On Sunday afternoon, I went to the first ever Off Sunset festival, a new street fair with music, culture, art, food that should repeat every year, to support beautification, art and youth programs with an emphasis on the LGBT community.
As one guy from the band Pansy Division said – and he may have been the only one on stage who was not gay – ‘I am going to report to my people, because people have too much fun on this other side of the fence’. Let’s just say that I had entered gayland and gayland population is about 95% male, probably peaking at 99% early afternoon. I was there for the bands of course but also for the street spectacle, and there was plenty of spectacle. Leather is the shit in gayland as everyone knows (there even was a Mr. LA Leather) but this year I couldn’t believe that everyone was wearing these uncomfortable leather bull dog harnesses around their chest… be careful, if gays are the fashion trendsetters we know they are, the S&M style will soon be in your next JC Penney catalogue.
A 99% male population? But where were all the lesbians? Oh, they were undoubtedly on stage, at least at the beginning of the afternoon when a lot of the first bands were fronted by women,… and they were tough women, man, they were tough.
The first band I saw, with the great name of Black Sabbitch, were a cover band, you’ve guessed it, an all-female Black Sabbath cover band. However they were so badass that they made the songs totally theirs, the charming frontman was built like a bodybuilder and wanted to eat us alive with her deep powerful vocal chords while making all kinds of body contortions on stage, the drummer was juggling with her sticks, and the guitar and bass players were amazingly cloning the great Sabbath in front of the crowd. It was beyond your average Ozzy homage, they were setting the stage on fire and they probably raised the already hot temperature of a few degrees while I was noticing that gay people knew all the lyrics of the songs.
Next, San Francisco’s Punx and his Hunx was the perfect fit for the colorful crowd, their punk, at times discordant, garage rock conquered everyone thanks to frontman Seth Bogart, who was embodying all kind of stuff with his stage antics and a homemade tight pant. On it, you could read everything from ‘Curious Britney Spears’, ‘Hannah Montana’, to ‘Justin over a Black Flag logo’… Actually, the band was mixing vintage girl group harmonies, bubble gum teenage pop with a real punk energy. What a ride! A riotous ride with ultra short songs, ‘Don’t call me Fabulous’, a ‘Bikini Kills’ t-shirt and a bass player with an eye for John Waters’ movie fashion… Bogart jumped in the crowd to caress a few heads and give a few hugs, and teenager puppy love had never feel so sweet-hot.
With Frightwig, we were back to tough females, the kind of girls you certainly don’t want to mess with! These furies had taken over all the instruments, guitars, bass and drums, and the guys were only allowed to play a very low-key keyboard or dance in boxers on each side of the stage, like accessory toy-boys exhibiting their most precious body part,… you’ll figure it out. These badass frightwigs had tamed the opposite sex for sure, and they played a wild set of rock-punk-psychedelia shouting ‘Man’s gotta do what he’s gotta do’, ‘Crazy World’, or ‘My crotch is not saying go’, if I understood correctly. While two of them were wearing leopard prints and glam rock outfits, the other one reminded me X’s Exene Cervenka, and Cecilia, the drummer, took the mic for the last song to give the most disheveled punk rock performance of the day.
