Queercore: How to Punk a Revolution: An Oral History 9781629637969, 9781629638201, 162963820X
...
https://ebin.pub/ebinpub/assets/img/apple-icon-57x57.png
ebin.pub
Citation preview

Praise for Queercore “Finally, a book that centers on the wild, innovative, and fearless contributions queers made to punk rock, creating a punker-thanpunk subculture beneath the subculture, queercore. Gossipy and inspiring, a historical document and a call to arms during a time when the entire planet could use a dose of queer, creative rage.” —Michelle Tea, author of Valencia “I knew at an early age I didn’t want to be part of a church; I wanted to be part of a circus. It’s documents such as this book that give hope for our future. Anarchists, the queer community, the roots of punk, the Situationists, and all the other influential artistic guts eventually had to intersect. Queercore is completely logical, relevant, and badass.” —Justin Pearson, The Locust, Three One G “This is a sensational set of oral histories of queer punk that includes everyone from Jayne County to Eileen Myles, from Vaginal Davis to Lynn Breedlove. The whole book works like a giant jigsaw puzzle that never offers a final or complete picture but at least scatters the pieces around to allow the reader to assemble some truly exciting scenarios. This is very possibly the best and only way that subcultural histories should emerge—namely as incomplete and incoherent, as a magnificent poly-vocal roar, as sound, fury, rebel yells and screams. This does not just capture queer punk; it is queer punk.” —Jack Halberstam, author of The Queer Art of Failure and In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives “Queercore: How to Punk a Revolution delivers a deeply invested history of the forgotten roots of queercore. While to some punk was inherently gay as fuck, the actual queer revolution came few and far between bands, scenes, and eras whose intersections were small, yet wildly significant. With voices ranging from Penny Arcade to Brontez Purnell, we hear a vast history from around the globe, echoing everything queer, dirty, and true.” —Cristy C. Road, frontwoman of Choked Up and author of Spit and Passion and Next World Tarot

“Queercore is the unrelenting polyrhythm of a culture, chanted in varied waves of sensation, by some of its most essential voices. Zigzagging through generations of nostalgia and controversy faster than their own power chords, this is not just a record of queercore (the movement), but a theoretical discussion about the intersectional ideology of ‘queer,’ as well as ‘punk’ itself. Reading—not watching or listening to—this book gave me the absolutely necessary opportunity to reinvigorate my own punk, both as performance art and radical protest. This unflinching oral history of how a subculture begins and survives, tenaciously layered in the present, is a bridge over the gap, that I, for one, have been waiting for.” —JD Samson, musician, producer, songwriter and DJ (Le Tigre/MEN)

Queercore

How to Punk a Revolution: An Oral History Editors: Liam Warfield, Walter Crasshole, and Yony Leyser Introduction: Anna Joy Springer and Lynn Breedlove

Queercore: How to Punk a Revolution: An Oral History Liam Warfield, Walter Crasshole, and Yony Leyser © 2021 Vaginal Davis interview passages by and courtesy of Philipp Meinert. This edition © PM Press All rights reserved. No part of this book may be transmitted by any means without permission in writing from the publisher. ISBN: 978–1–62963–796–9 (paperback) ISBN: 978–1–62963–820–1 (ebook) Library of Congress Control Number: 2019946104 Cover design by John Yates/www.stealworks.com Interior design by briandesign 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 PM Press PO Box 23912 Oakland, CA 94623 www.pmpress.org Printed in the USA

contents

Extremely Forward Introduction by Lynn Breedlove and Anna Joy Springer

vii

Introduction by Liam Warfield

xxi

1

Wrecking Nerves Stonewall to CBGB (1969–1976)

1

2

Gloriously Wrong The LA Scene (early ’80s)

8

3

Nothing Was Sacred Vaginal Davis in LA

12

4

Faction Toronto’s “Fabricated” Scene (mid-1980s– early 1990s)

17

5

Caught in the Cracks Between Gay and Punk

27

6

Let’s Get Back to Gay Liberation AIDS Activism and Beyond

35

Freaks on the Edges The West Coast Scene (late 1980s– mid 1990s)

42

Bodies Colliding Machismo (and Machisma) in the Punk Scene

52

Groovy Underwear Pansy Division Flirts with the Mainstream (1994)

58

10

The Name Game Homocore vs. Queercore

62

11

We Had Our Photocopiers The Queer Zine Explosion

66

7 8 9

Why Don’t You Just Get Together? The SPEW Convention and Homocore Chicago (1992–2001)

84

Baseball Bats and High-Heel Shoes Punks on Parade (San Francisco 1989/Chicago 1993)

90

14

We Were So Ready Riot Grrrl Emerges (early 1990s)

93

15

Tempers Flare Tensions in Toronto (late 1980s)

99

16

Contagious Euphoria Queercore on Screen

105

17

Smoke Signals Theater and Performance

114

18

Manufacturing Gay Assimilation and Its Discontents

118

19

A Herd of Cats The Queercore “Agenda”

126

20

All the Labels Navigating Gender

130

21

I Don’t Want What You Want Thoughts on Style

135

22

“Where Are They Now?”/Where Are We Now?

139

Afterword Smashing Orthodoxies by Walter Crasshole

144

Glossary of Protagonists

150

A Queercore and Queercore-Influential Filmography

156

Selected Zines

161

Queercore Essential Records (chronologically)

167

About the Editors

174

12 13

E X T R E M E LY F O R W A R D I N T R O D U C T I O N

vii

Extremely Forward Introduction by Lynn Breedlove and Anna Joy Springer

Anna Joy Springer and Lynn Breedlove

AJ: Hey! This might be our first collaboration! Except the five-plus years we spent together. Which started at the Tribe 8/Blatz meeting about the cover of that first split 7" we were on. LB: Love is political action. AJ: True. But we haven’t been together in twenty-five years. Unless you count our friendship. Which I’ve always believed is the model for lesbian post-breakup feminist family.

viii

E X T R E M E LY F O R W A R D I N T R O D U C T I O N

LB: EX-tended family. AJ: Sad to discover it’s rare to hate someone you love, then keep loving them as a BFF for twenty-five years after the fallout. LB: And now that we don’t take ourselves so seriously, we get to make each other laugh till our eyelids turn inside out. AJ: And talk about the Goddess. LB: So much for cool. AJ: But, really, so many people in this oral history were somehow part of your and my story. Except those mansplainy guys. But they are represented here too, for those who love them. LB: Someone’s gotta do it. AJ: All touched some, and some touched all. Like Iraya Robles of StaPrest and organizer at Epicenter and QTip, and Miriam Klein-Stahl. And Sister Spit. Enough for a whole other book. LB: You write, I’ll snark. AJ: This book, though. Frankly, I thought, surely, it might be kind of enraging, before I read it. I was like, “If Adele Bertei isn’t mentioned in the first few pages, I’m not gonna read it.” But yay, she is. LB: Don’t call me Shirley. But tell me more. AJ: Adele Bertei, queer punk musician extraordinaire of The Contortions and The Bloods in the Lower East Side NYC queer punk wildness times, before homocore and parallel to the fancy cocaine club scene. Lives around the corner from me in LA, a gold record in her bathroom. LB: There was so much more going on in the ’70s and ’80s than I knew, besides RuPaul living in a park as a nonbinary pink-mohawked teen. I claimed we were the first all-out, punk dyke band. Always lying.

E X T R E M E LY F O R W A R D I N T R O D U C T I O N

ix

AJ: Me too. Except when I say that one of my favorite stories here is how Popstitutes (probably) made that 1989 gay parade float, the cop car squashed by a giant high heel, and they were handing out heels and baseball bats to beat the cop car. That’s where Justin Vivian Bond met up with Silas and Leslie and Diet and all these incredible people! That, and lesbian theater at the Rhino. LB: I was extremely high somewhere. I missed that, the White Night Riot, Fab Mab, everything. Blanks need filling in for those who were not born yet, too little, or too checked out. AJ: I’d just graduated high school in Merced. And you definitely did not miss the amazing parts. You were one of the main attractions. Too bad we’re all hurling toward the next abyss now. LB: Lighten up, will ya, Professor? AJ: As someone who is extremely skeptical of “let’s pretend this isn’t a hierarchy,” I do tend to mention misogyny, environmental collapse, and systemic racism more than people like. But they gave me a whole section here to rail. LB: Careening between awareness and action, fights and apologies. AJ: Justin Vivian Bond gave one of my favorite quotes about that: “I have failings in my own consciousness, in my own habits, and what we used to see as humorous is totally unacceptable now.” So generous and elegant, like she has always been, before and after Broadway. What a great model for us to use today, to admit the truth without defensiveness or blame! Maybe you’re right: this history is a roadmap. So glad none of us had Twitter back then. LB: Social media would have overwhelmed us. But instead . . . meet me at the merch table and let’s talk/hug/fuck it out. Or if people gave your band side-eye, you’d just wonder why. Now we can access online tomes about what to do different, fail at, learn from, while discerning selfcare from narcissism.

x

E X T R E M E LY F O R W A R D I N T R O D U C T I O N

AJ: On a good day. We had rules though, like No talking shit about dyke bands. Cypher borrowed it from Tribe 8. LB: Our rule was about chick bands. So Lilith Fair got a pass. Just as it’s not a boycott if you never use it anyway, it’s not service if it doesn’t make you puke a little. AJ: And No fucking anyone in the band. That made the orgy birthday party guest lists challenging. LB: A panicky-at-play-parties ex–speed freak, I found safe spaces at snack tables and smoking areas. Anyway, there we were, disrupters of the disruption, making out on the iffy couch, beyond the sweaty sold out Bikini Kill show, soundtrack to our fluorescent-lit world. (Although I wondered, why can’t we be popular? Castration and blowjobs are as charming as girls in short skirts yelling “girls to the front!”) AJ: At Klub Kommotion. We’d just gotten together. You helped me move into Shred of Dignity House at 666 Illinois, a queer anarchist collective of organizers, artists, technicians, rabble rousers—I couldn’t believe I’d get to live there. LB: Queen of punk. Why not? AJ: I’m not big on the monarchy. LB: You slid right into the SF homocore scene. AJ: Standing on a ladder in my 1940s dress and tool belt and hairy legs and no deodorant, installing the neon sign I’d made for Silas Howard and Harry Dodge’s Red Dora’s The Bearded Lady Truckstop cafe. LB: If you don’t like the scene, grab a hammer and make one of your own. AJ: I was always so busy and freaked out. School, the Gr’ups, the peepshow, neon, a girlfriend with DID [dissociative identity disorder]. She developed AIDS and killed herself just a few weeks before the protease inhibitor cocktails came out. Fucking awful.

