By Alexander Cho

Originally published on Advocate.com April 11 2008 12:00 AM ET

Shaggy hair.
Wispy goatees. Tight jeans. Strange forearm tattoos. No,
it’s not Brooklyn or Echo Park -- it’s a party
in a huge, shabby backyard on a sleepy residential
street on the far east side of Austin. And those cute,
shaggy, tattooed rock-and-roll boys dancing around in front
of the stage? They’re actually girls. Or, more
accurately, they’re somewhere in between.

It’s the
last day of the annual mammoth music festival known as South
by Southwest, but this grassroots rock show is called
GayBiGayGay, a simultaneous nod to and dig at the
mainstream festival that takes over downtown Austin a
few miles away. Good vibes are flowing as freely as the
all-you-can-drink beer ($10 for a refillable cup with your
name on it in black marker), oversize sunglasses are
everywhere, and a couple hundred pretty, gender-queer
young things are busy flirting and dancing the
afternoon away.

“GayBiGayGay is a queer music festival in the
woods,” explains Silky Shoemaker, 25, who,
together with Hazey Fairless, 27, organizes the event,
now in its third year. “It’s a free, all-ages,
all-day-long gay band event with an emphasis on being
out of doors, lawn chairs, festive decor, DIY, nudity,
satin, the utopia, and rock 'n' roll.”

There’s
also an undoubted emphasis on disrupting binary gender norms
-- it seems that we’re not supposed to be quite
sure who’s doing whom when the femme,
polka-dot-sporting lead singer of local band the Hot as
Shits sings, “I love the feel of the wind on my
tits / I can’t get enough of your ass on my
clit.” But everyone cheers anyway.

That ambiguity is
part of the point of GayBiGayGay, a festival that
reflects a growing population of visibly gender-queer (or
otherwise nonidentified) youths across the country. In
fact, it seems that most of the people here have a
problem with strict labels and, when pressed, claim
“queer” as the only term that accurately
describes them -- if you have to go there.

Some of this
community’s recent visibility can be traced to the
emergence of a few high-profile, ambiguously gendered,
female-bodied celebrities in the last several years,
including The L Word’s Daniela Sea and
indie-rock group Le Tigre’s lesbian-identified
but ambiguously male J.D. Samson. In fact, Samson is here,
sharing a lawn blanket and a box of strawberries with
New York-based performance artist Dynasty Handbag.
Samson’s side project, a DJ duo aptly titled
“MEN,” is one of the festival’s
headliners.

“There’s definitely a trans revolution
happening right now,” says Samson. “And
[it] has been happening for the last decade, I would say, in
growing numbers. People have been letting themselves
be themselves, doing their gender as a nonbinary
situation.”

Gender-bending
and rock music have gone hand in hand for a long time, but
not usually in the female-to-male direction, nor embraced by
such a relatively young, visible crowd in the middle
of a blatantly red state.

Kristen Schilt, a
professor of sociology at Rice University in Houston,
dressed in black and white petticoats and with shocking
white hair, is in the crowd with her partner, Stacey.
“I think, particularly among young,
female-bodied people, we’re starting to see more of a
change than among male-bodied people,” she
says. “There are still tighter strictures on
what you can do if you're male-bodied.”

Her
sister-in-law, trans-male-identified Katy Koonce, whose
eponymous band is a crowd favorite, adds, regarding
Austin’s uniquely liberal Texan environment:
“If you look at this whole ‘Keep Austin
Weird’ thing -- it’s like, ‘We
can own this and make it part of our town instead of being
ashamed about it.’ Because we’re rock 'n'
roll, and we’re educated, and we’re
political. We’re this blue heart in the middle of a
red state, and I think people start to take pride in
that.”

As the afternoon
progresses into evening, people get up from their
blankets on the grass, wander over to the
shed-turned-makeshift staging area, mingle with
friends, or scarf down a Vietnamese sandwich from a
makeshift Bánh mì stand. Spontaneous, ambisexual
make-out sessions erupt. Puzzled neighbors peer down
the driveway.

And because it
doesn’t really matter how you identify here, there is
a sizable number of female lesbians, male gay men --
even some straight people.

“When I
came out, I’d never met someone who was a feminine
queer,” says femme-lesbian-identifying Sarah
Adorable, of Olympia, Wash.-based Scream Club.
“All my role models were butch girls, and
that’s it -- I felt very unaccepted, like I
wasn’t actually a genuine gay person. [Increasingly],
you don’t have to be defined by a ‘he’
or a ‘she’ -- you can accept both, and
you can go back and forth, and maybe the identity you have
right now isn’t the one you’re gonna
have forever.”

As she talks, a
girl with a necktie fashioned out of a maxi-pad walks by.

After dark,
Samson takes the turntables and, in a wry nod to the crowd,
segues her DJ set into a song that most people here probably
weren’t alive to hear on the radio: Deniece
Williams’s “Let’s Hear it for the
Boy.” The energy is high; the crowd screams and
proceeds to kick up even more backyard dust into the
humid Austin night.