SPACE PUSSY

There aren’t many rock concerts where you can tell a friend, “Hold on a minute. I’m going down to the front to check on the gender of the drummer.” But last night’s performance by Space Pussy at Provincetown’s Crown and Anchor was one such concert. The band included a hot ’80s style keyboard player, complete with British school tie, Union Jack wristband, and eye-shadow, a lesbian bass-player with curly black mop-top and shapeless blue smock, a skinny, pale straight-looking (and awesome) electric guitar player and a drummer out of an acid trip: extremely tall, male, with a long, Cher-like wig and a red bikini outfit. Of course they did a cover of Psycho-Killer by the Talking Heads. The crowd was varied – a few hairy bears, a mosh-pit of sorts full of dykelings, grungy straight couples tonguing in the back, and a smattering of punky townies, exhausted from a summer of service jobs. Gay? Straight? The categories are blurring all the time. Pop? Rock? Heavy metal? The genres are as varied as the sub-sub-cultures. But we had a blast. For any gay kid who grew up on rock and roll, it was an assimilative epiphany – one of so many now occurring as the culture churns on. It’s on nights like this that I feel like I’ve seen the future of gay separatism and identity politics. There isn’t one.