E X T R E M E LY F O R W A R D I N T R O D U C T I O N

xi

LB: I should have been more empathetic. But death was all around me, from bike messengering, homoing, or dope fiending. I saw it and kept moving, while bonding over grief. Once a self-centered bastard, always a lovable jerk. AJ: I get it. I’d first met Silas, you, and Leslie after our split record came out when you guys were on tour with MDC in Europe. We all met at a meeting to try to fix the mess of our ignorantly fucked up split 7" that’d already been distributed. Blatz members, including me, had no idea how not-in-a-good-way rude it was. LB: Now you tell me. AJ: Tribe 8 was right to say two bands with no South African black members, or any African American members, or trans women, should not use documentary South African black transgender slow dancing photographs from midcentury Apartheid as a representative and delightful cover image, or that the long ramble from the record-label guy about how American blues (which he related to whatever music must have been playing in those documentary photos) was really just another way to package a queer record with no songs about anything in the photos or about the blues. LB: Mahia, Leslie, and Silas spearheaded that. I was Rip Van Winkle, awake after a long slumber, lucky to be in a band where I got caught up to speed by people of color and the working class, who, as usual, did all the emotional labor. AJ: Right. I was the working-class feminist on the Blatz side of things, trying to keep up. And most people don’t know half of Blatz was queer. One member couldn’t be out because he was a Vietnam vet and could lose his benefits. After two or three meetings about cultural appropriation as racism, we pulled the records, got a new label and a new cover, which I drew with my ex, who was still alive then. I never finished it, so the woman in the foreground should be sitting on a pillow, but instead seems just to be hovering . . . LB: Floatation device ancestor homos, here/not here.

xii

E X T R E M E LY F O R W A R D I N T R O D U C T I O N

AJ: That meeting was the big pivot, where I saw I was more like the members of Tribe 8 than Blatz. I could seem not crazy for noticing hypocrisy and ignorance under the banner of anti–political correctness. That’s also where I crushed on you. So butch in your leather pants, but crying and telling Cat, your first drummer, “If you don’t shut up, I’m gonna punch you.” LB: We were processing so earnestly about really crucial shit, and she kept yelling, “Core of my asshole!” AJ: Enraging. But I loved that you could be such a boy and also PMS during a feminist meeting about representations of race in punk. LB: That slip was usually more appropriately funneled into my budding onstage persona of blowfish dissonance. Homocore meant that rejected by outsiders, we colored inside new lines we’d just learned to draw, laughing at “anarchy! no rules!” But boundaries are crucial in chaos. Punk’s main rule: no making out at the show, no love, no romance, no sex. We perceived that as some counterrevolutionary shit; our paths diverged. Some people did need to stop thinking with their dicks. We needed to start thinking with ours. So we loaded bags of silicon into vans, arguing with feminists: Is stage diving male behavior? What if femmes/queers/trans, fistfuck while crowd surfing. Did that happen? Was it physically impossible? If it’s a myth, promote that lie, make quistory. No, really, make it up. AJ: But I never thought the “not having a sexuality” thing was part of punk at all. I loved The Yeastie Girlz, and as we said in Blatz, “the Ashtray’s just a petting zoo.” Meaning lots of tweaking and fucking on beer-pee floors. So gross/so hot. I love how the book starts with nightmare genderfuck monsters wrecking nerves for fun, instead of sad little shame spirals in our own kitchens. reconfiguring emotional history, fun and tragedy in the same space, through swirls of hysterical ecstatic contagion, dead-serious operatic, grotesque absurdism articulated by contributors to this history. I’d never heard how the Toronto homocore scene was a “faction” till I read this. I was not a zine reader. I had heard of Fertile La Toyah Jackson. Luckily, a lot of the zines mentioned are now

E X T R E M E LY F O R W A R D I N T R O D U C T I O N

xiii

online and in paper archives. I love when Sarah Schulman expounds on zines and papers that informed punk and queerpunk zines. And theatricality in AIDS activism and bands. LB: Zines! At every show I got handed three. Bamboo Girl by Sabrina Margarita Alcantara-Tan was one of Tribe 8’s faves. And Diseased Pariah News, a compilation by people with HIV/AIDS. Facing death? Make a joke. Time honored tradition of the traumatized and targeted. AJ: People in the same room, transforming each other—different from sending digital notes with an audience of invisible watchers. The power of physical proximity, leaving the house, meeting people outside the Mini-Herd. LB: Band name! AJ: Reading about the anarchist gathering where Deke and Tom met, I got misty. I’d meet people accidentally, at shows, or from flyers on cafe walls. LB: Phone poles! That OCD self-appointed pole-cleaning gay, with his X-Acto knife in the Castro. I’d yell, “Dude! That’s our bulletin board. Give it a rest.” He finally did. RIP. AJ: But I wish I had known about the SPEW convention and Homocore Chicago. I know Cypher did at least one gig at Fireside Bowl. LB: Bowling and queercore, together at last. I remember Joanne and Carolyn and Mark, founders of Homocore Chicago, greeting us in their living room where we laid down our gear. They treated us like royalty, a van fulla studded-up dykes, POC, femmes, genderfuckers, kickin’ ass for the working class, who barely got through middle America intact, recognized as helpful geniuses. A homecoming. AJ: But sometimes I was so upset because of stuff happening in our relationship . . . LB: I spent a lotta time in the van crying . . .

xiv

E X T R E M E LY F O R W A R D I N T R O D U C T I O N

AJ: . . . which took place when both of us were on tour, and then I’d get to these venues all over the US and Europe and see Tribe 8 posters, and I’d be proud of you and also braggy and also mad because I was monogamous and you weren’t, and that broke my old-fashioned girl heart. LB: I did like finding your punny love poems addressed to me in silver Sharpie all over Chi Town and New Orleans. AJ: I loved leaving you notes on tour in venue bathrooms. Still, I hated that people thought of Cypher in the Snow as “Tribe 8’s Girlfriends.” So now I’d like to claim for history that you guys were our girlfriends. Boyfriends. And that Cypher was a phenomenal band and deserves a whole book of its own. LB: My name is Lynn Breedlove, and I approve this message. AJ: Like for instance, how beautiful were the members of Cypher? Remember Ulla McKnight? And Daniela Sea, Dorothy Wang, Carmen White, La La Hulse, Chloe Sherman, Margaret Hitchcock, Elitrea Frye, and Rusten Menard? Cypher sounded queer, like creepy circus self-help party time, all off kilter. We’re all still doing so many cool queer punk things. Which leads me to a small critique of this book: It kind wraps the whole queercore thing up in the past at the end, like oral history documentary things do so often. LB: Punk is loose ends. Quit tying us up. Unless it’s consensual. AJ: But like I said in my rage-oration after the East Bay punk documentary in Hollywood, we are not done. Old is not over, or stupid. LB: It’s adding A for asexual to the unpronounceable acronym. Buying Les-baru soccer dad SUVs to play for the six people of fifty, who said they were interested/going on Facebook but were too screen-drained to leave the couch. AJ: And an asterisk for so many unimaginable ways of being queer we have yet to know, as we grind away at systems that keep sexist, antiqueer,

E X T R E M E LY F O R W A R D I N T R O D U C T I O N

xv

normative, white-supremacist, antifreak, empire-building, warmongering, earth-killing practices at the mythical center of “common decency.” With humour and style. Punk didn’t end when it dyed its hair a “natural” shade. LB: Black is a color. Brown is a color. Gray. Add them to the queermo flag. AJ: And can we stop acting like our art and interventions have an expiration date? It freaks me out when people from “the old days” say the scene is dead, while right in the middle of it, people of color, trans folks, and other targeted peoples make big splashes. LB: Fuck You Pay Us, Squid Ink, G.L.O.S.S., Against Me, Trap Girl. Sarchasm, Cristy C. Road’s Choked Up. AJ: So many bands, all over the country and the world. I love how Deke pushes back against that notion of punk being dead (“It just smells like it is!”) at the end. Punk is a stretched-out pantyhose, with lots and lots of elasticity still. It may smell of grandma foot, it may have a hole . . . LB: Ageism is dead! AJ: . . . full of discharge, dope, and Hallmark bunnies, but still a cathedral full of raging freaks who love wrongly and gloriously, a prismatic panty hose. LB: Boundary! No unicorn puke. AJ: I wish I had time to talk about what all the Riot Crrrones are up to now. LB: Hag crusties! AJ: Hey, remember when you and I took your mom out for her birthday to see Kiki and Herb at Eichelberger’s in SF, and afterward Justin Vivian and your mom looked like twins and ignored us, smoking at the bar the whole night?

xvi

E X T R E M E LY F O R W A R D I N T R O D U C T I O N

LB: And talked endlessly about Jackie Kennedy and Chanel suits, fell in love, and admired each other from afar in femme solidarity forever. AJ: And that time we went to New York and stayed at Elitrea’s squat, and we went with Chloe Transister to the Jayne County show, and then to that drag punk disco place. LB: Don Hill’s. AJ: To see Misstress Formika aka Michael Formika Jones, who gave us free dinner at that De Sade themed restaurant, La Nouvelle Justine, where servers crawled to the table with plates on their back . . . LB: And she was the dominatrix maître d’, which made me love her even more than when she shredded an extra-large Tribe 8 shirt and braided it up the sides into a minidress before jumping onstage to introduce us, and then lounged in the laps of half-naked hunks in the basement. As you were saying, Justine’s? AJ: I beat one of the New York Hags on the whipping post by the bar. LB: And Marilyn Manson waved at us from another table, and we were all, “Whoa. They know who we are.” You could order perversions off the menu: your date’s dinner from a dog dish, in a cage, on a leash! Straight rich people, but also trans women in Catholic schoolgirl dresses, lined up to get spanked by goth drag queens, who treated us poor punks special. AJ: And I heard Apocalyptica for the first time. So sweet. Such good service! LB: I felt super high. And confused. And happy. This was it. AJ: And remember hugging Vag at the shows she put on in LA at that punk club, and how giant and magnificent and sweaty and friendly she was, like genuinely not stuck up at all, even though she was such a worldmaker?

