On a recent Saturday afternoon in North Hills, Calif., Chris Freeman is opening boxes he hasn't seen in years, pulling out memorabilia from a 1994 tour with Green Day.

Freeman laughs when he sees photos of his younger self running naked through a mosh pit in some arena in America and a photo of him posing with singer-songwriter Courtney Love.

A frontman for the LGBTQ rock band Pansy Division, Freeman also plays in GayC/DC, an all-gay AC/DC tribute, and a new project called Mary with GayC/DC members Glen Pavan and Steve McKnight. His roots are in a sub-genre of punk rock called Queercore, which emerged in the early '80s from a zine called "J.D.'s" in Toronto and spread to other cities, including San Francisco.

Pansy Division formed in 1991 in San Francisco's punk scene, playing in the same venues as bands like Rancid, Jawbreaker and Green Day. They were exposed to the mainstream but were never signed to a major label.

Next year, Pansy Division will celebrate its 30th anniversary, and the band plans for show No. 1,000 to be back where it all started. But before that, Freeman and his new band Mary will play at Palm Springs Pride on Sunday, Nov. 3.

Mary is one of three rock bands on the lineup, and that's OK. Freeman doesn't want to live in a world where there aren't openly gay rock musicians.

He spent his teen years in the same town as Kurt Cobain

Featuring LGBTQ-inspired lyrical content and openly gay band members, Queercore was rooted in the anarchist spirit of punk rock but disassociated itself from the general LGBTQ scenes and activism for equality. Bands chose to be rebellious in a culture of their own to fight religious and political oppression.

In the '90s, punk bands involved in Queercore inspired riot grrrl feminist bands like L7, Bikini Kill and Sleater-Kinney. A new generation of Queercore bands like God Is My Co-Pilot and Sister George also emerged.

Freeman's path to Queercore ran on parallel tracks.

Freeman was born in Seattle but moved around Washington state often with his father. He described his childhood as "two elementary schools, four junior highs and three high schools." During his teens, the pair lived in Aberdeen, Wash., the same town as Nirvana frontman Kurt Cobain, who was six years younger than Freeman at the time.

"It was horrific. I was bullied the most there than anywhere else," Freeman said. "Everybody came from some kind of a logging family and tough guys. No pansy-asses allowed. I had a very rough time there."

He spent most of his time at his local church to hide from bullies and also began trying to "pray the gay away."

He also found refuge in music growing up in a house with two older sisters who were Beatles fans. He took piano lessons and then switched to guitar after he saw KISS on "The Midnight Special" in 1975.

"I was activated," Freeman said. "I was like, ‘Oh, I want to do that!’ It was almost like Alice Cooper and Elton John came together and created this crazy monster. They were dark and crazy. I went and grabbed a guitar, took it in my room, and said, ‘I’m going to learn how to play this and figure it out.'"

When he was 16 years old, he decided he was ready for a band. In high school, he joined Relic, named after the 1971 Pink Floyd album that Freeman described as "never going to go anywhere." He also changed instruments.

"There was like three guitar players in this group and there was no way I was playing guitar," Freeman said. "When I filed my taxes that year for working at McDonalds, I got a refund check and bought my first bass with it. Now I was in a band and didn’t look back."

In May 1982, Freeman came out to friends in the Seattle music scene and his father.

"I thought I’d just tell everyone at once, and whoever wouldn’t be my friend anymore, that’s just the way it was going to go," Freeman said. "When I told my dad, it was, ‘Nope, you’re cut off. We’re not talking about this anymore, you’re not welcome at these different things. You can come to family functions but if you tell anyone else in the family you’re not welcome.’ For about nine years, we didn’t discuss anything.”

'Feel No Guilt In Your Desire'

In 1987, he moved to San Francisco with friends. He had a video editing career at Well's Fargo and thought he had given up music, but he started playing with bands in the underground. At the time, Tribe 8 and The Hyperdrive Kittens were the city's Queercore bands playing in the punk underground.

Freeman saw an ad in a local music magazine that caught his attention.

"It said, 'Looking for gay musicians into early Beatles, Buzzcocks and Ramones.'

When guitarist Ginoli started Pansy Division, he played shows to pre-recorded bass and drum instrumentals. "What he quickly realized was cassette players run at different speeds, so you may not be in tune with the track you’re playing. That’s when he started to figure out he should have a band," Freeman said.

"He put an ad out and I answered," Freeman continued. "We played one show playing to a tape of drums. It was the wrong thing to do. We needed a drummer and couldn’t play to tapes. We weren’t a track act like our drag friends."

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But even after Freeman joined, it was difficult to find other members who were openly gay and wanted to play punk music. Pansy Division went through several drummers in their early years and also added a second guitarist later on, but their shows were always a spectacle and their live performances combined pop punk and activism. They invited their friends to perform with them as backing dancers, often wrapped in cellophane tape and armed with signs declaring "Feel No Guilt In Your Desire," "Pansy Pride" and "Queer Pride."

"They would file in right before we were getting ready to play and it was like, ‘Oh god, what are they wearing now?’" Freeman recalled. "It was quite a spectacle."

A prominent punk rock club, 924 Gilman Street in Berkeley, served as a home venue for the band. The club rejects the corporate music industry and has a system of values.

"I never felt threatened or unsafe there at all," Freeman said. "That was part of the rules of Gilman: No homophobia, no violence against women, no alcohol or drugs, pick somebody up off the floor if they fell in the mosh pit.

"For me, when I went there, I’d feel like there was no possible way I’d get hurt."

Pansy Division joined Green Day on tour in 1994

After members of Green Day attended Pansy Division concerts, they decided to take the band on a tour in support of their 1994 album, "Dookie." (The original opener, a band called Tilt, broke up while on the road.) But Pansy Division had to condense their live spectacle.

