Growing up on a dirt road in small town Palm Coast, Bea McDonald didn’t have much access to the world at large. Jacksonville is a long drive up I-95, and you have a better chance of the Lombardi Trophy going to the Jags than you would of seeing McDonald at Epcot eating and drinking around the world.
That all changed when a teenaged McDonald was introduced to something better than overpriced drinks and gift shops. The songs of Bob Dylan came into the hands of McDonald and a new world rose from the Flagler County dirt road. Dylan and the Stooges would lay the foundation for what would later become Home Is Where, an indie-folk band that McDonald fronts.
“I grew up on a dirt road,” explains McDonald on the phone from Grand Rapids. “I had a lot of time to myself. I was really into movies and books for a while. I wasn’t really into music until I listened to Bob Dylan at 13 and I was like, ‘Wow this is what I always wanted to hear.’ Around the same time I got into Bob Dylan I got into the Stooges, and I wanted to the mix the two together. The poetry of Bob Dylan and the energy of punk music.”
This music gave McDonald a roadmap for the sounds she wanted to make, and she was able to find unicorns on a similar wavelength. It also helped McDonald make sense of the world around her, and that perspective would be crucial for the songs to come. McDonald learned about labor struggles and civil rights through Bob Dylan’s music.
The one thing that McDonald couldn’t learn from Bob? How to make it as a Florida band. The roadmap to being a band in Florida is never linear, and it’s even harder when the area code you reside in isn’t 407, 305, 954, 561, 904 or 813. Home Is Where made the 386 work, and were an active part in the Flagler County music scene.
“We didn’t really have any idea of what we were doing, and we didn’t have any ambitions other than to make music that meant something to us,” says McDonald. “So we would go anywhere that would let us play. I mean we played some strange bills with folks that didn’t even remotely sound like us or what we were doing. But in Florida, there are scenes, but it’s so scattered and varied that a weird band like us took on anything. We played empty rooms to rooms packed with maybe 50 people on a good night “
Florida is buried deep in the DNA of Home Is Where, from their folksy-country style of indie-rock to the band members, who are all Flo-Grown. Home Is Where’s latest album, Hunting Season, is dedicated to people from the Sunshine State who are in love with a state that sometimes doesn’t love them back.
Hunting Season, however, was written in New York. Even though many Floridians move up to New York by choice, it was a decision that McDonald made out of necessity. The culture war pushed by Gov. Ron DeSantis attacking members of LGBTQ+ community, and in particular trans people, was the deciding factor. Being homesick for a place that you can’t come back to weighed heavily on McDonald’s mind.
“I wrote the album when I was living in New York, and I was pretty miserable,” says McDonald. ‘I didn’t want to leave Florida, but a few of the band members ended up leaving because of the anti-trans legislation. Politicians around 2020/2021 started using trans people as a scapegoat and a few of us got a little paranoid about it, so we decided for safety reasons to leave and get out of the state for a while.”
“I escaped into writing these songs that were homesick songs about Florida, and the South in general, but definitely Florida,” she adds. “We wanted to make a record for people who felt like they had to leave their homes for that kind of reason. Florida’s always been a big influence on all of our music. We really wanted to make that the centerpoint. I haven’t heard or seen anything really like that about Florida except maybe The Florida Project.”
Home Is Where joins bands and artists over the years such as Chappell Roan and Jason Isbell who are reminding people that there’s more to country music than just guys on private jets talking about going to god’s country. There’s more to country, and Home Is Where proves that on Hunting Season. While the last record, The Whaler, was more emo, the band wanted to have more of a country and folksier sound on this record.
“The country stuff is something we always wanted to do, but we all had this notion to jump, scream and crash onstage for the past couple of years,” said McDonald. “I think we have gotten that out of our system. We wanted to see if we could make a record that implies that, and isn’t directly telling you to mosh or dance. It’s more of a record you could grill to and put on at a barbecue.”
One of the songs that fits the country and folk sound on the record is “Everyone Won the Lotto,” which is about McDonald’s experiences working at a gas station and being a merchant for a warped version of the American Dream.
“I worked at a lot of gas stations, and I see so many people wasting money on this lotto crap that they’re never going to win,” explains McDonald. “It’s a song about how weird hope can be and how money won’t fix everything. It’s about the American Dream and how weird it is, and how unobtainable it is, but they advertise it.”