E X T R E M E LY F O R W A R D I N T R O D U C T I O N

xvii

LB: A mythical superhero in whose arms you’d be cradled, snatched from the jaws of monsters. AJ: For realsies. I just learned about Cholita in this book. LB: Her eponymous comedy routine was a crackup. AJ: I also discovered G.B. Jones’s first zine was called Hide. That’s a good thing to do sometimes, achieve a certain safety that’s not enforced invisibility, but agency. Who’s peeping what, when, how. LB: Hide and seek. Jump out from behind a couch! Then disappear. AJ: Visibility is not a perfect 24/7 solution. I like that the participants in this book acknowledge a million ways of engaging, feelings, inversections, perverse politics. The strategies move and grow like a slime mold. LB: Ew. Slime mold! Always chasing people with slugs. Remember when you made Cypher paper dolls, tracing your whole-body outlines on the wall, and Chloe Sherman photographed your Lunachicks fuckyou-don’t-objectify-me thing and made it dykey? I was all, Noooo. Make us cute! They already think we’re gross! And you insisted, Nope. We’re gross! And scary! AJ: Viscosity. The overlapping slimy ecospheres of us. Slugs, rivers, scenes, cultures, unnamed outsiders and girly-girls. And this book gets that notion. The emphasis, neither individualistic nor anti-individual is on inevitable friction, upsetting, ecstatic and/or generative. It maps that approach. Except Bruce should have apologized to G.B., instead of just saying he should have credited her. LB: Go beyond “sorry.” Acknowledge you fucked up, say you’re working on it. Although no one will believe it until you do. AJ: Credit people, especially if they’re marginalized. That’s a good rule. Also, don’t wear swastika anything. It’s never cute. Or the fucking

xviii

E X T R E M E LY F O R W A R D I N T R O D U C T I O N

Confederate flag. Or the US flag. Unless it’s mangled and matches the dead couch. Any other rules, or pertinent folk songs? LB: Rule number one: no swastikas. Rule number two: See rule number one. Shortest punk song ever: “Is it OK to punch Nazis?” “Yes!” by Commando. (sequel to; “Is heroin vegan?” “Yes!” by Fly) AJ: Just because it’s vegan doesn’t mean it’s a healthy supplement. But this book is. And tasty. Read up! LB: Yep. Unless you are ADD and have a reader. In which case, collaborate on an audiobook. Oral oral history—what could be more queer? AJ: It’s surprisingly good. These punk histories are usually so boring and narrow. LB: All the depth and breadth. AJ: This is absolutely the place to talk about orals and size. Also, come find us, it’s easy. LB: If the CIA knows our dreams and every whisper, why not our pals? AJ: No stamps required. AJ and LB: Yeah! Look up people you discover here! And also find out about Raquel Gutierrez, Joan Jett Blakk, Iraya Robles, Diet Popstitute, Leslie Mah, Valerie Stadler, Stacey/Stacie Quijas, Michelle Tea, Ivy Jeanne McClelland, M Lamar, Juba Kalamka, Tae Won Yu, Sini Anderson, Erica Dawn Lyle, Tara Jane O’Neil, Danny Levesque, Samara Halpern, Leon Mostovoy, Rachel Carnes, Josh Ploeg, Christopher Lee, Sarah Kirsch, Chloe Dzubilo, Waiyde Palmer, and definitely The Hags, which

E X T R E M E LY F O R W A R D I N T R O D U C T I O N

xix

was not a band but a gang. Search for queercore bands, zines, books, films, and art. These will hook you into so many others. AJ: Remember, everyone reading and writing about this book also creates and expands queercore mythology. “Where are they now?” Those of us who haven’t died? Right here. LB: If you’re tuned in, you may see the dead are also here. Nothing essential is ever lost. AJ: More love stories! Can I get a “gaymen”? LB: Hallelujah and pass the ammunition.

INTRODUCTION

xxi

Introduction by Liam Warfield

The New Testament would have us believe that in the beginning was the Word, but history suggests that the naming of things, whether moments or movements, tends to lag far behind the fact of their existence. Queers and punks have always been with us, under various guises and nearly always on the margins, and the two have long intersected and cross-pollinated. Before its musical application, as Bruce LaBruce notes, punk was jailhouse slang for a guy who took it up the ass. But the word is much older, dating at least as far back as Shakespeare, and has referred, over time, to prostitutes, delinquents, cowards, and conditions of poor health (feeling punk). Queer has a similarly amorphous history: first appearing as a sort of shorthand for anything odd, perverse, eccentric or otherworldly; later as a slur along the lines of fairy or fag; reclaimed in the 1980s by activists and academics and more recently in vogue as an LGBTQI catchall. In a sense, the two words have been fellow-travelers through time, shifting from terms of derision to badges of otherness to popular acceptance and near-meaninglessness. Any starting point, then, is going to be arbitrary; for the purposes of this book I date the queer punk phenomenon to 1969. Neither term then had quite come into its modern usage, but in many ways ’69 was a moment of conception for the movement-to-be. The Stonewall riots, of course, marked the coming-out of the righteous queen and the gay liberationist, outrageous and confrontational, into the public sphere— queer in all but name. The year 1969 might be less obviously a punk touchstone, but between Altamont and Charles Manson, the Days of Rage and the Weather Underground, debut albums by The Stooges and MC5 and the stirrings of glam, it’s clear that something punk was in the air. Elsewhere on the fringes, John Waters’s first feature film, Mondo

xxii

INTRODUCTION

Trasho, and Jackie Curtis’s play Femme Fatale, starring future punk icons Wayne/Jayne County and Patti Smith, melded cheap drag and shock theatrics with a crass and caustic sense of humor that was very much queer-punk avant la lettre. By the time punk was named and codified, in the mid-to-late 1970s, countercultural expressions of gender and sexuality had become more complex and ambivalent. Punk, as a matter of course, dismissed, devalued and deprogrammed sex—the body itself was chopped, screwed, pierced, tattooed, a site of conflict and opposition. It almost goes without saying that the first waves of punk—in New York, London, LA, and elsewhere—were queer to a high degree. If one believes half the stories told by trans/punk pioneer Jayne County, everyone on the early scene at least fooled around with sex and gender. Some, like the Germs’ Darby Crash, were more closeted than others—though it didn’t take a genius to read between the lines of songs like “Sex Boy” and “American Leather.” Others, like Nervous Gender and the Screamers, were about as unambiguous as could be. It’s tempting to attribute the birth of queercore proper, in the mid1980s, to a nexus of circumstances and influences: Reagan, Thatcher and the rise of neoliberalism; the blood-politics of the AIDS epidemic; and an identity crisis for punk rock, as scenes which had begun as havens for weirdos, women and queer malcontents were overrun with skinheads and jocks. But unlike most other punk creation stories, in which seminal scenes seem to spring, fully formed and almost inevitable, out of particular cultural climates—New York’s exploding downtown, class strife and general unrest in mid-1970s London, the total banality of late-1970s Los Angeles—queercore began more as an absence than a confluence. What was a queer punk to do, in mid-1980s Toronto? Aside from a handful of artier bands and provocative fanzines, the punk scene was macho, hardcore, traditionalist. Meanwhile the gay world wanted nothing to do with punk rock—you could hardly dance to it, and it didn’t sell drinks. For G.B. Jones, Bruce LaBruce and their small coterie of artists, musicians and freaks, there were a couple of places to meet: an all-night restaurant called Just Desserts and a dive bar called Together’s, where they would show experimental films and occasionally host bands—hardly the makings of a legendary scene. So they did what visionaries do—they made up a scene and fooled other people into believing in it. Borrowing generously from Warhol

INTRODUCTION

xxiii

on the one hand and the Situationists on the other, Bruce, G.B., and their collaborators spread the illusion, through bands, films, and their influential zine J.D.s (that would be juvenile delinquents, James Dean, or J.D. Salinger—take your pick) that there was this queer punk explosion happening in Toronto. The word homocore first appeared as a wisecrack neologism in the pages of J.D.s, meant to take the piss out of the hypermasculine hardcore punk scene. A flippant fuck-you to the staid punk world or an international call-to-arms? In the Bay Area, where queer punk had been percolating for some time, Tom Jennings and Deke Nihilson borrowed homocore for their zine of the same name, which quickly graduated to newsprint and a print run of thousands. By the early 1990s, the term of preference had shifted to the more inclusive queercore, and the banner was being raised by bands, zine-writers and malcontents all over the map. Queercore, it should be said, was not simply a hybrid, a mashup of disparate genres like rap-metal or folk-rock. If anything, the queer-punk stance was reductive rather than additive, defined largely in the negative, the stripped-away. We didn’t fit here and we didn’t fit there is a common refrain throughout the narrative—freaks among the freaks, as Jody Bleyle says. Nor was it simply a musical movement, though it was certainly that. The amazing thing about queercore is that it was not just zines, not just music, notes G.B. Jones, one of the movement’s progenitors. There was film, there was photography, there was artwork, there was writing, performance art—pretty much every medium was incorporated into queercore. Why an oral history? The easy answer is that this project fell into my lap; my friend Yony Leyser, a filmmaker based in Berlin, had amassed nearly a hundred hours of interviews with over fifty movers and shakers from the queercore cosmos, and after cramming as much as possible into a ninety-minute documentary, he had a rich trove of unused material that he thought I might like to turn into a book. To my surprise, there was not a whole lot of existing literature on the subject. There were mountains of primary-source documents, of course: the thousands of zines that constituted the “queer zine explosion” of the late 1980s and ’90s, many of them lovingly archived and easily accessible, others gathering dust in closets and basements—not to mention all the tapes, records, films, videos, photographs, flyers, and other ephemera of the time. But queercore as a cultural phenomenon has, for the most part, resisted the box-set treatment—the gallery shows,

xxiv

INTRODUCTION

zine anthologies, anniversary tours, and coffee-table books that might signify the movement’s official passing into history. A 2012 article in Out magazine brought together some of the scene’s best-known figures for a quick overview; the first book-length critical treatment of the subject was released just a few years ago, by an eminent university press; and queercore—as a catchphrase, at least—has made a few odd, if not surprising, forays into mainstream consciousness (e.g. Queercore, the line of Gucci luxury shoes that debuted in 2017). There’s sure to be more on the way—our culture requires endless grist for its nostalgia mills, and even what was dangerously cutting-edge a quarter century ago tends to be marketable over time. Capitalism, as artist and filmmaker Scott Treleaven puts it, eventually digests everything. That said, the obvious virtue of oral history is that it allows the protagonists to tell their own stories in their own voices (the editor’s scissors and paste aside). It can be an especially messy mode of storytelling: the narrators may not always be reliable, they may embellish, gloss over, half-remember, or contradict. But history is messy, and punk is messy; and I’d like to hope that the multitude of voices in this book, brought into cacophonous discourse, are able to animate their subject in ways that a tidier telling might not. I wrap things up around 1999 not simply because thirty years makes a nice, round figure, but because by the cusp of the millennium various cultural and technological forces were challenging many of the basic premises around which queercore operated. What was the point of a photocopied zine when information could be shared so easily, and in so many ways, online? Why form a band when a laptop could just as easily light up the party? In his film, Queercore: How to Punk a Revolution, Yony Leyser attempts to chart some of inroads queercore has made into millennial culture—from artists like Peaches and The Gossip, who in the first decade of the twenty-first century employed queercore signifiers while climbing the charts and making the tabloids, to the ascendance of queer hip-hop and trans visibility. For the purposes of this book, I think the story works best with a temporal endpoint—though there’s ample musing on today’s quandaries, the narrative does not delve into the many bands, zines, festivals, websites, and so on that have carried the torch in the new millennium. The intention behind this book is not to rehash anyone’s glory days. It doesn’t pretend to be comprehensive or authoritative or the story

INTRODUCTION

xxv

behind the story. It doesn’t set out to describe a template for future revolt or to make a place for unsung heroes in some queer pantheon. It’s not meant as a rallying cry to make a zine! or start a band! It certainly doesn’t mean to say look how far we’ve come! Nor do I think that young queer people (or any queer people) are duty-bound to learn about their elders or celebrate queer history. History is useful insofar as it interrogates the present—and the present does desperately need some interrogation. Let’s hope, then, that the primordial currents of queer and punk continue crossing in new and vital ways.

