(slow, dramatic music)
(punk rock music)
♪ Summer's here ♪
♪ And I jump into my car ♪
♪ Take a drive down a highway ♪
♪ To the local queer bar ♪
♪ Pull your back, bar ♪
♪ We're going to a fag bar ♪
♪ Yeah ♪
- [Narrator] If you tell yourself a lie over and over,
you start to believe it.
When imagination takes over,
when we close our eyes,
ideas and fantasy worlds start to form.
Daydreams, moments free of constraints and rules.
Truth can be thrown out of the window
or rearranged in a new image.
Homocore, Queercore, started as a secret society,
a make believe world, a farce that became real.
Conceived a generation before the internet
by a couple of frustrated 20-year-olds.
They punked a revolution on their own terms.
♪ Are you a boy or are you a girl ♪
♪ In your bleached blonde hair ♪
- The early roots of punk were actually
quite sexually radical and diverse.
There was a lot of sexual experimentation,
sexual ambivalence, bisexuality, transsexuals.
♪ You put the boys and girls in some kind of trance ♪
♪ In your skintight pants ♪
The problem with the gay scene in the mid-80s was that
for us the gay scene was completely bourgeois
and conventional.
There was a lot of conformist behavior.
It was also very divided in terms of male and female
and we didn't feel welcome.
I mean, I would get kicked out of gay bars in Toronto
for wearing swastika earrings.
My style wasn't recognized as part of the gay movement.
So I was actually looked at with a lot of suspicion,
like they thought I was going to beat them up.
- [Man] Corner of Wellington and Portland.
Probably some sort of domestic dispute.
Looks like a couple of fag, homosexuals.
We're just going to let them sort it out.
- [Bruce] We were influenced by The Situationists
and Society of the Spectacle
and The Revolution of Everyday Life
and books like that, so our idea was to create a spectacle,
create personae, invent characters, invent a whole scene.
- [G.B.] Gays, lesbians, bisexual, transgender people
were living outside of the law.
It wasn't technically illegal
but in every other way behavior was still policed.
Gender representation was still policed,
not just by neighbors, friends, schoolmates,
associates, but by the police.
People were being arrested.
My friends were being beaten up on the street.
- [Scott] So we decided that we would form a rag tag gang
of queer revolutionaries.
You had to be queer,
an outlaw by birthright so to speak.
There would be no dress code, no style,
no fixed symbol or logo.
We'd be more like a pack of wolves
than a full-fledged existing gang.
And that was fine by us.
We wanted to be a circus, not a church.
♪ Be a fag ♪
- [G.B.] Occupying a position where you are outside
of the laws of the country that you live in
gives you an entirely different perspective than
having legal status.
Because you develop a critical
faculty in order to look at the society you're living in,
and you don't just take everything for granted.
You learn how to examine things
and navigate through a hostile landscape.
♪ Be a fag ♪
(punk rock music)
- I was rejected by two subcultures,
which was the gay subculture and the punk subculture.
So I've always felt like I'm on the fringe of the fringe.
(electronic punk music)
In Toronto in the 80s there was a hardcore punk scene
but there wasn't an alternative scene for queer kids,
so our strategy was to pretend that Toronto
had a full fledged crazy gay punk scene already happening.
And it was dykes and faggots together,
and transgender people and everyone already fighting
against not only the bourgeoisie within
the gay orthodoxy, but against the macho punks
who weren't as radical as they claimed to be,
who couldn't deal with homos and dykes.
- [G.B.] Look, you say you wanna be in this movie
but there is no roles for skinheads.
Skinheads are too neo-Nazi to hold the fascination of, say,
a new, revolutionary youth cult.
So, what's it gonna be?
Skinhead, or a star?
Say Doc Marten.
- Part of our modus operandi was to go to punk shows
or have straight punk boys over to our house
and get them drunk, and then we'd get them
to take their clothes off and take pictures of them
and put them in our movies or our fanzines.
(dramatic electronic music)
(upbeat percussive music)
- [Scott] We had the bases covered.
An upfront cult style allegiance under the
banners of good old punk rock, sex, and violence.
And we were convinced that no one was
gonna take us seriously.
But people did.
Dozens of them.
- And it actually worked.
I mean people thought that Toronto was the
hub of this hardcore gay punk movement.
And it turned out to just be me and two women,
who sat in their basement and churned out
alternative publications and experimental movies.
- [G.B.] I had read a lot of Situationists theory
and I had certain ideas about what happens
when you push situations in a culture to the breaking point,
And when you reach a point where society can't contain the
contradictions any longer, it forces a change.
If the theory was right, and it was right.
- [Bruce] I met G.B. and Fifth Column, the girl band
that G.B. Jones was a member of.
They were, in their way, deeply feminist as I was.
And then I just started go-go dancing for them
shortly after that.
- What did you bring?
- Oh, I brought my new go-go boy.
Put on a song, he'll prance for us.
- [Woman] Really?
♪ Oh you insecure little bitch ♪
(punk rock music)
- [Bruce] And then I moved in with them.
G.B. Jones already had amazing, kind of unorthodox
punk fanzines that had a lot of homosexual subtext.
So they were much more broad minded
and they were into all sorts of doing kinds of
alternative culture.
- [Narrator] Zines are self-published magazines,
the analog predecessor to blogs and social media.
They were huge in the 80s and 90s.
Traded at concerts, sold for change at cool book shops
or mail ordered and delivered in a brown envelope.
Inside the small photocopied pages were stories
about loud bands, punk scenes and Do-It-Yourself politics.
- [G.B.] I thought it would be really exciting
to start a zine for our crowd so I asked Bruce
if he wanted to do a zine with me
and we started doing J.D.s.
