Brontez Purnell: What Are You Waiting For?
AN ETERNITY AGO, the death of Little Richard reignited some debate around the Black queer image in contemporary music. In terms of visibility, we’ve certainly come leaps and bounds since the early days of Queen Richard. Survival is another story. But at that cultural nexus emerging from the Homocore movement of the ’90s, punk rock, and queer Black radicalism, a certain confluence of musicians, filmmakers, writers, and authors continue to find loud, destructive ways to make a living. One of those people is Alli Logout. A Texas-born twenty-seven-year-old musician and filmmaker based in New Orleans, Logout splits their time touring and recording as the frontperson for glam/no-wave punk outfit Special Interest and is also the cofounder of Studio LaLaLa, a Black- and trans-led production studio. I first became familiar with Logout’s underground films while hanging out with them at a punk festival in Chicago some years back, and was later reacquainted at a renegade rave thrown in a U-Haul during San Francisco’s Gay Pride not long after. We eventually conspired to shoot an homage to Maria Maggenti’s 1995 coming-of-age teen lesbian film, The Incredibly True Adventure of Two Girls in Love.
BP: How did you get into punk rock, Alli?
Alli Logout: I wasn’t raised on rock, or what I used to call guitar music. I was raised deeply on funk and hip-hop and rap, specifically Houston hip-hop. A lot of Swishahouse. But I was kind of interested in guitar music, and I had a girl from my soccer team make me an awful mixtape, like Fallout Boy and stuff. Then I met my first punk, Punk Patrick. We were at a Christian rock show at a church, and he was like, “Why do you like this shit?” And I’m like, “I don’t like it, but I like headbanging. And I like slamming. I just wish that there were more Black people.” And his jaw dropped. And he was like, “Um, did you know the founders of hardcore punk were all Black?” And I was like, “What?” And the next day he made me go over to his house, where he put on Bad Brains. And then it was over for me. I was sixteen.
When did the DIY bug hit you? When did you start going from a witness and a spectator to being like, Okay, punk is something I definitely want to participate in?
I was motivated out of spite. Once I started getting involved in the local scene, everybody was really white except for this one boy, who I ended up dating at one point. He was in a really sick band called Allah’s Infinite Justice. AIJ. And I knew that I could do it a lot better than all the white boys. I’m like, “What are they screaming about?”
I come from a really small town called Belton, where the older punk kids would rent out this old one-room schoolhouse in the middle of the woods and have these punk shows there. It was all an array of different kinds of punk and people, like the rednecks in Pantera, and the weird scene kids, and the spiky punks, and the nonracist skins who were actually racist, but you know . . . It was a small town and we were young. It was everybody weird coming into one place, and that’s always what punk was for me.
Did your queer identity and your punk identity start to unfold at the same time? Did they flow into one another? Or how did you reconcile these two identities?
For a minute, I felt like I really couldn’t be gay and punk at the same time. I was raised really religious, so I was quite repressed. In high school, everybody was being bisexual, and it would make me really frustrated because I knew I couldn’t participate. I guess it started with me and my punk friends going to raves for the first time. Big, massive raves where I could be gay, and we would go around and play this game where we would take a bunch of ecstasy and see how many people we could hook up with in a night. But punk became gayer for me once I finally started a band and I was out of my house for the first time, and it was like, “I am gay. I want the world to know I’m gay. I’m in this punk band and I’m fucking gay.” Like, somebody talk to me, please. I’m so alone.
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