It began in a bedroom in Naples, Florida, when a misbehaving punk teenager named Tom Gabel, armed with nothing but an acoustic guitar and a headful of anarchist politics, landed on a riff. Gabel formed Against Me! and rocketed the band from its scrappy beginnings - banging on a drum kit made of pickle buckets - to a major-label powerhouse that critics have called this generation's The Clash. Since its inception in 1997, Against Me! has been one of punk's most influential modern bands, but also one of its most divisive. As they climbed in their career, they gained new fans while infuriating their old ones. They suffered legal woes, a revolving door of drummers, and a horde of angry, militant punks who called them 'sellouts' and tried to sabotage their shows at every turn. But underneath the public turmoil, something much greater occupied Gabel - a secret kept for 30 years, only acknowledged in the scrawled-out pages of personal journals and hidden in lyrics. Through a troubled childhood, delinquency, and struggles with drugs, Gabel was on a punishing search for identity. Not until May 2012 did a Rolling Stone profile finally reveal it: Gabel is transgender, and would from then on be living as a woman named Laura Jane Grace. The story of Against Me!'s enigmatic founder, weaving the narrative of the band's history, as well as Grace's, drawing upon entries from the piles of journals Grace kept. An inside look at a remarkable story in the history of rock. Laura Jane Grace (born Thomas James Gabel, November 8, 1980) is an American musician best known as the founder, lead singer, songwriter and guitarist of the punk rock band Against Me! Having dealt with gender dysphoria since childhood, Grace publicly came out as a transgender woman in 2012, ceasing to use her birth name and taking the name Laura Jane Grace.