Queercore: How to Punk a Revolution: An Oral History

209 Pages·2021·5.782 MB·English

by  Liam Warfield, Walter Crasshole and Yony Leyser

Praise for Queercore
“Finally, a book that centers on the wild, innovative, and fearless
contributions queers made to punk rock, creating a punker-than-
punk 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inspiring, a historical document and a call to arms during a time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
7 Freaks on the Edges The West Coast Scene (late 1980s–
mid 1990s) 42
8 Bodies Colliding Machismo (and Machisma) in the
Punk Scene 52
9 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
12 Why Don’t You Just Get Together? The SPEW
Convention and Homocore Chicago (1992–2001) 84
13 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 Orthodoxiesby 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
EXTREMELY FORWARD INTRODUCTION 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 EXTREMELY FORWARD INTRODUCTION
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 rep-
resented 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 Sta-
Prest 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.
EXTREMELY FORWARD INTRODUCTION 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.