(upbeat punk music)
- [Bruce] We lived in this really ramshackeled
kind of squat like building that was really falling apart
and decrepit.
It was like this little punk community, and G.B. and I
would sit upstairs and we'd do J.D.s.
We'd cut and paste and write our manifestos.
♪ If I do that, the tabloids will have a field day ♪
♪ I wanna go and have some fun ♪
♪ Go where the action is ♪
♪ So who the hell are you to tell me ♪
- [Narrator] Bruce LaBruce was also an invention.
He claimed J.D.s stood for Juvenile Delinquents
but later for James Dean, J.D. Salinger,
and Jeffrey Dahmer.
He claimed he himself was a creation of G.B. Jones,
having described himself as Frankenstein's monster.
- My philosophy of homosexuality has always been
to embrace the things that make you different,
to embrace the more radical
aspects of gay identity.
We even went as far to say, in J.D.s,
homosexual is criminal, and kind of like actually
embraced the criminality of homosexuality.
- [J.B.] Yes, tons of shock value,
'cause it wasn't activism, it wasn't protest,
it wasn't about legalities and mechanism of the state.
And on the other hand, it was about culture,
aesthetics, glamour, stardom, freedom,
all the things that can be used as opposition to a state.
- It had a lot of different elements.
It was very politically serious on one hand
and very frivolous on the other.
There was a certain amount of camp.
There was a lot of auto-critique.
And that's part of the strategy of building up a spectacle,
so you can create a spectacle and then tear it down,
and that was done through laughing at yourself.
A lot.
(soft orchestral music)
"You're a skinhead, aren't you?" I said.
I could tell right away.
I happen to know a fair bit about skinheads,
believe it or not.
It's kind of a hobby with me.
An obsession, almost.
You see, I'm a hairdresser.
- [G.B.] We really started in the anarchist community,
we didn't really start in the gay community.
That was our milieu really, and the punk scene
and the post-punk scene, and experimental filmmakers
and artists.
Like that's really where we came out of.
- [Man] This isn't your movie anymore, it's our movie.
- [Woman] Now you're in our movie.
Why would we wanna be in your movie?
We can make our own movies now.
- [Man] Yeah, we're gonna make our own movies.
- [Woman] Yeah.
- [Man] We know just as many perverts as you do.
- [Woman] Yeah.
- You don't wanna make communication an elite thing.
And I think that's really a lot of what punk was about,
you know, a hands on, do what you want
of the people type of thing, you know.
You didn't have to worry about that you didn't have access
to the media, to television,
book publishing or whatever, you made your own.
You made your own record, you make your own fan zine,
you made your own scene.
(punk rock music)
- We talked a lot about how the roots of punk
were very queer.
And the original etymology of the word punk
was based on jailhouse slang where punks were
the passive boys in jail who got fucked up the ass.
- Punk when started it really was the potential for,
you know queer stuff, and it was definitely there.
I mean it kinda just under the surface, you know.
♪ Be quiet or be killed ♪
♪ He said ♪
♪ In front of you and in front of me ♪
♪ He made the pilot get on his knees ♪
♪ Made him crawl, made him whimper ♪
♪ Made him cry out for his mother ♪
♪ Wow, what a show ♪
♪ 122 hours of fear ♪
♪ Wow, what a show ♪
♪ 122 hours of fear ♪
- The So Cal punk scene had Nervous Gender
and Phranc and The Germs and Catholic Discipline,
and bands that represented alternative sexuality.
♪ A homosexual nymphomaniac ♪
♪ Walking in the streets of Galilee ♪
♪ Walking the streets of Galilee ♪
- By the end of the 70s and the early 80s,
the first wave of punk which had been pretty open
and accepting to weirdos of all kinds,
it got replaced by more and more stereotypical
kind of violence and shows became very scary.
(punk rock music)
- I think mid to late 80s, punk had become very macho
and it was homophobic, and I would get beat up
at hardcore shows for looking queer.
(punk rock music)
J.D.s was really a revenge zine,
it was a revenge against the macho punks.
(punk rock music)
Of course it was pre-internet,
and we sent it to people.
We advertised it in Maximumrocknroll
and Factsheet 5 and Forced Exposure or whatever
fanzine that had a larger circulation.
- [J.B.] When we were touring we were kind of like
this travelling circus, practically.
"Here's the band, and here's the zines
"and here's the movies, and..."
And that's really how it spread so quickly because
people were encountering it on so any different levels.
So then Bruce and I kind of put across this idea
that this is like a huge international movement
and people believed it.
- [Man] Thank you for coming to the show to actually see
the DIY bands play.
We don't need the corporate bullshit.
- [Narrator] Although the kids in Toronto
are mostly credited for creating Homocore,
they weren't the only ones.
In Los Angeles the punk drag queen Vaginal Davis
ruled the scene.
In San Francisco, two anarchists, Deke and Tom,
started a zine they called Homocore, solidifying the name.
- In San Francisco, at that time, there was like
this layer of like arty weirdos and we were less
concerned with who was gay or not
than having like, a cohort to hang out with.
Punk and gay overlap was at the fringes.
(punk rock music)
- Tom expressed a lot of discontent over
how he felt marginalized, it just felt like there
was something missing.
- We found J.D.s, you know, it didn't have
any straight forward manifesto or statement of purpose.
It was an aesthetic created in images and text,
we were like, "Fuck yes!
"I don't know why this is good, but this is really good."
(punk rock music)
It started with anarchist bookstore crowd.
We went to this anarchist conference in Toronto and,
when we got there and I met Deke.
- Within the first couple days they had a queer
anarchist circle.
- And when all the straight boys were throwing rocks
and getting all righteous, we were like,
hanging out like "Wow, queer punks, oh cool!"
