There’s a lot of stories that have come out since Kurt Cobain’s passing. While the mystery still surrounds his death, we now have at least one more missing piece of Kurt Cobain. In a rare interview with Jon Savage, that has now been unearthed, Kurt Cobain describes his time in high school,when he thought he might be gay.
Growing up, Cobain said that he had a gay friend in high school that he was particularly close to, but that connection was destroyed by his mother’s homophobia. Cobain elaborated on the confusing and frustrating time, telling Savage :
“I even thought that I was gay. I thought that might be the solution to my problem. Although I never experimented with it, I had a gay friend, and then my mother wouldn’t allow me to be friends with him anymore, because she’s homophobic. It was real devastating because finally I found a male friend who I actually hugged and was affectionate too, and we talked about a lot of things. I couldn’t hang out with him anymore.”
The uncovered audio is from a series of interviews that PBS is putting together called Blank on Blank. Blank on Blank unearths rare interviews from legends, and puts their audio to various illustrations. The last interview we wrote about that was a part of the PBS series was Jim Morrison’s interview , where he admitted that he used to get bullied over his weight.
Throughout Kurt Cobain’s short career, he was an advocate for the outcasts, and was quoted making bold statements to uprise against conformity. In the 90s the LGBT community made up a big chunk of those outcasts. The Nirvana frontman was quoted as saying, “I am not gay, although I wish I were, just to piss off homophobes.”
Now we have the origins of where that statement might have come from.
In 1992 Cobain did an interview with LGBT magazine The Advocate , and was quoted as saying that he identified with the gay community:
“I’m definitely gay in spirit, and I probably could be bisexual… If I wouldn’t have found Courtney, I probably would have carried on with a bisexual lifestyle.”
Courtney of course is Courtney Love, frontwoman for Hole, and the mother of their child Frances Bean Cobain.