NOFX

Fat Mike addresses gender and sexuality with NOFX's new song & video, "Fuck Euphemism"

NOFX recently announced their new album Single Album (due 2/26 via Fat Wreck Chords), and released lead single “Linewleum,” which reworked their classic “Linoleum.” They’ve now released second single “Fuck Euphemism,” which is an entirely new song, and which is also one of the most personal songs Fat Mike has ever written. It’s a classic NOFX-style ripper, and it addresses Mike’s sexuality and pronouns, as Mike explained in a new interview with SPIN:

I think it’s a very important song for the conversation with the trans community and the LBGT community. I consider myself queer and a part of it, so I can sing a song like this. I live a BDSM lifestyle and I’m a crossdresser, so it did bother me when people were calling me a cis male. I like the whole thing of defining yourself using your own terms, because I’m a punk rocker first, and then a submissive crossdressing male. The transgender community and the gay community are taking a stance on how we want to be known, and I’m going to be known as a certain way.

But I think the most important thing in this song is that it doesn’t need to be that way, because really you’re just a person. In part of the song, I say “Call me ‘per’ for the night,” where “per” is short for person. I think that is really the term that people should be embracing, like “I was with per last night” or “I love per” because it doesn’t give away anything. It’s singular, and isn’t that what people want to be known as, — as a person? They don’t want to be labeled. It’s a term that Doris Lessing came up within a book called The Good Terrorist, which I read in college in the ‘80s. Doris Lessing is a feminist writer, and she had it where, in the future, society called everyone “per” for person. It just makes sense to me.

There’s also a line in the song about how I did a line off of Scarlett’s $100,000 cunt, and I think I came out of the closet even more with that because I was too scared to wear women’s clothes until I was 45 — 9 years ago. I was still a closeted crossdresser, and I managed to come out a little more. That line for me is really huge because this domme I was seeing, Scarlett Sin, I didn’t know she was trans when I was seeing her. With a domme, there’s no sex going on, so you don’t really see what’s what she’s got under the hood. After a few sessions with her, I asked if she was trans and she said “You didn’t know?” I said “No, I actually didn’t. I never thought about it before. You still got a wiener?” She said, “No, I took the whole journey, and I got a really good one.”

Mike had a lot more to say about the album, life, and what’s next for NOFX, and you can read the whole thing here. Watch the Chris Graue-directed video for “Fuck Euphemism” below.

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