I write these lines with the latest solo work of Laura Jane Grace background. Its titled “Hole In My Head” (Polyvinyl, 24) and includes cuts like “Dysphoria Hoodie.” The dysphoria sweatshirt, a curious way to describe her anguish over the lack of correspondence between his biological sex and her gender identity. But the best way to put yourself in her shoes is to read this book –edited in Spanish by Altamarea in 2021 and now in Catalan Males Herbes– written hand in hand between Laura Jane Grace herself and the music journalist And Ozzi.
Originally published in English in 2016 and now translated for the first time into Catalan by the publishing house Males Herbes, this wonderful biography begins with our protagonist, born Tom Gabel, watching a Madonna video clip on the silly box. She was five years old and she wanted to be like that “Material Girl”, but that desire was short-lived. She understood that “it could never be her,” that he was just a kid living on a military base in Texas.
From this first memory we accompany Laura Jane Grace, who is who she always wanted to be, in her tortuous life journey, marked in her youth by shame and suffering, also by the consumption of drugs to silence what she then considered internal demons. . In strictly musical terms, we discover the impact that the publication of the “Dookie” of Green Day, his gateway to punk counterculture and bands like the British Crass, his favorite anarchists. He also recounts how he experienced the wrath of the punk Taliban when his band, Against Me!signs for independent labels such as No Idea and Fat Wreck and the interesting intrastory of his first album for a multinational, “New Wave”in 2007, a crucial episode in the career of the Gainsville band (now on an indefinite hiatus) in which another essential Ozzi book, “Sold”.
The name Against Me! It was a desperate cry of self-hatred that we only fully understood in 2012 when he explained in an interview for Rolling Stone that he had decided to begin the gender transition. Reading this book, which brings together fragments from the personal diary of that young man called Tom Gabel, we discovered that some lyrics from his first albums were authentic confessions, that some metaphors hid identity problems that no one took seriously. A very clear example is “The Ocean”, in which he sang that if he had had the choice, he would have been born a woman, and that her mother once told him that she would have called her Laura if she had been a boy. When the song was published in 2007, no one could imagine that years later he would be a transgender person and would become a prominent activist fighting for LGTBI+ rights.
Thus, I will not tire of recommending the reading of “Trans. Confessions of an anarchist and sold-out punk”now in Catalan, a very hard and radically sincere biography, a fascinating chapter in the history of punk rock.