Exploiting sexuality for the greater good
By Daily Bruin Staff
April 4, 1995 9:00 p.m.
Exploiting sexuality for the greater good
What’s that Noise?
Michael Tatum
Let’s get one thing straight: I love Bob Mould  love him.
As the frontman for Hüsker Dü and Sugar, he’s time and
again proved himself to be a mercurial songwriter, a moving singer
and, above all, a master of guitar anarchy.
So while I’ve never been a fan of Spin magazine, when I saw
Mould’s name on the cover of the October issue, I felt compelled to
slap down my hard earned spare change for it.
Now as I knew when I went into reading in the article, Mould is
gay. Though it’s no secret, this tidbit of news hasn’t been as
widely publicized as the sexuality of, say, Melissa Etheridge,
partially because Mould wants it that way, and partially because he
doesn’t sell as many records as Etheridge.
If you hadn’t known Mould was gay beforehand  assuming you
knew the meaning of the word subtle  you could infer as much
from reading the first half of the article. In it, interviewer
Dennis Cooper pays a visit to Mould at his home in Austin, Texas,
where he lives with his dog, as well as Kevin O’Neill, who handles
Sugar’s business affairs.
Now without neon billboards or ticker-tape parades, it should be
clear to the astute reader that, hey, maybe Mould and O’Neill are
an item. Personally, it gave warmth to my cynical heart that Mould,
after years of chronic depression and drug and alcohol abuse, had
finally found something resembling happiness, even if it might not
last past his next concert tour. If anything, the first half of the
article did something that most pieces on rock musicians don’t: It
gave me a good feeling.
That good feeling lasted up until the second half of the
article, which begins something like this: "Mould knows that I’m
going to get around to the issue of his sexual preference … Like
(him), I have doubts about both the importance of these kind of
self-labeling pronouncements and the public’s right to know."
Already, you can see what’s coming. While in the first half of
the article Cooper downplayed the issue and treated Mould like a
human being, as he deserves to be, here Cooper puts on his best PC
face and claims he’s not going to "make a big deal about it," after
which he then hammers the whole subject into the ground for the
next 15 paragraphs.
Clearly, this was the last direction that Mould, by all accounts
a private person, wanted this interview to take; in print, he says
the word "freak" six times. Instead of the down-to-earth rock star
he came off as in the first half of the story, here he comes off as
completely paranoid and petulant.
But of course, he has every right to such feelings. "The fact
that I’m supposed to make outrageous statements to gain more column
space in music publications is insulting," he tells Cooper, but
Mould, who of course had no idea how Cooper would handle this
story, didn’t know the half of it. Check out this set up:
"(He) and I head to the den, pull up two chairs to the coffee
table, and warily study the tiny skyscraper of my microcassette
recorder.
"’OK let’s go for it.’ Mould blinks at the recorder’s red light,
then sits back in his chair and looks off into the distance."
Self-indulgent horseshit, wouldn’t you say? The only thing
missing from that little excerpt is scene-heightening mood music in
the background.
Needless to say, I was pissed off. So I turned to the section of
the magazine in which they supply a bio and a picture of that
month’s contributors; I wanted to find out who this fugitive from
intelligent journalism, this Dennis Cooper, was.
I didn’t find out much about Dennis Cooper, but I did find this
deeply-felt synopsis of his interview: Bob Mould would like
everyone to know that he’s not a freak.
Mould doesn’t have to tell me. He probably doesn’t have to tell
you, either. He does however, have a few things to say to Dennis
Cooper and Spin. Would that they would listen.
* * *
I got to thinking about Mould’s Spin feature when Michael Stipe
was outed in Details, though to give credit where credit is due,
that was handled far more gracefully (They: So do you sleep with
men and women? Stipe: Yeah). And when Jann Wenner was outed
recently by a New York publication (he left his wife for a man), I
decided the time had come to write this article.
In these foul O.J.-Nancy Kerrigan-Menendez brothers times, I
don’t have to make too fine a point of what exploitation is. We all
know the cliché of the age of celebrity, that we live in a
country where most people care far too much about the lives of
superstars than the people that are supposedly close to them.
But the exploitation of people like Bob Mould and Jann Wenner is
something different. It’s not the "Hard Copy" brand exploitation
with which we are all familiar. It’s a different kind: It’s PC
exploitation, an exploitation that comes to you with a sad smile on
its face, pats you on the knee, promises you everything’s going to
be OK and then turns around and makes you look like a freak in
Spin. It co-opts you into being things you don’t want to be: a
spokesperson, a role model, a media scapegoat for the greater good.
Everything but a human being.
There are many rock stars who have written about what it means
to be gay: homosexuals (Tom Robinson), heterosexuals (Suede’s Bret
Anderson) and a few undetermined (David Bowie, whose ’80s
detraction of his ’70s proclamation "I’m gay and I always have
been," earned him Esquire’s Homophobe of the Year award). Since
sexuality is the subject of much of their work, it makes sense for
interviewers to explore the subject further.
By the same token, there are many public figures  Roy Cohn
is the obvious example  who have taken hard lines against
homosexuality, while being gay themselves. By all means,
particularly when they are in a legislative position as Cohn was,
these people should be taken to task.
But Bob Mould, Michael Stipe and Jann Wenner fall into neither
of these categories. The first two, both songwriters, have never
addressed gay issues, at least not with a conscious effort, in
their song writing. The latter, the founder of Rolling Stone
magazine, has been long known for his open-minded, left-wing
politics.
These men deserve their privacy. If Bob Mould, or anybody else,
decides to parade his life around, become a spokesperson and write
songs about what it means to be gay, he’ll choose that time. But
for anybody to decide that for him or anybody else is, quite
simply, wrong.
"I’m not (the gay community’s) spokesperson," Mould told Cooper.
"I write songs, I’m a storyteller. I don’t think, ‘Hey, is it time
to write a gay happy song … ‘ Who in their right mind thinks like
that? I don’t. I expect to be judged on how I treat other people
and how I carry myself as a human being."
On Sugar’s Internet page, there is a section where a list of
commonly asked questions about the band are answered. One of them
is this:
"What is the sexual orientation of the band members?"
The answer: "For some mysterious reason, everyone seems to be
interested about this. The band isn’t, and we aren’t either."
My sentiments exactly.
Tatum’s column appears every Wednesday.