Super Ego

'I USED TO get beat up to this song," you can usually hear me slurring to anyone in earshot on Sunday evenings as Van Halen's "Panama" or Mötley Crüe's "10 Seconds to Love" screeches from the bar's speakers. Hey, everyone needs a pickup line.

It's true that heavy metal can bring up mixed feelings in faggots who grew up in the late '80s. We all have vivid grade school flashbacks of acid-washed shaggies (or, weirder, pink-shirted prepsters) whaling on us for daring to wear horn rims – shaggies and prepsters whose lockers were plastered with Creem centerfolds, blushed and pouting heavy metal gods sporting outfits even an Alabama drag queen would retch over. Talk about contradictions.

A twisted young adulthood of tweaker therapy and a paddle-thick black book full of dungeon-happy daddies' digits cured me of my hard rock conflicts. I own my pain. Which is why Lisa Bang's Sunday hesher beer busts at that T.G.I. Friday's of leather-biker bars, the Hole in the Wall, are such a whiplash blast.

Bang, a vivacious quasi-femme whose sidelong glance darts from leather bitch dagger to kewpie doll query unnervingly quickly, started ButtRock Beer Bust with her gay husband, Chris Altman, and East Bay punk heartthrob Shauners last May. In the beginning their playlist was all Camaro-era whore-y chestnuts – heavy on the Crüe, Scorpions, and Poison – and the place went nuts. Word spread faster than a cough at an orgy, draining the nearby Eagle Tavern's regular Sunday beer bust of its younger patrons and drawing out a freak's worth of trucker-capped woodwork squeakers looking for the next post-ironic thing.

It was a pitch-perfect mockery of the then-current Hot Topic vogue for Guns 'N Roses tour jerseys and tiger-striped sling belts – or, for some, Torrid's mall-size bandanna-brimmed felt hats and leopard-print hose. When Shauners left to form his own trans-am band, Hostile Makeover, however, the crowd began to peter out – until Bang start waving that old black flag of X-ray Spec-tacular queer-friendly punk.

"The crowd was just more into a punker mix. I was running out of lipstick hesher songs to play – and the crowd at that time was tipping more toward Megadeth, anyway, though Twisted Sister still gets some shouts. I just found a butt-punk formula that works," she says. The former's overproduced sagas may have clocked in at more than nine minutes, but slick hard rockers left too few hedonistic gems behind to sustain forward movement, perhaps.

Screeching bands of adult male skeletons in spandex and liquid mascara – from a period of middle American history when gentlemen preferred permanents – seem natch for some subcultural reappropriation, especially in a bar scene where bathrooms stalls are known as headbanger ballrooms. Author John Leland's recently published tombstone on the grave of cool, Hip: A History, follows a timeline that conveniently elides this messy convergence of drag sensibility and overhyped machismo (as well as most of "gay American" history) in favor of a tech-clean '80s keyboard sheen – making hurricane-coiffed arena rockers doubly enticing to an underground starved for the as-yet unrediscovered, one would think.

But despite the ripe smell of Queen and Slade wafting from the hair band fun fur, promoters here have had a hard time sustaining interest in regular heavy metal club nights. Doug Hillsinger's wildly popular Thursday Night Live at the Eagle occasionally features bands who dig their chipped nails full-blast into heavy metal polish like (yay!) the Boyfriends and Pepper Spray (yawn). Club hero DJs Chicken John of Unisexy and Jef Leopard of everywhere else aren't afraid of a little smokin' in the boys room, and even the most punk rock of Gilman Street graduates think it's his or her god-given right to throw "(Cum on) Feel the Noize" into a warm-up set. No one denies the brief hesher blasts at the Zeitgeist's patio and Aunt Charlie's one-offs. Cult faves the Toilet Boys even take on the pyrotechnical Moby Dick of heavy metal, Great White, in their sold-out appearances.

But Bay Area clubbers haven't figured out a way to fully transform peacock masculinity to their tastes. We like our hip-hop Peaches-colored and our butt rock riding piggyback on the grunting hulk of punk. As the '80s recede further into pop culture mist, hipsters may forget that men in glittery tights once inspired a nation to homophobic rapture.

ButtRock Beer Busts take place Sundays, 3-6 p.m., Hole in the Wall, 289 Eighth St., S.F. $8. (415) 431-4695.

Thursday Night Live takes place Thursdays, 9 p.m., Eagle Tavern, 398 12th St., S.F. $5-$8. (415) 626-0880.