"They were like, ‘Where are your dancers?’" Freeman recalled. "We said, ‘We can’t afford to have dancers! What are you talking about? That’s four to eight more mouths to feed.’”

That summer, Green Day gained popularity after the music video for their song "Longview" released on MTV. They also traveled Lollapalooza and played at Woodstock 94.

During the second leg of the tour, Green Day expanded from clubs to arenas, and Pansy Division continued to open the shows. Freeman said they enjoyed the ride, playing in venues such as Cobo Hall in Detroit and Madison Square Garden in New York. They also accompanied Green Day to Saturday Night Live.

But their live shows were frustrating, even after Dan Havoc of Screeching Weasel joined Pansy Division on the tour as a drummer. The crowd was harsh, often turning their backs to them and sticking their middle fingers in the air. A year earlier "Don't Ask, Don't Tell," which barred military personnel from discriminating or harassing closeted LGBTQ service members, was signed into law. Two years later, Congress would pass the Defense of Marriage Act.

“We were not really that good, and even with Dan, we were the best we could have been," Freeman said. "All of our shortcomings were on display. We tried to make up for it by having a lot of personality and made the setlist so the first three songs were ambiguous. The mosh pit would start and then we’d hit them with a gay song. Then they’d start turning around and flipping us the bird.”

Pansy Division tried to win over women in the audience, telling them not to date guys who stick their middle fingers up because they probably don't like women, Freeman said. Sometimes it worked, often times it did not.

The concert experience was different than what he saw in an iconic photo Freeman "stared at" growing up: On the back cover of the KISS album, "Alive," a few fans in face-paint holdup a poster in front of the crowd at Cobo Hall, eagerly awaiting the start of the concert.

"When I played there, they all hated us," Freeman said. "If I would have known at 14 looking at this photo that I’d be standing in that venue looking at the same kind of thing, and all those people were going to chant us down, I would have said, ‘I'm never doing this!'"

After the Green Day tour, Pansy Division continued to play shows and put out albums. But four years later, after a successful European tour, they were crumbling behind the scenes. All of the members were suffering from lack of sleep and being hospitalized due to illnesses, Freeman said, but he learned something important about himself at the time.

"There was a point we decided to come back together and work after that tour again," Freeman said. "We took the van somewhere and parked it to try and hash out our problems. What happened was they all looked at me and said, 'You're the problem right now.' I was like, 'What are you talking about?' It was, 'You pushed us too hard, you were a dictator in the studio, and we can't have that anymore!' I learned a lot about myself just being with people."

In 2000, the band decided to record and tour sporadically to their liking, and opted to get day jobs.

"We thought, ‘We hit the glass ceiling, let’s save ourselves and not breakup because we ran ourselves into the ground,’" Freeman said. "I think that’s why we’ve stuck around for as long as we have."

GayC/DC started from another tribute band

By 2001 Freeman could no longer afford to live in San Francisco and moved to Los Angeles, where he started his next musical projects, GayC/DC and Mary.

Shortly after arriving in L.A., he discovered a group of gay musicians playing rock music and befriended the Queercore band Best Revenge, named after a Pansy Division song. He later joined a band of gay musicians who started a Go-Go's tribute called The Gay-Gays that lasted for 10 years.

After The Gay-Gays broke up, Freeman decided to start another band with guitarist Karl Rumpf and drummer Brian Welch in 2013, but they weren't sure what kind of tribute to start next.

"Karl was the one who said, 'GayC/DC, that would be hilarious' and we were like, 'Wait a minute, that might have something!'" Freeman said.

They connected with guitarist Steve McKnight after Freeman spent time on a website called DaddyHunt, a gay personals website for older men, and came across an ad with McKnight's photo.

"I was like, 'He's hot! Oh, he's a guitar player!' I sent him a message and I thought if we were going to do this, we needed an Angus Young that was serious," Freeman said. "Steve said, 'Oh, I love AC/DC!'"

GayC/DC later recruited former Best Revenge bassist Glen Pavan, but they struggled to find someone who was able to sing like the late Bon Scott and Brian Johnson.

Ultimately, Freeman won the band over as lead vocalist.

"I thought I'd give it a shot, but I told the band, 'You have to audition me and tell me if I'm any good or not," Freeman said. "I figured out how to tweak some vocals and make it work."

Steve McKnight is the origin of Mary

In the early 2000s at the Viper Room in Hollywood, Freeman saw a band that had a Monday night residency called Metal Skool, which later became Steel Panther. They were a group of serious musicians who did metal covers, but also performed their own comedy rock and metal material.

Freeman later saw this as a possibility with members of GayC/DC after hearing a story about McKnight's former band, Cry Wolf.

"They were being groomed and things were going to start happening for them," Freeman said. "Steve said, 'One day I walked into our record label's office and there's a poster of Nirvana where our photo used to be.'"

Using McKnight's leftover material, they formed Mary, an all-gay metal band which includes Pavan and drummer Carlo Ribaux. It still feels strange to Freeman to just be a lead vocalist and not playing bass.

"When I was really young, I thought I would be a Paul Stanley or a lead singer with a guitar," Freeman said. "Somewhere along the line, people told me I didn't have the voice to be a lead singer and I believed them.

"Finding a place for myself as the lead singer, I've had to break through those old concepts."

If you go

What: Mary

When: Sunday, Nov. 3 at noon

Where: Pride Stage at Palm Springs Pride

Cost: Free

Desert Sun reporter Brian Blueskye covers arts and entertainment. He can be reached at brian.blueskye@desertsun.com or (760) 778-4617.