WRECKING NERVES

1

1

Wrecking Nerves Stonewall to CBGB (1969–1976)

Jayne County: I have to say, we had a ball. We were too young to get into the bars, so we had fake IDs; but really, we made our party on the street. I don’t know how we kept from getting murdered, but we did. We used to joke about having two pairs of shoes in our purses, one to prance around in and one to change into and run. Because you had people coming along in cars and yelling at you, Wayne County and the Backstreet Boys’ fucking faggot, fucking queer! . . . At the Trucks! and then you had the cops, who wanted to shave your head and put you in jail, call your daddy because you were wearing a dress. It was pretty fucked up, but we managed to have a ball. We had such a good time. We would wreck people’s nerves. We’d call each other up—You going wrecking tonight? I don’t know if I’m in the mood . . .Well, there’s a party. We’ll have some free drinks, and then we’ll go wrecking—OK, let’s go! We’d put on some lipstick, fluff up our hair, pull our little hip-huggers down and go wrecking. We’d go down to the Fox Theater and have one of those, can you make it walking around the Fox Theater in high heels? Your friends would follow in a car, in case people tried to beat you up or kill you or anything. And when you came around the corner they would go, Yay, she made it, she walked around the Fox Theater on high heels! That’s what we had to do—we couldn’t get in the bars, we had to make our own fun.

2

QUEERCORE: HOW TO PUNK A REVOLUTION

Another thing we would do, when the clubs would let out we’d see all these straight guys, with girls and all, and we’d slow down the car and go, Oh!, he’s with a girl tonight. Do you believe that? Miss Thing, oh my god, I sucked his dick last night, honey, it was horrible! Stuff like that. We’d go down to the Greyhound bus station and go to the men’s room, the men would be peeing, and we’d sneak up behind them and go, Woooh!, look at all the dicks for sucking, baby, yeah!, totally freak them out. That’s what we had to do—we just went around wrecking people’s damn nerves. And a lot of the closet-case gay people, gay people that were kind of “respectable,” would not invite us to parties because we would give them away—the neighbors would know it was a queer party. And we would— we’d go out on the balcony and scream and put on makeup—and before you know it the cops would be pulling around. It was like, Don’t invite that group of screaming queens. They will ruin your party. Penny Arcade: In New York in the late ’60s there was this whole precursor to punk, John Vaccaro and Playhouse of the Ridiculous, and it was totally queer. In 1969, Danny Fields brought Iggy Pop to New York. Iggy Pop was exactly our kind of person. There was already this queer, edgy thing going on that was kind of like rock without the roll, nervy downtown-homo-queer-whatever. I mean, Patti Smith, Debbie Harry, Jayne County, Ruby and The Rednecks—there were all those early punk bands that were all part of that scene, and it was very queer. I left New York in 1971; I left just when Wayne County was moving from doing DJing at Max’s backroom, upstairs, to doing his own music. I ended up going with John Vaccaro to Amsterdam; I could have gone to London with Andy Warhol but I decided not to go because I was really sick of the “Pop Tart” thing—and I was the flavor of the year; I was, like, the it-girl of 1969, and all I saw was that I was getting invited to richer and richer people’s houses. The art that we were making wasn’t compelling the way it was with John Vaccaro. Vaccaro was hardcore. Vaccaro was like the Rolling Stones to everybody else’s Beatles. By the time I came back at the end of 1974, all of these people had started to establish themselves, and the music scene at Max’s had kind of started in earnest. In the beginning, it was just, like, once in a while somebody would play at Max’s—Lou Reed, Iggy, Alice Cooper—that’s pretty much all I remember. I don’t think there were a lot of bands that played there before about 1972. But there was always a queer element.

WRECKING NERVES

3

In about 1975, Danny Fields said to me, You have to come to CBGBs— my band The Ramones are playing! So I went. It was really hard to see The Ramones as machismo. And even though they were (mostly) hetero, it was really hard to see them as hetero. The downtown scene was a lot queerer, y’know? Nobody was really interested in people’s sexuality, unless you personally wanted to fuck the person. And that’s how I feel about gender identity. Who gives a fuck what your sexual orientation is? That’s so counter-revolutionary, and counter-evolutionary. Larry Livermore: I got into the first wave of gay liberation starting around ’69, right after Stonewall, but at the time I was in Michigan. We had one gay bar in Ann Arbor and it was such a little scene that all the weirdos of every kind, not necessarily gay people, but just every kind of weirdo—in one corner would be one or two leather people, in another corner would be a couple of dykes, and there were these two teenage boys that later became transgender—we didn’t call it that back then, but they both had gender surgery later on. In 1971 glam rock arrived, a lot of straight people dressing up like the Dolls and Ziggy Stardust and stuff that would hang out there. The bar was excluding these black drag queens, and we staged a parade in drag down Main Street. This is a small midwestern town—a liberal midwestern town, but it was still pretty shocking in 1970-something. I was never a drag queen; I think I’ve been in drag one other time besides that in my life, but it was like, You’re picking on the weirdos. Well, we’re the weirdos and you can’t do that. I felt really empowered by that sense that we don’t need to hide anymore, and that’s what homocore was too. It was the same thing. The hippie culture had to have these liberation movements for women and gay people, the punk scene had to do the same thing. Seems kind of weird that they would have to, but that’s how it felt. John Waters: We made fun of hippies. Yippies, though, were kind of punks. Yippies went to political riots. That was like—my idea of a rave would be a riot. We would just hitchhike to different cities where there was going to be a riot. And I went to get laid and get high—yes, I was against the war in Vietnam, but I was more interested in getting laid and getting high. But part of that was fighting the cops, and the tear gas and everything—and it was exciting to have sex at a riot! Even though punk wasn’t around yet—that felt like punk to me.

4

QUEERCORE: HOW TO PUNK A REVOLUTION

Jayne County: When I first started getting on stage in the late ’60s, people were calling it drag rock. Or gay rock, or transvestite rock. Then the “glam rock” thing kind of stuck. Instead of drag or gay or whatever, you could say glam. It was like with punk, when instead of punk people started saying new wave—it became whitewashed for the general public. Mykel Board: I used to go to New York Dolls concerts, down at Club 82. They played often, every couple of weeks. And suddenly they stopped dressing up—suddenly they weren’t in dresses anymore. They were playing the same music, the same stuff going on. I asked somebody there, What’s going on? How come they’re not dressing up anymore? And they said, Don’t you know? Glitter is dead. It’s punk rock now. So my first experience of punk rock—this was 1974, ’75?—it was the stuff I’d always liked! So, OK, it’s punk rock now—it has a different name, but it’s the same music, same people. Punk rock probably suited my personality more than glitter did because I’m very much of a contrarian, and an anti- kind of guy; and punk rock was an anti- kind of music. Jayne County: That first wave of punk that happened, I was the first to play at CBGB. I played there when even it wasn’t called CBGB, it was called Hilly’s and it was nothing but Hells Angels, and I had to walk out on stage in front of an audience of Hells Angels. And they were freaking out, because that was the height of when I was really doing awful stuff—fucking myself with a fake pussy, with a three-headed dildo, masturbating with a statue of the Virgin Mary, eating fake dog food out of a toilet. And surprise, surprise—the Hells Angels loved it. By the end of the night everyone was drunk, and I was sitting in their laps, camping around, and just being totally outrageous. What I was doing was so in-your-face that the Hells Angels loved it. They thought it was fabulous. Mykel Board: CBGB and Max’s Kansas City were the only two venues for punk rock in New York. Jayne County used to play at Max’s Kansas City—at that time she was Wayne County. She was completely outrageous, with a big bouffant hairdo and a “Dave Clark Five” tiara, and she would sing songs about eating shit. . . . She inspired a lot of people to do extreme things not only with the music, but with sexuality.

WRECKING NERVES

5

Jayne County: I played Max’s more than CBGB, I was really more of a Max’s Kansas City act. I mean, I loved CBGB, I have the best memories in the world . . . CBGB, that bathroom down there—you could run down into that bathroom and wait until someone famous came in, that would be your chance to see their cocks. There were no stalls, people had to just stand there and pee, and you could just run and go, Oooh, I see your cock, yeah! They’d go, Here it is, Jayne, come and get it . . . A lot of them did that to me— David Johansen, Deedee . . . those An early Wayne (Jayne) County flyer bathrooms down there, they were fun. People would get drunk and just turn around and whip it out. Quite a few of the punks were gay, they just weren’t out. They might not even have thought of themselves as gay—a lot of them were very young at the time. I guess everyone knows Walter Lure from The Heartbreakers was . . . he wasn’t out either, but he came out as gay in London, during the whole punk thing. Me and my manager, Leee Black Childers, who was also managing The Heartbreakers, we began to notice that every time we saw Walter he was with a pretty boy, somebody that was very noticeably gay. He didn’t say anything, he just let people assume what they wanted to assume. With Joe Strummer from The Clash, there was always the rumor that he was bisexual. I think he was totally gay. At the beginning, when he was with The Clash, he probably didn’t know what he was either, he was very young. But he had an affair for years with a famous London artist. You always heard rumors about people. And my friend Leee Black Childers, who was on the business side of things—Leee is totally gay, he’s a big raving queen. He had gay experiences with a whole list of people and he’d seduce people left and right. We were at a party in London, a lot of the early punks were there . . . and I found myself up on the roof, and I saw this blonde person sitting there, and Leee Black Childers down on his knees, working away . . . and when I got a little

6

QUEERCORE: HOW TO PUNK A REVOLUTION

closer I noticed it was Billy Idol! Leee was really good at finding out about who was what, or who would let you do what. He had a real knack for seduction. I don’t want to make him sound like a sleazy old oversexed queen—but he actually is. John Waters: Punk rock music got me back into liking popular music. I didn’t like any music between The Beatles and punk. I didn’t listen to any music. I liked rhythm and blues so much that I thought The Beatles ruined rock ’n’ roll. They were too sweet and nice. Now I like them; I’m not against them. But I didn’t want to go to Woodstock—I wanted to go to Altamont. So when punk came along, it was so great—because we felt that we had always been punks, there just wasn’t a word for it. When we made Pink Flamingoes, the colored hair—blue and red hair—you couldn’t buy that in the drugstore. You had to strip your hair and use India ink or magic markers to dye your hair that color. Even though we made movies to shock hippies, in a way the point was—it was punk, we just didn’t know it. So I was thrilled when it first came out. It got me back into popular music—to this day. Eileen Myles: Punk culture was art culture. Punk, I feel, is a better name for postmodernity. And if there’s any way to describe the art movement of my generation, it was punk—it was film, it was poetry, it was theater, it was music, it was everything. Joanna Brown: I’m from Shreveport, Louisiana, and I ran away to Chicago when I was nineteen because it was the biggest city where I had a place to sleep when I got there. I got into punk rock when I was fifteen—I found the other three people in Shreveport who were into punk rock, and the one cool teacher and his wife that took us to see The Clash in Dallas, which was three hours away. And it changed my life forever. There was one store in Shreveport that sold non-top-40 records, they sold punk rock and weird shit. We’d meet on our bicycles and pedal over there to go through the stacks. And they sold a couple of offbeat magazines—New York Rocker and Trouser Press. One issue of the New York Rocker had a photo spread that was famous couples of punk rock. There was John Doe and Exene from X, and Les and Lene Lovich—and one of the couples was Adele Bertei and Lesley Woods from the Au Pairs. And I went off into a corner by myself and I was like, Holy shit, there’s

WRECKING NERVES

7

girls in there, and they’re a couple, and there’s a picture of them and they’re not ashamed! And then there was an interview with Phranc, the Jewish lesbian folk singer, when her first record came out; and I realized—if you were a punk, that it was OK to be queer. It blew my mind!

