Inside Music is a podcast about the lives of professionals in the music business. Each week, host James Shotwell chats with an artist or industry tastemaker to learn how anyone can navigate the world of entertainment.
On this episode of INSIDE MUSIC, host James Shotwell calls Punk Out founder Michael McCarron for a conversation about the state of the world today and what can be done to make everything a little bit better for everyone. Michael’s role in the alternative music world is more important now than ever, and we hope the release of this episode inspires you, the listener, to get more involved in your local music community. There is also some talk of weddings, Warped Tour’s upcoming cruise, and more. If you hate politics you might not like this episode, but don’t worry – another conversation will follow next week.
The music you hear in this episode is taken from the soundtrack to the new film La La Land, which opened in theaters on December 9.
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Anyone who has spent more than a few days browsing our content will have no doubt noticed a number of contributions from the fine folks at Punk Out. You may or may not be aware of this, but Punk Out is not a music blog. Okay it is, but it’s not a music blog that typically features news and reviews. Punk Out exists for a much greater purpose, which we at Haulix believe is very important and today PO founder Michael McCarron is going to tell us the origin story of the organization.
I became really good at hiding in my own skin. I mean, ”date a girl for 4+ years” good. For most of my life, though, I was living this little game where I’d say all the right things, kiss all the right people, do all the right mind-numbing drugs. But eventually, that schtick fell flat, that “passion” got called out, and those decisions drove me into the ground. It took 18 years (six of which I spent rocking out in the dank VFW halls peppering the outskirts of the Philly metro area) for me to pull the plug on who I was. It took another two years for an upgraded model to be plugged back in.
Six years later, and I’m still surprised there was even an updated model of me available.
At Punk Out, we believe in one simple mantra: Louder. Prouder. We aim to connect and support LGBT+ musicians and fans through the music they create and love. We see connections (real, flesh-and-blood connections) as an avenue for tangible change. See, here’s how it works: when musicians feel empowered to share their experiences, they serve as microphones able to amplify our message of inclusion and respect to their fans—far better than any blog post or Facebook status. But how do we empower musicians? By creating a support network where musicians feel as if they are equals amongst their peers, regardless of their sexual orientation and/or gender identity.
Here’s the thing though: that support network, that diverse community adhering to a set of core values, that doesn’t exist in our scene’s current incarnation. But those core values are what we’re working on creating. We see a music scene that encourages musicians to express themselves organically. We see a scene where our straight and cisgender peers support our queer peers and enforce the mores of inclusion and mutual respect. We see a scene that embraces diversity of all stripes. And we see a scene that provides the helping hand needed when so many of us fall down.
Punk Out is not the panacea. But we hope to help develop the music community we all deserve. We can’t do it alone though. It’s easy to toss out idealistic rhetoric and to promote a positive agenda. And it’s even easier to tear down others when they slip up. You can talk a big game, but armchair activism only takes you so far. Ask yourself, what are you doing to improve the community you owe so much to? Are you out there pushing back when someone spits bullshit homophobic nonsense at a random kid at a show? Are you giving money to bands or labels who promote inclusiveness and empathy? It starts with taking a good hard look in the mirror because real change is going to come from the individual level.
This is an amazing time in our music community, despite what some may tell you. Do we have problems? Undeniably so. But the future looks bright. Hell, if you asked me when I was a teenager if I ever thought I’d feel secure enough to be an out gay man, let alone start a queer organization in our music scene, I would have scoffed at you. But here I am. All I want in life is for others to feel the same sense of comfort in being who they are and in writing music about what they’ve truly experienced. No filter. No pronoun switches. No apologies. We, as a community, need to pull together to encourage everyone to feel safe and secure. Because being who you truly are—that’s punk as fuck.
Michael McCarron is the founder of Punk Out. For more information on his efforts, please visit the organization’s official website.
I woke up at 5 AM on a summer morning to the sound of rain pounding on my windowsill, building in intensity by the second. Two hours later, I arrived at Manhattan’s Webster Hall, armed with ponchos, umbrellas, and enough food to survive an apocalypse. Despite the torrential downpour, I took a rush hour train, navigated the subway system by myself for the first time, and walked in circles in NYC’s East Village just to sit outside of the venue for 12 hours.
Nobody seemed to understand. Passerby’s stared at me as I sat alone on a city sidewalk with the bitter wind chill and rain drops soaking through my clothes and into my skin. My mother called me every 20 minutes with a sense of worry and confusion in her voice, wondering why her child would do something so crazy. My friends rolled their eyes when I told them where I was…and they all asked, “Why?”
Why did I want to wait half a day to see the band PVRIS? It is because concerts give me the self-confidence that I have been unable to find in any other section of my life. Being in that crowded venue allots me a few hours to be myself, but the waiting in line and finding new friends can be just as exciting.
