Kurt Cobain Pushed the Boundaries of Gender and Made Room for Us All

Nirvana took every step to sand the edges of rock’s obsessive relationship with toxic masculinity.

This is Everyone Is Gay, a column by Niko Stratis on gender and sexuality in nineties music—and how pop culture failed to talk about it at the time.

We all have our cultural touchstones; moments dropped onto our lives like meteors, exploding on impact and shifting the tectonic plates to reveal a new world. Where you were when Princess Di died, when Clinton was impeached, when McDonald’s stopped selling personal pan pizzas. Dramatic shifts from which there is no recovery.

I remember being outside one day in early April, 1994. It was hot and unseasonably sunny for that time of year in the Yukon. When I got home from school, I’d run a long length of orange extension cables through the living room and out the patio door so I could sit outside and listen to music. Hours spent in the social overload of the schoolyard had left me emotionally drained. I was eager to shut myself off from the world around me, read an old dog-eared copy of a Stephen King novel, and listen to CDs on the blown-out speakers of my little blue off-brand stereo. That’s when my mom came outside and said I should come in. CBC Radio was repeating a broadcast from earlier in the day: Kurt Cobain was dead. From inside the house, I could hear my stereo out on the patio, playing a song off into the distance. It was “Dive” by Nirvana.

In the early to mid nineties, Nirvana was the biggest band in the world, not just to me, but to everyone with two ears and a beating heart. Their second album, Nevermind, is ubiquitous to the point of being almost unnecessary to describe. “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” the first single, was and continues to be omnipresent. Where once it was the champion of rock radio, it is now a mainstay of radio stations that play golden oldies; a stark reminder that everything turns old with time.

Nirvana arrived at the right time and managed to bottle lightning. They were one of many bands of an era that played in a loud-quiet-loud structure they’d cribbed from the Pixies and other forebears. What helped Nirvana stand afield from their grunge-era brethren was the endless well of Cobain’s charisma and their subversive take on dissonant pop songwriting.

When Nevermind dropped in 1991 I was almost ten years old; by the time Cobain died in 1994, I was twelve. I was at the age when you become a sponge for the culture that proliferates around you. I absorbed everything I came into contact with and let it soak deep within me. Nirvana got into me and never left.

What struck me immediately about Nirvana was Cobain’s anger. Not an anger misplaced, mind you, but an anger languishing in abstraction. I always felt that Cobain, like myself and indeed a lot of people, was vainly attempting to pinpoint the things within himself that felt out of step with the world around him. He wasn’t angry at a system or a woman who had wronged him. He was frustrated, seeking an unattainable sense of control over himself, his own pain, and his place in the world.

What struck me immediately about Nirvana was Kurt Cobain’s anger.

After Cobain died, my interest in the band grew into an obsession almost overnight. The conversation around him, already feverish in life, became cultish in death. By joining the club of famous artists who died at the age of twenty-seven, his legacy became locked in the life he left behind. His biography and work seemed suddenly littered with clues for fans to sift through as they tried to better understand the decision that led to his suicide, alone in a garden shed in Washington.

Though a critical darling when he was alive, Cobain was still considered less an enigma than a petulant force. By his own words, he was pissy and ungovernable with the press, often picked on for his appearance, attitude, and demeanor. It was no secret that Cobain was an addict, and it was no secret that music journalists loved addiction as a headline but were less inclined to find patience or empathy for it in reality.

The most striking thing about Cobain, outside of the flannel-clad bluster and bravado of grunge, was how he pushed the boundaries of his gender. He would regularly appear onstage wearing a dress over his usual attire of jeans and multiple shirts. As time wore on between the massive success of Nevermind and follow-up album In Utero, he seemed to revel in being seen as anything but what was codified as your average cishet man.

While dyeing your hair with Kool-Aid was de rigueur in the alt-rock 90s, Cobain took to wearing dresses, cropped silk tops with lace trim, and painted nails in press photos. Nirvana took every step to sand the edges of rock’s obsessive relationship with toxic masculinity, at one point selling t-shirts that said fudge packin/crack smoking/satan worshiping/mother fucker on the back. While it’s easy to turn a cynical eye to the branding exercise of it all, it’s the fudge packin’ that always stood out to me. Not many men that screamed their anguish into microphones were bragging about queer sex.

The dead celebrity industrial complex has had a lengthy run with Kurt Cobain in the years since he passed. In his life we attempted to decipher him, and in his death we picked through the ashes to decode what we’d misunderstood. In the settlement of his affairs, copies of his private journals were found and locked away in a vault by the Cobain estate, until they were bought by a major publishing house for an undetermined price. The best material was culled and collected in over 200 pages, bound in hardcover, and called Journals. The book is a collection of intimate notes, drawings and reworked lyrics—clues for us to parse like so many armchair detectives.

The journals have been a source of tension over the years, with some people arguing that we shouldn’t have access to the private musings of a dead man. But the journals do offer an alluring opportunity to better understand Cobain. Beyond the doodles and scribbles penciled into drugstore notebooks, there were glimpses of an alternate-history Nirvana. Cobain had initially envisioned Nevermind as an album split in two, with a “girl side” and a “boy side.” Songs like “Polly” (boy) and “Lithium” (girl) would have found their place on either side of the binary. Alternate lyrics for In Utero’s “All Apologies” once begged, simply, “let me have some breasts.”

I felt a kinship with this man struggling to find himself. I also knew myself to be out of step with the expectations placed on me. On “Serve the Servants” from In Utero, Cobain sings, “as my bones grew they did hurt, they hurt really bad.” I understood him to be giving voice to the pain of a puberty you might not want to participate in. I didn’t know or understand dysphoria, but I knew how it felt to not be able to find a way to comfortably dress or appear as society would imagine a man should.

I will remember where I was when Cobain died as I remember the day I worried I too would die, that my desires for myself would be my undoing.

As I grew older and more obsessed with Cobain, I eagerly bought up every magazine that featured him on the cover. Every time, I hoped that this issue was the one in which they asked about his discomfort with himself. I bought biographies and read them cover to cover in bed at night, not able to sleep until I had gotten to the final pages, hoping that maybe this once, the answers would reveal themselves. That I would understand myself, and my pain and discomfort with myself, through a man that I had watched struggle publicly with what I thought was the same internal strife.

For a few years in the early 2000s I even bought into the conspiracy theory that Cobain had been murdered, a wild theory that has spawned two documentaries: 1998’s Kurt And Courtney and 2015’s Soaked In Bleach. There was some comfort in this misdirection. If in fact he hadn’t taken his life by his own hand, perhaps the demons that plagued him didn’t win after all.

Nirvana is a mark I have carried with me through my entire adult life. I have bought albums as they were re-released, remastered again, and re-released a third time. I have read Cobain conspiracies on the internet and engaged in conversation with trans girls on the internet as some try to claim Cobain as our own.

More powerful, to me, than Cobain being a Tall Girl is the idea that someone so visible, so loud, and so angry was pushing for the very things we pushed for ourselves. I don’t know if Cobain was trans; that’s not my place to speculate. But regardless of his desires, we find ourselves in his intentions. The boundaries he pushed made space for so many angry people of a certain age, eager as we were to not be men ourselves. The fire burning in our hearts not for others but for the expectations placed upon us.

I will remember where I was when Cobain died that day as I remember the day I worried that I too would die, that my desires for myself would be my undoing. Where Cobain didn’t make it many of us are lucky to now find ourselves.