It’s 2001, maybe 02. I’m a teenager, in love with punk rock and, like most teenagers, feeling the flimsiness of the boundaries that have been holding me in my little world, but not yet sure how I’m going to break through them. A girl I like just got her driver’s licence and drives me around the suburbs at night, with no particular destination. Nights with nothing to do but listen to music and get in trouble.

The music is playing pretty softly but this one part gets my attention: “She started dancing to that FINE FINE music/ You know her life was saved by rock’n’roll”. The voice cuts through the traffic.

Wait, I tell her. Can I turn up this music? What is this band?

It is, of course, the Velvet Underground doing Rock & Roll, from the album Loaded. I ask if we can listen to the whole album. We can. We drive around in circles and I encounter the voice of Lou Reed for the first time. I’ll never be the same.

I don’t think I’ll ever be able to fully explain the way that the Velvet Underground’s records opened a door in my head. But it has something to do with Lou Reed as a mythic figure: a person who fitted no category, who defied limits and trends and definitions. Radically ambiguous and radically free. I decided I wanted to be the same way.

Looking back, I realise how primed I was to fall in love with Lou Reed and the Velvets. I was a suburban kid who fancied myself somehow intellectual. I was into punk rock but I couldn’t get into the subcultural signifiers of dyed hair, safety pins and torn denim. Being a punk seemed like a new set of rules that I wasn’t interested in having to follow. I was interested in total freedom.

I was also unsure of my sexuality and afraid to tell anyone that I was attracted to both men and women. Masculine performance seemed alien to me, but dressing feminine did not strike me as an option, considering the hypermasculinity that is the prevalent dogma among high-school boys. I knew gay kids but I knew I wasn’t gay, and even if I was, a lot of my friends seemed likely to be grossed out if I admitted it. I felt imprisoned, as queer kids often do.

Lou Reed was an ideal figure to me. He was bisexual, like me, and seemed to inhabit an ambiguous middle place on the masculine-feminine spectrum. He was artily avant garde, but he also made a lot of traditionalist, good ol’ rock’n’roll. He was somehow “punk” but he was never part of the media-saturated punk movement of the late 60s; rather, he preceded and transcended it. His lyrics were mysterious and unpredictable. Whoever heard of a punk singer lilting: “Jesus, help me find my proper place?” What did it mean to “put jelly on your shoulder?” In Lou Reed’s refusal to be categorisable, I saw the sketchy outlines of a way of being that might actually work for me. I sensed in this man’s voice and image a freedom for which I lusted fiercely.

I’ve always been drawn to ambiguity in pop music. I loved learning about how Bob Dylan refused to be the poster boy for the folk protest music movement and became one of the greatest artists of the 20th century by embracing rock’n’roll and surreal, poetically evocative lyrics – a rebel against the rebellion. Or Morrissey’s reimagining of rock stardom as literary, gay and somehow almost euphorically depressed. Nothing sets me on fire like the walking contradiction. I trust someone more if they are not down the line, or not what you would expect them to be. It’s a signal that they are being real with us rather than inhabiting a pre-existing cliche.

It is often this human impulse – the impulse to transcend the roles that have been prepared for us – that drives performers to subvert the gender expression expected of them. Messing with one’s gender is nothing new for pop music. Rock’n’roll has had its queer practitioners from the beginning: Little Richard has been known for wearing makeup onstage since the 1950s and over the years has identified himself as gay and omnisexual.

No labels: Furman onstage in Salisbury. Photograph: Andy Sheppard/Redferns

David Bowie was more a proponent of androgyny than Lou Reed ever was, and he more than anyone else made male femininity trendy in rock music, inspiring and giving pop-culture credence to the look of the New York Dolls, T Rex and countless punk bands of the 70s. By the 80s, men wearing makeup and dressing “glam” was more or less standard for popular rock bands, many of whom also embraced hypermasculine rock’n’roll tropes like misogyny, male supremacy and violence. (Side note: I’ve always found the co-opting of glam by the hair-metal bands pretty amusing. They seem so clearly marketed toward straight people, and yet they look so incredibly campy and gay. It’s like the external form of queerness became trendy, while becoming divorced from actual queer people in all aspects other than appearance.)

As the years went by, more and more performers felt comfortable coming out as non-heterosexual or gender nonconforming: influential punk rocker Jayne County came out as a transgender woman in the late 70s; Grace Jones and Boy George were prominently androgynous throughout the 80s; since the 90, Antony Hegarty has been one of the most well-known transgender artists in music. The full list of musicians who don’t conform to traditional gender roles, of course, would be nearly endless, and more and more appear every year, whether by debuting their work or coming out as trans or gender fluid.

Over the past few years, I’ve added myself to this list, performing more and more often in clothing, makeup and jewellery traditionally intended for women and girls. I’d like to set the record straight (so to speak): this behaviour is not just part of an onstage persona, nor is it a gimmick to get people’s attention. Gender fluidity is very much a part of my life offstage, though I am still exploring what it means. I’ve not quite decided on a gender identity, I may never decide, and that’s all right with me. I am proud to exist in an ambiguous, undecided state.

Lou Reed, Sept. 1973 - Copenhagen, Denmark. Photo: Jorgen Angel/Redferns Photograph: Jorgen Angel/Redferns

Far from being a showbiz gimmick, for me dressing as I please has signalled the end of a lifelong performance of straightforward masculinity. I have always been uncomfortable with masculinity. Since I was young, “acting like a man” appeared to me as a set of suffocating rules that everyone around me was enforcing with their disapproval of and disgust with all that was even faintly feminine in me. Well into my 20s I still felt paranoid about passing as sufficiently masculine, though my facade was airtight, since I dressed the part and steeped myself in the conventions of young male social life. I wasn’t even particularly macho, but when everyone around you expects you to be a certain way, that doesn’t feel like the real you; it’s like you’re constantly in hiding. And a life in hiding is not easy to sustain.

Instead, I’ve embraced the liminal zone that so many of my heroes occupy. I’ve declared independence from categories that don’t work for me. Music genre is another good example. I defy any critic to sum up my musical output with a genre label. It can’t be done; you’re just going to have to listen without bringing those prejudices to the table. I certainly don’t have any interest in sticking to one sort of musical cliche or self-definition as an artist. We exist in a multivalent world filled with ambiguities, and I aim to move through it like Lou Reed: independent, continually transforming, free.

Ezra Furman’s album Perpetual Motion People is out 6 July on Bella Union