McDonald still has faith that one day she will be able to return to Florida and live freely, but in the meantime their Saturday show at the Abbey will be a homecoming of sorts for the band.
“Yeah I like Orlando, and I like Central Florida a lot,” says McDonald. “It’s my kind of trash and I understand it. Even the dilapidated parts fall apart in an interesting way compared to everywhere else in the country. I like Orlando. I hate Disney and Mickey Mouse and all that crap. We’ve played some good shows down there too. I’ve had a lot of good times in Orlando. The very last show we played on the first half of The Whaler tour, and we had all of our friends and family come out to support us, and it was really nice.”
Troy Masters was a cheerleader. When my name was called as the Los Angeles Press Club’s Print Journalist of the Year for 2020, Troy leapt out of his seat with a whoop and an almost jazz-hand enthusiasm, thrilled that the mainstream audience attending the Southern California Journalism Awards gala that October night in 2021 recognized the value of the LGBTQ community’s Los Angeles Blade.
That joy has been extinguished. On Wednesday, Dec. 11, after frantic unanswered calls from his sister Tammy late Monday and Tuesday, Troy’s longtime friend and former partner Arturo Jiminez did a wellness check at Troy’s L.A. apartment and found him dead, with his beloved dog Cody quietly alive by his side. The L.A. Coroner determined Troy Masters died by suicide. No note was recovered. He was 63.
Considered smart, charming, committed to LGBTQ people and the LGBTQ press, Troy’s inexplicable suicide shook everyone, even those with whom he sometimes clashed.
Troy’s sister and mother – to whom he was absolutely devoted – are devastated. “We are still trying to navigate our lives without our precious brother/son. I want the world to know that Troy was loved and we always tried to let him know that,” says younger sister Tammy Masters.
Tammy was 16 when she discovered Troy was gay and outed him to their mother. A “busy-body sister,” Tammy picked up the phone at their Tennessee home and heard Troy talking with his college boyfriend. She confronted him and he begged her not to tell.
“Of course, I ran and told Mom,” Tammy says, chuckling during the phone call. “But she – like all mothers – knew it. She knew it from an early age but loved him unconditionally; 1979 was a time [in the Deep South] when this just was not spoken of. But that didn’t stop Mom from being in his corner.”
Mom even marched with Troy in his first Gay Pride Parade in New York City. “Mom said to him, ‘Oh, my! All these handsome men and not one of them has given me a second look! They are too busy checking each other out!” Tammy says, bursting into laughter. “Troy and my mother had that kind of understanding that she would always be there and always have his back!
“As for me,” she continues, “I have lost the brother that I used to fight for in any given situation. And I will continue to honor his cause and lifetime commitment to the rights and freedom for the LGBTQ community!”
Tammy adds: “The outpouring of love has been comforting at this difficult time and we thank all of you!”
Troy Masters and his beloved dog Cody.
No one yet knows why Troy took his life. We may never know. But Troy and I often shared our deeply disturbing bouts with drowning depression. Waves would inexplicitly come upon us, triggered by sadness or an image or a thought we’d let get mangled in our unresolved, inescapable past trauma.
We survived because we shared our pain without judgment or shame. We may have argued – but in this, we trusted each other. We set everything else aside and respectfully, actively listened to the words and the pain within the words.
Listening, Indian philosopher Krishnamurti once said, is an act of love. And we practiced listening. We sought stories that led to laughter. That was the rope ladder out of the dark rabbit hole with its bottomless pit of bullying and endless suffering. Rung by rung, we’d talk and laugh and gripe about our beloved dogs.
I shared my 12 Step mantra when I got clean and sober: I will not drink, use or kill myself one minute at a time. A suicide survivor, I sought help and I urged him to seek help, too, since I was only a loving friend – and sometimes that’s not enough.
(If you need help, please reach out to talk with someone: call or text 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline. They also have services in Spanish and for the deaf.)
In 2015, Troy wrote a personal essay for Gay City News about his idyllic childhood in the 1960s with his sister in Nashville, where his stepfather was a prominent musician. The people he met “taught me a lot about having a mission in life.”
During summers, they went to Dothan, Ala., to hang out with his stepfather’s mother, Granny Alabama. But Troy learned about “adult conversation — often filled with derogatory expletives about Blacks and Jews” and felt “my safety there was fragile.”