8

QUEERCORE: HOW TO PUNK A REVOLUTION

2

Gloriously Wrong The LA Scene (Early ’80s)

Dennis Cooper: What’s so interesting about the LA punk music scene was that it was very queer. You think about the major bands that were around; you had The Germs, and The Screamers, and The Bags, and Phranc, and Nervous Gender, and B People, and Human Hands—that were all queer, or at least partly queer. I was going to see all those shows and knew some of those people, and I was trying to combine things, trying to get everyone together and see what happened. And let poetry be a part of it—let poetry have some sort of adjunct . . . let poetry get some sort of shine off that whole thing. Deke Nihilson: The LA scene was crawling with queer punks. Some of them more closeted, like Darby Crash, and some of them very out, like the Catholic Discipline people. And there were allies too, people who weren’t queer—like, X was always right there. You see a lot of it in the London scene too—look at the Derek Jarman film Jubilee. Queers were always there as part of it. It wasn’t like a queercore thing; it was just of course—it’s where the freaks and the creatives and the misfits and the outcasts all came together and did their own thing. So of course there’s going to be queers in it, and women, and a bunch of other people. Don Bolles: We didn’t need queercore back then because everything in Hollywood in some way was queercore. There was such a crazy diversity. Everyone that was part of the scene was either, like, a hustler on Hollywood Boulevard, like Bruce Barf, or Tony the Hustler, who was a good friend of ours—Darby lived with him for a while, he was a leather guy from Chicago . . . everyone did everything back then, except you weren’t really supposed to like sex that much, you weren’t supposed to

G L O R I O U S LY W R O N G

9

obsess over it like the disco people. It wasn’t like, Hey, party, let’s have sex! That just looked gross to us. It was like, Sex? Who cares? Let’s jump around to crazy music. Fuck sex! I always say, when people ask, Was Darby gay? I go, Well, y’know, that’s a trick question. Because An early Germs leaflet from San gay people tended to like Barbra Francisco Streisand and Busby Berkeley movies. Darby was homosexual. He liked to bone teenage skater boys and be boned by them. Rik L. Rik was this gorgeous kid, he sang for this band called F-Word at the time, and he went around barefoot, and was really into, like, gothic kind of things. He was just gorgeous—Johnny Depp could have played him in a movie, except that he wasn’t as cute as Rik L. Rick. Darby, I guess, got Rik to go back to his place with him. So one thing led to another, and at some point Darby was trying to seduce him, and he was telling him—Hey, it’s cool, y’know, the Greeks, the Romans . . . Rik says that he didn’t end up doing anything, but I don’t know. I think it would have been very tough to say no to Darby, I mean everyone loved him. Even the people that hated everything he stood for wanted him to love them, to approve of them. But he was worried that the way things were going with him and his sexuality, and with the hardcore punk scene coming to prominence, with Orange County jocks now being the main population at shows where at first they’d been a tiny minority—these people were not approving of homosexuality at all. But these were sort of the ranks of kids that Darby would choose his boyfriends from—he liked those Orange County skater kids, those Riverside skater kids. But he did not want anyone to know that he was gay. Phranc: I grew up listening to folk music. The first rock and roll I listened to was Patti Smith. I didn’t even—I was a complete folk music nerd growing up, and that’s what I wanted to do. I dropped out of high school to be a lesbian. When I was seventeen I came out as a dyke, and I couldn’t be a lesbian in my parents’ house—so I left home, and spent most of my time in Venice, playing my guitar on the boardwalk for

10

QUEERCORE: HOW TO PUNK A REVOLUTION

Tomata du Plenty/The Screamers featured in Slash

money. Then I found out about this place called the Woman’s Building, which was a feminist art institution in downtown Los Angeles. There were all these women, downtown, making art! I’d go there and I’d play my guitar in the bathroom, because the acoustics were really great, and that little community really embraced me. Then I went up to San Francisco. I wanted to find some new lesbians, because of course San Francisco was the queer mecca. And instead

G L O R I O U S LY W R O N G

11

of finding new lesbians, I found punk rock! I moved into a house on Howard Street, and The Avengers played our housewarming party . . . it was just kind of the beginning of my life. After being the outsider, being the queer kid in high school, not fitting in musically, not fitting in any way, I just thought I’d been born too late. I’d missed all the activism, everybody in school was apathetic . . . now suddenly I was with people who were my age, and they were really angry, and they were making art and music, and it was very exciting. I had to come back to LA because I couldn’t get a job in San Francisco. And I didn’t know anyone in LA except for women from the Woman’s Building, and some lesbians in the community here—but I was into punk rock, and the two worlds did not meet. All I wanted to do was be in a band, and find punk rock in LA. So I just started going to venues, by myself. I’d put on a little suit and tie and go out, and I’d stand against the wall and try to look cool. One night I was at Bases Hall on Vermont, and I was standing there in my suit and this guy came up to me and said, Wanna be in a band? And I was like, Yeah! They didn’t ask me if I could play or sing or anything; I just looked right. And the band was Nervous Gender. Don Bolles: They were really great. They played in new, artier spaces downtown like the Brave Dog, at First and Alameda. They were so good. I saw them in either late ’78 or early ’79, and I was blown away. It sounded like a swarm of insane bees, the synthesizers, and they were very dissonant. You could tell they weren’t trying to be particularly dissonant; they were trying to play songs, but it was gloriously wrong. Frank was just banging on this Fender Jaguar completely out of tune, totally detuned actually. It was ridiculous, they were just the best. There were these three crazy synthesizer players, and this guitar player. They were even more flaming, they had a bigger flamer quotient than The Screamers. Phranc: The music was so far from anything I would have made on my own. It was all electronic, keyboards, very angry—and kind of misogynist—queer music; but it was passionate, and I was in a band, with these three gay men. I wasn’t in Nervous Gender for a long time; but we had a good time.

12

QUEERCORE: HOW TO PUNK A REVOLUTION

3

Nothing Was Sacred Vaginal Davis in LA

Brontez Purnell: Raquel Gutiérrez, who’s a poet, once told me that Vaginal Creme Davis’s influence was totally ubiquitous to LA. Kathleen Hanna: Vaginal Creme Davis? She is a wonderful performer, singer, scene-maker, scene-stealer, shrimper—I don’t know how to describe her, writer? Queercore legend. Sarah Schulman: Vaginal Davis— she was one of the, the actual, very first queercore person. Vaginal Davis: I attracted a lot of attention at that time in the late 1970s. All the kids that looked weird got a lot of attention. I didn’t think of myself as looking so weird at the time. I pretty much looked similar to the way I look now. Always had my hair very short or shaved, and my standard look was very thin, straight-leg pants. I kinda look Vaginal Davis and Joan Jett Blakk at the way like people looked in the SPEW 2. Photo by Mark Freitas early 1960s. That was sort of like my little uniform. Well, when I wasn’t all dolled up, when I wasn’t like wearing, y’know . . . I went between my casual sort of early 1960s look and then my fancier look was doing sort of silent movie-star drag.

NOTHING WAS SACRED

13

Jürgen Brüning: Vaginal is two meters tall, and I’m only 1.68 meters, so I always have to look up whenever I talk to her. She is this amazing person who loves to talk. I’ve had the chance to meet and work with Vaginal several times over the years. I’m not sure when I met her though. Maybe on the shoot for Bruce LaBruce’s Hustler White in Los Angeles? I’m not sure. But she lives in Berlin now and does theater projects with [frequent Bruce LaBruce star] Susanne Sachße. It’s great. Vaginal Davis: When I first started, it was the late 1970s and I was putting together urban Blaxploitation looks and commentary and original music. I was writing these weird sort of songs—I didn’t think they were punk songs at all. I thought they were more like showtunes. Because of my lack of skill; it came off more as punk rock than showtunes. But I was using as my examples Hollywood musicals. Everyone thought that I was so weird, because it hadn’t become retro yet. I wasn’t born middle class and I didn’t ever feel like I was fully integrated into full punk scene. When I started to actually perform doing my own thing with my first group, The Afro Sisters, I felt like a lot of the punks didn’t know where to put The Afro Sisters. Bruce LaBruce: When we were doing J.D.s in Toronto we thought we were the only ones who had this kind of . . . philosophy. Then we started reaching out, making fanzines, and finding people in other cities. And it turned out Vaginal was making work in Los Angeles that was very simpatico. She had her fanzine, Fertile La Toyah Jackson, and I thought she was the most glamorous woman I had ever encountered. We used to write long rambling letters to each other. So we were very connected Fertile La Toyah Jackson Magazine even before we met. And when I went down to LA to show No Skin off My Ass there for the first time, I

