever at that concert. It’s not my gayness that is torn from me when I listen to the Smashing Pumpkins; it’s my loneliness.