It’s not an exaggeration to call Lynn Breedlove one of America’s most important queer artists and most influential living storytellers. From his formative career as the lead singer of seminal dyke punk band Tribe 8 to his work as a trans activist in San Francisco founding the nonprofit rideshare service Homobiles, to his Lambda Literary Award-winning book and solo stage production Lynn Breedlove’s One Freak Show, Breedlove has used a singular voice to tell queer stories for over 30 years.
(Photo Credit: Daniel Foerste)
When my Dad and his wife were murdered by my stepbrother, I didn’t start writing, I kept writing. I always wrote. Wake, caffeinate, write, walk. I worked on a memoir, went to band practice. Then my COMMANDO bandmates said, let’s make an album with just you and us. Andy Meyerson, the percussionist, and Travis Andrews, the guitarist, were two highly skilled musicians who deftly handled five of us vocalists, across the front of the stage and off it, with all our conflicting styles and needs. So I agreed. We called the project Trust Me, and the album Why I Like Dead Guys after the complicated feelings of the last song, on a love-hate relationship with men.
We made an album that started with a letter to my stepbrother. It’s full of love, anger, snark, and attends to the confusion that results when one family member takes out others. Musically there’s the lullabye-ish intro, then Hoagy Carmichael’s “Stardust,” an allusion to the last line about trying to remember what my dad sounded like when I’d ask him to whistle while we counted shooting stars. A lot of how I work is non-linear, and yet, I wanted that image to be followed by the “Stardust” motif, because that was specifically what I asked my dad to whistle. But Andy and Travis are very anti-nail-on-the-head, so they put it in the break early on in the song. I like it that way. Their work keeps me from being Captain Obvious and makes the funny funnier and the heartbreak achier.
Are these songs? Stories? Life defies what’s expected and familiar. So does this genre. I usually either tell a tale or yell a song. This is more of a quiet shattering. A friend called it a nonchalant sledgehammer.
That’s cool.
The next to the last piece is a letter to my dad, where there’s a line that says I know he didn’t beg or flinch at the moment of death. That was how my parents taught me. All of them went through some shit. But they were fearlessly chill. One time on a backpacking trip, my dad was taking pictures of a bear as it rushed him on its hind legs. He just kept clicking away because it was an awesome photo op. Right before the bear got to my dad, it dropped down on all fours and walked away, when it saw this guy was not going to be intimidated. Later Dad said, “Hmm, guess that could’ve gone sideways.”
My mom went through a gnarly war. She spent her life trying to understand and take responsibility for what Germans did. My stepmom had a traumatic childhood and yet did her best to raise three sons, even though one kept threatening to kill her.
I’m like them too.
Grief is a domino effect. One releases others, as well as joys, memories. I lost, many times before, many gorgeous humans, and I got through it. I’m a member of multiple high risk groups: punks, bike messengers, addicts, queer and trans people. A lot of my friends died. So homages make sense, not just for my dad and stepmom who never got a proper memorial because it was COVID, but for all the people who didn’t get that.
Most of these pieces are not how people died, but how they lived, There’s “A Tale of Two Boys,” about Rick, the coolest kid at school I grew up with and tried to be like. Mike Brinson, another boy I hung out with who turned on me but all the while taught me to be a man, from bikes to fist fights. There was a girl l had a crush on who was straight, rich, and strung out. It was doomed. The only thing that died was hope. There are young men who lived with integrity and died for it. There’s a small dog who left when Mom did because it was his job to accompany her. That one kills me.
Whenever Trust Me performs Why I Like Dead Guys, it becomes a gathering to meditate on loss, to tell a funny story while leaning on a shoulder and remember how friends and family inspired us.
I’m just a story teller whose job it is to incite a pit and make you laugh or yell. This one feels riskier. With Andy and Travis, I can afford to get quiet. It’s easy to flail and shout, but I’m already good at that. Always plenty to be pissed off about.
We could all use a quiet approach right now. I love talking to whoever comes up after the show. Usually they’re hyped and sweaty. But to see them tearful, happy, relieved, healed, ready to feel in order to fight back, is profound.