It was a harsh revelation. “‘Troy is a queer,’ I overheard my stepfather say with energetic disgust to another family member,” Troy wrote. “Even at 13, I understood that my feelings for other boys were supposed to be secret. Now I knew terror. What my stepfather said humiliated me, sending an icy panic through my body that changed my demeanor and ruined my confidence. For the first time in my life, I felt depression and I became painfully shy. Alabama became a place, not of love, not of shelter, not of the magic of family, but of fear.”
At the public pool, “kids would scream, ‘faggot,’ ‘queer,’ ‘chicken,’ ‘homo,’ as they tried to dunk my head under the water. At one point, a big crowd joined in –– including kids I had known all my life –– and I was terrified they were trying to drown me.
“My depression became dangerous and I remember thinking of ways to hurt myself,” Troy wrote.
But Troy Masters — who left home at 17 and graduated from the University of Tennessee at Knoxville — focused on creating a life that prioritized being of service to his own intersectional LGBTQ people. He also practiced compassion and last August, Troy reached out to his dying stepfather. A 45-minute Facetime farewell turned into a lovefest of forgiveness and reconciliation.
Troy discovered his advocacy chops as an ad representative at the daring gay and lesbian activist publication Outweek from 1989 to 1991.
“We had no idea that hiring him would change someone’s life, its trajectory and create a lifelong commitment” to the LGBTQ press, says Outweek’s co-founder and former editor-in-chief Gabriel Rotello, now a TV producer. “He was great – always a pleasure to work with. He had very little drama – and there was a lot of drama at Outweek. It was a tumultuous time and I tended to hire people because of their activism,” including Michelangelo Signorile, Masha Gessen, and Sarah Pettit.
Rotello speculates that because Troy “knew what he was doing” in a difficult profession, he was determined to launch his own publication when Outweek folded. “I’ve always been very happy it happened that way for Troy,” Rotello says. “It was a cool thing.”
Troy and friends launched NYQ, renamed QW, funded by record producer and ACT UP supporter Bill Chafin. QW (QueerWeek) was the first glossy gay and lesbian magazine published in New York City featuring news, culture, and events. It lasted for 18 months until Chafin died of AIDS in 1992 at age 35.
The horrific Second Wave of AIDS was peaking in 1992 but New Yorkers had no gay news source to provide reliable information at the epicenter of the epidemic.
“When my business partner died of AIDS and I had to close shop, I was left hopeless and severely depressed while the epidemic raged around me. I was barely functioning,” Troy told VoyageLA in 2018. “But one day, a friend in Moscow, Masha Gessen, urged me to get off my back and get busy; New York’s LGBT community was suffering an urgent health care crisis, fighting for basic legal rights and against an increase in violence. That, she said, was not nothing and I needed to get back in the game.”
Staff of Gay News City in New York City, which Troy Masters founded in 2002.
“We were always in total agreement that the work we were doing was important and that any story we delved into had to be done right,” Schindler wrote in Gay City News.
Though the two “sometimes famously crossed swords,” Troy’s sudden death has special meaning for Schindler. “I will always remember Troy’s sweetness and gentleness. Five days before his death, he texted me birthday wishes with the tag, ‘I hope you get a meaningful spanking today.’ That devilishness stays with me.”
Troy had “very high EI (Emotional Intelligence), Schindler says in a phone call. “He had so much insight into me. It was something he had about a lot of people – what kind of person they were; what they were really saying.”
Troy was also very mischievous. Schindler recounts a time when the two met a very important person in the newspaper business and Troy said something provocative. “I held my breath,” Schindler says. “But it worked. It was an icebreaker. He had the ability to connect quickly.”
The journalistic standard at LGNY and Gay City News was not a question of “objectivity” but fairness. “We’re pro-gay,” Schindler says, quoting Andy Humm. “Our reporting is clear advocacy yet I think we were viewed in New York as an honest broker.”
Schindler thinks Troy’s move to Los Angeles to jump-start his entrepreneurial spirit and reconnect with Arturo, who was already in L.A., was risky. “He was over 50,” Schindler says. “I was surprised and disappointed to lose a colleague – but he was always surprising.”
“In many ways, crossing the continent and starting a print newspaper venture in this digitally obsessed era was a high-wire, counter-intuitive decision,” Troy told VoyageLA. “But I have been relentlessly determined and absolutely confident that my decades of experience make me uniquely positioned to do this.”
