A few of us had started following hardcore, and in like 1996 we saw an ad in HeartAttack Magazine that said Los Crudos was booking a summer tour and had Martin’s phone number. My friend called and set him up with a show at a Grange Hall outside of town. On the night of the show, Martin needed to make a call and so I gave him a ride to my friend’s house to use the phone. That was the first time I met him. I made the band spaghetti. The next day, Los Crudos played the Cleveland hardcore fest—and that very day Martin came out on stage. I was 19 and sort of trying to get my own footing in terms of figuring out my sexuality, and I wrote him a letter. I really looked up to him.

So your identities as a queer man and a musician have been tied together from the start. And Limp Wrist couldn’t have been more upfront about being queer.

At the beginning, our lyrics were very tongue in cheek, poking fun at the male-dominated hardcore scene. It started out as: “This is what it’s like to be a fag in the hardcore scene.” Then it sort of changed to: “This is what it’s like to be a punk fag in a gay world.”

What is that like?

Well, in terms of the industry, we’ve literally done nothing differently over the years. Martin puts out our records in the U.S. We do it all ourselves. We haven’t really established that much of a relationship with the internet-focused generation who are like, “We demand that you answer us right away.” We’re like, “...that’s not gonna happen.” [Laughs]

You communicate in other ways.

The thing about being a queer man is that, unless you are a shut-in, you’re forced into situations where you are in the same room with people who might not understand where you’re coming from. Limp Wrist facilitates a conversation.

I never know what to expect from our shows, and I’m honestly humbled every time that there are kids who’ve never seen us play before and are stoked. In the last few years, there have been so many trans and non-binary folks in the crowd. We played in Olympia, Washington, and Gary, Indiana, and there were trans kids there. These aren’t major hub cities. To see these young trans kids coming to our shows and feeling like it’s their space is really great.

Just like punk, queer culture hasn’t always been welcoming to some. Not just trans folks, but even women.

We make a point of paying homage to women who forged their place as queer women in the scene way before men did—way before men did. But I do often wonder, are there people who look at our imagery and think, “This is not for me.”

The Facades cover, for example, which puts the male body rather confrontationally front and center.

[Laughs] We were actually getting ready to play a show after the trans march in San Francisco, three years ago. We were just putting on our outfits, like we do, doing our little dress rehearsal in our apartment. The photo is on the stoop outside our old apartment. We were about halfway done writing the record and Martin set a camera up on a box and did the timer thing and there you go. We were like, “OK, we definitely have to finish this record now.”