Kurt Cobain: Montage of Heck premieres at the SXSW festival this week, and in it, fans of the late rocker will likely see sides of the artist they never knew existed, like his rarely publicized gay rights advocacy, which could be related to the rebellious spirit he carried. That spirit manifested itself right around the time his parents divorced. It was hard on the Aberdeen, Wash. native, and he would soon lash out in and outside of school as a way to express his feelings of anger and alienation. In a rare 1993 interview unearthed by PBS in 2013, the Nirvana frontman talked about his struggles with identity in high school.
“I felt so different and so crazy that people just left me alone… I had a real good childhood until the divorce,” Cobain told Jon Savage. “I couldn’t face some of my friends at school.”
Cobain also went on to explain how he couldn’t identify with the other males in school, and his comments highlighted his predisposition to relate with alienated social classes and genders. “Because I couldn’t find any male friends I felt compatible with, I ended up hanging with girls a lot. I always felt they weren’t treated with respect, especially because women are totally oppressed.”
Cobain also says in the interview that he eventually found another male that he could relate with, but the friend was gay, and Cobain’s mother was quite homophobic. He said he found a kindred spirit in the gay teen, and although he supposedly turned down his advances, he remained friends with him until his mother made him end the relationship. Cobain would even pretend in school that he was gay.
I used to pretend I was gay just to f*ck with people. I’ve had the reputation of being a homosexual every since I was 14… I got beat up a lot, of course, because of my association with them. People just thought I was weird at first, just some f*cked-up kid. But once I got the gay tag, it gave me the freedom to be able to be a freak and let people know that they should just stay away from me.
Cobain also reportedly spray-painted things with a “God is gay” tag. In his music, he proclaimed that “everyone is gay.” He made it clear that he thought “being gay was cool.” In a 1992 interview with the Advocate, he said that he might be homosexual, although he had strong feelings for women.
Throughout my life, I’ve always been really close with girls and made friends with girls. And I’ve always been a really sickly, feminine person anyhow, so I thought I was gay for a while because I didn’t find any of the girls in my high school attractive at all. They had really awful haircuts and f*cked-up attitudes. So I thought I would try to be gay for a while, but I’m just more sexually attracted to women. But I’m really glad that I found a few gay friends, because it totally saved me from becoming a monk or something.
Kurt Cobain used his inner turmoil to fuel his passions for rights, life, and art. Although that turmoil would eventually take his life, he found that he was able to anchor it in several good causes during his brief time on this planet. The musician would have turned 48 last month.