Troy launched The Pride L.A. as part of the Mirror Media Group, which publishes the Santa Monica Mirror and other Westside community papers. But on June 12, 2016, the day of the Pulse Nightclub shooting in Orlando, Fla., Troy said he found MAGA paraphernalia in a partner’s office. He immediately plotted his exit. On March 10, 2017, Troy and the “internationally respected” Washington Blade announced the launch of the Los Angeles Blade.
Troy Masters and then-Rep. Adam Schiff. (Photo courtesy of Karen Ocamb)
In a March 23, 2017 commentary promising a commitment to journalistic excellence, Troy wrote: “We are living in a paradigm shifting moment in real time. You can feel it. Sometimes it’s overwhelming. Sometimes it’s toxic. Sometimes it’s perplexing, even terrifying. On the other hand, sometimes it’s just downright exhilarating. This moment is a profound opportunity to reexamine our roots and jumpstart our passion for full equality.”
Troy tried hard to keep that commitment, including writing a personal essay to illustrate that LGBTQ people are part of the #MeToo movement. In “Ending a Long Silence,” Troy wrote about being raped at 14 or 15 by an Amtrak employee on “The Floridian” traveling from Dothan, Ala., to Nashville.
“What I thought was innocent and flirtatious affection quickly turned sexual and into a full-fledged rape,” Troy wrote. “I panicked as he undressed me, unable to yell out and frozen by fear. I was falling into a deepening shame that was almost like a dissociation, something I found myself doing in moments of childhood stress from that moment on. Occasionally, even now.”
From the personal to the political, Troy Masters tried to inform and inspire LGBTQ people.
“Just recently he invited us to participate with the LA Blade and other partners to support the LGBTQ forum on Asylum Seekers and Immigrants. He cared about underserved community. He explored LGBTQ who were ignored and forgotten. He wanted to end HIV; help support people living with HIV but most of all, he fought for justice,” Zaldivar says. “I am saddened by his loss. His voice will never be forgotten. We will remember him as an unsung hero. May he rest in peace in the hands of God.”
“It pains me to know that my dear, beautiful and amazing friend Troy is no longer with us … He always gave me and many people light,” Salcedo says. “I know that we are living in dark times right now and we need to understand that our ancestors and transcestors are the one who are going to walk us through these dark times… See you on the other side, my dear and beautiful sibling in the struggle, Troy Masters.”
“Troy was immensely committed to covering stories from the LGBTQ community. Following his move to Los Angeles from New York, he became dedicated to featuring news from the City of West Hollywood in the Los Angeles Blade and we worked with him for many years,” says Joshua Schare, director of Communications for the City of West Hollywood, who knew Troy for 30 years, starting in 1994 as a college intern at OUT Magazine.
“Like so many of us at the City of West Hollywood and in the region’s LGBTQ community, I will miss him and his day-to-day impact on our community.”
Troy Masters accepting a proclamation from the City of West Hollywood. (Photo by Richard Settle for the City of West Hollywood)
“Troy Masters was a visionary, mentor, and advocate; however, the title I most associated with him was friend,” says West Hollywood Mayor John Erickson. “Troy was always a sense of light and working to bring awareness to issues and causes larger than himself. He was an advocate for so many and for me personally, not having him in the world makes it a little less bright. Rest in Power, Troy. We will continue to cause good trouble on your behalf.”
Erickson adjourned the WeHo City Council meeting on Monday in his memory.
Masters launched the Los Angeles Blade with his partners from the Washington Blade, Lynne Brown, Kevin Naff, and Brian Pitts, in 2017.
Cover of the election issue of the Los Angeles Blade.
“Troy’s reputation in New York was well known and respected and we were so excited to start this new venture with him,” says Naff. “His passion and dedication to queer LA will be missed by so many. We will carry on the important work of the Los Angeles Blade — it’s part of his legacy and what he would want.”
AIDS Healthcare Foundation President Michael Weinstein, who collaborated with Troy on many projects, says he was “a champion of many things that are near and dear to our heart,” including “being in the forefront of alerting the community to the dangers of Mpox.”
“All of who he was creates a void that we all must try to fill,” Weinstein says. “His death by suicide reminds us that despite the many gains we have made, we’re not all right a lot of the time. The wounds that LGBT people have experienced throughout our lives are yet to be healed even as we face the political storm clouds ahead that will place even greater burdens on our psyches.”
May the memory and legacy of Troy Masters be a blessing.
Veteran LGBTQ journalist Karen Ocamb served as the news editor and reporter for the Los Angeles Blade.
