04/05/2024
LGBTQ Nation reports on the life of Donna Lee Parsons, a trans woman whose contribution to the development of punk rock music and rap hardcover crossovers was incredibly important during the early eighties. Parsons was a founder of punk fanzine Mouth of the Rat, and from there founded Rat Cage Records. Among the bands that Parsons signed was a youthful punk-rap fusion band called the Beastie Boys. In 2001, twenty years after their initial records came out, Parsons also came out and announced she was a trans woman. The Beastie Boys paid for her gender affirmation surgery. Parsons died from colon cancer a year after the surgery but spent the last year of her life proudly living as the woman she wanted to be. “My understanding was that she was pretty much dying and that she wanted to live out the rest of the little time she had left in the body of her choosing,” Beastie Boys’ Adam Horovitz wrote in the Beastie Boys Book. “So [Adam] Yauch took care of it. He organized it so we gave her the money for the [gender-affirming] operation, but it was under the guise of reimbursement and unpaid back royalties for the Polly Stew record from 1982. Donna got the operation and then, within a year, passed away.” Norman Brannon also notes Donna's contribution to punk and hardcore music in the online zine Anti-Matter, and notes "I’ve often said that the history of LGBTQ+ people in the hardcore scene is like the history of LGBTQ+ people everywhere: We are sometimes hidden and often erased. These days, it seems almost normal to start one’s public life as an out queer or trans person, but for most of recorded history, this was simply not the case. Whether we struggled in private or in front of the world, the outcomes have varied to the extent that there will always be some things we may never know about the people who came before us."
