new May 2012 interview on Rolling Stone Magazine.

I've been to every international newsstand I could think of this morning. And they all told me I couldn't get the American rolling stone version for another week and some said not for another 4 to 6 weeks. THIS FUCKING SUCKS! I really wanna read the article =( =( =(

Good to know, wanted to search/ask too. So much about International Press sections.

We'd all appreciate a high quality scan. :-)

I have been quietly watching this thread Smile

and I just wish to let you all know, as someone experienced in Hormones and Transgender myself -

HRT has no impact on your voice, voice training and practice change your voice but hormones themselves do not change your voice Smile

Just thought I would clear that up for you all, as there seems some mis-information around HRT Male to Female transitioning and the changing of voice.

*waves to the other idle readers from the Transgender community who linked me here in the first place* =)

I just remembered there is kind of a lack of female musicians in punk... cis or trans, who cares, Laura will be an awesome one. Sort of makes me feel even more comfortable about this change.

And yeah, a scan or a typed version of the article would be nice. Some parts are too difficult to read even with maximum Ctrl and + pressed Neutral

Sorry, I've been really busy. Gonna start typing some more now.

Does the current issue have Barack Obama on the front of it? It says May 2012, but I can't find anything in the magazine about Tom/Laura, maybe I wasn't looking close enough.

I think that's last month issue. I saw that one on Wednesday.

It's not that one. The Tom one is out 23rd =)

I believe Rolling Stone comes out every two weeks.

Is it going to be in stores today? I could've sworn it said the new issue would be available this Friday? I'm sorry if this has been mentioned in eariler pages, I went out this morning trying to find it, but no stores have it yet.

You guys are really reaching, I bet less then 80% of the lyrics you've posted is about the transgender issue

But if someone is a transgender their whole life without anyone knowing it's probably not too far-fetched to assume that person's artistic work deals with it in some way. I mean, a lot of her lyrics are open to various interpretations (that's one reason they're so good), but some of them just make a lot more sense to me now than they did before her coming out.

And Aaron, that's understandable - it's six pages long after all! Sorry to be impatient (^^);

Mechamunky wrote:

Is it going to be in stores today? I could've sworn it said the new issue would be available this Friday? I'm sorry if this has been mentioned in eariler pages, I went out this morning trying to find it, but no stores have it yet.

Yeah I think the new issue might be the Obama one though.

All I know is that Tom is in the issue dated 25 May =)

Also, here's what I've typed so far... You lose the italics and stuff for now, but I'll upload the document eventually.

Quote:

On a warm Friday evening at the end of March, the artist soon to be formerly known as Tommy Gabel is walking through Manhattan to meet one of his biggest fans, a 23-year-old woman named January Hunt. When Hunt was 16, she saw Gabel play a show and wrote him a long, impassioned fan letter about how he’d changed her life.

Right now, Gabel is feeling a little nervous. “It’s probably stupid to talk to a fan like this,” he says. “I don’t really know her – I just sent her a cryptic message on Twitter asking if she could meet up. I just don’t have anyone else to talk to.”

Gabel, 31, is the lead singer for AM!, a 15-year-old punk band from Gainesville, Florida, most famous for their radical politics and Gabel’s throat-shredding growl. They’ve sung about economic injustice, dismantling the system and generally fucking shit up on stages from tiny suburban clubs to Giants Stadium, and been praised by Bruce Springsteen and Foo Fighters while shouting about things like “The Politics of Starving” and “Cliché Guevara.”
The song that helped change January’s life is called “Searching for a Former Clarity,” a ballad tucked at the end of the band’s 2005 record. The lyrics are about a man who’s dying of what sounds like AIDS; midway through, Gabel sings:
And in the journal you kept by the side of your bed...
Confessing childhood secrets of dressing up in women’s clothes
Compulsions you never knew the reasons to

The song resonated with January so intensely because it was her story, too. As a transgender teenager in suburban New York, Hunt put on dresses and high heels and painted her nails pink, never daring to tell her friends in the hardcore scene. It was the first time a punk band’s lyrics spoke directly to her experience. And when she showed up six years later to another AM! Show, crowd-surfing like a champ in her red pencil skirt and shoulder-length blond hair, she had Gabel, in whatever small way, to thank.

Gabel remembered her, too. “when I saw her at that show, I was like, ‘Fuck, yeah,’” he says. “I just found it so awesome and empowering.”

In a way, it showed me what a coward I was being. Because if she had the courage to come out as trans – then why the fuck didn’t I?

For so long as he can remember, Gabel has lived with a condition known as gender dysphoria. As the textbooks explain it, it’s a feeling of intense dissatisfaction and disconnect from the gender you were assigned at birth. As Gabel explains it, “The cliché is that you’re a woman trapped in a man’s body, but it’s not that simple. It’s a feeling of detachment from your body and from yourself. And it’s shitty, man. It’s really fucking shitty.”

Over the past few months, Gabel has begun the public part of a process that’s been going on privately for years: leaving his male identity behind and living the rest of his life as a woman. He’s been doing research – reading books like Julia Serano’s Whipping Girl, watching transition videos on YouTube. Soon, he’ll start taking hormones and undergoing electrolysis. And down the road – in the next couple of years – he intends to have surgery. “Right now, I’m in this awkward transition period,” he says. “I look like a dude and feel like a dude, and it sucks. But eventually it’ll flip, and I’ll present as female.”

