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• 1 2016-04-13T13:32:49-07:00 Darby Crash 37 gallery 2016-06-09T17:07:41-07:00

  Born, 1958 

  "The teachers either thought Paul was the coolest, some were in awe of him...or else they hated him, were scared of him, didn't want anything to do with him." -Paul Roessler (Lexicon Devil, 19) 

  An iconic figure of the 70s Los Angeles punk scene, Germs lyricist-songwriter and performer, Darby Crash, embodied a multitude of identities. As seen by the evolution of his names from Jan Paul Beahm to Bobby Pyn, to the legendary Darby Crash, he sought novel, vibrant ways of being. From freak, druggie, intellectual fein, to lowbrow scumbag, Crash through his performance as a musician and everyday “disturbed kid” created his own queered path within an already chaotic scene. 

  "I didn't care in a thousand years if Darby was gay or not; I don't think anyone else did either." -Bob Biggs (Lexicon Devil, 259)

  Rumors/gossip, in the true spirit of Munoz, told a mixed story of Crash's sexuality. Many friends of Crash’s like Hellin Killer and Tony Montesion theorized that Darby was gay, but either in denial or frightened of his own sexuality. Perhaps, Darby was fearful of the ridicule and made great efforts to conceal his gayness. For examples, friends and acquaintances tell stories of Crash’s reluctance to sexually engage with women. Tomata du Plenty blames the overall punk ethos for shaming Crash. He remarks, “It’s a real shame that punk rock was so in the closet back then. I heard Darby was despondent over his sexuality.” 

  “He always said he would never be old...” -Dan Bolles  (We Got the Neutron Bomb, 269)

  On September 23, 1977 at the Hollywood Palladium “Punk Rock Fashion Show” Bobby Pyn declared himself Darby Crash. Yet, only three years would follow Crash’s new identity, for he committed suicide in December of 1980 with an intentional heroin overdose. Friends like Gerber and Pat Smear were in disbelief, despite the fact that Crash routinely pledged to kill himself by the age of twenty-two (fn). While Crash's life story speaks to the volume of his personalities, it is his death that frames a true queered life, not one solely based on sexuality. One can note his acid trips, his informal parking lot shows, or his infamous Germ's burn, but his premature death speaks to a truly queered life. Halberstam writes that "in Western cultures, we chart the emergence of the adult from the dangerous and unruly period of adolescence as a desired process of maturation; and we create longevity as the most desirable future, applaud the pursuit of long life (under any circumstance), and pathologize modes of living that show little or no concern for longevity" (4).  In such a way Crash's planned suicide altered a normative narrative of living life to the fullest/longest potential in a way that combines the punk pessimism and self-destruction encapsulated in the  
  
  Others interpret his death 

  Crash's reckless lifestyle (a central tenet to punk) and his "wasted potential" (according to Professor Peter Robert Brown) attracts fans, for his life defies heternormative beliefs in longevity, a narrative structure void of destructive excess. His seemingly inevitable suicide, based on an highly intense life filled with heroin, alcohol, and questions of sexuality (to name a few), represents a "hardcore," life. Like the heavy rhythms and chaotic pace of his songs, Crash lived a short, frantic life.

  One can only theorize the role Crash's sexuality played in his decision to commit suicide. Gossip suggests that Darby feared his queerness within a homophobic scene, thus living an inauthentic life. Just as Crash concealed his musical skills, he hid his true being, threatened by public knowledge. His internalized demand of heterosexuality (as represented in his own homophobic comments) represents an interpolation, a self-hatred into a world privileging heteronormativity, a world unable to hold the space for Crash's bricolage of personalities that  in the end centered around his homosexuality. Unable to put together a divided self (one tortured by the demands of social constructs), Crash (speculatively) ended his short life for these reasons. Faderman and Timmons write, "Some, like Darby Crash of the Germs, were revealed to be gay only posthumously" (252). Yet, their account invalidates his struggle to reconcile sexuality, while according to gossip, being openly gay to some during his lifetime.    

  His death suggests a not so queer punk scene, for the realm could not support a true notion of youthfulness, a tenet central to Halberstam's argument. The Los Angeles punk scene seemed to reinstall parental norms (i.e. a lack of freedom to be a crazed kid), for it suggested confining to a dominant culture, fearful of homosexuality. Queerness thus lacked space within an oppressive punk scene. This tragedy, this contradiction lends an entry point into fan culture, a group of people seeking to memorialize such loss. His cult status captures (or tries to capture) his oxymoronic youthfulness in death. Frozen in time as a teenager/young adult, Crash image persists as a representation of the chaotic, contradictory punk scene.  
  
  "His often quoted demand for more, 'Gimme gimme this, gimme gimme that,' is the semiarticulate dmeand for a world that is not the world of California in the late 1970s or the burgeoning reality of Ronald Reagan's America" (Muñoz, "Annihilation" 98).