Here It’s December Every Day

I’m visiting my mom in Wilmington, Delaware for a few weeks in the summer of 2006. I’m fifteen. Mom drank and did a few lines before retiring to the bedroom we shared during our visits. My younger brother stays up with her as she looks out the window for cops, while I escape downstairs to watch MTV. I know from bits I’ve heard on the radio and seen on the Internet that “Miss Murder” is in the top 10. I have to see Davey. I have to hear his voice. I need the song to enter my bloodstream. I don’t care if I had to stay up through the witching hour to hear it. I need it now. 

Just shy of 2 a.m., without an introduction, the video begins. A woman in black sits on a gaudy bench in a dark room lit only by the desk lamp. Her back is exposed. She takes a sheet of paper from a wooden tray and stamps it. She doesn’t reveal the content of the stamp. 

Then he’s there, standing with his arms relaxed, one hand covering the other. His eyes are closed revealing the soft blue of his shadow. His dark hair is trimmed short on one side and combs over the other side down to his chest. A blond highlight shimmers in the camera. He sings the opening lines to “Prelude 12/21,” concluding with Kiss my eyes and lay me to sleep. He opens his eyes the moment the drums pound. His bright eyes look full with false lashes. He has a lip ring.

The woman folds the paper.

Davey sits at the desk. When the camera zooms on his face, I see he’s wearing a full face of makeup. His long, manicured nails catch the light when he moves his hair off his forehead.

My heart catches in my throat. I can’t describe why I believe I love him. I haven’t seen the frontman of a post-hardcore band look pretty, wear “guyliner” and, wanting to take it further, put on a full face of makeup, complete with nails and accessories. I can’t describe why hearing and watching him scream, sounding so strong when he looks like what Southerners around me call a “sissy,” gives me goosebumps, makes me also want to scream. It’s because I am an angsty, closet case in the heart of the Bible Belt, and Davey Havok is everything I can’t yet be. 

The way he looks on the outside aligns with how I feel inside.

*

AFI’s Decemberunderground released on June 6, 2006. That’s 666. But it wasn’t on purpose. AFI isn’t Satanic despite what my devoted evangelical parents believed, but Davey is outspoken against Christianity. In a 2014 article with Vanyaland, Davey notes the “destructive and dangerous effects of organized religion throughout history.” Their song “Sacrilege” on their 2009 album Crash Love showcases the hypocrisy of evangelicalism, and because I grew up incredibly immersed in church culture, I always skipped it, feeling that if I listened then God would punish me. 

Decemberunderground reached no. 1 on the US Billboard 200, no. 2 on the Canadian and European charts, and no. 3 on the Australian charts and was released to generally positive reviews. Corey Apar from allmusic said, “The core of AFI’s sound never strays too far from what listeners have grown to love about them in the first place.”

However, it seemed that hardcore fans mostly hated it. Neil Strauss from Rolling Stone said “something isn’t right in the world of AFI,” claiming their sound would “be at home on the soundtrack to the next Spider-Man movie.” NME said the album was a “maudlin mope-fest comprised chiefly of schlock rock clichés (‘The Killing Lights’) and slightly risible stabs at synth-pop (‘The Interview’), just about redeemed by choruses you could hang a trench coat on.”

My stepmom was not a fan either. Any music we wanted to purchase that didn’t play on the Christian radio had to be vetted by either one of my parents. She sat at the computer while I practiced Beethoven’s Pathetique for an upcoming recital. The Pathetique was long, and I had hoped by the time I finished practicing, she would’ve read the lyrics. But I had to wait a few days until I asked about them. She thought I would want to kill myself listening to the songs. She also didn’t like the lyric that goes I taste of blood / She bit my lip and drank my war / from years before. “She” changes to “he” in subsequent choruses. 

My stepmom didn’t know I felt AFI was one of the things keeping me alive.

