ot everyone gets to be a Rock God, but nothing stops teenage boys from sitting on their beds with headphones blasting, "We will, we will rock you!" while they masturbate to their alphabetized collections of rock 'n roll album covers. Ambidextrous and many limbed, the acclaimed poet Daniel Nester revisits this universal truth in God Save My Queen (Soft Skull Press). It's a memoir, in poetry form, that uses every song Queen ever recorded as a jumping-off point for Nester's personal recollections and extrapolations. And there are footnotes. In this interview, Nester reveals how Freddie Mercury and "Fat Bottomed Girls" were essential to his sexual development. ? Ross Martin


Nerve: What is the correlation between arena rock, such as Queen, and sexual self-discovery?
Daniel Nester: They happen at the same time. Good arena-rock music has a sexual arc. You don't start listening to REM until you've gotten laid maybe two times. Anybody who started listening before then shouldn't have, and they've been warped forever.

Warped?
Their sexual performance. They probably never fuck to music. There's nothing better than fucking or masturbating to music. Like if you're listening to "Mr. Roboto," there's a certain part you should time the orgasm to. But if you listen to "Radio Free Europe" or "Shiny Happy People," nothing's going to happen.

How did you come to these conclusions?
Well, I grew up in my room listening to Queen albums, huddled in a fetal position, masturbating with my headphones on. Queen provided the soundtrack for that changeover from non-masturbation to masturbation.

Did you ever get caught?
In those days I humped — well, I didn't really hump, I made love to — pillows. My parents found a wad on one of them, so I said I had a bad cold. And one time I got caught dancing to "Another One Bites The Dust" in brightly colored clothes and a sleeveless shirt. That's when they really thought I might not exactly be straight.

What's the best Queen song for orgasm?
"Bohemian Rhapsody," right after the opera part.

Will people be more attracted to you when God Save My Queen comes out?
I think so. Being honest is the key. Plus, I pose no threat to them.

My friend Dana says she'd like to "bang" you.
She can give me a picture and I can masturbate to it, but that's as far as it's going to go.

Because of your wife.
I think if Dana wants to bang me, she should go home to her man and bang him harder. Or channel it into her own favorite arena rock band.

Your wife is very conspicuously thanked as "the love of my life" in the book, on the same line you thank Freddie Mercury himself.
There's the dichotomy right there. The real life love and the art love, the diva love.

But you seem to confuse the two. In your book, at least, they're indistinguishable.
I'm interested in where music and real life meet.

Do you fantasize about Freddie in bed?
Sometimes I think it would be cool to be as cool as Freddie.

What does your wife think of that?
She just thinks it's strange. And she makes me put all my Flash Gordon posters all the way up in the loft.

What do her parents think of your obsession?
They have no freakin' idea who Queen is. They just know "We Are The Champions." It's the same with my parents, although I haven't talked to my father in six years.

Your father weighs heavily on these pages. One of the most troubling moments is when you mishear Freddie sing "Father," when he's really singing "Farther."
"If you have parents that don't understand you, you withdraw into your own world and cry for help at the same time. I would actually sing, "Father, father" out loud in my room. My listening to very effeminate rock music was completely the opposite of my truck-driving father. I wanted approval and I wanted to be able to love Queen's music at the same time, and those things, especially in America in the early eighties, did not happen.

So like most Queen fans, you had to defend yourself.
I would wear a Queen t-shirt and everybody else was into Dio and AC/DC. Queen fans would defend Freddie and say, "He's bisexual," meaning he bangs women but every once in a while he sucks cock. Okay, but how does that get you into the cool table at lunch? I'm forever scarred by this, and I want revenge. But now it doesn't matter as much to people.

You struggle with your own virility throughout the book.
I struggle with that now.

And there are repeated references to your own breasts. I'm thinking of the line about the day after you went to hear a Queen tribute band: "I fell ill the next day. My wife wiped a wet rag on my breasts."
I have man-titties, Ross, as you know.

Too much General Gao Chicken.
I think it's good advice for all men to let their wife rub a wet rag on your body and submit to being taken care of.

One great tragedy is that you never got to see Queen perform live.
It was July 25th, 1982. My mom didn't let me go. Billy Squire was opening for them at the Philadelphia Spectrum. It was their last tour. I've never let her live it down. I was fourteen.

Nerve published the original version of your poem, "Fat Bottom Girls," which appears in this book. How did that change your life?
The second you think you've gone too far with admitting something about yourself, your sex, your genitals, you push it a little more. I'm a student of Sharon Olds in a lot of ways.

Don't you owe Joe Wenderoth a debt of gratitude, too?
I owe him for the form and the vulgarity and the mixing of high and low [art]. But I owe Sharon Olds more, though there's no way she knows who Queen is. Unless I make her a mix CD.

You're writing another book about your obsession with Queen?
Yep, I still have to do six Queen plus some solo albums.

Why not keep your obsession with Queen a private joy?
I did for twenty years. Except for people who got stoned in my apartment, no one knew.

What did it feel like to come out?
I don't know yet. I read at a writers conference last week, and nobody talked to me after. Nobody.

That would be easier if your publisher weren't calling your book a memoir!
Fuck, they are calling it a memoir. I'm fucked. I'm going to be jerking off across America.

Have you sent it to the remaining members of Queen yet?
I'm afraid they'll actually look at it. In "Brighton Rock," for example, I say [Queen's guitarist] Brian May looks really cute and I want to fuck him.

The book's so exhaustively well-researched, it functions as a triptych through the first half of the Queen oeuvre, and it's filled with quite a bit of biographical information about the band that we haven't seen before.
All the books written on Queen suck. I'm the first real writer to write about Queen. If my book accomplishes anything, it's to say that Queen may be in Mountain Dew and Taco Bell commercials, but Queen is also the soundtrack to at least one man's coming of age, and he's still haunted by all these inside sexual pangs that accompany each and every song Queen has ever recorded.

Maybe you wouldn't have had to write this book had you been left alone with Freddie Mercury in the green room backstage for a few minutes. I would've given him a big hug. Then we'd have gone to a bar for vodka and to check out the chubby boys. Freddie was a chubby chaser, so maybe he'd want to date me.  n°  

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Ross Martin's recent work appears in magazines such as Agni, Bomb, Boulevard, Denver Quarterly, Fence, Kenyon Review, Poetry Daily, Prairie Schooner, Verse, Witness and others. He has taught at Rhode Island School of Design, The New School University and Washington University in St. Louis, where he received his MFA. His first book, 'The Cop Who Rides Alone,' is published by Zoo Press (www.zoopress.org).