Tag Archives: queercore

Creating truth from nothing

I was recently reading the book Queercore: How To Punk A Revolution, an oral history of the Queercore punk scene, and I came across an interesting story.

One of the pivotal moments in the creation of queercore was the zine JDs, created by G.B. Jones and Bruce LaBruce. The zine documented a thriving gay punk scene happening in Toronto at a time when punk was still fairly homophobic and many gay punks struggled to find a way to reconcile their identification as both punk and gay. JDs presented a scene where these two things were able to exist side by side with no apparent contradiction. And, most importantly, here was a place where punks could be openly gay and feel accepted.

There was one issue though, it didn’t exist. The Toronto gay punk scene was in fact a handful of friends who all hung out at the same bar and a couple of whom had formed a band that occasionally played said bar. No one outside Toronto knew this though and so everyone just took them at their word and they went off and founded their own gay punk scenes all over the US and Canada because they thought that bridge had already been crossed and it was a natural normal thing.

In the book Kathleen Hanna sites JDs as a big inspiration in how she talked about riot grrl in the early days. Back when she still talked to the press about it, she would tell them that riot grrl was a national movement with groups all over the country. In truth, it was a couple dozen folks at the time, mostly in DC and Olympia, WA. Again though, people didn’t know that and so they thought they were walking down well trodden trails when in fact they were blazing brand new ones.

When I was thinking about this, it occurred to me that this wasn’t the first time I’d come across this tactic. R.U. Sirius, the original editor in chief at the infamous cyber punk magazine Mondo 2000, admitted, years after the magazine folded, that they regularly invented stories for the magazine if they couldn’t find actual people that were living the story that they wanted to tell. Again, the expectation was that people would read the article and be inspired to do their own thing, because they thought someone else had already done it.

The whole thing gives new meaning to “be the change you want to see in the world”.

Acknowledging ugly truths

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I’ve seen a couple of videos on TikTok that put forward the idea that punk is inherently inclusive and that if something is sexist, misogynistic, homophobic, etc. then it can’t be punk. While I applaud actively trying to make punk inclusive for everyone, and I may be taking to video creators too literally in their comments, I’m very uncomfortable with this sentiment.

The reality is that a lot of punk’s early history is sexist and misogynistic and homophobic and transphobic and all the rest. A quick read through oral histories like Please Kill Me and We’ve Got the Neutron Bomb makes that clear. And we’re not even getting into hardcore here. To present punk as something that was always inclusive is to just ignore the history of punk. It also makes telling the story of punk difficult.

How do you explain Kathleen Hanna’s call of “girls to the front!” or the concept of girls only shows, with out acknowledging the misogynistic environment that riot grrl pushed back against?

How do you explain the importance of zines like J.D.’s and Homocore or bands like Pansy Division and Team Dresch without acknowledging the homophobia in the scene?

And beyond the concepts, there’s the simple matter of giving people their due credit. Riot Grrl and Queercore were two of the most important movements in the history of punk. Not because they gave us great bands, but because they rebelled against the rebellion. They called out the hypocrisy and bullshit of punk and they demanded that it be what it was supposed to be. That took a lot of guts and a lot of courage and it deserves to be recognized. And that recognition can not be properly given unless we’re willing to talk about how and where punk has failed.

In the end the power of punk comes from it’s honesty. This is an art form that is at it’s best when it is being brutally honest about the best and worst things about humanity. If we’re going to move this art form forward and pay proper tribute to the people who came before us, then we need to be brutally honest with ourselves about how we got here. We need to celebrate the things we got right, but we also need to acknowledge the things we got wrong. And we need to honor the people who showed us we were wrong.

Queercore and Assimilation

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Queercore: How to Punk A Revolution is an oral history about the Queercore punk scene and it’s creation. Below are a series of quotes about the assimilation of the gay rights movement into the mainstream that I thought were interesting.

