Black No. 1

Copied from antiquity, or 2014.  I'm never writing anything again, I'm just reposting things I still think about.  This one was reaching, but I'm sticking with it for now.  All those special memories...

I want to comment on what I wrote seven years ago.  I do so in bold. Don't @ me.  I'm just a person, dealing with personhood.

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5/30/14

My dead gothic vampire boyfriend was a feminist.

Every year, sometimes more than once per year, I remember that Peter Steele is dead.  This is still pretty hard for me to accept, and I generally mark these occasions by watching a million live shows and interviews on Youtube, and feeling very sad, then feeling ridiculous for feeling sad, while still feeling sad. 

This year, I was joined by my jewelry bff, with whom I spent all of this week's idle hours at work discussing the matter at length.  I think we are probably friends because of Type O Negative.
Soon after meeting in a jewelry class, she showed me a keychain that she had made.  "Looks like the Type O Negative logo," I said, instantly regretting my comment.  My foreverlove for this band isn't something I bring up in mixed company, for obvious reasons.

Worn constantly in the 90s and never again. I keep it with the clothes I wear regularly, though. DGAF

"It is the Type O Negative logo," she said.  I raised one eyebrow.  We were now GOOD. FRIENDS.  It lasted til I left the state, some things are too good to keep alive.

So anyway, in trawling interviews this week, I noted how remarkably without prejudicial hangup Peter seemed to be.  Believe it or not, a 6'8 white guy with a Brooklyn accent who fronts a doom metal band is fed a lot of baiting questions by music journalists, trying to lead him into representing the cliched mentality of many of the genre's fans.  He batted each of these questions away with bored yet witty answers that would have made any one of today's contributors to feministing.com give a reply of, not bad.

Despite insisting that he hated everyone equally, Peter kind of sounds like a third wave feminist to me.  Labels are offensive to everyone, and I wouldn't go around re-casting a dead person's values to better suit my own, but it's true and you should know it.  Oh shit.  I'm gonna get it... should anyone pay attention to this which thank god no one does.

In one early interview, he was asked about the recent national criminalization of marital rape (1993).  Obviously, it was a leading question intended to elicit a controversial reply re: marital rape isn't real rape, that you somehow forfeit sexual sovereignty when you marry (if you're a woman), or whatever insane opinion stupid men were having at the time.  He instantly rejected this position and instead talked at length about consent, the lack of which was completely unacceptable to him, because of his wild opinion that it's not hot to push people who don't want you into sex.  I don't think I can over-emphasize how unusual his approaches to topics concerning women were for his lifestyle and surroundings at the time, not to mention the fact that there was no mainstream outlet for feminist thought at the time that could have influenced him (don't think he was reading Ms Magazine) - instead, he was (I guess!) simply influenced by his lifelong positive, supportive and familial relationships with women.  He may not have described the issue in the way that I would have, but the message was the same.  Certainly not what that two-bit music journalist was expecting to hear.

He was accused of misogyny, and rightly so, in response to the band's first album.  The songs are frantically angry, all written about and immediately following a breakup, and the music sounds like 80s hardcore, and I guess it was.  It was, I just never listened to any of their contemporaries. I know nothing of this genre.  I bought the album as a young teen after I had already absorbed the Bloody Kisses album.  I basically threw it out the window once I had listened to the first four songs.  It was not the band I knew from the baroque and atmospheric Bloody Kisses album.  Peter took a lot of heat for the lyrics on this album, again rightly so, but I believe his explanations when he says he was a very angry, very young and emotionally shattered person at the time of the writing.  Additionally, the songs were not written for an album.  They were demos that he had made for himself which were made into a record in a very questionable move by the record company.

Believe me, I almost never accept the inevitable excuses when a guy is accused of misogyny.  Rarely do these characterizations result from misunderstandings - many men express themselves expecting the support and lauding that they've received all their lives, and when they get busted for crossing the current societal boundary line of acceptability, it's all a big misunderstanding, no one has a sense of humor, it's a witch hunt, they're being discriminated against, and all of the other tearful protestations regular white guys get up to every time they get into trouble.  Pretty good, 7-year-past-self.