- Everybody wanted, you know, scene reports if you will.
What's going on in your town?
When it came my turn I said something like,
you know, I'm the only person in my scene
who is willing to be out and Tom Jennings heard me.
He was the one in the crowd who thought,
"Yeah, you know, what about all those isolated kids
"out there?"
- When I came back from the anarchist conference,
I did the first issue of Homocore in
response to my experience in Toronto,
where I met Bruce and all that stuff.
- [Scott] In true punk rock fashion we disseminated
our ideas through a zine.
Photocopied communiques, cut and paste collages.
Pornography, blasphemy, anarchy, sodomy.
Sure it's been done before.
But the best thing that could happen is not to be unique,
but to be part of an ongoing history.
- G.B. Jones and Bruce LaBruce had been putting out J.D.s,
they had a couple of issues out and that's where
Tom swiped the word Homocore from.
- The core was important as the homo, you know,
so it was about hardcore punk.
- [J.D.] I thought it was funny to play on hardcore
and I thought it would being really upsetting for people.
♪ Rebel rebel on the street ♪
- [Larry] We did a show at the Deaf Club, which was a venue
for the very early punk scene and then it kind of gone away.
It was clubhouse for deaf people and they let people
put on punk shows there 'cause the noise didn't
bother them, but they would use to dance to the vibrations
and the stomping of the floor.
And so for the first time in a few years,
we did a Homocore benefit show there with MDC
and that was kind of the launch.
- I didn't do this consciously, I'd love to take
credit for these things.
No, in fact we set it up to end up making the world
we wanted to live in, 'cause you can either complain
or you gonna do something.
So basically Deke and I became sort of cohort
and worked on Homocore together.
We were selectively documenting things that
we liked in the world, and intentionally or otherwise,
creating this mythology of queer punk in San Francisco
that did not exist.
That was the point.
It really didn't exist.
- [Bruce] We had a Homocore top 10 list of bands
that we really liked that had gay themed songs.
- [G.B.] Some of the songs were very homophobic.
I had no problem like putting in a band writing
a homophobic song claiming they are part of a movement
of queers that wanted to do punk music.
What a better way to get revenge on them?
- We were grasping for stuff that was musically compatible.
Like, "Look, this is a great punk song!
"Oh, you're a bunch of dickheads.
"Oh, well that's less interesting now."
Unless you're really cute
and that last for like 15 minutes, right?
So there was a bunch of that.
♪ Fuck you, say my name ♪
- Anti-Scrunti Faction, A.S.F, I think it was
the first real dyke band.
The name Anti-Scrunti Faction makes fun of like
the straight girls that would go to the shows
just to blow the guys in the band.
They made up a name for those girls, scrunti.
And then their band was Anti-Scrunti Faction.
- Donna was trying to form bands
and find compatible people, and review records,
and a few times we just went off and sort of made stuff up.
We just found records that seemed
like they'd be compatible.
- It's no mistake, that in every society,
in every tribal structure there are laws governing sexuality
and to us that suggests that sexuality
has in itself some power and energy,
which is, these societies and controls have
a vested interest in suppressing.
That freedom is taken away when there is a threat,
therefore there is a threat to control from sexuality,
therefore it ought to be investigated and liberated.
There was a disconnect between the roots of punk
and how it has been expressed and revealed,
it was the same old fear of exposure went for a while.
So for me it was just really liberating and refreshing
when it finally became integrated again with queer.
Because, if a community has any right to shout
about inequity, it's the gay queer community.
It certainly has been for a long time, so,
it just seemed to me completely logical that at some point
that outrage at inequity,
would also be expressed more in terms of gender politics
because there was so many queer people involved.
That it would start towards on them, it's not just
about mundane, day-to-day party politics.
It goes much deeper.
It's about human rights, it's about the right
to be whoever you want to be,
which is was what some of the earlier songs
were saying over and over.
- Meanwhile, AIDS had already devastated the gay community.
- The US government wanted all queer people
to be dead and they were defunding our art
and saying that we were just going to burn in hell
and people showing up at performances,
protestors, right-wing fanatical Christians,
harassing us and trying to silence us.
- [Bruce] I was just wondering, do you think
I'll be the next the gay celebrity to die of AIDS?
I mean, I've been lying here thinking of them all.
- [Woman] Well, I wouldn't worry about it.
You're not that famous yet.
- Some people were doing ACT UP,
and felt like the first thing was to try to save our dying.
Some people felt like it's important to fight for
the sick among us, but it's also important to have a life,
here and now.
We can't just be reduced to dying of AIDS,
we have to have our own culture,
our own spaces, our own movements,
our own, you know, positive part of living, too.
And that's were I think groups like Queer Nation came from.
It was a much more proactive agenda, that said,
"Okay, let's get back to Gay Liberation."
- Queer Nation was a relatively diverse organization,
and I joined it in San Francisco, and it was all about
queer visibility.
It just became an intentional, political choice to go out
and be seen, and be queer, and be in-your-face,
and have people know that we existed and what we were about.
- We had been with ACT UP, we had been political,
we'd been roaming around but we hadn't yet
found that community, and we went to that gay pride parade,
oh, I remember it.
- [People Chanting] Two, four, six, eight,
gays and lesbians educate!
Two, four, six, eight, how do you know
your teacher's straight?
- [Woman] And here it comes!
- I was by myself, I hadn't made that many friends
at that point.
I said, "I'm gonna go, and I'm just gonna stand
"at the beginning of the parade route,
"and when I see a float or an organization
"or some people that I feel like I can fit in with,
"I'm just jumping in the parade."
- We did a float at the Gay Pride Parade in 1989
in San Francisco where
a rich benefactor rented a junk car and a tow truck.