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MAGA comes to the Abbey! And we’re hyped! Wait, come back, we’re referring to the Lords of Acid bringing their “Make Acid Great Again” tour to Orlando. And the audience for this show in all likelihood will be a study in contrasts to a rally from that loser.
The Belgian dancefloor sleazoids deal in a filthy, sweaty industrial-techno collision custom-made for excess, stimulation and disco-ball scrying. The band broke out of the industrial underground in the late 1980s with seminal singles “I Sit on Acid” and “Pussy” along with ridiculously seminal and OTT libertine soundtrack Lust (recently reissued, for research purposes) before making it into the overground with their soundtrack to Mortal Kombat (they made it werk).
Founding members Praga Khan and Oliver Adams will be joined by new vocalist Gigi Ricci to bring these sounds to North America for the first time in over five years. There are going to be a lot of babysitters making bank this week.
In the early 2010s, a sense of yearning for the recent past captured the attention of Internet users worldwide. The retro revival set its sights and sounds on the 1980s and ’90s, rebooting the decades’ aesthetics for an online generation.
Soundtracking this revival was a new style of lo-fi electronic music seemingly made in — and for — the moment. Known among the cognoscenti as “vaporwave,” the nostalgia-based subgenre emerged with a one-two punch of audio and art primed for virtual virality. The scene was a familiar one, even if you’d only seen it on Tumblr: Greek sculptures on grids going nowhere, a neon sunset foreshadowing the warm pop waiting inside.
Something about that nameless nostalgia appealed to George Clanton, a Virginia-based artist whose penchant for the past manifested in a solo pop project called Mirror Kisses. Named after an Echo and the Bunnymen lyric, the project was intended to be “a spoof on ’80s music” for Clanton to share with his friends.
“The first Mirror Kisses album — that I’ve since erased from the Internet — was me making what I thought was a Human League record,” Clanton says. But when “everyone pretty much agreed [it] was way better than everything else [he] had done,” Clanton began taking the project more seriously. “Instead of making jokey style music like I did in the beginning,” he says, “I started getting interested in integrating more of my personal life and artistic best.”
After releasing a pair of Mirror Kisses albums — Bad Dreams (2012) and Heartbeats (2013) — Clanton participated anonymously in the vaporwave scene under the moniker ESPRIT 空想 (Chinese for “fantasy”). Much to his surprise, the effort was “a huge success, at least in the vaporwave sphere,” that paved the way for future trips into the past.
While simultaneously working on the next Mirror Kisses album, Clanton realized the project’s name no longer fit: “The music had become so serious and personal,” he says, “and I got sick of telling people the name of my band was Mirror Kisses.” So he went back to the basics. “I felt like this was my big opportunity to change my band name to George Clanton. I knew I wouldn’t get sick of it.”
The change did him good. In 2015, Clanton released 100% Electronica — the first album under his own name — on his own independent record label, 100% Electronica (co-founded by Clanton and then-girlfriend/now-wife Neggy Gemmy, née Lindsey French). Initially formed to release Clanton and French’s music, the label broke new musical ground by releasing the first-ever vaporwave vinyl record, ESPRIT 空想’s Girls Only 7-inch EP.
Hot on the heels of the albums’ success, Clanton took the wax wave worldwide. “There were a lot of artists I really loved that did not have vinyl,” he says of his desire to start the label. One of those artists was the Australian duo S U R F I N G, whose vaporwave classic Deep Fantasy was the first 100% Electronica album not released by Clanton or French.
Whether he’s running the label, working on his own projects, or coordinating an upcoming tour, Clanton says, “It’s always been driven by music, all of my passions in life.” And when it comes to music, he always turns it up to 11: “To me, the music just doesn’t sound right unless it’s super loud.”
Perhaps a relic of his younger punk days, Clanton’s love for loudness often shocks fans expecting his live show to be a calming experience. “A lot of people — and they’re not wrong for this — listen to my music to chill out to,” he says, adding that “isn’t [his] intention, generally speaking.” For Clanton, the louder the music, the better. “Whichever is the loudest show on stage ends up being my favorite for the tour,” he says. “It can never be loud enough.”
Clanton visits Orlando for the first time on 4/20, topping a stacked Abbey lineup featuring L.A. electro punx Sextile, St. Louis siblings Frost Children, and Dade County darlings Donzii. Warning: The volume — among other things — will be high.
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