GLR January-February Supplement 2024

The Randy Years of a Punk Musician

A HOST of accolades marks Sean DeLear’s posthumous reputation: “the Queen Mother of alternative music,” “a punk rock fairy godmother,” “a walking work of art,” “a person who single-handedly made counterculture feel viable,” AND “a fierce, fully formed faggot.” To use an expression DeLear often applied to others, he was a “bitchin’ babe.”

pean art collective Gelitin and performing as a solo cabaret artist. DeLear was born Anthony Robertson

P HILIP G AMBONE

in 1965 to evangelical Christian parents, among the first Black couples to move to Simi Valley. While the diary provides lit tle information about his early life, we do learn that Sean and his friend David were “doing things since we were about eight or nine.” Whatever those things were, they left DeLear with an early and remarkably guilt-free outlook on sex. The diary, which DeLear began on New Year’s Day 1979, when he was fourteen, was found after he died in 2017. The en tries, mostly a paragraph long, take us on a stream-of-con sciousness ride into the mind of a typical teenage boy with a precociously playful curiosity about gay sex. A lot of the diary focuses on the kinds of activities we might expect of any ado lescent boy: fleeting crushes, high school sports, a prize pos session (a Minolta XG-7 camera), boredom with school, a paper route, trying out for a part in Bye Bye Birdie , saving money to buy a waterbed, happy expressions of surprise at how popular he is at school, posing for the big ninth-grade photo, renting a

I COULD NOT BELIEVE IT The 1979 Teenage Diaries of Sean DeLear Edited by Michael Bullock & Cesar Padilla Semiotext(e). 215 pages, $16.95

“He was so many things,” writes Michael Bullock, co-edi tor of DeLear’s teenage diary I Could Not Believe It , recently issued by Semiotext(e): “punk musician, intercontinental scen ester, video vixen, dance-track vocalist, party host, heavy-metal groupie, marijuana farmer, and even Frances Bean Cobain’s babysitter.” DeLear was the lead singer of the power pop-punk band Glue, which was a vital element in the Silver Lake scene of the 1980s and ’90s. Adored for his matter-of-fact androgyny and his “lyrical and vocal tempestuousness,” he later went on to collaborate with performance-based artists, joining the Euro Philip Gambone, a regular contributor to TheG&LR , is the editor of Breaking the Rules: The Intimate Diary of Ross Terrill .

TheG & LR

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