And we painted the car to look vaguely like a police car,
and somebody made a giant papier maché high heel,
which we stuck in the top of the car as if was crushing
the police car.
And we towed this thing down Market Street
as our parade entry.
And just sort of let it all hang out that we were the punks,
he hated the police, because they hated us.
- And all the sudden, around the corner comes this.
(cheering) (yelling)
- They pulled the cop car, they all were around it,
and I remembered that it was like a bunch of punks
pulling out baseball bats and proceeding to smash
the cop car and I was just like, "Yes."
- Then on the trunk they had taken an apple crate
and bolted it to the trunk,
and filled it with high heels.
So then I just jumped into the parade,
and grabbed a high heel and started
pounding this police car and we just basically
destroyed this police car.
- Which I just love that we have these
butch and femme memories.
For me it was the baseball bat,
so for Justin it was the high heel shoe.
- And so all of these people became my friends,
and then I had a community.
It was a life-changing day,
it was really amazing.
- It was a crystallizing moment because we were like,
"That's our people."
But we didn't look like them yet so we went home
and cut our hair into Mohawks and like went
and found that scene, but it was that day
and like seeing that action.
It was like falling in love.
- [Female Announcer] Here comes another one of
those quiet groups.
- [Male Announcer] It's their subtlety!
That's what this parade is all about, subtlety.
- In front of that was a banner that said
"No apologies, no assimilation ever,"
which caused some frontally debate in the group
because some people thought that assimilation
was maybe not for them, but culturally the right way to go
to take the animus out of homophobia.
Others of us felt like assimilation
into a death culture was itself a death trap.
You know, you demand the right to serve in the military
and you're gonna end up dropping phosphorous bombs
on Afghani kids, and really, is that liberation?
Is that freedom?
We didn't feel it was the spirit of the early
gay rights movement and in a wider cultural sense
was always something that punk rock actively critiqued.
- Gays now are really selling themselves short, I think.
Because they traditionally have had such a great opportunity
to be different and to be the avant-garde, you know,
and to be glamorous, and to be outsiders who
look at the dominant culture
or the dominant ideology from a distance, and they can be
like spies or double agents.
That's much more glamorous than trying
to convince everyone that you're just the same
as everyone else and you have the same feelings
and you just want to raise a family,
and, you know, be a well balanced individual.
- [Woman] A person who functions normally
in a sick society is himself sick.
- [Bruce] That's what's happened a lot in the gay movement,
The oppressed have become the oppressors.
- In the late 70s,
mid-70s actually, people started coming out of the closet.
People who dragged their feet coming out of the closet,
came out of the closet and immediately started
forming committees. (audience laughs)
Where they tried to tell the rest of us
who were never in the closet
what we could say and what we could do.
Oh, they wanted to be professionally gay,
they wanted to be gay.
They had meetings where they decided that
we couldn't say dyke, we couldn't say fag,
we couldn't say queer.
Oh, they hated the word queer!
Ooh, ooh. (audience laughs)
Losers, freaks, and deviants started
the gay liberation movement, not these fuckin'
control freaks. (audience cheers)
We wanted them to go back in the closet.
Now all of a sudden these same kind of people,
now they all wanna be queer.
Well, they're not queer.
Queer means you have no friends.
Queers means that you have sustained a period of rejection,
isolation and exclusion so profound
that it marks you as an outsider forever.
Yeah.
You know, in the 60s when we said straight,
we never meant heterosexual.
We meant narrow-minded.
And the gay world has gotten to be a straighter,
and straighter and a straighter place.
And I don't have any preparation or any inclination
to live in a completely straight world.
- This journey of freedom can only really begin
when all are one sex,
one gender,
one true experience.
Queer to me means refusing to be part of the status quo,
refusing to accept the mantle of so called normalcy.
- Actually this time really rejecting gay in general,
the gay community must be destroyed.
- The thing is, that they want to be separate by equal.
- I think that identity politics are for people
who don't have an identity.
You know, because to me, why you would describe
yourself only by your sexuality?
- You see, they never talk about anything
but their sex life.
That's why they have to be separate.
- I'm still more at home in a punk bar
than a gay bar if you want to know the truth.
I'd get laid better. (laughs)
More my type, the few maybe,
not everybody's gay but they're more well rounded.
So, the punk community is always, I feel,
very safe with and very at home with.
Like the straight gay people I know today
that are more conservative than my parents were,
there's more rules in the gay world now than there
was in the world I rebelled from.
But I don't know any straight punks meaning that way.
You know, that look punks, but they are very conservative
in real life.
I don't know too many of them.
(punk rock music) (dog growling)
- We hated nice gay people,
we hated the fake friendliness of our supposed community.
We hated the homogenization brought on by years
of shit dance music and designer clothes.
Of course you could commodify each other,
you all look the fucking same.
We hated the sexism, the racism, the classism.
We hated their drugs, their bathouses, bars and clubs.
More than anything, we didn't want to fit in.
Like the tattoo says, we wanted to be godless, lawless,
and nomadic.
You alienated us before we even got started.
But you know, when all was said and done,
when all of this was over, when the blood and spunk
had dried and there is nothing left for us to say,
what we came up with, no matter how dogeared
and fucked up it all was, what we came up
with was better than any of this.
When you realize that you're queer,
and you look back at the way you've been treated
or the things that you've been told about
the way society is allowed to treat you,
the way you are supposed to think about yourself
in relationship to society that say you're,
you know, perverse or you're evil or like any
of these kind of like
pejorative terms that have been thrown at you.
When you realize that that's wrong
fundamentally, and that you know innately in yourself
that you're connecting with something that's
not only correct but natural,
I think that there's a process that one goes through
where one starts to analyze all of the other systems
that one's involved in,
and then we go through and analyze them as stringently.
