a dying punk asked his brother if there were any gays like him in rock. the answer is four hours long and it starts today.

"Where are the gays like me?"

Marcus Black asked his brother that, and then he died, and the question sat there unanswered for the better part of fifteen years. He was a punk musician. People reports he died of cancer in January 2012, at 41. He had given his life to metal and punk and rock and roll, three rooms that spent their entire existence insisting they were the straightest places on earth, and he could not find one person in any of them who looked like him.

His brother is Dustin Lance Black, who won an Oscar for writing Milk. So the question landed on the one man in America with a professional habit of digging up gay men who existed and then got filed where nobody would think to look.

what rock out actually argues

Rock Out, four parts, started streaming Sunday on Revry. The thesis is not that rock music had a few gay people in it. The thesis is that the queerness was never missing, it was backstage doing the paperwork. Per People, the series goes straight at the managers: Brian Epstein, who built the Beatles, alongside Larry Parnes and Peter Brown. The men art-directing the most aggressively masculine genre in American music were, a striking number of them, homosexuals, which is either the funniest fact in rock history or the saddest, depending on the hour you hear it.

Then it goes at the ones who tried it out front, where it costs more. The Blade reports the series covers what happened to Little Richard's career after he came out, and Jobriath, who attempted to be an openly gay rock star in the 1970s and was destroyed for the attempt. Elton John and Freddie Mercury are in it. So are Jayne County and Joseph Genaro of the Dead Milkmen. Patty Schemel, who drummed for Hole, wrote the score, per the listing at NewFest, which screened the feature cut of the film last October. The distance between Jobriath and Orville Peck putting an openly gay cowboy on the cover of Playgirl this month is the whole series in one line.

who else sat down for it

Dolly Parton did. The Los Angeles Blade reports the series carries one of her final interviews before her death in August. She spent decades being the person gay men were permitted to love out loud in places where they were permitted to love nothing else, so of course she said yes.

Marcus never got his answer. Four hours of it went up on Sunday anyway.