Mendelssohn's Rock Bible: Queercore!

The common misconception is that Sergey Brin and Larry Page named their search engine Google because they wanted googol (that is 1, followed by 100 zeroes), but the guy with whom they shared their office at Stanford University misspelled it when he did a search of available domain names. In fact, Sergey and Larry named their search engine after a rock band popular among Stanford computer science students at the time — Gary Google & The G-Spots — which had risen from the ashes of the San Jose-based Count V, of “Psychotic Reaction” infamy, some 25 years before. Drummer Butch Atkinson and tambourinist Kenn Ellner had grown fatally tired of their audiences calling for the V's chart-topping Yardbirds imitation, rather than the thoughtful environmental advocacy they’d turned to by the dawn of the 1970s, and had rechristened themselves The G-Spots in the wake of German physician Ernst Gräfenberg’s discovery that the anterior wall of the human vagina isn’t uniformly erogenous. Their new lead singer, an avid hiker and recycler, had originally called himself Gary Goggles, but a Menlo Park branding consultant convinced the group that double o’s were generally perceived as sexier than double g’s, and that Gary’s popularity among Bay Area biplane nerds was making the group less attractive to nubile young maidens of the sort to which most heterosexual rock bands are in the business of trying to appeal.

Luz (L), and Widdecombe.

Which isn’t to suggest that all male rock bands are heterosexual, of course. At the big Gay Pride jamboree in San Francisco in 1997, I saw a group called Pansy Division, whose name I thought clever, and who were accompanied on stage by a male go-go dancer who did absolutely nothing for me — not a thing! — because I don’t have a gay bone in my body, and have never once seen a charismatically handsome fellow male and thought to myself, “I wouldn’t mind a bit of that.” 

The Pansies fancied themselves avatars of the queercore, uh, movement, and hoped to demonstrate that gay men were just as likely to enjoy The Buzzcocks as Liza Minnelli. They weren’t very good, but one had to admire their gumption. Other notable (mostly) gay male rock bands include Hüsker Du, The Eagles, Whitesnake, and Phish. 

One member of my UK band The Freudian Sluts and I had what I regarded as an interesting discussion on our way to rehearsal one day in early 2016 after I discovered that he didn't want to wear a red shirt on stage for fear of being perceived as sexually ambivalent. I invited him to imagine himself shipwrecked with two others — the young Brazilian male model Jesús Luz, with whom Madonna had cavorted after the collapse of her second marriage, and Anne Widdecombe, a Tory politician not commonly mistaken for Kate Moss — and asked with which he would be more likely to interact erotically after several months of sexual abstinence. His blurting, “Anne Widdecombe!” before the question was completely out of my mouth confirmed my worst fears.

In the 1960s, when I was an insufferable baseball and biplane nerd, three brothers from the Dominican Republic  —  Felipe, Mateo, and Jesus Alou — played simultaneously for the San Francisco Giants. The Los Angeles Dodgers announcers weren’t permitted to say Jesús even if they pronounced it Spanishly (hay-SOOCE), as someone had apparently come to believe that Christian Dodger fans might be offended by the young outfielder’s irreverence. How dare he be named that! Never mind that a great many Latino men are named for Our Lord ’n’ Saviour (and his mama!), though nowadays most Latino ballplayers’ names seem to begin with Y, a trend the noted Venezuelan-American journalist Pilar Marrero believes to have started in Cuba.

The highpoint of Gary Google & The G-Spots’ career was headlining at the annual convention of The American Association of Gynecologists in 2003. They are not known to have recorded. Interestingly, 1 followed by 100 zeroes in now the net worth in dollars of Larry Page, earlier famous for having managed The Kinks and The Troggs. You can look this up!