Commentary: Yes, Kurt Cobain was a grunge icon. He was also a gay rights hero.
By Aaron Hamburger, The Washington Post 1 hr ago

In September 1991, I was a nervous freshman at the University of Michigan, sitting on a friend's dorm room floor, when a guy ran in from down the hall, saying, "You've got to hear this." He fed a cassette tape into the stereo, and I heard "Smells Like Teen Spirit" by Nirvana for the first time. It's hard to capture how radical that song and that moment felt. Cobain and his bandmates were suddenly ubiquitous, an explosion of insolent Pacific Northwest cool into my deeply uncool, and fundamentally conservative, Midwestern world. (A few months later, Nirvana's "Nevermind" supplanted Michael Jackson's "Dangerous" atop the Billboard charts.) Hearing his music was like receiving a dispatch from another spiritual plane, one that offered irrefutable evidence that there were other ways of living - and maybe other ways of loving, too.

I don't speak of love idly. Cobain is the Gen X icon who popularized alternative music and culture, but on the 25th anniversary of his death today (April 5), I cherish another aspect of his legacy much more: his consistent and vocal support of gay rights. Something began to change in me the moment "Smells Like Teen Spirit" came on in that Ann Arbor dorm room, and it wasn't just my grungy new approach to fashion. Cobain's "oh well, whatever, never mind" attitude about sexual identity, expressed in lyrics and interviews, changed the course of my life.

Though Cobain might not be the first name you think of when it comes to gay rights, his band was never shy about its politics, especially where LGBTQ issues were concerned. In 1992, Nirvana played a "No on #9" benefit concert and issued a public statement opposing Measure 9, a statewide anti-gay citizen ballot initiative in Oregon that would have required "all governments" in the state to treat homosexuality as "abnormal, wrong, unnatural and perverse." And in the liner notes of their album "Insecticide," released that December, they warned:"If any of you in any way hate homosexuals, people of different color, or women, please do this one favor for us - leave us the f--- alone! Don't come to our shows and don't buy our records." The liner notes to their next album, "In Utero," echoed that admonition: "If you're a sexist, racist, homophobe or basically an a--hole, don't buy this CD. I don't care if you like me, I hate you."

Cobain himself repeatedly and publicly affirmed his pro-gay stance. In a 1993 interview with the Advocate, which I remember reading breathlessly in a Borders bookstore with the cover folded over so no one could tell what I was holding, Cobain called himself "gay in spirit" and revealed that as a teenager, he often questioned his sexuality and sprayed "God is gay " graffiti in the small town of Aberdeen, Washington, where he grew up. ( The line "God is gay" later popped up in the Nirvana song "Stay Away." ) During the end credits of a "Saturday Night Live" episode in 1992, he made out with bandmate Krist Novoselic. And in 1993, Cobain appeared on the cover of the music magazine the Face wearing a dainty flower print dress and red nail polish.
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Hamburger is the author of the novel "Nirvana Is Here."