What else I've 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 maybe is artificial?
And so I think that this alignment of queer and punk
was a really, really natural kind of alignment.
Punks have always been questioning the status quo
and, you know, queers very naturally should be, too.
- It's true that there will be no revolution
without sexual revolution.
But, it's also true that there will be
no be sexual revolution without homosexual revolution.
Do you know what I mean?
- The idea of a homosexual agenda sounds like you're
actively trying to recruit straight people
into homosexuality, for example, which I think is
a great pastime.
You know, I think it's a really worthy goal so, why not?
I mean, there's always been this perception
that gays are this kind of predatory kind of animal,
which I think is quite exciting.
(gunshot)
- Heterosexuality is the opiate of the masses.
(gunshot)
- Yes, Gudrun.
(gunshot)
- Join the homosexual Intifada!
(gunshot)
- I know, Gudrun.
(gunshot)
- I like the idea of embracing
the negative stereotypes that
straight society has about homosexuals
and really sticking it to them.
- We felt that at its strongest queer culture
represented a standing critique of the entire society
and its illnesses and what needed to be overthrown,
you know, a much more revolutionary take on the
potential of queer liberation.
And that in fact, queer liberation represents
a sexual liberation for everyone including straights.
And Homocore is an expression of that in its time and place,
that liberation, not assimilation, critique.
We kind of felt like we were putting
the punk back in the homo movement,
and the homo back in the punk movement at the same time.
- It brought a lot of people out
because up to that time it was, you, people felt trapped.
They felt "Well, okay.
"I like guys, but does that mean that I have to like disco?
"They all go together, right?
"Those horrible clothes, and disco music?
"So if I like guys I gotta like disco
"and have bad taste in clothes?"
Homocore, Tom's magazine, and the stuff
that Bruce LaBruce was doing freed people from doing that.
"Yeah, I can like guys and have a black leather jacket.
"All right!"
So, it was like a great leap forward,
and it really lead to the freedom and liberation
for a lot of people who were kept in the closet,
not from the society's "Oh, you're bad if
"you're a homosexual", but they were kept in the closet
because they liked stuff that wasn't gay.
And, what could they do?
They had to choose, and Homocore let them.
"Oh, you don't have to choose.
"You can have your cock and eat it, too." (chuckles)
♪ Just you and I ♪
♪ In a dream ♪
- All these celebrities coming out of the closet
has contributed to gay culture becoming very mediocre.
It's taking the mystique out of homosexuality.
- Why can't homosexuality be an invisible influence
on art and culture and the media?
That's what I don't understand.
- You know, I'm gay but I don't like all gay things,
sometimes they're terrible.
So I think the gay punk rock movement was brave enough
to admit that, that gay is not enough.
- [J.B.] I think queer culture has to step back
from the really narrow definition that people
in the last century have imposed upon it,
and open itself back up to what it used to be,
prior to the narrow focus that's been forced upon it
because of the necessity of political activism.
- Oh, those queers.
They're fuckin' political.
- Oh, so political.
It's time to get apolitical, back to our gay roots.
- The artist is more important than the activist.
(punk rock music)
- [Woman] Let's round up the bitches and kick some ass.
(punk rock music)
- I thought, "I wanna do some kind of activism
"that sort of picks up where ACT UP left off.
"I wanna do cultural activism."
I'm a musician.
I'll form a band.
(punk rock music)
Turns out other people had the same idea at the same time.
- We created this little world that was kind of fictional,
but then it did start to develop into something real.
So in the early 90s bands actually started forming
and contributing original music to J.D.s.
- 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
and before there was a scene.
It's kind of the same way with Homocore with
G.B. Jones and Bruce LaBruce in Toronto
dreaming up this scene when there wasn't any.
But, it culturally seemed like it was a ripe idea.
- Almost all things, including electronic inventions
are responses to culture.
So while I was doing this and Deke was doing this,
the people in Toronto had been doing this,
the people in Philadelphia had.
And then there's a moment when there's simultaneous
discovery, or simultaneous invention.
- We became known as the Homocore movement
and then the Queercore movement.
- [Woman] Yes dear, yes ma'am.
(punk rock music)
♪ Femme ♪
- [Jon] Tribe 8 are really great parallel to Pansy Division.
They had a different set of issues,
but they're really parallel issues.
Like Chris and Pansy Division used to say,
they were kind of the Stooges to our Ramones.
♪ When you're on your knees looking up at her ♪
♪ You know she looks so magnificent ♪
♪ She looks down at you ♪
- As far as I know kind of we were the first doing, like,
what we were doing, which is saying "We are all dykes,
"only dykes are allowed in the band,
"and we are gonna sing about being dykes".
Period, dot.
- There weren't that many songs, about,
songs about love.
I mean, can you imagine thinking that there
is a problem because there aren't enough songs about love
that you can relate to?
I mean, that's crazy.
It was a real desperation, I mean it was,
it felt like life or death to me.
I felt like if I didn't find some dykes
to play music with, like to play, not just any music,
but music that was like the music that I just,
that was like my soul connection to the universe, you know,
that I couldn't imagine living.
I couldn't imagine actually
going on.
Going on.
I couldn't imagine it.
I couldn't imagine how I would be able to do that.
So it felt like life or death.
That made me cry.
- Part of the reason I wanted to do the band
was because nobody was out, there was nobody saying
"I'm gay and I'm playing this music" or
"I'm gay, fuck you" or whatever.
I mean, the only people that I knew were out were
people like Sylvester and Jimmy Sommerville.
So there was this idea that gay culture
seemed really limited so I felt alienated.
I had so many more friendships and acceptance
being gay from straight people in the music scene.