14

QUEERCORE: HOW TO PUNK A REVOLUTION

stayed with her, in her crummy little apartment on Sunset Boulevard. And I thought it was extremely glamorous. Vaginal Davis: At the time, there were only a few queercore/homocore magazines. And one of the earliest ones was my magazine: Fertile La Toyah Jackson. It lasted for about ten years, but I only had about six issues. One issue lasted for so long because I never dated them and never wrote about things that could date them. And as long as I was getting orders, I kept printing new copies. I think that’s one of the differences between a magazine like mine and Flipside or Maximum Rocknroll—they were dated. I called them “The Visual Issue” or “The Harvest Issue” or “The Paris Issue,” you know? I would never like say “FLT Volume One, July 3, 1983.” And I did that on purpose, because I just wanted it to like last for a long time. It still looks like nothing else out there. Kembra Pfahler: I met Vaginal Davis in Los Angeles in the early ’90s. She was hosting an event—a club. This was at a time when Ron Athey and Rick Owens and a lot of other artists that I really admire were all living in Los Angeles. I can remember growing up in Los Angeles always feeling extremely devalued; I felt like people were very sizeist, and misogynist, and sexist toward me or whatever, so much so that I created this incredibly large persona in Karen Black to excavate all of that shame that I had embedded in me for so many years. And I remember meeting Ms. Davis. At the time I was a much younger artist, and Ms. Davis really took me seriously, and I instantly felt this incredible respect—mutual respect—about the work that we were both doing. At that time, people really didn’t take seriously a five-foot-one, hundred-pound punk rock girl. I mostly was derided, y’know; my look wasn’t popular at the time, I hadn’t been discovered by Calvin Klein, people threw things at me when I walked down the street, and they would yell Scary Sherri! or Vampira! or whatever. So I had this instant connection with Ms. Davis. And I think she’s a very important part of this generation of queer artists, someone that married different genders, different sexual backgrounds. Homosexuality was no longer exclusive and separatist. I think that’s something that Bruce and Ms. Davis are really responsible for. And Ron Athey, too. The circle of people that they engaged with was inclusive; it wasn’t separatist, it wasn’t misogynist. I think it was really a turning point for queer culture. And Ms. Davis taking me under her

NOTHING WAS SACRED

15

wing, y’know—come with me. I’m just so grateful to her for that. Besides the fact that she’s an incredible linguist, an incredible visual artist, an incredible lyricist, and . . . presence. She’s a great beauty. Vaginal Davis: Dennis Cooper was a contributing editor at Artforum and had written about my Hag Gallery and then he wrote about the zines. He was the one who said: “Vaginal Davis is the future of art.” He wrote this grandiose tag . . . that I was the future of art. At that time, I didn’t know what Artforum was. I had no idea what it was. I was written up in all these like highbrow art magazines like Art in America, Artforum. I didn’t know even about these magazines. This shows how naive I was, because I was really young then. Genesis P-Orridge: I encountered Bruce LaBruce in Los Angeles, through Glen Meadmore who is in Hustler White. Glen is immensely tall and used to work as a duo with Vaginal Davis. They did a really aggressive cabaret act together. They both are over six-foot-six; they would wear sort of Cockette punk. Because they were so big and strong, they would literally grab somebody in the front row, who they assumed was straight, drag him on stage, attack him with dead chickens, and stick their asses on his face—overwhelm him in a quite brutally aggressive way. And they always picked the one who looked the most normal and butch to humiliate. Billy Miller: Yeah, Vag is hilarious, Vag is just a funny person all the way around. And the kind of humour that I can relate to. A title like Fertile La Toyah Jackson is just funny. And she had some great shows—Cholita and some other groups. Vaginal Davis: Cholita were the Female Menudo, my band with Alice Bag. When we worked on Cholita in the 1980s, it came in a period where I was very much not interested in any kind of alternative music culture things. I stopped like listening to punk rock or anything rock ’n’ roll oriented or anything underground. It would appear that I kind of divorced myself from the whole scene and I was only listening to Spanish-language music, especially this radio station called K-Radio Amore: K-LOVE. And it was playing Mexican pop music or Spanish pop music. The Afro Sisters sort of like went idle. Or we stopped really

16

QUEERCORE: HOW TO PUNK A REVOLUTION

performing and then Cholita emerged. Cholita! emerged as sort of like Latina all-girl-pop group who were all teenagers between the ages of twelve and fourteen. And the minute you turn fifteen, you’re too old and you get kicked out, like Menudo, the Puerto Rican boy group. One time we performed on this big street scene in Silver Lake called The Sunset Junction. It’s a big, big festival that they had every year in Silver Lake. And we performed on the main stage there and some women from a TV show completely believed our backstory from the group, that we were all teenagers—even though at that time it was the mid-1990s, like ’94 or something. So I was maybe thirty-two. This woman from a television show, she says “Oh, I would like you guys to be on this TV show. Perform on the show but then also bring your mothers.” As big as I am, she thought I was under fifteen, y’know. If you do anything really convincing enough on stage, people believe it. And then, I remember she was talking to us and staying still in character, I said, Oh, you want us? And it was like one of these talk shows. And we said, Oh, you want us to be on that talk show? Isn’t that a little exploitative? And she said, Oh no, because there will be a psychologist on the show too. Tony Arena: Her performances are like nothing that I’ve ever seen. Brilliant, y’know. Brilliant performances. Eventually I got so happy that I got to be in a G.B. Jones movie with Vaginal Davis, The Lollipop Generation . . . an awesome movie. Scott Treleaven: Humor was one of the things that made queercore so amazing. Whenever things got a little too straight-faced, someone was there to interject some—sometimes wonderfully vicious—humor into things. Vaginal Davis was like a saint—she was able to send up anything. Nothing was sacred—still isn’t. She’s kind of perfection in that way.

FAC T I O N

17

4

Faction Toronto’s “Fabricated” Scene (mid-1980s–early 1990s)

A young G.B. Jones and Bruce LaBruce

G.B. Jones: I had been in a band called Bunny & the Lakers, with Peter Morgan, Howard Pope and Wendy King. And we had broken up amicably when Peter moved to England and Howard moved to New York. They’d been good friends, so I was really depressed. I told my friend John Brown, the painter, and he suggested that I go meet these two girls, Janet and Kathleen, who were starting a band. So I went over to their house, and I told them I could play drums, even though I’d never played drums before. We were just starting out, so we were hanging around with our friends rather than trying to be part of a scene. And really, our own scene

18

QUEERCORE: HOW TO PUNK A REVOLUTION

evolved out of that, playing with bands like Rongwrong, The Woods Are Full of Cuckoos, The Party’s Over. It was a very separate scene from anything going on in Toronto at the time. I think all of our bands were what would later be called post-punk, rather than being first-generation punk; we were more experimental, weirder. People would call us “art-damaged.” The first zine I ever worked on was called Hide. It was a zine that my friend Candy and Caroline Azar had started, and they asked me to help with it. They were doing really exciting things; Caroline was doing amazing work with xerox, just taking every object she could find—pieces of lath, chainlink fence—she was xeroxing it all, creating the most amazing collages out of these objects that I’d never have thought of xeroxing. I’d had an instructor in college, Barbara Cover of early proto-queercore zine Hide Astman, who’d introduced me to xerox art and xerox photography, and I was just in love with xerox machines, I thought they were the best thing in the world. Caroline had come up the idea that she wanted to have not just a paper zine but also include a cassette with each issue. We were really interested in the whole cassette culture that was going on in the 1980s. We had stuff in Hide that was queer-related—people don’t really know that, but Hide was kind of like the gateway to J.D.s. Someone doing a whole article about hustlers they had met, for instance. Bruce LaBruce: Just Desserts was the ground zero where I met a lot of people involved with the queercore movement in Toronto. It was a kind of bourgeois dessert restaurant, run by this ex-hippie art student who hired all these freaks and misfits to torture and terrorize the clientele; that’s what people went to the restaurant for, basically. I was a film student at York University, and there were eight or nine of us working during the day shift—all film students at York University. And then these punks, junkies and musicians were all working the night shift. That’s where I met G.B. Jones.

FAC T I O N

19

Mark Freitas and G.B. Jones in G.B.’s apartment, ca. 1989 or 1990.

I was already experimenting a lot with style; I’ve always had my hair bleached or shaved—I was looking a bit Liquid Sky in those days, and she had her big red fright wig, and her tights, and her motorcycle boots. It was partly style, really, to begin with. And then politics. I was studying film theory and social and political thought in university; my professor, Robin Wood, was a hardcore Marxist feminist. So I was getting my political education in the university, and then I was getting my punk education at work, at Just Desserts. We had these long shifts— it was an all-night restaurant, open until three a.m. on weekdays and twenty-four hours on weekends. So we had a lot of time to sit around, to learn, to talk and plan and scheme and create revolutions in our coffee cups. I met Fifth Column while working at the restaurant, and started go-go dancing for them shortly after that—a kind of feminist gesture, reversing the objectification of the body, and the gender—so instead of the usual kind of decorative female go-go dancing it was a girl band with a male go-go dancer. Then I moved in with them, with Fifth Column. We lived in this ramshackle, squat-like building in east Toronto, at Queen and Parliament. The building was really falling apart and decrepit. There was a double storefront: the Fifth Column rehearsal space was in one storefront

20

QUEERCORE: HOW TO PUNK A REVOLUTION

and my bedroom was in the other. There was no heat downstairs, so I was always upstairs, where G.B. lived; we’d sit upstairs where it was warm and do our zine J.D.s, cutting and pasting and writing our manifestos. G.B. Jones: If one was to look for the genesis of J.D.s, it really starts with Caroline Azar. Most people have never given her any credit Cover of Fifth Column’s All Time Queen for this, but . . . in the early ’80s of the World she started working at what people would call a dive bar, called Together’s. Caroline’s background is in theater, and so her incredible ability to assemble a cast around her came into play. We met Joe the Ho there, this hustler who would wear these amazing, cute little mod shirts and this short little haircut—hustlers just didn’t look like that, then. And all sorts of weird punk kids and older dykes . . . it was an economically diverse bar, where people from different strata of society would socialize—people that were poor, people that were working-class, punks, hustlers. Then she started putting on shows there. She would have, like, an experimental film night, where she’d get filmmakers like John Porter, I had one of my films show there . . . and people were extremely receptive. Then Caroline got me a job as a DJ there. I’d play what I called punk lite—Siouxsie and the Banshees, Blondie, just stuff I thought people would like. And the bar ended up becoming enormously popular. Then Caroline arranged a night where Fifth Column would play; so then we had live music coming into the situation. I was really fascinated by the phenomenon of what was happening there. I had been going to a used bookstore, and I’d found these really old tabloids that had been published in Toronto, called things like Tattler and Midnight. They’d have columns in them written by gay people, reports on what was happening in the gay scene, like, such-and-such hustler did this thing this week . . . and I thought, wow, this is incredible! It was like a gossip column, all about people at the St. Charles, and the Blue Jay. I thought it would be really exciting to start a zine that did the same

FAC T I O N

21

Lyric sheet to Fifth Column’s “The Fairview Mall Story”

thing for our crowd at Together’s. So I asked Bruce if he wanted to make a zine with me, and we started J.D.s. The pictures of Bruce and Joe the Ho that were in the first issue I took at Together’s—most of the people in the first issue were people that went to Together’s and hung out with Caroline. Anita from Fifth Column, her sister Angela, and their friends—and they were hardcore punks, so these hardcore punk girls would come in with their huge mohawks, and all the old dykes would go, Oh, your hair is so pretty! It was just the most incredible scene. And I was taking pictures of everyone there and putting them in J.D.s; and that’s basically how it started.

