Whatever Happened to Dying With Your Mask On If You’ve Got To?
Notes from an Immunocompromised Music Fan
Originally published in print in Cripple Punk Mag 3.
In July 2021, I broke my leg and one of my best friends died. In December 2021, I was diagnosed with an autoimmune disease. In May 2022, I got into emo music again.
As a fourteen year-old, I’d been devoted to the mall emo bands of the 2000s as much as any other teen destined to discover they were transgay in the future, but I was never really into the scene. Looking up LiveJournal band primers was as close as I got. I had not yet figured out how to keep track of that kind of social signaling. As I got older and bands broke up or went on hiatus, my interest waned for a time.
Something about the past year has made it come back alive for me. Maybe something about my shifting gender, the wear of the pandemic, and the loss of friends makes the almost- childish raw expressiveness of pop-punk and adjacent genres a comfort. I spent all of May and June listening to Gerard Way’s “Action Cat,” the echo of “Do you miss me? ’Cause I miss you’’ in my headphones. I started watching livestreams of the My Chemical Romance tour and felt fireworks go off in my head at the high of going on new antidepressants and seeing Gerard Way in funny little costumes. I bought tickets to see them at the nearest tour stop.When I started rabidly telling anyone I could about My Chem, my friend who is one of those people with an encyclopedic knowledge of indie music told me I might like an emo act called Proper.
I listened to “Jean,” a song about an old friend dying in immigration detention, and sobbed to the feeling of “I always thought I’d see you again eventually” howled over a massive guitar riff.
I don’t intend to belabor the usual alt kid of color representation politics lament, but I was surprised and pleased to learn Proper is queer-fronted and all-Black. It’s not so hard to find incredible pop-punk/emo/post-hardcore etc bands these days that are gayer and transer and more ethnic than the majority of the mall emo scene had been in its prime.
See, like what is probably 30% of My Chemical Romance’s fanbase, I am a transmasc who relates to Frank Iero. The usual reasons apply–he’s short and irreverent, but he’s also chronically ill. His interviews and solo lyrics are dotted with references to his lifetime of constant nausea, fatigue, and stomach issues. He’s played a show with an oxygen mask and a clock pendant Sharpied with “TIME TO GET ILL.” He is, by all accounts, immunocompromised too. And I watched as he, alongside his bandmates, shed their masks and toured massive arenas. Simply being ill does not create any kind of solidarity with other ill people. Identifying with celebrities always requires some measure of cognitive dissonance anyway. This is just a particularly painful sort.
On a smaller scale, the state of things is easier to understand in some ways. If you are in an indie band and it’s impossible to make enough money to survive off streaming, you need to tour.
If you have no choice but to be exposed to unmasked people at work and on public transit and via your children, why not do risky things that make life enjoyable? In other ways, for people and bands and scenes closer to understanding ordinary life, a lack of care gets harder to understand.
I went to a show in October. Pinkshift, an all-POC punk band with unusual technical chops and incredible live energy, was playing a tiny venue in town. The venue policy required masks and proof of vaccination. I had the best time. Even perched on a stool in the back, feeling the crowd’s energy while I screamed along and banged my cane to the beat was transcendent. It was the most excited I’d felt in a year. It was stupid of me to go. No one checked for vaccine cards. My friends and I were some of the only people masking. Looking at the crowd of kids, it was hard to hate them. But it was also hard to feel like professed progressive politics and inclusive ethos actually amount to anything.
I don’t have an unusual experience. I would argue that becoming chronically ill in your twenties is a deeply normal life path for the kind of people punk music is supposed to be for. I broke my leg and lost my friend and all I got was lupus. Being autistic, transgender, and a child of refugees makes me a decent staging ground for trauma-mediated Weird Diseases, and I’m fairly well-off. Having physically stressful jobs, unstable housing, losing friends to suicide, and other demographically typical experiences makes the slow collapse of the body ever more likely. Immunocompromised people live among society’s re- exposed eugenic bones, and we don’t even have any good shows to see while we’re here.
This is a place that’s hard to end on. I could add some advice about mitigating and communicating about risk to make safer events, but it feels hollow at this point. I am a stranger to most of the people reading this piece. I am fortunate enough to have a community that is willing to keep accessibility in mind enough that I have a social and political life that sustains me outside of the music scene. There are immunocompromised people in your community, or immunocompromised people that could be in your community. The life that you can collectively give to them is up to you.
PS follow the People’s CDC for information on the Covid Pandemic, which is very much still ongoing