Music

Laura Jane Grace says she 'fucking hates people' after Orlando shooting

by Richard Howard

Since coming out as transgender in 2012, Against Me! singer Laura Jane Grace has become a vocal advocate for LGBTQ rights. After burning her birth certificate at a North Carolina show in protest of that state’s bill which prohibits transgender people from using bathrooms that do not match their “biological sex” listed, it’s clear that she’s not afraid to speak out on issues faced by the LGBTQ community at large.

In the wake of Saturday’s mass shooting at the Orlando, Florida LGBTQ nightclub Pulse, however, Grace’s usual eloquence was replaced with raw emotion when speaking about her feelings in a Rolling Stone interview.

She noted that transgender people were not specifically targeted in the shooting, but said it is important to talk about everyday violence that they face. “That’s what talking about [the North Carolina bill] HB2 is really about. It’s like laws like that, people’s mentalities like that, that are thinly masked transphobia and that equates to violence.”

Grace also told the magazine that Against Me!’s yet unnamed album, which comes out in the fall, consists mainly of love songs “written through a trans lens.” However, the song that stands out to her most is one called “Suicide Bomber,” which takes a unique look at the fallout of terrorist acts.

“It’s the idea of, as a parent myself, how does your love relate to your kid if your kid grows up to do something so fucking horrific like a shooting or a bombing? How does the love of a parent then change based on that? I wrote that song shortly after the Bataclan incident, thinking about, how do the parents feel? It wasn’t their fault. Do they no longer love their kid?”

The singer’s busy year also includes the release of a memoir titled Tranny which is due out November 15th. Citing word reclamation as the reason she chose a word she “loathes” for the title, Grace is more than a little trepidatious about the book’s release.

“I’m so fucking terrified of my book coming out. I’m worried that it’s going to come out and I’m never going to be able to have any kind of normalcy in my life again because of this book… I have a kid who is one day going to read my book and I didn’t hold anything back.”

[h/t Rolling Stone]