Walking through the streets tonight in a T-shirt and hoodie, Gabel doesn’t look especially feminine. He’s point-guard tall and rock-star skinny, with tattoos covering his arms and chest. But if you look just right at his blue eyes or already-lasered cheeks, or the way he brushes his brown curls out of his face, you can almost catch a glimpse of the woman he’s becoming.

According to Brandon Hill, research associate and resident transgender expert at the Kinsey Institute, about one in 30,000 men is clinically diagnosed as being transgender. Gabel isn’t the first musician to identify that way – the list includes proto-punk singer Jayne County, electronic composer Wendy Carlos and cabaret artists Justin Vivian Bond. But this is definitely the first time someone from such a high-profile band has come out in such a high-profile way. “I’m going to have embarrassing moments,” Gabel says, “and that won’t be fun. But that’s part of what talking to you is about – is hoping people understand, and hoping they’ll be fairly kind.”

As of this night in New York, he’s only shared his news with a handful of people. Even his parents and little brother don’t know. “Even now,” he says, “there’s a part of me that’s not convinced I know what the fuck I’m doing. But there’s another part of me that’s completely, 100 percent sure.”

Soon, Gabel arrives at the cafe where he and January are planning to meet. She’s waiting for his out front. And for a second, he just stands across the street, working up the nerve. “She seems really cool,” he says. “And I don’t have any trans friends, and I feel like I need one. Basically,” he says, “I’m just going to ask her to be my friend.”

One week later, Gabel is at home in St. Augustine, Florida, in his cosy bungalow on a well-manicured block in one of the unpunkest neighbourhoods imaginable. There’s a Prius in the driveway and a purple tricycle on the lawn. The only hint of anything rock & roll is the big white Chevy tour van parked out front.

“Hey!” Gabel says when he answers the door, “come in. We’re just finishing lunch.” He leads the way down the hall and into the kitchen, where, sitting at the table, are a pretty, dark-haired woman in a black tank top and an impossibly cute two-year-old in a blue dress and braids – Gabel’s wife, Heather, 35, and their daughter, Evelyn. “Evelyn’s about to take a nap,” Heather says, and Gabel grabs his keys. “Should we go talk?”

Gabel says he and Heather are staying together. “For me, the most terrifying thing about this was how she would accept the news,” he says. “But she’s been super-amazing and understanding.” According to Hill, this is rare but not unheard of. Roughly a third of transgender women are attracted to women, and some of them try to maintain the relationships they’re in pre-transition.” There are people who start off staying together and, after the full transition, start to trickle out.” Hill says, “But just by being willing, they stand a much higher chance.”

Gabel gets in their 1964 Mercury Comet and we drive to his favourite fish-taco stand, where, at a picnic table under a palm tree, he starts telling his story. “Growing up, my experience with transsexualism was nothing but shame,” he says. “It was something very hidden, and dealt with very privately.” The first time he remembers feeling that way was when he was four or five, and he saw Madonna on TV and fantasised about being her. He also remembers playing with Barbies – his mom says he was really into the pink Corvette – as well as his father not being happy about it. “For me, that was a moment when I remember, ‘OK, I’m obviously doing something that’s not OK in my dad’s eyes,’” he says. “But even when I would play G.I. Joes, I wouldn’t play war – I would make up stories.”

Gabel’s dad, Major Thomas Gabel, is a West Point grad who served 20 years in the Army, and Tommy grew up hopping from base to base: Fort Benning, For Hood, an Italian NATO post during the first Iraq War. Then when Tommy was 11, his parents got divorced, and he and his mom moved to Florida to live with his grandmother.

“It was a bad divorce,” Gabel says. “A nasty divorce. I don’t know what the failure of the marriage was – I never asked.” But whatever it was, it was bad enough for his mom to never speak to his dad again. Sometimes Gabel would go stay with him during the summer, but it was never fun. His mom says, “I think Tommy became the catchall for the anger of the split.”

Florida is the first time Gabel remembers being severely depressed. “It probably had a lot to do with where I was puberty-wise, and hormones,” he says, “but that was a period of extreme dysphoria – of just not wanting to be male.” Some days, he would pray to God: “Dear God, please, when I wake up, I want a female body.”

Other times he’d try the devil: “I promise to spend the rest of my life as a serial killer if you turn me into a woman.” He though he was a pervert, or had some kind of fetish. There was no Internet back then, so all he knew was what he’d seen in movies, which basically meant The Crying Game and The Silence of the Lambs – or, as Gabel puts it, “the sad tranny and the fucking scary tranny.”

For most of his teenage years, Gabel was “miserable.” Because he’d moved around so much, he’d never had many friends. He got picked on at school, called a “faggot” because of the way he dressed. By 13, he’d started experimenting pretty seriously with hard drugs, graduating from alcohol and pot to acid and cocaine. He’d go on to struggle with addiction well into his twenties; in retrospect, he thinks, he was doing whatever he could to numb the pain.

Even today, Gabel can’t look at his reflection in the mirror without being disgusted by the parts that look male: his Adam’s apple, his square jaw, his shoulders, his hips. Back then, the only way he knew how to cope was to cross-dress: “Just the act of looking in the mirror while presenting feminine is immediately calming,” he says.

I have Against Me! on constant rotation in my head, and Laura thanks for making kickass music that brings my spirit up, YOU ROCK LAURA!!!!

http://www.jbtvonline.com/interviews/against-me-identity-and-concept-albums

well, this is interesting... :L

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new May 2012 interview on Rolling Stone Magazine.

new May 2012 interview on Rolling Stone Magazine.

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