But I believe Peter.  And not because I love him.  I believe him because everything he said from the beginning of his career to the painful end was almost confrontationally authentic and consistent.  At the height of his career, he discussed his fear and insecurity, his self-loathing, his suspicious feelings about praise, and all of the other issues that people of his emotional constitution or background feel on a daily basis.  When asked about how he got into bodybuilding, he says flat out, it's vanity and insecurity.  He thought he was unattractive and that his considerable height made him look ridiculous, and he did what many young men do in response: worked the hell out.  People rarely admit that kind of shit, particularly not when someone is writing it down.  When he became a sex symbol among female fans, many of whom rabidly pursued him in person, he said, "What's wrong with you? I'm just another asshole in a band."  He openly discussed his drug addiction and subsequent destruction late in his career, and it is heartbreaking to watch.  Aged beyond his years, these interviews show a frightened and gaunt-faced man discussing the bitter experiences he had in the penal and institutional asylum systems as a result of his addictions.  His eyes were wild, his teeth were rotten, and he could have walked through a crowd of his own fans without being recognized.  That is, if he hadn't still been the size of Andre the Giant, with hair down his back like the metal version of Marius the vampire.  (Anne Rice, fool! It's goth night). 

His bandmates and family say that he was finally clean and reasonably happy or hopeful when he died.  His cause of death was aortic aneurysm, a breach resulting from the weakening of the walls of the aorta - an ironic, fairly common malady among recently rehabilitated long-term addicts.  It's a fast death following a very long one, and it doesn't care if you're no longer using.

If I misrepresented him when talking about his openness about his discomfort with life, it's because I didn't mention that he normally expressed this with a black, rapier wit.  He slipped dark jokes into his conversation constantly, sometimes absurd one-liners, and sometimes subtle, razor-thin remarks that only revealed themselves a moment later. He seemed to enjoy expressing his frustrations and troubles comedically, and he was very, very funny - but then, his brand of bleak wit is just the kind I like, just the kind I am attuned to look for, one that we all possess in some way but that few are able to hone. Find the evidence yourself.

Plus he was hot.  Lame, but I'll allow it.


It's Cahnivore's video!  Peter working on a car to his own band's music in shitty late 80s/early 90s Brooklyn.  Honestly, could you love it more?

Still listen to this regularly.

Still love this, learned nothing, never will, feel ok about it.

Don't know what this was because it's been deleted.

Final thoughts:

I realize that it's a mistake to try to justify Peter for a now time, and a now audience.  I don't know what I'm trying to do, other than continue to love this band in a way that is untenable to public wokeness, although I feel their offenses are pretty minor considering their contemporaries.  I still think we can review and judge things from the time in which they were created, but were I a public figure, I probably couldn't say that safely without having to answer for everything he ever said or did in public or private, which I obviously cannot do and hence the don't @ me.

There are some problematic things about this band and about this person, but it's not nothing that he's been dead about ten years.  I see little point in tearing him apart using a current perspective, particularly when he was already publicly irrelevant at the time of his death, and (knowing little about the current fandom) when I think that mostly no one is actually interested in him anymore.

It's not my goal or job to make him acceptable in perpetuity.  However, I think the interviews I refer to and unfortunately never linked (but do your own damn research, I don't get paid for this), do shed light on a complicated and embattled personality who was struggling with the world he was born into, and who clearly was aware of the fact that the intensely misogynistic world in which he came up and made his living was not the correct way of the world.  And yes, as I mention in the original post, I am aware of the first album and I fucking hate it and always have, as apparently do all of the people responsible for it. 

(I wish I was still in contact with my Type O jewelry BFF, the only other person with whom I have shared in detail my obsession with this band and person.  Tell her to text me.)

Many of their early songs were disgusting, troubling, upsetting and unacceptable to women who listened.  I think that's made obvious but I say it again here.

I believe that, were Peter alive today, he would have addressed his first album, the only release that was problematic, and either disowned it or explained his changed views.  I think people who know him would say the same.