JACK PARKER
- 4 hours ago
- 7 min read
PONS, PERFORMER
Watch out, Tina Turner, and look out, world. Jack Parker (they/them) is now the hardest-working person in show business. Last year, they performed 160 shows. Can you imagine? Many New York City bands are passion projects and sonic side hustles. For Jack Parker, that is not the case.
I saw Jack Parker perform, labeled under the group “The Pons,” when they opened for Mary Shelley. It was like watching the post punk band Suicide in 2030 in Brooklyn, high on acid. There were lights, synthesizers, and a drummer. What more do you need? The sounds stung, and the noises gnawed. My feedback: “Wow, that was weird.” I had never heard sounds like that before. In 2026, very few things are cutting edge. Even though Jack is only 25, they may be one of the few riding the wave of the future.
At an early age, creativity served as a tool for Jack to resist the oppressive silence that surrounded their conservative upbringing in North Carolina. New experiences redefined everything Jack thought they knew. Jack's alternative journey began with a formative consequential trip to Costa Rica that dismantled the myth of being heteronormative and made it nearly impossible for them to follow a conventional professional path.
As a non-conforming artist, Jack creates music that embodies their lifelong devotion to unorthodoxy, incorporating elements of confrontational “No Wave” and the theatricality of glam-rock.
— August Bernadicou, Executive Director of The LGBTQ History Project
“I was born in Raleigh, North Carolina, and I only technically lived there for like a year, so I don't remember it at all. Then I moved to Winston-Salem, North Carolina, and that's where I really grew up, in the suburbs of Winston-Salem, not the city proper. It was a very rural, very conservative kind of traditional upbringing, a classic Southern suburban experience.
I didn't really gain a sense of consciousness that I was queer until fourth grade. It was the first time I remember having thoughts. Before that, I was just kind of coasting through existence—I remember the first Obama election. I remember when Obama was running for president for the first time.
Everything eventually kicked in when I changed schools. I was around these preppy, intense, cool kids. I feel like it took me a few years to navigate that sort of—I definitely cosplayed a jock kid in middle school. There was also a lot of pressure from my parents to do that kind of thing, you know, play sports and be cool, be popular. I pretty quickly started to turn away from all that, and sort of fell into my own person. I got really into surfing and skateboarding, that whole culture. I feel like that triggered my whole dive into alternative culture, or whatever.
I grew up in a Christian household in the most annoying way possible. My parents weren’t practicing Christians; they wouldn’t go to church, but they would arbitrarily enforce the rules they wanted. They dictated their rules. There was very intense censoring going on. I didn’t really listen to music until I was 12 or 13. The rule was that if I wanted to download a song on my iPod, I had to be comfortable saying all the lyrics to my parents’ faces. I couldn’t play any rap. I really wanted the video game, Devil May Cry. My parents said no. They were also really conservative and weird about me dating people, having people over, and having a closed door. My dad was in the military, and there was a strict military atmosphere in our house. It definitely wasn’t the sort of environment where I felt comfortable talking about my feelings. My mom is one of those people who is against gay marriage. ‘What’s next, marrying a dog? Marrying a toaster?’ We are going to let them marry whoever they want. I haven’t spoken to my parents in six years. I cut off contact in 2020.
The big thing, the sort of life-defining moment that I think about—I don't know if anything would be the same if none of this had happened, and the whole thing's weird—but when I was in like seventh grade, we moved to Costa Rica for a couple of years, and I went to school there. It turned me on to this whole other way of life and culture, and there's no supervision there. Kids grew up really, really fast. When I was 13, people started getting fucked up—drinking, smoking, and trying to get laid. Surf and skate culture is really big in Costa Rica. It propelled me into this weird—I got a taste of this bohemian lifestyle. It fried my brain.
After that, there was no chance I would be able to adjust to a normal life. I always knew I would never work a normal job. I am fully incapable of doing that. Costa Rica broke down the American myth. It sort of shattered the whole illusion of like you graduate high school, then you go to college, and then from college you get a straight job that you work—just sort of the straight American dream life, or whatever. I could move to a foreign country and be a bartender. That sounds pretty cool. This was my parents’ worst nightmare. It was a whiplash in both environments.
Coming to terms with my queerness was a really slow process for me. There were a lot of gay signs. I had weird, homoerotic friendships with other boys. Now I think, ‘Oh, that was kind of gay.’ This journey was a sexual awakening, because my main struggle, my entire life, was definitely more around my gender than my sexuality. I was never attracted to cis women. The gender thing was longer, more complicated, and more confusing. I was really nonbinary for a long time, and it was confusing to me. It just never clicked. I feel like I never got the vocabulary or education to understand it. From a young age, I was attracted to androgyny, drag, glam, and theater, which I discovered through music. I like David Bowie and T. Rex.
I didn’t feel like a boy, and I didn’t feel like a trans woman. It came together when I was 19. I was explaining this to someone, and they said, ‘You are describing nonbinary.’ I was like, ‘I guess you're right.’ There was no possible way I could live with this reality in North Carolina.
From a day-to-day perspective, I did not struggle too much in interactions because I am very cis-passing. I can go boy-mode and switch. When I am touring in the Deep South, I feel like some gender politics can be a little dated. It’s annoying when someone clocks me as a cis, straight dude. For example, there was one time we were playing a show in England. We had a trans woman in the band, and she was pretty passing. I was talking to this promoter—we had this show fall through at the last minute, and I was trying to shuffle things around to see if we could rebook it with this person. He said, ‘I’d love to set up a show, but we only work with LGBTQ artists.’ We didn’t get the gig. It’s awkward: I don’t identify as a guy, and my bandmate was a trans woman. I am in an awkward position where I feel like I have to go out of my way to reveal myself even though I am pretty public with my queerness and my personal life.
At shows, there is a gender dynamic. I don’t know the right word, but it is almost like a culture of flirting. People come to me, and I feel objectified. Someone will make a pass at me in a not-cool way. It is across the lines from what is socially acceptable. There is a stereotype that all men think about is sex, no matter what you know. Sometimes it feels like people treat me a certain way that I do not like. I can be pretty uncomfortable. This is something I think of sometimes: it’s kind of fucked up.
If I had to give advice, I would say, ‘Just do it. Just fucking do it, because you have to go through a journey after severing pivotal relationships.’ It gets easier over time. There is the sort of myth we are sold. I feel very nihilistic about everything that is going on right now. I’m 25 years old, so I don’t have a ton of perspective on everything, but the direction of this global fascism trend—what is happening in America-–has me feeling confused and pretty hopeless. There are so many issues I care about, I don’t even know where to begin. The most consequential event that radicalized me is what is happening in Gaza. That is the final straw. There is this global movement where billionaires have their hands on everything. There doesn’t seem to be international law anymore, and powerful militaries can do whatever they want. There is an imperial boomerang. They are cracking down on protestors, and everything is under surveillance. It’s hard for me to see a way forward without something like the French Revolution happening. I don’t know the path, but as a politically engaged person, I care about the progressive agenda. I keep getting pushed farther to the left. There needs to be a full overhaul of the system, or I am getting out as fast as I can.”
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The LGBTQ History Project is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit preserving the lives and legacies of LGBTQ+ activists from the first wave of gay liberation through oral histories, archives, and the QueerCore Podcast.
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