And being musical and being into rock 'n' roll in the
gay scene just made people act really shitty towards me.
- We love rock, we wanted to go to rock shows
where there are other people that we can like have fun with
and make out with, and we wanna hear what they have to say.
♪ 'Cause I'm a Jewish lesbian, you see ♪
♪ And fascism isn't anarchy ♪
When I saw Phranc playing for the first time,
tears just started running down my face,
and I didn't realize why at first and I think later
I remember like driving home after the show,
and just saying like I don't think that
I'd ever seen someone who I could be
who is older than me.
When life in front of you is that empty,
like you just are desperate to just tell your story
and hear other peoples stories.
- Do you guys know Phranc, the all-American
Jewish lesbian folksinger? (audience cheers)
Oh, good.
This song is basically about me wishing that
Phranc were my mom.
Phranc has the really good advice like,
not to have crushes on straight girls.
And, uh, it's about choosing your own family when
you're gay 'cause you have to because probably
your own family didn't treat you very well.
(punk rock music)
- We were like angry dykes on stage.
It was an angry time, we were angry.
♪ Yes ma'am ♪
♪ Femme bitch top ♪
And we were totally hypocritical,
half the time we would sing a song about
straight girls thinking you wanna sleep with them
and the next song would be like
"Hey, straight guy I'm hitting on your girlfriend".
Just had to be constantly unbalancing whenever possible.
For a young straight man to come up
and suck Lynnee's dick.
- [Lynnee] Besides that, it proves how punk rock you are.
- [Silas] It does.
The best thing was like getting a straight guy
to get up on stage and give Lynnee a blowjob.
It was amazing, you know, and they got really into it
because, not always, not in Texas.
It became like a badge of honor to give Lynnee
a blowjob on stage as a straight guy.
(punk rock music)
- Good boy.
♪ Jealous cowards try to control ♪
♪ Rise above, we're gonna rise above ♪
♪ They distort what we say ♪
♪ Rise above, we're gonna rise above ♪
♪ Try and stop what we do ♪
♪ Rise above, we're gonna rise above ♪
♪ When they can't do it themselves ♪
♪ Rise above, we're gonna rise above ♪
- They had never seen it, but they also weren't
like against it, they were like embracing it immediately.
They were like this is punk rock:
fucking with gender is fucking with the
dominant paradigm and so that means it's punk rock, so yeah.
♪ We're born with a chance ♪
♪ Rise above, we're gonna rise above ♪
♪ I am gonna have my chance ♪
♪ Rise above, we're gonna rise above ♪
♪ We are born with a chance ♪
♪ Rise above, we're gonna rise above ♪
♪ And I'm gonna pull down your pants ♪
♪ Rise above, we're gonna rise above ♪
♪ We are tired of your abuse ♪
♪ Try to stop us, it's no use ♪
- Okay, you've got all these macho guys
who slam around and take their shirts off
and show off their pecks, so you've got these macha girls
who go on stage and take their shirts off
and show off their pecks.
So Homocore is exactly that,
playing on homo-tude, to be punk.
- The definition of punk is to subvert the dominant paradigm
through art or culture, through music.
And, we were turning gender on its head,
we were turning sexuality on its head.
We just took what we were doing and sang about it.
- Oh my goodness, oh my goodness.
I just have to introduce them.
Oh my God, oh my oh, oh.
Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls,
sucker devotees, they're the incredible,
they are the magnificent, Team Dresch.
(audience cheers)
(punk rock music)
- [Jody] It was just really simple, we just said what
we needed to hear and we just did what we wanted to see.
♪ Well how did I do ♪
♪ Not good, fuck me ♪
♪ I spent the last 10 days of my life ♪
♪ Not getting any sleep ♪
♪ Well how do I do ♪
♪ I don't, fuck you ♪
♪ I spent the last 10 days of my life ♪
♪ Searching for you ♪
♪ What have you ♪
♪ I heard, I heard ♪
♪ Everything ♪
- There was something missing that wasn't
being talk about and to be as blunt about the
sexual aspect as we were,
to me it was a real fun way of saying fuck you
to the right wing who just want us to go away,
and also to gays who are assimilationists
and just wanted us to be nice and behave.
And my ACT UP experience taught me, no.
Don't compromise, don't behave, push the envelope.
♪ 'Till never again will you look twice ♪
♪ At a butch boy top, you know is too damn nice ♪
♪ She's the one who extracts ♪
- You know, it was new.
We were on the break of this third wave, you know.
It was like "We're doing something different here.
"We're not lesbians, we're dykes."
I mean basically lesbians were pissed at us.
They were all like "You're stomping around on
"all this work that we've done.
"You're like wagging rubber dicks, gettin' blowjobs,
"talking about boinking, fisting."
Whatever, you know it was the opposite of what they
had been doing.
And we were making fun of them, we were like,
"Haha, Birkenstock babes, whatever."
♪ Is that enough emotion for you honey ♪
But of course at the same time we totally
admired everything that they'd done,
and we would read everything that they had
written and we had their books on our shelves,
and we studied very carefully everything that
they had said and done.
And then we went to build on that, and say,
"Okay, well that's, how that isn't working anymore
"and this isn't working anymore,
"and we're gonna take these things and then we're gonna
"create the next level.
"We're sex radicals."
If you're saying that we have,
we're in charge of our bodies, that's what feminism
is all about, then great.
Then I should be able to run around with my tits out,
and say stop looking at my tits.
It's just like an elbow, a tit, what?
It's my pecks, and what?
I should be able to get a blowjob,
I should be able to fuck with a rubber dick,
I should be able to do all that stuff because it's my body.
And whatever like attachments,
you know, becomes my body.
I'm in charge, right?
That's what you said, mom.