So I started dressing emo- or scene-adjacent. I knew some of the guys at school got their jeans from Delia’s, a women’s clothing store, because they fit tighter and rode low. I wore Vans and Converse sneakers and band shirts, my favorite being a gray Underoath shirt with yellow lettering, silhouettes of tombstones, and a blue vintage bicycle. (I found one for $10 in a thrift store a few months ago and bought it. I still listen to Underoath regularly.) I had other band shirts I loved from Flyleaf and The Almost, but never AFI since I wasn’t allowed to listen to them. My stepmom hated my skinny jeans so much she hid them in her room—forbidden territory—for a week. Sometimes my dad would tell me to change my clothes before we left the house.

I found ways to listen to AFI on the bus. My neighbor Lauren and I would sit beside each other on the ride home, each of us with an earbud in our ears, listening to Decemberunderground. I felt desperate to listen to them whenever I could. There was something about the theatre of the lyrics and music that stirred up something in me like I was told church music was supposed to. I felt him in my chest similar to those times in youth group the band would play a compelling song about surrendering your life to Jesus. I wanted to give mine to Davey because I knew Davey accepted me and the church did not.

*

After graduation, my parents thought sending me to Christian college would be the right fit for me, though I didn’t have to if I didn’t want to. I went in part to seek a “cure” from my homosexuality. As a gay kid at Christian college, I believed myself to be an outcast because I was made to be one. I believed myself an outcast because I was forced to be one. I sat in thrice-weekly chapel where 13,000 students erupted in applause over a girl being cured of her homosexuality. It was the loudest applause I’d ever heard. It was the beginning of my freshman year. After that I kept to a few people who knew the truth and loved me despite it. 

One friend in particular lived in my old dorm room. The first time we met, I offered him a ride to the store to grab necessities he forgot at his home in New England. He wore distressed khakis, a fitted t-shirt, and Birkenstock sandals. On the drive back to campus from the store, I played AFI. “Dude, no fuckin’ way! I love AFI.” Since then we kept close together, not understanding that he also shared a secret—he doubted his belief in God, a big taboo concept that students hardly addressed with each other. On AFI’s official website, Davey said Decemberunderground “is a time and a place. It is where the cold can huddle together in darkness and isolation.” My friend transferred the end of his freshman year.

In a 2006 interview with Rolling Stone, Davey, named the “doom-and-gloom singer,” answered that his favorite lyric on the album was Am I beautiful? / Am I usable? In college I was a prominent church figure and secretly underwent conversion therapy. After a few sessions, I realized conversion therapy wasn’t going to work. The pastor had told me no one would love me, and that I couldn’t have a family. At my church, I fell from grace and was pushed out, which sent me into a spiral. I dated a drug addict and alcoholic who later had been arrested multiple times.

Am I beautiful? / Am I usable?

I graduated in 2013 without killing myself, by the grace of God. Ten years after its release, I kept visiting Decemberunderground.

In 2016, I slept with anyone who wanted me. I loved anyone who loved me. Desire took the shape of my subconscious. My goal with all interactions with men was to get them to want me, whether or not I wanted them, and once I even found myself in a year-long destructive relationship with a man twenty-four years older than me.

Wanting someone else wasn’t the point. If someone wanted me, I said yes. Some of these men genuinely cared for me and our friendships remain solid. Others set out to take advantage of me, and I let them. Am I beautiful? / Am I usable? That’s all I cared about. Traces of the person I was still existed.

Going back to Decemberunderground feels like going home. I’m reminded of who I am when I listen. I remember I lost my virginity to a song called “Kiss and Control.” I remember sitting up late to watch “Miss Murder” on MTV. I remember sitting on the deck in Ocean City, New Jersey, listening to “Summer Shudder” as Mom drank inside. I remember playing Power 96.1 in the kitchen where I worked, waiting for “Love Like Winter” to play. The album provides snapshots of my emotional life on a level other albums haven’t been able to pinpoint. It felt (it feels) so specific.

Davey was the friend who called me on my shit. He was the friend who taught me to feel beautiful, that embracing the divine feminine within could be powerful. If nothing else Decemberunderground created a secret place beneath an icy lake for outcasts who didn’t fit in without knowing why.

When I listen, I think of Davey in his eyeliner and eyeshadow, face of makeup, and gender non-specific clothing. Each time feels like the first time.