As the line wraps around the block, I share my ponchos with a few fans who soon become friends. The small talk slowly turns into conversations usually shared with best friends after months (maybe even years) as trust is built up. Before I know it, we are exchanging stories of middle school bullies who left us crying on the bathroom floor and how it fueled our internal fire to become better than those broken fragments.
Suddenly, all the weight on my shoulders is lifted. How is it that these people who were just strangers a little while ago are the reason I feel less alone? I can’t even begin to tell you about the relief that comes from knowing that someone else has fought off the same demons as yourself. The concert community taught me not to be ashamed of the nights I spent questioning who I was or the petty mistakes that I kept hidden in the depths of my chest. And to think, all this empowerment before I even step inside the venue!
Once the wave of darkness overtakes the sweaty room, the real magic happens. For me, this isn’t the music. It’s those brief moments in between where the drummer and guitarists are tuning their instruments and the vocalist has to entertain the rambunctious crowd. While I’ve had a plethora of amazing encounters during these fillers, a few have sent chills through my bones despite the blazing heat created by being in close contact with sweaty kids.
Since this all started with PVRIS, it only makes sense that I talk about Lynn Gunn. In a music scene lacking in female representation, Gunn is the much needed bright light–even though she wears only black–that will inspire a younger generation of girls to pick up a guitar. Watching her on stage, I am mesmerized. Not only by her impeccable vocals, but by the confidence she has in herself that somehow makes me feel just as secure in myself. As someone who has struggled with identity for way too many years, there’s some comfort in seeing an openly gay female musician proudly sing a song she wrote for her girlfriend (Love, Robot vocalist and fellow role model Alexa San Román.) People say it gets better, but I only actually felt the potential for things to improve after seeing someone who has probably gone through similar tribulations and emerged on the other side.
Speaking of “the other side,” I must also bring up Tonight Alive vocalist Jenna McDougall. Like Gunn, McDougall transforms a concert from a night filled with music into one of hope and fading feelings of self-doubt. She doesn’t use the lulls in a set to just interact with the crowd, but to inspire them. On the Future Hearts Tour this past spring, McDougall adopted a mantra: “From this day, I refuse to live in fear of someone else’s judgement.” I may have been to a few shows on that tour, but the words hit just as hard each time. When she repeats this phrase with passion and asks the audience to recite it back, I scream it while tuning out the world around me. It’s one thing to hear someone else say it, but hearing the sentence roll off my tongue actually makes me feel and believe every single word.
Before discovering concerts, I was always a quiet, soft-spoken kid who hated seeing that reflection in the mirror. Then music came crashing in and welcomed me into a new world where I was encouraged to wear those pizza converse my friends made fun of me for and where nobody cared who slept on the left side of my bed. From the petty to major things, concerts gave me the confidence take the person I was inside the venue and bring her into the light of day.
I will forever be grateful for the songs, band members, and music-obsessed friends who broke through my thick skin and pulled out a person I never knew existed. Because of these events, I can look at myself and smile, because I love me just the way I am and I no longer live in fear of anyone’s judgement.
Emma stumbled into the music journalism field when she saw an ad for a blog in need of writers. Since that day in January 2015, she has been a founding member of the team over at ShuffleBeatMusic, a blog that interviews musicians and reviews shows. While cataloguing the success of performers helps her to stay engaged in the scene, Emma’s dream is to some day be on the other side of the industry. A self-taught musician who plays drums, guitar, bass, and keys, she has just recently formed the band Heartless Bones and hopes to grace the stages of Warped Tour someday. Of course, there must always be a backup plan. Emma is currently studying Public Relations and music business at Hofstra University in Hempstead, New York. Wherever life leads her, it will always circle back to music.
On this episode of INSIDE MUSIC, host James Shotwell shares two recent conversations with two influential industry personalities. One is working to bring attention to LGBT issues and build discussion around equality within the music community, while the other is a beloved alternative musician whose new project offers a unique take on modern indie music.
The music you hear in the intro to ‘Inside Music’ this week is “No Friends” from Off & On. You can learn more about that song, as well as the album it hails from, on the band’s official website.
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I hope this shocks you as much as it still shocks me…and I’ve been privy to these statistics for several years now: 40% of all homeless kids and teens in the United States identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and/or queer (LGBTQ), while less than 3% of the general population identities under the queer umbrella.
Think about that for a second: Forty percent.
To put that in perspective, imagine the uproar if you went to a Taking Back Sunday show and 40% of their set was New Again tracks. There’d be a mutiny! But meanwhile, on the streets of America, queer kids and teens sleep under blankets on sidewalks, beg for food, sell their bodies, become ensnared in substance abuse, and fall victim to rape and other unspeakable forms of violence. Sure puts the angst of The Story So Far in proper perspective.
