Laura Jane Grace, who plays Floridian Social in St. Petersburg, Florida on April 26, 2023. Credit: Photo by Bella Peterson

They say you can’t go home again, but that’s not true. Laura Jane Grace is disproving that this weekend.

Her solo set at Floridian Social on Sunday, April 16 is just part of a tour that includes the High Dive in Gainesville as well as stops in Jacksonville, Orlando and Tallahassee. She picked a fine time to come back to Florida, given the current chaos in our politics and our culture. But the timing was no accident for her.

Laura Jane Grace was born in Fort Benning, but she is best-known for the various bands she helped lead in her adopted hometown of Gainesville. The most famous, of course, is Against Me! That band has released seven albums, four EPs and two live albums on six different labels since their founding in 1997. Grace’s second solo album, Stay Alive, was released by Polyvinyl in October 2020, and she’s released two EPs as well.
After all these years on the road, the logistics of touring remain essentially the same for her, although the all-pervasive influence of technology cannot be denied.

“In some ways, it’s dramatically easier,” Grace says via Zoom from her home in Brooklyn. “But in other ways, it being easier makes it much more stressful, because of how quickly it moves. When I started out, it was literally a matter of writing a letter, putting it in the post box, then waiting however long to hear from some stranger, like, ‘Can we play your house in Rochester, New York?’ And then you’re going out there, totally blind, and you don’t know this person or what the situation will be.

“We would go out and do tours that were a month long, and maybe like a dozen out of 30 shows booked would actually happen. In the old days, when you were on the road, and the van broke down, you were pretty much fucked. You’d just have to walk down the road to the nearest gas station to find a payphone to call a tow truck or whatever.”

Ultimately, artists in her realm make the majority of their income from touring, so Grace, like countless other artists, is still kind of playing catch-up on the money missed during the pandemic.

“We were three shows into a tour, and it got canceled,” Grace—who’ll meet fans at Bananas Records before the show—says. “How bands survive is going out and playing live shows, but I’ve tried to put myself in a position where, if something like that ever happens again, the effect isn’t completely devastating.”

These are tumultuous times in Florida, of course, and for Grace the personal is very much political. As one of the leading trans women performers in America, she has long been an influential advocate for LGBTQ+ rights in and around her native state, and she shared our general concern with the direction things are going in.

“Yeah, I don’t mind talking about this stuff at all,” she says. “Honestly, part of me is scared. There’s a part of me that wonders, ‘Could this be my last time touring through Florida?’ Because soon enough, a person like me could be outlawed from existing in the state. In some ways, these things are becoming more and more glaring.”

There are no easy answers, but Laura Jane Grace does not shy away from asking the questions.

Tickets to see Laura Jane Grace play Floridian Social in St. Petersburg, Florida on Sunday, April 16 are still available and start at $25.

This post originally appeared at Orlando Weekly.