These are from the Australia leg of Swarm Tour in March 2023. These shows happened from 2am-6am for a week and I watched every single one via shitty Instagram livestreams even though I had a full time job. I'm pretty sure waking up from deep REM sleep at like 3am to fry my retinas with a live Gerard Way upskirt feed for six days straight left me with permanent brain damage. I felt so connected to not only the 2k people in the livestream with me and the 15k people at the show on the other side of the world, but also to all the fans throughout the history of music fandom who would have committed real, honest to God crimes to experience a nightly livestream pointed straight up their favorite musician's skirt. During MCR's orignal run in the 2000s, fans used their blogs to share shows with each other. LiveJournal is (still) littered with posts from young fans who would get home the night after their show and word vomit every single detail they remembered from the night in the most scattered, unedited form of reporting you can imagine. These posts certainly "drip with desire" (in Catherine Grant and Kate Random Love's words) in some ways, but my contemporary eyes and heart can feel how they're also held back by rock fandom sensibilities of the time. Even on the distinctly feminine LiveJournal platform, I find young women policing their words, their tone, their expressions. They report in a cool tone that "mcr totally kicked a$$ last night" and "played some of the old stuff". God forbid anyone get too excited.

Of course, I understand their impulse. I understand it deeply and intimately. When I was a teenager, I felt bad going to rock shows, because I felt like my presence in the pit as a teen girl hurt my favorite band's credibility. And I didn't want to hurt them. I loved them. But I couldn't show that to anyone--at least no one that I didn't trust. My touch contaminated anything I got close to with teen fangirl cooties. When people questioned me about liking what were essentially not-like-other-girl boybands I defensively exclaimed It's about the music, not how hot they are. That was what everyone else said. That was what real rock dudes said (or so the girls around me said). Then I grew up to be a twenty seven year old lesbian who gets faint at the sight of Gerard Way in a miniskirt. Somewhere along the way calling Gerard hot in a girl way started to feel empowering. It felt defiant. I'm not sure exactly when it flipped.