Cub Sport on prioritising queer joy and fending off religious hate
Cub Sports members, from left: Zoe Davis, Dan Puusaari, Tim Nelson and Sam Netterfield. (supplied)
Tim Nelson, the lead singer of Australian band Cub Sport, has told PinkNews about their latest album. Jesus in the gay barwriting music with Troye Sivan and giving hope to queer Christians.
“Losing everyone but I don’t feel so sad,” Nelson sings on the single “Keep Me Safe,” taken from her recently released fifth studio album.
It’s one of several lyrics on the Brisbane-based band’s album that hint at undermining trauma and reclaiming their own happiness.
The album moves away from the group’s previous four albums, trading in brooding vocals and hazy instrumentals in the 2020s Like nirvana for bright dance pop that moves between airy and euphoric.
The band’s change of direction reflects a change in direction in Nelson’s life.
“Many of my lyrics in our earlier [music] it was about working through the hard side of being queer,” he tells PinkNews. “There was a lot of trauma and things I really needed to get out of before I was able to move forward and create something lighter that placed more emphasis on a sense of fun, joy and euphoria.”
For Nelson and his bandmates, the difficulties that come with being queer were innumerable. Nelson met Sam Netterfield, who plays keyboards in the band, when he was 12 at their Pentecostal Christian religious school. Their two-decade relationship paints a harrowing picture of the devastation wrought by anti-LGBTQ+ religious positions — while they both fell in love at a young age and dated briefly when they were 17, school taught them that being gay will only lead you to hell.
Though they broke up, they formed Cub Sport in 2010 — and began to realize they had never fallen out of love.
They wed in 2018, but the embarrassment of being queer that was baked into them took years to unravel.
Keep Me Safe follows the couple’s very specific teenage memory of sitting in their car and feeling their first love blossom. It’s an incredibly formative experience for LGBTQ+ people, but one that Nelson hasn’t been able to fully enjoy for a long time. The sense of nostalgia the memory was meant to evoke was cloaked by the pain of hiding it at the time.
“I feel like it took me so long to feel comfortable sharing so many details about that time because when it happened it was all an absolute secret,” explains Nelson. “I never really got a chance to talk about the magic of that time because I was so busy trying to hide it from everyone. It’s very empowering for my 17-year-old self to be able to share what I now realize are big life moments.”
Creating something “queer and gay” was a “wonderful feeling,” especially at a time when the LGBTQ+ community is enduring such animosity. However, the album’s title got the blood boiling of homophobic religious zealots – especially given the fact that the record was released on Good Friday.
“I knew it was going to get a bit of a buzz,” Nelson admits, though the album’s title is actually a nod to a poem of the same name by transpoet Jay Hulme.
The poem is about reconciling queer identity with religious belief rather than a point of provocation, but that didn’t stop angry Christians from flooding Cub Sport’s social media pages with quotes from the Bible allegedly condemning support homosexuality.
Did that bother Nelson?
“At first I thought a lot, ‘I can just dismiss that.’ But to be honest, after a few days of nonstop commenting, it was a bit triggering just because it was a lot of what was detrimental to me growing up,” he says. “I woke up one morning and read some comments and I was like, ‘Why did I do this to myself?'”
While the influx of hateful comments reminded him that the types of people who for years forced him to suppress his sexuality still exist in the world, it also had the counter-effect of opening the doors for queer and forward-thinking Christians to get involved to get in touch with them show their support.
“There have been many progressive Christians who have told us that they think what we are doing is a great thing, which was wonderful to hear. It gives me hope for queer people growing up in the church,” he says. “I just want people to have a sense of hope.”
Nelson and the band have put the hype surrounding the album title behind them and are currently touring the world. In June they will perform alongside legendary Grace Jones and gay fan favorite Carly Rae Jepsen at WeHo Pride in LA.
As if that wasn’t enough, Nelson recently collaborated with one of his idols: queer Australian pop king Troye Sivan. During a songwriting camp in February, the two came together to create potential new Cub Sport music.
“He makes great pop music. He just has so many good ideas, he’s a superstar,” enthuses Nelson.
“We wrote for Cub Sport, but there are certain parts of it [the song] that sounded so much better when Troye sang it. So I don’t know. It’s time to find out what could happen with this song, but I hope we’ll do more together.”
He adds: “I’m just grateful for where I am and to have gotten to this point. I’m doing my best to just enjoy it and make the most of it while things are feeling good.”
Jesus in the gay bar is out now. Tickets for Cub Sport’s UK, US and Australian tours are on sale now.