i was just thinking how sure i am that gwen was NOT chill about the gavin rossdale bisexual history revelation. and i was pretty sure it happened at the beginning of their relationship. this is so old tea but to this day i don’t think they have their story straight about when they met, or really that first year of their relationship. i believe they met in december 1995. circulating lore says they hooked up at the bush/goo goo dolls/no doubt show in new orleans, february 1996. these are his courtney days, too, to my knowledge the source of the specifics on their relationship is just courtney herself, she said it was 8 months hooking up, 1995-1996, while they were seeing other people. i don’t know if that’s relevant, feels relevant, i don’t know who else he might have been seeing in 1995.
boy george’s book outing gavin came out in the uk in april 1995 and gavin denied it in rolling stone in april 1996, i’m not sure if he said anything before then. i haven’t read the text, but the facts as they stand seem to be that gavin dated marilyn (peter robinson) in the early eighties, i think in london. this comes out in 1995, gavin denies it, gavin and gwen get married in 2002. in 2003, marilyn puts out a single about gavin, the cover a photo of them together from that period. in 2009, i think, marilyn tells the press their relationship was a 5 year relationship. in 2010 gavin confirms for the first time that he had a relationship with marilyn, which he describes as an event that happened one time, but did not deny lasted five years. actually what he said was, “you have to know what you like, and i know what i like.” which lol. ok! i feel like fuckboys have ways of being repressed that go unappreciated. that’s just my opinion that no one asked for.
i don’t know if we know exactly when that photo dates to, but gavin says he was 17 in that relationship, which would place it in the neighborhood of 1982. (they’re like 3 years apart - as far as i can tell their relative ages were not an issue for him and have not been the subject of scandal.) (they are both scorpios.) it’s not relevant that courtney was in liverpool in 1982, but i think courtney’s time in liverpool will someday reveal itself again to be important in some way, so i am mentioning it now so i can return to this when i am proven right.
in 2015 gwen and gavin announced their splitting, and marilyn told a tabloid gavin had recently called him to vent or rave about his marriage and to blame him for its instability— for all the outing to tabloids and so on. marilyn sort of said that gwen had never been able to get over gavin’s bisexual past, which had been known to her but as extant but deniable—or maybe like, knowable but deniable—for the whole of their relationship, from the start. and boy do i believe that. it was a thing that existed by the fact of having been spoken but which had been negated by the act of being denied. marilyn said that gwen could never get over it and let me tell you i believe that is extremely plausible lol. it sounds extremely true that gwen could not cohere or simply deal with the idea of her maybe bisexual husband lol.
i feel like marilyn was trying to say two things, first that gavin was repressed and maybe just regular closeted lol and second that gavin’s habitual lying (about all things) made gwen paranoid to begin with, and made their relationship structurally unsound.
first of all do we believe this call took place? don’t care, not relevant. takeaway is the same. (additionally, we should heed this scorpio’s scorpio wisdom in general.)
you have to understand that the reason this is interesting to me—actually extremely important to me—actually maybe the most important imaginable thing to me personally—is because this is the whole entire substance of my beloved evil femcel shadow self document no doubt - return of saturn (2000). the way i often kind of describe this album is as a series of desires which are basically evil but which you can easily find yourself desiring if you’re not careful—by you i mean me and by if you’re not careful i mean if you don’t exercise historical agency in some sense or in some other sense if you don’t recognize that the price of a desire (the desire itself, not even getting the thing!) is freedom, where freedom isn’t even really just your own freedom, but is total systemic agency. another way i look at return of saturn is that it’s gwen speaking into truth a series of things that are either plainly false already or are proven false in the course of gwen arguing them. so here we have a third way of understanding return of saturn, which is as a kind of structural biphobia lmfao. i’m extremely excited by this—we have so many albums about how you can understand people relating to people through basically a gay way. that’s almost every album ever. you can do that with almost every album, especially here. but how many structurally biphobic albums are there. almost none. that’s that real gwen stefani advantage. because you can also just read return of saturn on a very surface level with the understanding that gwen is a walking sex panic. which we all know to be true!
i wanted to take a second to note something i recalled gwen having said about seeing red flags in return of saturn—sure, i guess, whatever, i mean i guess—but when i found it it was in fact promotion for the single “red flag,” from her 2016 divorce rollout record, so, sure, lol. that’s hers to do and what we love from a woman and i definitely need to listen to her divorce rollout record. genuinely i can’t wait for lana del rey to get to be 50 i bet she’s gonna have some crazy shit for us.
on courtney, well, i don’t think it’s nothing that she was with him when he was “dealing” with being outed —and i am certain she found this edifying or at least very interesting! what i would really love to hear is courtney’s analysis, in light of this, of return of saturn. i need the courtney love lacanian return of saturn read. i bet she would also think about sophie muller, david lachapelle. courtney love in my opinion has been almost unreasonably kind to gwen, to fruitful ends (hollaback girl)! i’m with gwen on one thing, that courtney could have seen that gwen wasn’t a cheerleader archetype, and i don’t think courtney thought much of it at all, but it is sort of interesting how that went like: courtney calls herself a school stoner to gwen’s cheerleader, a type of typology that isn’t even really native to courtney love, and gwen said, i take that typology extremely seriously, it is native to me, but i am not, you know, that type (hollaback girl). (wrote myself into having to say “native to gwen stefani” and i guess i will stand by it.) i know courtney wasn’t thinking but i also think she is very capable of this kind of generative discourse. it worked on gwen; it worked differently on lana, who is a sensitive and honest listener; kim gordon is too cruel and not smart enough to ever be alive dialectically; with kat i think she’s maybe just too much the hole running through.
(note on marilyn if you’re not british new romantic or whatever, he was a scene kid artist musician who put out pop music as marilyn but has always as far as i know been he/him it’s not a superseded names thing or anything)