Now, in fear that this becomes the pop-punk equivalent of a Sarah McLachlan commercial, I’ll get to my point: LGBTQ youth homelessness is at epidemic levels and our scene should care about it.
Here’s why. These queer kids on the streets are us. They are our age. They are our generation. And they often come from similar fucked-up home lives as we do. That fucked-up home life is why many of us gravitated to some slice of the punk community to begin with: to escape the isolation, the judgment, the anger, and/or the fear of being different.
In recent years we’ve seen a substantial increase in the amount of queer kids and teens becoming homeless. Why? Well, it’s complicated, but the simplest explanation is that increased LGBTQ youth homelessness is a product of a false sense of security. As our society has made progress on queer issues (Marriage Equality, employment protections, etc.), the media’s coverage of the LGBTQ community has become rosier and rosier. Closeted kids see this positive coverage, assume it’s safe to come out, and then find out ex post facto that their support network is as weak as the ties that bind Tom DeLonge to Blink-182. Queer kids get abruptly kicked out of their homes and are forced to live on the streets without any street smarts or knowledge of the resources available to them. And then there’s the whole “most homeless shelters are run by religious organizations” thing, which makes it way more difficult for LGBTQ kids to find the queer-specific resources they need (but that’s a box of shit I do not wish to unpack at this moment.) So the cycle devolves into all the terrible symptoms associated with youth homelessness: sexual abuse, rape, substance abuse, criminal activity, stunted educational development, lack of employment opportunities, etc.
These kids could be in the pits of a Beartooth show. And they might be. But I’m guessing that, for the most part, they are not.
So, what can we do? Well, there’s a lot. It starts with building a more inclusive music community for all. It means tackling the rampant homophobia, transphobia, biphobia, and misogyny that wreaks living hell in our scene. It demands that musicians speak out about the plight of queer kids and teens. And this isn’t unprecedented. In the 1980s, one of the vogue musical celebrity causes was ending homelessness in the United States. We have precedence.
We need to support organizations such as The Ally Coalition, who work with local LGBTQ youth homeless recourse centers. We need to demand that more centers like the L.A. Gay & Lesbian Center’s Youth Center on Highland in Los Angeles or the Ali Forney Center in New York City receive adequate funding. And we need to take a fresh look at how we as individuals view kids and teens living on the streets.
This past April, we threw an awesome benefit show, headlined by the dudes in Gatherers, and raised several hundred dollars for Philly’s only LGBTQ youth homeless resource center, the Attic Youth Center. And we’re in talks to throw more benefit shows for the AYC in the coming months. We know the support is out there.
The punk community, in all its flavors, is about bringing outsiders together. The queer kids who live on the streets could easily be you or I. That’s why the punk community should care. Let’s use our music to bring homeless queer kids and teens under our roof.
Michael McCarron is the founder of Punk Out, a movement dedicated to fostering a culture change in regards to the LGBTQ community within the alternative music scene, to providing resources and support to those who are journeying through the “coming-out” process, and to encouraging musicians who identify as gay, bisexual, or transgender to be more visible. Click here for more information.
Hello, everyone! We are very happy to learn that you were able to find time in your schedule to spend a few minutes learning about the modern music industry. This post is a little different than our typical content, but the change was needed in order to properly explain the need for and importance of the company at the center of the story being shared.
This site exists to promote the future of the entertainment industry, and to do that we need input from people like you and your entertainment-loving friends. If you have any questions about the content in this article, or if you have an artist you would like to see featured on this blog, please contact james@haulix.com. We can also be found on Twitter and Facebook.
We have written a lot about the community and widespread digital family one gains when they enter the music business, but we have admittedly done a poor job of highlighting the people who ensure that sense of universal acceptance is guaranteed to everyone who enters the world of entertainment. We all know there will likely always be people who do not agree with or condone the way other people try to live their lives, regardless of the fact the way that other person lives their life has no impact on the first person’s existence, but fortunately for all mankind more and more people are open to the idea of universal acceptance with each passing day. We wanted to make it a point to highlight the efforts of one person working hard to make sure people not only feel welcome in music, but that people who do judge others question the motivations behind their actions, and after a bit of research we knew Michael McCarron was the person we needed to meet.
You may know Michael McCarron from his various roles around the music business over the last few years, but in recent months its been his work with the organization Punk Out that has made the biggest impact on the industry as a whole. Punk Out, as you will soon learn, is dedicated to connecting and supporting lesbian, gay, and transgender, as well as questioning (LGBTQ) musicians and fans through the alternative music scene. We asked Michael to talk about all of this, the reason such a group is needed in music today, and the story behind how he became involved in this project. It took a while, but he eventually came back to us with a brilliant editorial that is both moving and deeply inspiring. You can read his words below.
