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"I can't decide if I'm the Rolling Stones and 'it's only rock and roll, but I like it,' or if I'm David Bowie, and 'I only do rock and roll so that I can do other things.'"

Tim Carroll is wearing a faux snakeskin codpiece as he says this, and nothing else above the knees. He looks into the mirror, pivoting on white vinyl, high-heeled nurse's boots, and squints, as if what he sees will help him choose between the famous Stones lyric and the Bowie quote.

"I think I'm the Stones," he says, finally. He flashes a jagged smile. "It's rock and roll, and I like it."

Tim Carroll is in a backroom of the Church, a studio art space in south Minneapolis, where his band, Faggot, is about to play a word-of-mouth concert on the night of May 26. The singer is a naked, pink tower of a man, with the beginnings of a gut and a salt-and-pepper buzz cut. He absently sings a Madonna song—"It's all an illusion/There's too much confusion"—and announces that he's a few months older than Madonna. Then he slaps his tummy. "I'm getting really fat," he says.

"Yeah, you are," says Jon Nielsen. The bearded drummer is a couple of decades younger than Carroll. So are the other two members of Faggot, frenetic guitarist Jason Wade and cool bassist Saira Huff, who have the lion-haired, pierced look of hardcore punk lifers. Everyone in Faggot plays in other bands except Carroll. "This was his first band, at 46," says Wade. "He's 48 now."

Carroll is eager to tell his story to City Pages, and as band members apply glitter and permanent marker, the frontman lobs random bits of information at this reporter.

"I was raised Catholic in Cleveland, Ohio," he begins. "We were nine generations of plumbers."

"Which is why he has the butt crack," says Wade, spanking him.

In the next 15 minutes, Carroll fires off the following "verifiable facts":

 

• "I sucked Henry Rollins's dick in 1981 on Vine and Selma, near Hollywood Boulevard."

• "I slapped Belinda Carlisle in the face before she was a Go-Go. She deserved it, though."

• "I don't have AIDS. I've tried. I've used IV drugs and sucked every AIDS homo I know. I don't get AIDS."

• "Our song 'You're Gay, You're Dead' is a true story. One morning in 2001, I woke up, and my lover of 17 years was dead on the couch."

• "See this scar right here? I took a razor blade to my arm one night. I was so high on meth, I thought the aliens were in there. I knew it. I was going to save the world."

 

The stories keep coming, and at least one requires a note of qualification here—Henry Rollins is on the record as saying he's never had a homosexual experience. As for the bouts of self-destruction and the tragic incident he mentions—

"That explains this," Carroll says, gesturing to his outfit. "Jon, do you think James would be pissed about the song ["You're Gay, You're Dead"]? I used to. But I'm sure he's laughing. He was such an egotist, he would have laughed."

 

Faggot take the stage of the deconsecrated chapel wearing very little and looking slightly like The Muppet Show band. Wade has whitened his mutton chop sideburns. Huff has reddened her skin and shredded her fishnets. Carroll has the word "faggot" written across his chest, with an arrow pointing to his crotch. "This is my song to America," he announces. "I love you, America. I was raised Irish Catholic in Cleveland, Ohio. Thank you." He has red makeup across his eyes, which makes him look like a Lakota warrior.

Then Faggot lunge forward with the song "Fuck You, Amerika!" and any hints of Muppetry evaporate. Wade and Huff relax into a Ramones stance, smiling at each other as they summon a monstrous, sensuous rock throb that assumes the shape of classic hairball rock, but with a skuzzy texture all its own—"heavy" rather than "metal," as Rollins once described Black Flag. Nielsen is a blur of arms, his long curls puffing into a near-Afro one minute into the song.

