After Last Night. The Rev-Lons. 1964. Reprise.

 I entered high school in the fall of 1980 when I was fourteen. Emotional Rescue, a record I still think of highly, was number one on the charts. I had just broken with a group of friends so I entered my final years of schooling awkwardly alone. I can remember getting to school that first week before first bell without an idea of what to do with myself before classes started. Eventually I found  a second floor spot opposite a flight of stairs, near the school office where I could passively await first period. Along with a few stand alone students, I held up a bit of wall, just as I would many years later in gay bars in Fort Worth and Dallas, silently cruising with a beer bottle in my right hand. From that second story spot on the wall I watched as the coaches climbed the steps from the ground floor where they’d entered the school after parking their cars on the street out by the football field house. On their way to the office, they made a solemn entrance, practicing their theater of authority and discipline, which I, with no role of my own yet to play, took very seriously. Their clothing impressed me. Picked for them by their wives, their wardrobe was meant to convey the idea of white middle class control, the kind of social jurisdiction our Mexican families brought us to this country to emulate; their blended poly-wool dress slacks told of an almost desperate dependency upon heterosexual family traditions that supposedly repressed the animal violence of their desires, while their blue denim jeans, worn the Fridays before our two-day weekend break, were meant to soften the appearance of their dominion over the predominantly minority student body. Ostensibly, high school is the place where you are introduced to the idea of a social order, but, on the Rev-Lons’ After Last Night, you can hear lead singer Rachel Hernandez shamelessly go one step further, like all the popular kids, and define her hierarchical role; in this case, the all powerful Cheerleader With A Boyfriend. Hernandez’ delivery is so direct that, like all the best girl group vocalists, there is the suggestion in her performance of how she’ll carry her prowess as teenage provocateur into her adulthood, when it will complicate her life and, if not kill her, then cause irreparable damage. After Last Night is camp bliss, the sort of 45 rpm single that gay men were playing repeatedly in 1964 just to have their own emotions sung to them in a heightened state of obnoxious good cheer. The song is liberating, too, in the sense that you’re fully immersed in its theme of opposite sex romance in which the gender roles are so fixed it even evokes the boy’s sexuality. The reason I didn’t do as well in high school as I could have was because of my fixation on the sexual drives of three adult men, sometimes four, sometimes five. I was so alienated from my own sex life that I began to fetishize white American masculinity. I was less interested in what I wanted than I was in what would be asked of me as a sexual…partner. After Last Night, with its chorus of “last night he held me near and…like a child, I closed my eyes and smiled,” is like a rallying cheer for the closeted or non-practicing homosexual wed to the baroque fantasy imposed upon him by desire. Emotional rescue, indeed. From the 2005 Rhino box set Girl Group Sounds: One Kiss Can Lead To Another


June 29 021

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