Pride: Kurt Cobain, the LGBT Advocate

Kurt Cobain was the first character in Guillermo’s At 27 series that I actually remembered dying. I was just eight years old at the time, when the concept of suicide was new and nearly impossible to digest. My brother, who I really looked up to and who really looked up to Kurt, came home from school with a joke the next day. What went through Kurt Cobain’s head when he killed himself? I didn’t know. I didn’t know what anyone would be thinking when they put a gun to their head. His teeth. I sat wondering why he’d gone about it that way, and pictured Kurt placing the barrel against his front incisors, blasting them into the grey matter of his temporal lobe. My brother had to explain the joke.
At Kurt’s memorial service, his second grade yearbook photo was handed out. He had the same blonde bowl cut I did then. In many ways, Kurt Cobain as a child was a lot like we were, drawing and singing, our bedrooms our studios. Being the gay kid in elementary school automatically made you the outsider. And although he only claimed to be “gay in spirit,” Kurt liked that the other kids thought he was gay because it meant they left him alone. His father insisted he join the wrestling team, and while he was skilled at the sport, Kurt would allow himself to be pinned every time. When his father moved on to Little League Baseball, Kurt intentionally struck out just to avoid playing. I spent my first Little League game hiding in the bathroom with my own father, who never pushed sports on me again. But he did build a tiny ice skating rink in our driveway the following winter, using a tarp and the garden hose.

Back when he was just another gay eight-year-old with a bowl cut, Guillermo moved to Bogotá with his family from the more turbulent Medellín. On the Colombian playground, a boy’s masculinity was measured by his aptitude for soccer, which Guillermo wanted nothing to do with. Shunned by the other boys, Guillermo spent recess in the library drawing and reading. Like me, he didn’t exactly know what “gay” meant, but knew it set him apart from everyone else, in a way no kid would want to be. Parents and teachers grew concerned once little Guillermo started talking about transvestites and Satan.
It didn’t help that Guillermo’s gym class was segregated by gender. There was no way I would have gotten through it not having goth girls with thyroid conditions around to pretend to play badminton with. But at my elementary school, the playground was divided into a girls’ side and a boys’ side for as long as anyone could remember. Throughout the years, my best girl friends and I teetered a white line painted on the concrete, trading the contents of our My Little Pony lunchboxes and talking about TV shows we weren’t supposed to watch, while boys played basketball far behind me and girls hopscotched even further away. It wasn’t so long after Kurt Cobain killed himself that Robert Morris Elementary finally threw out the rule, and I was free to Double Dutch while little dykes-in-training took over the basketball court.
Kurt Cobain was a vocal opponent of homophobia, and resented Nirvana fans that refused to acknowledge the band’s political views. The liner notes from Incesticide declared — “if any of you in any way hate homosexuals… don’t come to our shows and don’t buy our records.” But kids in Nirvana shirts still wrote “fage” in all my R. L. Stine books, and yelled “I smell fruit!” each time I walked up the street from school. Even my brother and his friends, while they plucked the chords from ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit,’ still seemed to think “gay” was just a fun way to describe something awful.
I don’t know what went through Kurt Cobain’s head when he killed himself, but I know the overwhelming anger one can feel at the world’s betrayals. It can bring the greatest poet to stick her head in an oven, cause a college freshman to jump off the George Washington Bridge, cut short all the lives for whom it never got better. More than a decade after his death, Kurt’s hometown in Washington put up a sign that read “Welcome to Aberdeen — Come As You Are”. Exactly what my badminton partner and I would have told him.