The goal of gay liberation was to expand what is possible for a human being, to open up the society and make all different ways of living, and all different ways of being sexual and being in a relationship and being in a community, accessible and possible for all people. Eventually this movement, as the country and the world became more reactionary, was replaced by a gay rights movement. And that’s an entirely different idea. It’s not about social transformation; it’s about gay people fitting into already-existing social concepts of what is acceptable. So what we have now is that instead of gay people, or queer people, changing the world, the world has changed us. Now we become acceptable to the degree that we resemble the dominant culture.
When Barack Obama says that we should respect gay people because we should respect love, what he’s talking about is gay marriage and gay family structure, which is what love means to him. He is not talking about sexual liberation at all, and he’s not talking about even the basics of antidiscrimination laws. He’s talking about us fitting exactly into his concept of how a citizen should behave. Herbert Marcuse called that repressive tolerance-when you’re tolerated, which keeps you in a position of subservience and inferiority at the will and whim of the dominant group. And this is being touted, hours after Obama’s speech, as this revolutionary concept that shows that gay people have arrived. But actually it shows that we’re in terrible trouble. Because on our own, in the places where we are different from dominant culture, there’s no acceptance at all.
Sarah Schulman (writer)

Tom Jennings had a giant banner up in his house at 666 Illinois in San Francisco that said No Assimilation Ever. Now… TV shows like Will & Grace and Glee are all about, Look how cute we are. We’re gay-don’t you love us? We’re so cute. If God hates fags, why are we so cute? Which is one way-and it’s a very important way-to bring visibility and awareness about queers, to be like, Look, we’re charming. We’re cute. We’re just like you. Look how adorable we are and how sexy.
But we were like, Yeah, we’re queer; you hate us, right? Yeah, we’re that. We’re that thing you hate. And people… I guess it’s the same reason you pay money to go on a rollercoaster, because it’s scary-we pay to be scared. And people wanted that. Sometimes you want Will & Grace, sometimes you want Tribe 8. Like we always say, there’s room for Melissa Etheridge and there’s room for Tribe 8, but you need both. You come at the problem from all directions, y’know; from the mellifluous sounds of Melissa Etheridge, singing about climbing through some babe’s window, to us being like, Suck my dick, motherfucker! You need both.
Lynn Breedlove (member of Tribe 8)

I always talk about the luxury of normality. The first time I experienced the luxury of normality was in the late ’90s, when I went to a Radical Faerie gathering. I was not well known to the Radical Faeries-I hadn’t starred on Broadway, hadn’t been nominated for a Tony, hadn’t played Carnegie Hall, this was before all of that. So I went to a Faerie sanctuary, it was my first night there, and I put on this gold lamé dress to go to dinner. And as I was walking through the camp, there were all these people dressed in amazing, outlandish, gorgeous ways, and nobody batted an eye when I walked past. I was used to being stared at, my whole life-either the object of misogynistic comments or homophobic comments, sometimes twice in ten minutes, by different people who perceived me in different ways. No one batted an eye, and I was so shocked, because I had never been invisible before. I burst into tears-it was such a profound thing, to understand what it’s like for most people to just walk down the street and not cause a stir.
So I understand the desire to assimilate. I understand the desire to be a man who lives with your husband and your children in a suburban neighborhood. It’s a comfortable, safe lifestyle, and I wouldn’t begrudge anyone a comfortable, safe lifestyle. I mean, I would like to have a comfortable, safe lifestyle myself; and maybe someday I will be more invisible. I think as I get older and I read more as a sort of well-off, middle-aged white woman, I am more invisible, which I like. But that doesn’t change people’s reactions to finding out my truth, and for me, my truth is the most important thing.
And that has nothing to do with assimilation or queer politics; it’s a demand that I put on myself to be honest, and to grow, and to be able to change, and to not be stuck in an idea that someone else has of me-whether it’s my parents, or a current lover, or what I think a future lover might want from me, or my public, as an artist. So I think the idea of being assimilationist is vilified unfairly. But I also don’t think that demanding a space to be yourself should be considered a threat to anybody. I call it, like, expanding the circle of normality.
Justin Vivian Bond (actor/singer)

Nothing irks me more than seeing-like, my Wikipedia page says American songwriter. I was never an American songwriter! I want to be known as the Jewish lesbian folk singer. I want to say the word Jewish; I want to say the word lesbian; I want to be known as a dyke the minute I walk out the door, every single day. Because I feel like being myself is the most political thing I can do.
Phranc (Jewish lesbian folk singer)

From a different chapter, but worth mentioning.

By its very nature, queercore is a herd of cats. People who call themselves queer tend to be aggressively individualistic, y’know? I don’t want to be male or female. Why do I have to fit in your paradigm? I want to be who I am, and that might be some of both or neither or something else at any given moment. My gender, my body, my expression is mine to define. But that’s the thing; for all the differences, there is that unifying idea, that unifying unmet need. None of us can be that or do that alone, because it leaves us too isolated, which leaves too many of us vulnerable-which leaves too many of us dead at the hands of haters. So we come together. Not just despite but because of our differences, because together we can do things that we can’t do alone.
Deke Nihilson (co-creator of Homocore zine)