I have to admit, I've avoided seeing Faggot up to this show because of their name. Some classic punk bands such as the Dicks were open about their homosexuality, and queercore has more recently made a genre of it. The word "punk" itself was once homophobic slang. Today, though, simply calling your band "Faggot" signals transgression for its own sake, artiness, or worse, a gag. Yet Carroll's hilarious provocation is no joke. Grabbing his crotch, flailing like a surfer in a wind tunnel, he preens like some bogey nelly queen, the spirit of Stonewall come back to haunt the age of gay marriage. He's fearless, which endears him to strangers in the audience.

"I've gotta go fuck my groupies," he growls after the first song, hugging and kissing the tank-topped young rockers at the front of the stage.

Behind the band, the group's only "dancer" tonight (sometimes they have up to nine) begins grabbing and lifting up the male musicians. He's Michael Gaughan (pronounced "gone") of the bands NOW and Brother and Sister, and is better known in hip-hop circles as battle champion Ice-Rod. During the next song, as he prances around in near nudity, I can't help thinking that Ice-Rod would call this guy a "faggot."

It's weird: All week long, I've been talking to friends about homophobia in hip hop, and here's one of the best freestyle rappers in town saying, essentially, "Who cares?"

Faggot have this effect on inhibitions. One fan bounds onstage to announce, "If anyone wants to take their clothes off, get up here and go fucking crazy!"

Carroll mockingly sings the Jermaine Stewart song: "We don't have to take our clothes off to have a good time/Oh, yea/We'll drink the cherry wine—get your fucking clothes off, faggot!" His persona is that of a drill sergeant for sexual liberation.

"I'm 48 years old and I'm up here doing this in front of all you shy little people," he thunders. Then he tears into "Mongolian Beef" ("retards need to be fucked, too, dammit!"). No one streaks, but many dance around the band as Carroll humps a guitar amplifier.

The singer thanks the audience— "I hope you're cleaned out now"—and closes with "You're Gay, You're Dead," singing, "I woke up/I found you dead/You don't have AIDS/Why you so dead?" The song is idiotic, brilliant, funny, and sad:

You cannot breathe
When you are dead
You cannot breathe
When you are gay

If Carroll seems fearless, he's had more to fear than most people. "Do you want to know why I'm Faggot?" he asks me on the same night as the show, when we're alone. The humor has suddenly drained from his face.

 

"I'm Faggot because my friend was murdered in front of me in 1998. We were gay-bashed, and the whole time, the guy that was killing Brian was screaming at us, 'You want a piece of me, faggot? You want a piece of me, faggot?'

"Ever since then, I've thought, I'm not going to live the rest of my life with these nightmares of this man brutalizing me and killing my friend and screaming 'faggot' at us. For years, if I ever heard that word, I would cringe. I would even go into post-traumatic stress shock. So I'm not going to let him have the power. I'm going to take that word back."

According to news accounts, Edgard Mora, the man who caused the death of Brian Wilmes near a San Francisco leather bar in 1998, was convicted of a hate crime, adding two years to his three-year sentence for involuntary manslaughter. Carroll testified about the homophobic taunts at trial. Yet he had qualms about his role in the politics accompanying the case.

"I didn't ask to be the poster boy for hate crimes," he says. "I didn't even ask for this guy to come up and start beating us. I always felt weird about the whole thing. I felt like the city was trying to use me for an agenda."

Carroll is suspicious of anyone advocating on his behalf, and says he's never had anything handed to him. He was born in a farm town outside Cleveland, Ohio, and according to family lore, his father's response to the news that Mom was pregnant with him—her fifth child—was, "Jesus Christ, not again!" Faggot's "Have an Abortion" opens with the lines "Oh no/Not again/Have an abortion/I should have been."

With a few drinks in him, Carroll will call himself a "mook." He does a sort of hillbilly version of an Irish jig, and talks about his Catholic upbringing. "When I was 14, I got to suck the priest's dick," he says. "I'm not going to sue the church. I liked that guy's dick. I was in confession, it was great."

