In saying he's gay, Passion Pit's Michael Angelakos shrugs off expectations. All bands have a mythology
around them, and Passion Pit’s begins with a man and a woman. It goes
like this: When he was a student at Emerson College, Michael Angelakos
recorded a set of songs in his dorm room and gave them to his
then-girlfriend as a belated Valentine’s Day present. The sweetly
romantic electro-pop made it onto the Chunk of Change EP in 2008, which then made it to listeners and festival stages worldwide.
There’s another chapter of Passion Pit’s mythology, and
it’s also about a man and a (different) woman. Angelakos has talked
openly about his bipolar disorder, depression, and alcoholism; he has
also talked about deeply loving Kristy Mucci, the woman he married. In a
2012 Pitchfork profile,
he said that she stopped him from jumping out of a window during one of
his manic episodes, and some of the songs on his most recent album, Gossamer, are explicitly about her. “Just believe in me, Kristina / All these demons, I can beat them,” goes one lyric that People quoted when it covered their divorce this past August.
Passion
Pit’s latest extra-musical chapter began Monday, when the 28-year-old
Angelakos for the first time said publicly that he’s gay. The statement
came during a conversation on Bret Easton Ellis’s podcast
that began (after a lengthy monologue from Ellis about Quentin
Tarantino’s recent controversies) with a discussion of Angelakos’s
mental-health struggles and the media’s treatment of them. “It’s pretty
amazing how often my life can be condensed into a
very-easy-to-rattle-off monologue,” Angelakos said, before any mention
of his sexuality.
Whenever
a public figure comes out, there are few stock reactions from the
Internet-commenting masses. Some people offer congratulations. Some
people recoil, either with blatantly homophobic statements or the
equally insidious idea that LGBT folks should keep quiet about their
personal lives (even though straight celebs aren’t asked to do the
same). And some people ask what took the public figure so long to come
out, often with a hint of condemnation.
It’s the last question—why now?—that
Angelakos and Ellis spent the most time discussing on the podcast.
Angelakos said he first felt conflicted about his sexuality around age
20, but tried to forget about it because he was in a world of “dudes in
bands talking about girls.” He also talked about having no gay role
models growing up, a deathly fear of AIDS, a wonderful relationship with
a woman, and a profound amount of self-hatred. In other words, it’s
complicated.
More than anything, though, Angelakos talked about
stories: the ones he told to himself, the ones that the public told
about him, and the ones that belong in both categories. “Also, there was
the narrative of the Chunk of Change EP,” Angelakos said when starting to explain why he stayed in the closet. “It’s like, he made it for his girlfriend.”
Ellis broke in with a tone of helpful skepticism: “That’s the myth, that’s the origin story.”
“That’s a very true story!” Angelakos shot back.
Everything
came to a climax, he said, this past spring, when his marriage was in
trouble and he was getting wound up about his own press coverage. It was
Mucci who encouraged him to figure out his sexuality, while also saying
she didn’t hold him at fault or think he misled her. He recalled
talking to her on his birthday and hearing that she was exhausted from
dealing with his issues. “I needed to feel embarrassed about how I was
making other people feel, because that was the only way I could
understand how I was feeling,”Angelakos said. “It’s kind of like RuPaul
saying, ‘If you don’t love yourself how the hell are you going to love
anybody else?’ That was quite honestly what was happening.”
Mucci
also helped him move past his hangups with the public. “You can’t be
buying all these things that people are saying about you, all these
narratives,” Angelakos remembered her saying. “You have a very rich and
interesting life that cannot be condensed into an article.”
His
anxiety about narratives should be relatable to a lot of people who’ve
had to come out. In a society where straightness is the default, being
gay can feel like a disruption to one’s life story, an unwanted plot
twist—when in fact what it means is that it’s dangerous to try and fit
into predetermined narratives. “I was buying into these notions that I
kind of was receiving very early on: This is the way you live your life,” Angelakos said when talking about his marriage.
As for the future, Angelakos
said that he is excited to make music that can be fully honest,
something he hasn’t quite been able to do since the early days of the
band. And he’s trying not to worry about what this revelation means for
his mythology. “Publicly, I came out about [being] bipolar and everyone was, ‘Ohhh that dude is crazy.’ That’s basically overshadowed so much
of my work life,” he said. “If I come out what is that going to do? How
can that diminish the impact of it? But then I was like, I don’t care! I
don’t care anymore. I like girls, I like boys, everyone's fantastic,
but you know what? I’m gay. Finally.”
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