How many queers are there?
Oh see, you had heterosexual parents
and you turned out queer.
- Fuckin' perverts.
- So let's see if if it's okay queer people
to raise these kids 'cause it might turn out to
be fuckin' heterosexual, like most fuckin' fuck
fucked up fuckin' heterosexual fuckin' world!
And we had the power of the mic and we'd go,
"Oh look at this guy throwing his elbow in girls faces.
"Oh gee, that's bad, dude.
"You shouldn't be doing that."
And dykes would just jump on the guy
and beat the crap out and throw him in the back.
- Oh my god, did you hear what he said?
It doesn't matter what gender you are.
Huh?
I guess the fact that most women in this room get paid
a lot less than men do for the same jobs,
it doesn't matter though, it doesn't matter what gender.
I mean, it doesn't matter, I mean,
that one in four women are raped or that domestic violence
exists or that women are serial killed or,
or that aren't many women in, oh, I've heard it,
I've heard it, I've heard it.
It matters to me.
And there's also a thing that said,
women should be in the front and men should be in the back
and you should respect that.
- The Homocore was to punk as gay liberation was
to hippie in the same way that around the same time
came riot grrrl, which was kind of the women's liberation
movement of the punk scene.
- [Man] Some dumb hoes, these punk rocker bitches
walking down the street.
They were asking for it and they deny it but it's true.
- Bullshit!
This song is dedicated to him.
(punk rock music)
Suck my left one!
- Riot grrrl expressed it in similar terms,
like "I'm not gonna hold your leather jacket
"at the back of the pit anymore, you know,
"I'm gonna be in the pit and I'm gonna make it
"a safe place for people my size and for all people
"of all sizes and you know, all attitudes."
Riot grrrl and Homocore/Queercore,
it rose up of the same energy.
- We were actually really inspired by J.D.s
and by Homocore and especially by Double Bill
by G.B. Jones which changed my life because I was like,
I can be a feminist and have a fucking sense of humor,
I can talk about rape with like a weird
fucked up smile on my face.
There would be no Bikini Kill without J.D.s
and without Homocore and without G.B. Jones.
I would have no career.
(punk rock music)
Bikini Kill started because we were frustrated that
when we would talk to women in bands
they would say they weren't feminist.
And there was this kind of like moshing culture
that was very anti-gay and very anti-women
and it made it so only certain people were invited
to the party and that was straight white men
who wanted to touch each other but didn't know how
else to touch each other than to being violent.
And that's what riot grrrl was reacting against.
It's like actually this is our party,
not your party, you know.
It's like Patti Smith said, "We started it, we own it,
"we're taking it over."
Something like that.
- Because viewing our work as being connected
to our girlfriends politics real lives is essential
if we are gonna figure out how we are doing impacts,
reflects, perpetuates, or disrupts the status quo.
I actually feel like I had a lot of women role models
when I started.
In a way the 80s, there was less women really.
I mean I was really hard just to actually think of
other women in bands.
- 'Cause there were like two girls at every show
when we first started playing and guys totally hated us,
and so I was going around the clip board
and getting peoples addresses' and inviting every
girl to the show and saying, "Please bring your friends,
"please bring your friends."
And you create that, you're a part of creating
that community.
Because we are interested in creating non-hierarchical
ways of being and making music, friends, and scenes
based on communication and understanding,
instead of competition.
(punk rock music)
♪ That girl thinks she's the queen of the neighborhood ♪
♪ She's got the hottest trike in town ♪
♪ That girl she holds her head up so high ♪
♪ I think I want to be her best friend, yeah ♪
♪ Rebel girl rebel girl, rebel girl ♪
♪ I think I want to take you home ♪
♪ I want to try on your clothes ♪
And 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
and we had just had two meetings in DC
and I said "Oh, yeah riot grrrl is like all
"over the country, there's meetings happening everywhere."
And that article came out and then girls started looking
for the meetings like I was like Minneapolis, Chicago,
you know like LA, wherever.
I was like, San Luis Obispo, like whatever.
I just made up a bunch of places and I was like
"Yeah, there is meetings taking place like all over,
"like we started this thing, it's totally a phenomenon."
And then it became a phenomenon 'cause like I said it was.
And I remember having that feeling that that's
what the girls in Toronto were doing.
That they were like five people
but they made it seem like it was so huge.
I liked that, I liked that they felt like they could
do that, that they were such bitches,
that they thought they could just like take over everything
and more than anything that influenced me.
- Hello.
- [Woman] Oh hi, Candy.
- Are you up for something?
- [Woman] Yeah, what do you mean?
- [Candy] Do you wanna join a gang?
- [Woman] Yeah!
- [Candy] It's all girls.
- [Woman] Really?
- [Candy] Okay?
- [Woman] Okay, sounds great.
- [Man] Oh, yeah man, I wanna fuck your tight ass.
- [Woman] That reminds me, you boys buy toilet paper?
- [Man] Boys don't use as much toilet paper as girls do
so I shouldn't have to buy any.
- [Woman] What?
What about the shit at the end of your dick
while you're packing that fudge, brownie hounds?
- Because we recognize fantasies of
Instant Macho Gun Revolution as impractical lies
meant to keep us simply dreaming instead of becoming
our dreams and thus seek to create revolution
in our own lives every single day
by envisioning and creating alternatives
to the bullshit Christian capitalist way of doing things.
♪ You spread ♪
♪ My legs ♪
♪ Apart ♪
I've always considered Queercore and riot grrrl
a part of the larger thing of punk rock.
We all were a part of questioning how large punk rock
could expand to include feminism and queerness.
And I think that a lot of times punk rock in general
gets talked about as a musical genre
and I always thought of it as an idea,
an idea that like anybody can do with they want to do,
if we could create our own culture.