By the time he woke up to find his partner of 17 years, James Gilkison, dead on the couch in 2001, they had been through much together. Gilkison had given up acting in San Francisco to study law in Sacramento after learning that he had contracted a rare disease during a Peace Corps stint in the '80s, which would eventually rob him of sight. "He passes the California state bar, blind," says Carroll, "and we're thinking, 'Yay, we finally made it through all this hard work.' And I wake up one morning and he's dead." Carroll says the pharmacy mixed up Gilkison's prescriptions.

"The law said I couldn't sue the pharmaceutical company for killing my husband because I'm not his husband," says Carroll. "I had no rights. So fuck you, faggot, is what I feel like. You're all a bunch of faggots."

Carroll says he freaked out for a year and a half until he talked to his friend Molli Slade, who said, "Why don't you come to Minneapolis and just start over?" Carroll did just that in 2003. Nine months later he was in a band.

"I got in from San Francisco, and I was bored," says Carroll. "I called up Rainbow Cab, and I said, 'Take me to the Eagle, I guess.' I was trying to get a blowjob."

On the taxi ride, Carroll says he struck up a conversation with the driver, and played himself off as an art scout from California. The cabbie invited him to his studio in the Sexton Building, and, once there, pointed to a window visible from his own. "'See over there?' he says. 'There's a lesbian over there who makes clothes, and I always watch her and her girlfriend make out.' But it was Jason and Saira, not lesbians."

 

Carroll asked to meet the neighbors, and soon they were hanging out with Huff. "She's got Ziggy Stardust blaring on the stereo and she's sewing at the sewing machine," he says. (A fashion designer, Huff would go on to make all the band's clothes; she also organizes fashion events.) As the band tells it, the story of that night ends with the cabbie's car stalling on Washington Avenue, the driver puking out the passenger's side window, and Huff jumping out of the driver's seat as a police car rolled up. "I don't know what's going on," she cried.

"She had platform shoes, hair up to here, a sequin outfit," says Carroll. "She was this Burning Man punk goddess. And this poor dumb fuck Mr. Anderson the cop from Minneapolis comes up, looks at her tits, and goes, 'Well, yeah, you should just pull your car over.'"

Tim Carroll made as vivid an impression on Wade the first time they hung out, the night they were kicked out of the Front for nudity. "We're dancing around, and there's all these jocks," says Wade. "I look down, and there's Tim's pants around his ankles. And there's his butt hole looking up at me. The jocks were into it. They were like, 'Hey, dude, that was pretty cool.'"

Wade had booked shows for a decade back in Rapid City, South Dakota, fronting the thrash-metal band Resin and otherwise gaining a reputation as the sort of character who might one day play in a band called Faggot. "Jason is one of the most bizarre and interesting people I've ever met in my life," says alternative folk singer Haley Bonar, who knew Nielsen and Wade in Rapid City, and lived with Huff and Wade when she first moved to Minneapolis. "There were several times when I came home where Jason would just be buck naked, flailing his dick around. He'll greet people like, 'What's up, bitch?' He's making a violent experimental film called Stabber and got $10,000 to do it. They like to dress up pretty much every day. They find costumes they're going to wear."

While still living in "Rapid," Wade went on The Jerry Springer Show with two friends. "Jason was wearing makeup and his hair was really long and flowing," says Bonar. "They'd made up this total lie about a love triangle. I think it was Jason's idea, because he was like, 'Dude, they fly you to Chicago, you get food, and you stay in a hotel, and you go on TV.'

"When I played a show with Mason Jennings a couple years ago at the 400 Bar," she continues, "those guys all showed up dressed to the nines. They were like, 'Hey!' They missed my show, of course. And I went over to them and was talking to them by the door, and they're like, 'Who's this?' I was like, 'That's Mason Jennings.' The set started with that song from O Brother, Where Art Thou?, like [singing] 'as I went down to the river to pray,' and everyone was quiet. And Jason goes, 'Fuck this!' Like really loud."

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