GAY PEOPLE'S Chronicle

NOVEMBER 27, 1998

Evenings Out

DRUGS

Free at last

Punk rocker Scott Free's new release is a blistering scream on AIDS and gay bashing

"You have to be my age to write an album like this. The function of AIDS and the way worked, people who are 21 years old couldn't have had experiences like that."

by Jeffrey L. Newman Chicago Scott Free prides himself on being forthright.

The thirtysomething, in-your-face punk rock singer is unapologetically blunt, both in his music and in his life-especially when it comes to the ravages that AIDS took on gay men during the last 18 years, and how homophobia continues to permeate society.

"I'm pissed off at what happened to us through the '80s. Our culture and our community's denial disturbs me. It doesn't seem like people wanted to deal with us. I don't know any gay man in his 30s who hasn't gone through the crap I sing about."

What he sings about, or rather screams about, on his self-produced, indie release

Getting Off, are songs that deal graphically

with death from AIDS and the ongoing discrimination that gay men and women experience from middle America.

One reviewer tagged it "truly one of the most disturbing, yet powerful gay recordings of the AIDS era.”

"I think this type of response is needed. I think these kind of blatant points of view are important to wake people up to the devastation of AIDS and the disease of gay bashing," says the singer, who himself is living with HIV. "I try to have a pretty melody every once in a while, but most of it is screaming. I think it's an appropriate response to what happened to us. I'm surprised there isn't more of it.”

One of the most haunting and moving songs on his blistering opus is "Walker," a

song inspired by the agonizing death of his ex-lover, who died from AIDS complications years ago. The graphically explicit song resonates with anger and a burning contempt for a society that rejected and isolated a man at his most vulnerable because he was both gay and living with AIDS.

"To me, the hardest part of it was how gross it is for someone to die from a disease.

"I really related to punk. It was so different then, from how it is now. It was really about the misfits-the people who didn't belong, which is how I felt.”

It's pretty awful to watch them and know what they are going through,” says Free.

"When my ex-lover was dying, I was the only one going to see him in the hospital," he adds. "When he died, I realized I was a nobody in the scheme of things. When it came to the funeral requests, I had no say. I was a nobody. The purpose of what I write about is just to show the grossness of it all. It's about the whole experience of watching someone die, and how traumatic that is."

Free says the need to make it so blatantly graphic was because he was fed up with the way other artists have prettied up the process of gay men with AIDS-most notably Angels in America and Rent.

"I wrote it that way to show the realism of

," he

the disease, instead of all those theater pieces that turn people with AIDS into angels, or 'take a look at what happened to me,' says. "I don't understand the angels analogy or the 'feel sorry for us' attitude. ACT UP should be the attitude. If you look at it, ACT UP is the only reason some of us are still alive. They changed that. They saved who knows how many hundreds of thousands of lives."

Born and raised in Chicago, Free played music throughout his teen years, and performed various kinds of music before settling into the punk genre. From gospel-he sang falsetto for Lavender Light, Chicago's people of all colors lesbian and gay gospel choir to house music (with some mild success in the Windy City); he tried it all.

But no matter what he dabbled in, he always found himself returning back to the screaming, harshness of the punk rock scene. "I remember having to go see the Sex Pistols when I was a kid. Even when I was way too young, I would figure some way to see them," he recalls. "I really related to punk. It was so different then, from how it is now. It was really about the misfits-the people who didn't belong, which is how I felt."

While he tried to give a mainstream career a shot-even going so far as to enroll as an industrial engineer major at Northwestern University outside of Chicago-his heart was never in it.

"I kind of went through the motions. I went along with things," he says.

"Still, the punk thing was still in me and I dropped out."

In the early 1990s he performed as Plaster of Paris at club host London Broil's twisted drag show Tuck at infamous Foxy's night-

club in Chicago. Then, in 1995, he performed with a punk trio at HomocoreChicago's fourth anniversary show.

Earlier this year, he pulled all the money he saved from his day job as a computer programmer to produce his own album.

Besides "Walker," the record is filled with equally haunting tales. Songs range from blatant male-to-male sexuality to gruesome descriptions of death from AIDS. The opening song, "Procreate," is a hardcore clashing of sound with lyrics that flip from an anonymous sexual encounter to a childhood memory to the current realities of AIDS. "When I Was Alive," is about his own struggle living with AIDS.

Free calls the album a frighteningly honest look inside the mind of gay-male America.

"This album is not about AIDS. It is about that hatred that brought about AIDS, the hatred that comes from uptight men who are secretly unsure of their own sexuality, the hatred from Christians who have the perfect way to vent their hatred—to just say 'God said so,' Free says. "In 'Procreate,' when I say 'We died for your sins,' I mean the sin of hatred. I'm sorry but I cannot forgive what this country did to its own, or at least allowed to happen to its own."

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He says the album is also a reflection of his age and being a gay man who came out during the onset of AIDS and in the middle of the Reagan homophobic years. Continued on page 12