By Larry Bob

SCENES AND BANDS don't have sex or gender; people do. Nonetheless, San Francisco does have what could be called, for lack of a better term, a queer rock scene. Tribe 8 and Pansy Division have boldly replaced the ambiguous pronouns of closety music for the better part of a decade, and the space they've created has widened thanks to a new generation of queer bands. Though the new bands aren't necessarily as polemical as first-generation queercore, it's not a case of returning to the closet: it's about even wilder variation beyond conventional identities. Most bands have members of at least two genders or sexualities; their vectors point in a multitude of directions, but the energy's not diffused, it's intensified.

Present day: atop a flashing disco floor at Kimo's on Polk Street, Leper Sex Killer on the Loose rally for "freaks together on the streets" in their anti-gentrification anthem "I Want My City Back." Another sharp-as-nails glam attack, "Rock'n'Roll Tranny," is their last complete song before the police arrive, bringing a premature end to the set.

What brought the police to Kimo's? Maybe a yuppie neighbor complained about the "noise." What brought me there? Having already passed 30, I'd been making a special effort to get out of the house and participate in what might be the last chance to live in San Francisco. My introduction to the current scene came in the spring of 1999. By May of the same year, the first time I went upstairs at Kimo's for a show, I'd already seen each band on the bill – the Subtonix, the Little Deaths, Clone, and Guillotine – at least once.

My entrée into the swirl was Reginald Lamar. I'd seen him perform sometime in the mid '90s at a Queers Together in Punkness event; I was part of Q-TIP, which put on all-ages shows at Epicenter. Sometime in 1997 Reginald approached me at the club called Baby Judy's, asking me to play piano for him. After we'd been performing together about a year, Reginald (who has also appeared under the names Ian Callas and the Grand Negress Godiva) put together a rock band called Guillotine that played an alchemical mix of opera and heavy metal. Seeing Guillotine (and the other bands on that killer bill) was my excuse for going to my first Kimo's show.

My old queer zine dictum "nothing should be assumed about anybody's sexuality – including yours" definitely still holds. I don't want to provide an endless catalog of possibly inaccurate speculations on the sexuality and gender of each member of every band: just take as faith that these bands play together, go to one another's shows, share members, put up each other's flyers, date each other, have occasional fallings-out and patchings-up. In short, they're a scene. Or maybe even something better: as Aaron Detroit of the Little Deaths says, "It's much more a community I'm involved with rather than a scene."

The Little Deaths have gone through various lineups, at one point coexisting as a superset of the (now-disbanded) trio Fighter D. The current members are vocalist Detroit, guitarist Claire Walsh, bassist Mikel Delgado, and drummer Scott Bradley. The Subtonix are a five-piece (Jessy Panic, bass and vocals; Jessie Trashed, sax; Brandi, keyboards; Cookie Tuff, drums; Jenny H., guitar) whose roots are more new wave than glam and whose performances utilize fake-blood theatrics. Although one member of Clone used to be in 7 Year Bitch, Clone sounds nothing like that group – electronic effects nightmarishly warp singer Xtra Schneider's voice. Guillotine, unfortunately, have broken up.

Since seeing those four bands at Kimo's, I've been to more than 40 different live shows and club nights, all the while meeting people. Nearly everyone is in more than one band or has some sort of side project. Jenny H. is in four bands. For the no wave-esque Erase Errata, she sings and occasionally picks up the trumpet, accompanied by drummer Bianca, guitarist Sara, and bassist Ellie. On the song "Marathon," while Jenny plays trumpet, Ellie holds down the strings with her fingers and hits them edge-on with the pick, making a keyboard-like sound. Jenny plays guitar and sings for California Lightening, a duo with drummer Bianca. And she now plays guitar for the Subtonix. (Original guitarist Colleen All Cars is recording solo.) And she plays keyboards for Girls in Trouble, a duo with Jesse, who's also got a solo project called Lezbot Rhythmbox.

Names like Guillotine, Clone, and Leper Sex Killer on the Loose prove this scene has a more horror-tinged vision of sex and society than the early-'90s queer acts. When I first saw Leper Sex Killer, they were a two-piece acoustic guitar duo (Tracy Lourdes and Annie), but they've since gone electric, mutating into a four-piece with the addition of Wesley on drums and Roxy Monoxide on bass. Roxy also sings and plays guitar in the Floating Corpses, along with bassist Frog and Annie on drums; some of their songs first debuted as solo material that Roxy played on acoustic guitar at the spoken-word showcase Kvetch and at a queer night at Oakland's Stork Club.

Bands may be multiplying, but San Francisco's music venues are disappearing one by one. There's a lack of all-ages places in the city. In Berkeley, Gilman Street provides one option, and Jenny H. runs Club Hot in Oakland, hosting occasional shows in the warehouse space where she lives. Besides the live action, there are several recorded-music nights, such as Skid Marx in the Tenderloin. Despite visits from the police – who photographed that criminal device known as a turntable – the Cud Club and Detention have found a home at the embattled Coco Club.

Some online resources have helped nurture the scene. Chainsaw, the pioneering queer rock label run by Donna Dresch, has a Web site (www.chainsaw.com) that's a source of news and gossip – though the hope is the gossip won't be vicious now that new software has made posting less anonymous. The New York- and Germany-based Heartcore Records has a similar site (www.heartcorerecords.com). There's also a queer-punk e-mail list, and I do a Web site (www.holytitclamps.com) that lists bands on tour and San Francisco queer events and sends out announcements on a weekly basis.

The bands are still largely unrecorded. Demo tapes exist, but this is not a monetarily rich scene: most people in it work at record or clothes stores, not as computer nerds. There isn't a surplus of money around to press vanity CDs; daily survival is more of a concern. Nonetheless, the Little Deaths and Fighter D both have had CDs released by Heartcore Records. Inconventient Press and Recordings will be putting out a 7-inch by Erase Errata and a split 12-inch featuring Girls in Trouble. Last, but definitely not least, Aaron Detroit has been planning a compilation record called No Love to document the local scene: many of the bands mentioned in this article will be featured on it.

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