A friend of mine who works at The M-Shop asked me last week if I was going to go to the Pansy Division show on Thursday night.

I told him I didn’t really want to show up and have everyone think I was gay, especially after guys are writing in and saying I’m cute.

The next day I had the opportunity to do a phone interview with Chris Freeman, one of the founding members of the band.

Toward the end of the interview I asked him if there was anything else he wanted to add.

“I guess the one thing I want people to know is if they’re worried that people will think they’re gay because they come to our show, they need to think again about what they’re doing,” he said.

Wow. He pretty much nailed that one.

So I got off the phone and took Freeman’s advice — I thought again about why I was worried about going to the Pansy Division show.

I thought about how I claim not to be homophobic, even though I don’t exactly agree with homosexuality.

I thought about my cousin who came out of the closet a few years ago, much to my surprise.

I thought about a column I wrote a year ago about how wrong it is to judge music by its lyrical content.

I remember writing that “you don’t walk into Musicland and ask for the Satanic section or the love songs section as you do the Christian section.”

And what do you know, a year later, I am doing just that — judging music by its lyrical content.

The funny thing is, I have a ton of CDs by gay artists. I know every word to at least a dozen Queen songs. David Bowie, Boy George, Indigo Girls, Melissa Etheridge, the list goes on and on, and those are just the openly gay musicians.

So what separates Pansy Division from the Indigo Girls, who I won’t miss play at Stephens Auditorium next month?

I guess I don’t really have an answer. Maybe it has something to do with some of Pansy Division’s song titles, such as “For Those About To Suck Cock, We Salute You.”

But then again, Trent Reznor can sing “God is dead and know one cares, and if there is a hell, I’ll see you there,” and even as a Christian, I can hear the song and not be offended.

During my interview with Freeman I asked him what the most unique thing is about being in a gay band.

He answered “that’s it, only that we are gay, that’s the only wildcard.”

OK, so that was a stupid question. Pansy Division is a band just like Pearl Jam is a band and what its members write about can be interpreted differently by everyone who listens to it.

Freeman told me he writes his songs about human situations from a gay perspective so they will still pertain to everyone. He then went on to say he has been listening to heterosexual music for years and can still find something to understand in it.

Music is a form of expression, but it is also a form of entertainment, and by turning away from a kind of music we like because of the lyrical context, we are shorting ourselves of that entertainment.

---

Corey Moss is a junior in journalism and mass communication from Urbandale.