I’m gay and before I came out swingin’ from a South Philly basement, I honed my homo sensibilities on the mean streets of suburban Philadelphia in the early 2000s. I flew my queer flag high, rocked the rainbow scarf even on hot summer days, and I threw some ‘bows in the pits of local Lansdale basement shows. The Scene was my home and it welcomed me and my queerness with open arms.
Actually, that is an utter fabrication of my teenage years. In reality I was a deeply closeted kid who hid behind long hair. I was ridiculed by classmates for wearing a Hawthorne Heights shirt, presumably because their emotional music was equated with femininity, and gosh, that’s a horrific crime. And my trips to Lansdale basements involved heteronormative acts, such as engaging in your run-of-the-mill ridicule of “fan girls,” as well as a prayer that I would not be outed for what I was and am. The Scene that I used in order to scaffold my sanity from my insecurities, frustrations, and fears was simply not welcoming to kids like me. As I learned more about this de facto segregation, I dug deeper and deeper into the closeted abyss. I was forced to hide from the most central support system I relied on. The irony was all too apparent to my adolescent mind. It was devastating.
Age has a way of distancing us from what seemed inevitable, and looking back I see that there were points of intervention that could have changed a lot of my typical adolescent story. Like many people, I used music to cope with my insecurities and looked to the alternative music scene for acceptance when it seemed like no person or institution would accept me. But the Scene screwed me over. It did not accept me.
Looking back I can’t help but think what if? What if I knew Buddy Nielsen of Senses Fail was struggling with a lot of the same shit I was struggling with. Or that Laura Jane Grace was battling her own society-stamped identity? What if I knew my idols got it? How much more confident would I have been? Would I have told Steve from Biology class that I thought he was cute? Would I have reported my high school gym teacher for calling a classmate “gay” after he was unable to do a full pull-up? I can’t be certain without an ounce of doubt…but I might have. That is why this past March I started Punk Out.
Punk Out is an organization dedicated to connecting and supporting lesbian, gay, transgender, and questioning (LGBTQ) musicians and fans through the alternative music scene. We believe that musicians have a unique opportunity to do good and to influence youth culture because they have a stage and capture the attention of the youth unlike any other individuals present in a youth’s life. Kids often come to embody their favorite music and musicians. We believe that when musicians speak out, they make an impact no other individual can make. That is why we want musicians who identify as LGBTQ to be proud and visible. We encourage musicians who identify as LGBTQ to come out and be proud of who they are, for when musicians do this, their fans might find the courage, where practical, to do the same. Yet, what many forget is that these same musicians lack many of the supports necessary in order to come-out that their closeted fans lack. This is where Punk Out comes in. We hope to be that support network for both musicians and fans. We’re all in this together.
Starting an LGBTQ organization that is intertwined with the alternative music industry and predicated on encouraging musicians to come-out of the closet poses three unique challenges. First and foremost is finding musicians who identify as queer and convincing those musicians to take a stance that may involve personal challenges or risks but will better the Scene overall. It is a difficult sell, especially when there are a limited number of role models for those musicians to emulate. It takes tremendous courage and strength to come out in whatever community you frequent, but in the alternative music scene, a scene that is all too commonly misogynistic and homophobic due to the a need to be seen as tough, the strength and courage needed is amplified. Second, I created Punk Out because there were no similar resources already in place. This brings the obvious challenges of not being able to imitate the achievements of like-minded organizations. Our workaround was, and is, to study the successes and struggles of other organizations, such as To Write Love On Her Arms, in order to find parallels between what they are doing and what Punk Out is aiming to do. The third challenge is one any founder and director of a volunteer organization can sympathize with: finding people with enough time to devote to your cause. Punk Out demands a lot of time, and when you are running an organization that is based on volunteerism, finding highly qualified and skilled individuals to volunteer their efforts on a consistent basis is difficult. Punk Out is a labor of love…with the emphasis on labor.
Punk Out was born out of a need to aid a desperately underserved community within the alternative music scene. It was born to accomplish a personal vision and attain a universal goal. But there is so much more to do. We see a future where all people, regardless of gender and/or sexual identity, are welcome to mosh in the pits of every pop-punk, hardcore, and metalcore show. We see a future where there are hundreds of Laura Jane Grace’s, Buddy Nielsen’s, Tyler Carter’s, Drew Justice’s, Tegan Quin’s, Sara Quin’s, and Phoenix Arn-Horn’s. We see a future where kids who are queer flock to the alternative music scene because of its acceptance of LGBTQ people. We are Punk Out and together we sing.
Michael McCarron is the founder of Punk Out. For more information on his efforts, please visit the organization’s official website.