22

QUEERCORE: HOW TO PUNK A REVOLUTION

At the same time, Caroline had the idea to do this song called “The Fairview Mall Story,” which was about the bust, at the Fairview Mall, of these men who’d been having sex in the washroom, and the police surveillance that caught them. The police then released the list of their names to the radio, and the radio announcers read their names over the air and their lives were horribly ruined, and one of them committed suicide, so Caroline wanted to write a song about that. And not too many people were doing stuff like that. Bruce LaBruce: “The Fairview Mall Story” was the song that I performed with Fifth Column most often. It was based on a true-life incident that happened around that time, these married men getting busted for having gay sex in the public bathrooms of a shopping mall. I had a little rap with Caroline in the middle of the song and then I would go-go dance. G.B. Jones: That song inspired me to look among all the hardcore records that Candy had—because it seemed like there were some other groups that had weird songs about gay stuff. Mighty Sphincter had a song called “Gay Bar,” the Leather Nun had a song—I think it was a cover of the ABBA song “I Need a Man,” something like that—and I think the Leather Nuns probably were queer. Some people were doing it as a joke; some people were letting their sexuality creep in; it was all very ambiguous, which I thought was really interesting. Bruce LaBruce: J.D.s was really music-based, so we had a list, a homocore list of top-ten bands that we really liked, that had gay-themed songs—everyone from Patti Smith to the Ramones to underground punk bands like Aryan Disgrace. The Nip Drivers was one of our favorites, who had a song about Quentin Crisp. And I loved The Ugly Americans, who were a straight punk band who had a song against homophobia. And then we had bands that actually started forming and contributing original music to J.D.s. G.B. Jones: I had no problem putting in a band with a homophobic song and claiming that this was all part of the new queercore movement. What better way to get revenge on them than to claim that they’re part of a movement of queers in punk music? So Bruce and I kind of

FAC T I O N

23

put across the idea that this was a huge international movement. And people believed it! That was the shocking part. We’d have all these songs, we’d write up these lists, and people just thought, Oh, this is really happening! And lo and behold, the next thing we knew there were all these bands, sending us songs so we could put out our own cassette compilations. And from there it just took off. Bruce LaBruce: We were influ- J.D.s “Homocore Top Ten” enced by the Situationists—so we had this idea of spectacle, creating a kind of spectacle that was, in a way, a parody of pop culture and in a parallel way, like Warhol’s superstars, a parody of Hollywood, yet they became real superstars. So we created an illusion that there was a full-fledged queer punk movement happening in Toronto, dykes and faggots and transgender people, to the extent that people—like Gus Van Sant says, he came to Toronto to make To Die For and was expecting to find this crazy queer punk scene that was thriving and ubiquitous, and it was just me and three dykes, basically. Dennis Cooper: I mean, I visited Johnny and Rex a couple of times, and G.B., and that’s exactly what was going on—there was nothing going on. It was all happening in their houses. I mean, a little later it picked up because Scott Treleaven started doing his stuff. But at that time, it was all just a big fantasy, right? It was a fantasy, what was happening in Toronto. Mark Freitas: The way they made it sound, in J.D.s, it really took on these epic proportions—it was like when I was a midwestern boy living in rural Michigan and I would subscribe to Details and Interview and the Village Voice and imagine New York—oh my god, this amazing scene!—I had the same kind of gigantic picture of this scene in Toronto. Tony Arena: It didn’t sound fake when I was reading J.D.s. I know they always say, We were writing about a scene that didn’t in fact exist. I was

24

QUEERCORE: HOW TO PUNK A REVOLUTION

like—I think it exists. Even if it’s just four or five people, that’s a scene and those people do exist. Fifth Column did exist as a band. A few people can be a scene. A few people is more than me, one kid alone in my bedroom drawing pictures of gay guys. To me, writing to those people in Toronto, they had a scene that they were making, and even if it was just a few people it was more than just me alone. And then suddenly it exploded into this huge global thing—and thank god it did. But when I was alone, that was a big deal—that there were a handful of queer punks hanging out together, having parties. That was a big deal to me. Glenn Belverio: When you start to fabricate something, it’s like—Diana Vreeland, one of my muses, my icons. Mrs. Vreeland called it faction, a combination of fact and fiction. In the case of homocore they needed to do it because there weren’t very many gay people who wanted to listen to punk rock—they were listening to whatever, very bad dance music. So they had to make it seem like it was a bigger movement than it really was. Of course, it became a real movement. Through the distribution of zines and tapes it grew into a global phenomenon. Kathleen Hanna: We didn’t really know how big the scene in Toronto was, with J.D.s and G.B., but I did know that G.B. was multifaceted— she was making films, she was making zines, she was in a band. And I had the same sort of drive. I’m the kind of person who is constantly making shit. I was born to make shit, so I really related to her on that level, trying to create a scene. Later on, when I did one of the only mainstream-press interviews I did, for the LA Weekly, and I was asked about riot grrrl—we’d had just two meetings, in Washington, DC, but I was like, Riot grrrl is all over the country; there are meetings happening everywhere—Minneapolis, Chicago, LA—I just made up a bunch of places and I was like, Yeah, there are meetings all over, we started this thing, and it’s totally a phenomenon. And then it became a phenomenon, because I said it was. That article came out and then girls started looking for the meetings. And I remember having the feeling that that’s was what the girls in Toronto were doing. They were, like, five people but they made it seem like it was so huge. I liked that they felt like they could do that— that they were such bitches, that they thought they just could take over everything. And more than anything that influenced me—that they were bitches. They were bitches with style.

FAC T I O N

25

G.B. Jones: We really started in the anarchist community. We didn’t really start in the gay community. We were trading with anarchist zines and meeting anarchists from the States, and that was really our milieu—the punk scene, the post-punk scene, experimental filmmakers and artists. So we met all these people when we were touring and we’d show our films, and that’s how it started spreading. We’d take the zines with us when we traveled; we were kind of like this traveling circus, y’know—here’s the band!, and here’s the zine!, and here’s the movies! It was very much like the Exploding Plastic Inevitable. And I think that’s how it spread so quickly, because people were encountering it so many different levels. Tom Jennings: In San Francisco we were creating this mythology of queer punk that did not exist. That was the point. It really did not exist. People started reading Homocore, and, I think, perceiving that there was a queer punk subculture in San Francisco when it was really just Deke and me. Whether we were doing this intentionally or not, I don’t really remember. But there was a lot of spontaneous . . . almost nothing gets invented by one person alone. Almost all inventions are responses to human culture. So while Deke and I were doing Homocore, the people in Toronto had been doing their thing. There’s a moment of simultaneous discovery. If you invent something and no one’s ever heard of it, it remains obscure because no one knows what to do with it. So Homocore had to make sense in some context. And with all the other zines it did. They were all contemporary responses to the pressures of the time. Jon Ginoli: Before the Sex Pistols formed, Malcolm McLaren had this idea of what he wanted a band to be like—before there was a band like that, before there was a scene. It’s kind of the same with homocore, with G.B. Jones and Bruce LaBruce in Toronto dreaming up this scene when there wasn’t any. But culturally it was a ripe idea. Bruce LaBruce: When you make a fiction, when you create an idealistic world with these fanzines, it’s like a fantasy of how you want to be perceived by the world. So for me personally, I created Bruce LaBruce—this hard, punk character that was militant and aggressive, but also making porn, and creating havoc, breaking the law, shoplifting, getting his lips

26

QUEERCORE: HOW TO PUNK A REVOLUTION

sewn shut, which I did several times. So it was a creation of a persona, but it was also a fiction, a performance. And of course, all the other people who were doing fanzines—I realized they were doing the same thing. So in LA, Vaginal Davis was creating this kind of glamazon character . . . My idea of that whole scene in LA was similar to other people’s idea of what was going on in Toronto with J.D.s—I mean, she created this whole glamorous fantasy world. And when I got there—with her, it kind of did live up to the expectations, but it was much smaller, more down and dirty. She lived in a crummy little apartment and had a day job at UCLA. So it’s more grounded in reality when you meet people in real life.

CAUGHT IN THE CRACKS

27

5

Caught in the Cracks Between Gay and Punk

Adam Rathe: Queercore wasn’t just against homophobia and the martyring of gay people. It was against the mainstream gay society, against the idea of upper-class white men going to the gym and spending their nights at the baths. It was against dance music, it was against small dogs and summer houses. Bruce LaBruce: For us the gay scene was completely bourgeois and conventional, and we didn’t feel welcome in that scene either. In fact, in Toronto there was a gay bar in the gay ghetto that we sort of adopted as our unofficial headquarters, and we used to hang out there all the time because we wanted to participate in the gay world. But we didn’t really feel welcome in the gay bars. I mean, I would get kicked out of the gay bars in Toronto for wearing swastika earrings. I wasn’t welcome. My style wasn’t welcome. I couldn’t get laid—except in a bathhouse, when I had all my clothes off. Part of my position has always been that I was rejected by two subcultures, the gay subculture and the punk subculture. I’ve never really felt like I’ve fit into either of them. So I’ve always felt like I’m on the fringe of the fringe. Like even the fringe elements—my work is either too extreme for them or doesn’t fit into the kind of orthodoxy that these subcultures have. It’s the same with my work in art versus pornography: the art world quite often views my work as too pornographic, and the porn people think that my work is too arty, so I’m caught in the cracks somewhere between the two. So that’s always informed my work and my identity, this idea of either being too extreme for the extreme edge of a subculture or just not fitting in anywhere—being a total misfit.

