Local Perth five-piece Hannah Mae and the Hoodwinks recently launched their latest music video in response to a vicious homophobic attack on the group’s front woman.

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The video for This Love addresses an incident last year where Hannah Mae and her partner were verbally abused and attacked outside of a Perth restaurant.

Following a warm response to the video clip, Hannah Mae sat down with OUTinPerth to talk about why she wanted to respond to hate with love, and the importance of being visibly queer in the arts.

How did you feel in the days after you were attacked?

It took a really long time to get over it. When it happens, you start getting angry. When someone hurts you, your natural response is to want to punch back and you can’t really do that in the moment so you start trying to find other people to blame. Getting angry at the restaurant, trying to get through to the police but in the end it was no one’s fault but his.

At first I was really angry, but then I started getting sad and wondering if anything he said had merit. I started doing research and asking questions and looking some of his ideologies. When someone tells you things like he did, I try to take things on board and see things from other people’s point of view. In the end I realised that he didn’t make sense and that’s okay, it’s time to move on.”

What was the attacker saying that made you question yourself?

He was really passionate about Hitler… he was saying things like “I really think that Hitler had the right idea”, saying we should be drowned, put in barrels, shot… this idea that we’re taking society down somehow, as if we’re not contributing.

“Because his views were so concrete I thought ‘OK, how does this have any merit?’. For such a long time people saw homosexuality as a mental health issue and as it comes to the forefront of society it’s interesting to look back at how we got to this point. Perhaps gay people are becoming more prevalent in society as a sort of survival mechanism. Our world is getting eaten alive by people who keep breeding, and gay people can’t breed without a lot of help or money, so maybe we’re the answer to saving this planet? Maybe he’s wrong?

What made you want to turn this moment into a song?

It took me a while to write about it because it was really hard. At first I just started writing social media posts to get it out of my system, until I was sitting in my office and realised ‘I have to write a song about this’. I’ve been told I need to stop writing love songs, which I ignore, because that’s what I want to write about!

It was really hard to write a song about being gay. In the past, I’ve sort of danced around pronouns, rather than outwardly saying ‘I’m gay!’. Those who know me know, but often I have to tell people that my songs are about girls. People have told me to censor my ‘gayness’, to stop being so gay, to not write about girls in my music… but it’s important. People need to hear it, people want to hear it! Whenever I hear a song that’s written about a girl I feel so amazing, and I want people to feel that too.

Did you think public homophobia intensified during the time of the postal survey?

I was doing fine until about three weeks into it, then one day I left work and just cried all the way home. I had started reading the comments, and as I said, when I hear an argument I want to hear the other point of view so that I can understand, or help them understand.

I had to stop reading the comments because I just kept reading the same things over and over again; ‘think of the children!’, ‘we have to protect the family!’. All these ideas that it was going to ruin society, or lead to bestiality… if they just sat down and had a conversation they would never even think these sorts of things, but when you’re on social media people just want to spread their view and not listen to anyone else’s. Hopefully the song will catch someone’s attention for long enough to consider our point of view.

Does this mean you will include your ‘gayness’ in your songs more often from now on?

“Definitely! I’ve been trying to do that a long time now, using ‘she’ and ‘hers’. We’re making a new video with a gay story line as well!

When you hear a girl sing about ‘she’ or ‘her’, it just feels so amazing. Like, ‘Yes! I have a friend!’ I can’t wait to write more and put more songs in the world that are super gay!

Check out the video for This Love below. You can also download the full track for free when you leave a review on Bandcamp.

OIP Staff