The word Punk, of course refers to prison slang for the passive recipient of homosexual advances, but by the 1980s so much of the hardcore punk scene was represented by an ultra-macho, mostly homophobic fanbase. This was a stark diversion from the early gender-bent roots of British Punk Rock that juxtaposed fascist imagery with explicit homosexual iconography. Indeed, there was a zeitgeist shift represented in Vivian Westwood’s explicit designs at Malcolm McLaren’s famous Sex Shoppe, in the experimental music of Throbbing Gristle, the groundbreaking cinema of Derek Jarman, and the explosive performances of transplanted American transperson Jayne (neé Wayne) County. Similarly, the California scene that launched The Screamers and M.D.C. had somewhat lost ground to a jock-centric skinhead scene that hinged on division rather than inclusion, especially in and around the suburbs of Los Angeles.
What had begun as a safe haven for angsty LGBTQ teens became yet another space of marginalization and (frequently) violence.
Queercore as we now understand it got its start in Toronto in the mid 1980s as a situationist kitsch movement launched by various zines (like the seminal J.D.s) and a filmmaking collective that included Steven Rumbelow, Bruce La Bruce and G.B. Jones (of Fifth Column), who had met on the anarchist fringe of the city’s vibrant punk and gay communities. Kindred spirits in Los Angeles (Vaginal Davis) and San Francisco (Tom Jennings and Deke Nihilson, who would launch the Homocore zine) were busy creating a gay punk scene out of whole cloth, initially presenting a farce that would become reality. The subsequent explosion of activism in the era of AIDS that birthed Act Up and Queer Nation found a strong support mechanism among political punks (some gay, some not), who elevated the visibility of punks and queers–allied in the effort to take away the animus from the phobia, which inevitably intertwined the two as concurrent, anarchistic movements.
QUEERCORE: HOW TO PUNK A REVOLUTION is not just the history of a musical subgenre, it’s a lesson in reproducible activism. Filmmaker Yony Leyser brings together archival footage from dozens of films that documented the scene in real time alongside live footage of the shows that most of us only saw in the pages of Maximum RockNRoll. Further illustrating the narrative is a slick and easily digestible collection of interviews with John Waters, Kim Gordon, Beth Ditto, Kathleen Hanna, Peaches, Genesis Breyer P-Orridge, Justin Vivian Bond, Lynn Breedlove, Silas Howard, Penny Arcade, Team Dresch, the aforementioned Bruce La Bruce and G.B. Jones, and members of Pansy Division alongside dozens of other bands and badasses who were part of or influenced by the seminal subculture.
Whether you’re queer or a punk or both or neither, Queercore: How to Punk a Revolution is an entertaining, uplifting, rocking good time that reminds us of the debt that we owe as a society to a group of fearless, innovative, queer punks.
Altered Innocence, an independent distributor that specializes in edgy and artistic foreign, queer and coming-of-age cinema, have put together a great looking and sounding blu-ray that perfectly captures the spirit and the aesthetic of the subject. Most important for music fans will be the well-balanced 5.1 DTS-HD master audio, but the upgrade of archival film and video materials to the HD Blu-Ray format must have been considerable, because it all looks sharp enough to blend seamlessly with the new footage and the many inserts of fliers, posters, zine pages and other incidental treasures that make this as much a feast for the eyes as for the ears. Extras include extended interviews with Jayne County, John Waters, Dennis Cooper, Kim Gordon and Don Bolles, and there are both English and Spanish optional subtitles.
Queercore was an official selection of Outfest Los Angeles, Frameline, Doc NYC, and the Sonic Visions Music Doc Festival, as well as screening silently (with subtitles) in fine art galleries as part of this year’s Day of Silence. The feature runs 80 minutes with an aspect ratio of 1.85:1. The Blu-ray has an SRP of $24.99 and the DVD is $21.99. Both are available now.
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Matt Kennedy is the owner and director of Gallery 30 South in Pasadena, where he’s exhibited Chuck D., Frances Bean Cobain, African American Punk Rock Quilts, and Linda Aronow’s photos of the LA Punk Scene 1982-1992. He grew up in Lynn, MA where he went to school with the members of Disrupt and delivered newspapers on his BMX to members of Slapshot, SS Decontrol and Boston.