28

QUEERCORE: HOW TO PUNK A REVOLUTION

An excerpt from G.B. Jones and Bruce LaBruce’s “Don’t Be Gay, or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Fuck Punk up the Ass” manifesto originally printed in Maximum Rocknroll

Andrew Martini: I think everyone in Limp Wrist who is gay has had a sort of dressed-down stage, trying to fit into a more mainstream gay scene. When I was about twenty-five I started going to gay bars. This was around when Limp Wrist started. I started going to gay bars and trying to fit in with people there, but I didn’t really connect with people

CAUGHT IN THE CRACKS

29

because it was more like a pop culture kind of thing, and I wasn’t really into that at the time. But everyone in Limp Wrist to a certain degree has tried to do that, and then come back and been like, Yeah . . . I don’t really need to be accepted in that scene—it’s cool. Martín Sorrondeguy: Growing up a Catholic boy, going to Catholic school all the way through high school, being an altar boy, being a Cub Scout, Boy Scout—anything that really went against all that really appealed to me. I was always searching for something weird and different. Punk came into my world starting with cousins that we visited in New York. As a kid I always liked Kiss, because they were weird and they wore makeup. Then in 1979 my family went to New York and my cousins had, like, Ramones ticket stubs up on their wall. And ever since that stuff entered my world, I was fascinated by it. In terms of my queerness, my gayness, that was so much riskier to dive into, and I came out way later. There was the punk rock, for a long time, and I just ignored sex for a long time. I was straddling two worlds. Before I got heavily into punk, there was this underground house scene, these dance crews that were made up of mostly Latino and black kids. The Culitos were one of the most popular crews, they would do these amazing house dancing routines, and they were openly, out queer kids in the hood. Talk about risky—I mean, these kids were putting it out there. I remember this one kid had a curly mohawk, dyed blonde, and glittery makeup—this is broad daylight—at Division and Western, in 1983. People were freaking out . . . but there was this wave of queerness that went through all the neighborhoods tied to house music. So when I was going to punk shows at the Metro, and it was really tough—there were a lot of skinheads in Chicago, a lot of craziness—I found my way to navigate those two worlds. Like, I’m gonna go here to get my punk, but I know where to go to get my dick. Then the time came when I couldn’t ignore it anymore, I kind of knew where I had to go. It ended up happening where I went on a tour with Los Crudos, and I realized that I couldn’t fight these feelings I was having anymore. I did it in this weird way where I came out in Chicago last. I came out in all these different cities. It was like a drive-by comeout. And it was going really well. Then, finally, it was at the Fireside Bowl one night, and I just said it. I was at home, y’know, and it’s hard

30

QUEERCORE: HOW TO PUNK A REVOLUTION

to come out at home. And it was awesome—so many kids just rushed the stage and stood up for me. Scott Treleaven: I realized fairly early on with regards to sexuality—it’s a component of our personalities that’s hardwired to a bunch of other things, that influences behavior and worldview in some really fundamental ways. It wasn’t simply about who I was fucking; it was much deeper. And when you realize that you’re queer and you look back at the way that you’ve been treated, the way you’re supposed to think about yourself in relationship to society—you’re perverse or you’re evil, any of these pejorative terms that have been thrown at you—when you realize that’s fundamentally wrong, and that you know innately that you’re connecting with something that’s not only correct but natural, there’s a process that you go through where you start to analyze all the other systems you’re involved in. What else have I been told that’s not true? What else have I been convinced of that’s actually false? What else is supported and sustained by society that may be artificial? So I think the alignment of queer and punk was really natural. Punk has always questioned the status quo, and of course queers should too. Jody Bleyle: Let’s say you’re a punk, you’re starting to grow up, you’re getting older, and you see the adult world in front of you and just think, That’s not my world. I don’t see a place for myself there. And when you’re queer you look ahead of you and you don’t see a place for yourself there either. So in that sense there’s a real commonality. I think there was a real desperation—I mean, it felt like life or death to me. I felt like if I didn’t find some dykes to play music with—not just any music but the music that was, like, my sole connection to the universe—I couldn’t imagine living, I couldn’t imagine actually going on. I couldn’t imagine how I would be able to do that, so it felt like life or death. Brontez Purnell: I think I was fifteen, sixteen, seventeen, y’know the years get blurry, but I was in Alabama and my drama teacher called gay people a genetic mistake. So I wrote a letter to Kathleen Hanna and told her, and she wrote me back. She gave me the first Le Tigre CD and she was like—I still have the letter somewhere—“Don’t worry about it, you shouldn’t feel pressure about your sexuality or whatever.” And it was a couple years later when I was eighteen and I moved to Bloomington and

CAUGHT IN THE CRACKS

31

I went on tour with Le Tigre and Panty Raid. And she remembered me because she said she kept my picture as a bookmark for years. Deke Nihilson: By the middle-to-late ’80s, hardcore punk rock for a lot of people was an alternative way to be meathead. And meanwhile, by that point, AIDS had already devastated the gay community, and you started seeing this shift, historically, from the Gay Liberation Front–era demands for life on our own terms to—of necessity—pleading with the state for resources, for research, for people who were dying. Out of that came this sort of assimilationist thrust, demanding the right to get married and have kids in the suburbs like everybody else—We’re just like anybody else except for who we’re sleeping with!—which we didn’t feel was in the spirit of the early gay rights movements. In a wider cultural sense, this assimilationism was always something that punk rock actively critiqued, so we kind of felt that we were putting the punk back in the homo movement and the homo back in the punk movement at the same time. Jena von Brucker: I think we felt ostracized by gay culture. There were a lot things going on in that culture that we didn’t like. There was lot of separation between men and women, there was a lot of hostility toward women. So there was a certain amount of anger that fueled the things that we said about the gay establishment. Some of what we said was harsh, but I think we were calling attention to things that needed attention. Could it have been said in a different way? Yes—there were probably people who said it in a really nice way, in an academic way. We said it in a very confrontational way. But it’s not that those things didn’t have to be said. Bruce LaBruce: We were against all sorts of orthodoxies, G.B. Jones and I. We didn’t call ourselves artists; we thought the art world was corrupt at that point. We thought that the gay orthodoxy was bullshit and bourgeois. But then any sort of “legitimate” queer activism we were very suspicious of; we were also very suspicious of the anarchist movement—because I’ve never seen a more bureaucratic institution than the anarchist movement. It was impossible to get anything done, everything had to be done by committee and everything was talked to death. In terms of activism it wasn’t nimble enough, it was entrenched in all sorts

32

QUEERCORE: HOW TO PUNK A REVOLUTION

of dogma. So we always skipped around that kind of stuff and always considered ourselves outsiders among the outsiders. Brontez Purnell: How the hell are two tech workers with an exponentially greater amount of wealth, living with their boyfriends, how are me and them the same people necessarily? I feel like the straight men that I’ve lived with in my life over the years, I feel like they’re more my people than those other people. Just because we like to suck dick and fuck booty-hole, we’re all the same person? That can’t be right. That can’t be real. Mykel Board: In the ’70s, the hets wanted to be like the homos. The hets looked at the homos and said, Man, they have sex all over the place, they’re free, they don’t get tied down. So they started these swingers clubs, trying to imitate the homo lifestyle. They wanted all the fun that the homos were having at that time. When Plato’s Retreat opened, it was an imitation of a gay sex club—it happened to be guys and girls together, but otherwise it was just a gay sex club. That was considered wild and exciting. Now it’s completely reversed. Gay people want to imitate the het lifestyle. They want to get married, they want to adopt children, they want to fit in society. There’s going to be a gay president. And . . . it’s really sad, the changes that have happened. I think it’s really awful to be gay now. When I hear somebody say I’m queer or I’m homo—yeah! But I’m gay is so respectable, it gives me the creeps. Respectable people generally give me the creeps; but people who naturally have a way out of this cage of respectability and they don’t take it, they just want to get inside and shut the door, those people really give me the creeps. Bruce Benderson: What disturbs me about the word punk is that it used to have such a strong political signification. It was an expression of working-class frustration. Now, say you’re from a lawyer’s family, like me; you grow up in the best part of town and start hanging out at punk concerts but are otherwise apolitical, what exactly are you expressing? I don’t know; maybe you’re vicariously getting off on that working-class energy, in the same way that the bohemians who came to poor neighborhoods vicariously got off on the energy of the lumpenproletariat and created art. I believe that every single avant-garde was created out of that

CAUGHT IN THE CRACKS

33

experience. And the reason we don’t have a vibrant avant-garde now is because that essential link between bohemia and the culture of poverty that led to every single avant-garde—Baudelaire, the flâneur, walking through the worst neighborhoods at night, taking a bath of degeneration and being inspired by that; Norman Mailer calling himself a “white negro”; and so on—no longer exists. It was my generation who started to ruin that equation. And I think it’s because, although we were intrigued by what the beatniks were doing, we were really the first suburban generation. After the war, the suburbs were created by ex-GIs, with government money, and suddenly middle-class people were more isolated than they had ever been before. Home was a box with a nuclear family in it, held together by raging tensions and resentments, who then filed into a capsule called the car to go to a shopping mall that was covered and no longer visible from the streets—these were the people who had to create the next generation of bohemia! They did it by stressing pleasure, and it was called being hippie. After that, and after “punk,” the links with the culture of poverty were completely severed. Studio 54—people talk about it as a glamorous place, right? But really, the energy of Studio 54 came from preposterous class mixing. It was Liza Minnelli dancing with a black bicycle messenger. It was people getting in not because of who their families were or because of their education but because of how connected they were, either visually or behaviorally, to pleasure. As far as I’m concerned, that was the last great urban moment for pleasure, bohemia, class interpenetration. The Reagan ’80s saw the return of the white bourgeoisie into the city, the boutiquing of the city, all the minorities pushed to the periphery—what’s called the donut model, where instead of having this concentrated mass of anger in places like Harlem or S.C.A.B. propaganda

34

QUEERCORE: HOW TO PUNK A REVOLUTION

Watts, you now had them all dispersed so that their anger couldn’t congeal and cause trouble. There’s no contact between classes, which is a terrible situation for an artist. An artist needs collision with other classes, he needs to be an adventurer. It was the same thing with homosexuality— that was a class adventure. It was the doctor taking care of the homeless street kid; it was somebody from a white, middle-class home venturing to Harlem, and sleeping with one black stud after another; it was total interpenetration of classes. Homosexuality was a wonderful adventure, based on that kind of rule-breaking. That you can call queer. Queer is not discussing strategies, politics, or points of view at the university.

L E T ’ S G E T B A C K T O G AY L I B E R AT I O N

35

6

Let’s Get Back to Gay Liberation AIDS Activism and Beyond Joanna Brown: When I first joined ACT UP I was coming out of the anarchist movement, which was mostly people yabbering in church basements, theorizing and not doing jack shit. At the same time it was very straight; and when I brought up, y’know, I think I’m queer, I was told that’s just bourgeois ideology. We can’t have that. Then I started reading about ACT UP. And I was like, Wow, these people are really doing shit—they’re, like, tying themselves to members of Congress, I want to go to one of their meetings! But even at ACT UP meetings, while I really appreciated the political work, and I got really involved Poster from the Silence = Death Project, and really liked the direct-action 1987 approach, socially I didn’t fit it at all. I was a queer who liked punk rock, and besides my girlfriend Carolyn there really weren’t any others. Jayne County: I, for one, loved ACT UP. I’m not one of those people who say, No, you have to be nice; you have to do it the right way. You really have to make a noise. You have to cause some trouble. You have to get attention. If you don’t yell and scream, no one’s going to listen to you,

36

QUEERCORE: HOW TO PUNK A REVOLUTION

Demonstration on women’s AIDS issues at the Sixth International AIDS conference in San Francisco, June 22, 1990. Photo by Daniel Nicoletta

they’ll just overlook you and move on to the next thing. You have to say, Hold on, wait a fucking minute—and it gets people’s attention. I think more gay people should be more vocal, even at the cost of getting beat up or whatever. There has to come a point when you open your mouth and stomp your feet. Eileen Myles: I 