The Secret Life of Transgender Rocker Tom Gabel
The frontman of the aggro-political punk crew Against Me! has always known he was really a woman. Now he's becoming one.
By Josh Eells
May 31, 2012 11:05 AM ET
http://www.rollingstone.com/music/news/the-secret-life-of-transgender-rocker-tom-gabel-20120531On a warm Friday evening at the end of March, the artist soon to be formerly known as Tommy Gabel is walking through Manhattan on his way to meet one of his biggest fans, a 23-year-old woman named January Hunt. When Hunt was 16, she saw Gabel play a show and wrote him a long, impassioned fan letter about how he'd changed her life.
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The song that helped change January's life is called "Searching for a Former Clarity," a ballad tucked at the end of the band's 2005 record. The lyrics are about a man who's dying of what sounds like AIDS; midway through, Gabel sings:
And in the journal you kept by the side of your bed... Confessing childhood secrets of dressing up in women's clothes / Compulsions you never knew the reasons to
The song resonated with January so intensely because it was her story, too. As a transgender teenager in suburban New York, Hunt put on dresses and high heels and painted her nails pink, never daring to tell her friends in the hardcore scene. When she heard Gabel's song that night, it was the first time a punk band's lyrics spoke directly to her experience. And when she showed up six years later to another Against Me! show, crowd-surfing like a champ in her red pencil skirt and shoulder-length blond hair, she had Gabel, in whatever small way, to thank.