♪ While we were crying ♪
♪ I guess didn't give a fuck ♪
Bands could sound different and still be a part
of the same thing 'cause we don't all have to
like each other or sound the same
in order to be a community.
- I think mostly what we had in common
was that our lyrics were a lot about like,
"Hey, fuck you, we're pissed off,
"this is the new feminism,
"and this is how we're doing it now,
"and if you don't like it suck my dick."
- Riot grrrl and Queercore bands were totally tight
and they toured together and they were absolutely
comrades in arms.
♪ Aw fuck ♪
♪ Women's love, it's so friendly ♪
♪ Women's love like herbal tea ♪
♪ Women's love empowers me ♪
- This is my Tribe 8 star.
So this was given to me by Stacie Quijas,
also known as Quedge at Leslie Mah's apartment
and everybody else from Tribe 8 was there.
It was one of the coolest moments of my life.
I was literally like laying on a blanket
getting a tattoo with India ink and needles
from the most beautiful punk girl I'd ever seen in my life,
and I was such a fan of their band.
Seeing Tribe 8 was a big life changer
and we toured with them.
- What was amazing about being a queer band on tour
in the 90s is you're in this little bubble
with these other queers, and you're just like
so fuckin' grateful that you're in this van
with four or five other queers because
you're traveling through this cultural waste lands
and there's no fuckin' queers.
And when you pull up to the club and there's
the fucking queers standing out front,
and you can see 'em, you know.
They got funny color hair,
they got the facial piercings, they have the Mohawk,
they have the wifebeaters or pleasers, or whatevers,
you know, and the combat boots, and you're like,
"There's our people, yes."
♪ I just wanna tie her to the bedposts ♪
♪ And call her nasty names like you evil bitch from hell ♪
♪ It's such a sin, it's so wrong ♪
And even when we played with like other bands
that were like straight, they were totally supporting us
and lauding us, and going like
"Yeah, we're behind you 100%, we love what you are doing."
♪ Well I went to school in Olympia ♪
♪ And what do you do ♪
♪ With a revolution ♪
(punk rock music)
- I felt so comfortable in my band
and safe to come out publicly because
I felt that what all the bands were saying
and what Kurt was saying was, it's okay to be gay,
and if you don't like it that's not cool,
and just standing up for gay rights.
And Kurt doing lots of gay press was important.
- [Kurt] I started being proud of the fact that I was gay
even though I wasn't because I almost found my identity.
- Kurt was hanging out with our drummer Toby Veil
and she was best friends with Donna Dresch.
We were all reading the same fanzines
so I can't imagine that he never picked up the
Homocore with Donna's picture on it.
I mean I think that might have been why he started,
you know graffitiing "God is gay" everywhere.
- "'Cause god is gay.
"The whole goddamned world's a fag."
He made a comment in The Advocate about liking my films.
I was totally stoked when he wrote that, that was so cool.
- They did write about us for a very brief second.
We were just, they couldn't hold the gaze on us too long.
I don't think we were like made for primetime in that way.
- One of the great attracting forces in Queercore
at the time was it was basically indigestible.
You know the last thing that people wanted was
a bunch of fags that only know three chords or less
banging away on their guitars and saying how great it is
to fuck dudes or anything like that,
or like, chicks chasing each other around with
dildos on stage only to cut them off with chainsaws
and things like that.
Capitalism was not really prepared for that.
- I think that riot grrrl got picked up by the media because
it was a bunch of the way that they portrayed it was
it was like these hot white girls who were pissed off
but it was sexy.
I do think it was more palpable and it was way less gay.
I don't think at that time the media was ready
for anything that was gay
and they could say like we are bisexual
but that was sexy to straight men.
- It is so much easier for capitalism to use a female body
that a man might want, to sell shit,
than it is to use queer people and queer bodies.
You know Jack Halberstam actually has this whole
riff about how everything in the world
can be used by capitalism to sell things
except the butch lesbian body.
(punk rock music)
♪ Don't mess with the best 'cause the best don't mess ♪
♪ Don't put me to the test before I lay you to rest ♪
♪ Don't get wise, bubble-eyes ♪
♪ Before we knock you down to peanut size ♪
(punk rock music)
The lack of media spotlight glare,
helped Queercore have more natural, less conflictual life
as a culture.
Because there weren't like huge things that you
had to constantly be defining yourself against.
Gender non-confirming people and queer desire generally
sort of like operates at the margins of that stuff
which I think is like, awesome.
Like I think that's a great position of liberation
for queer art except when you are like being liberated
from ever getting a decent wage for your creative product.
But you know, Queercore is punks.
They weren't trying to get the big record deal.
Maybe Pansy Division was, I don't know.
(dramatic music)
- I'm Kurt Loder with MTV News.
Queer punk, Homocore, whatever you call them
there's a new breed of proudly gay punk bands
making a big noise these days.
Chief among them, San Francisco's delightfully poppy
Pansy Division, which got a lot of attention after
Green Day hired the group as its opening act
on a US tour last fall.
- Green Day, when they reached that major label level
wanted to show where they came from
and so they were taking all these different lookout bands
on tour with them, but we happened to be
on the tour where they broke.
- Green Day kind of were ahead of their time too.
They represent that kind of punk consciousness where
they're not gay, but they knew it wasn't right
to pick on somebody for being different in any way.
And I think they got a big kick out of Pansy Division's
lyrics because some of them were pretty funny
and they got even a bigger kick out of shocking
their suburban fans in these fairly generic audiences,
last year they were watching whatever other
mainstream that came through.
- I just thought they're just a great band,
you know they're really catchy, and, uh,
I think it, you know, there's a lot you know more to
punk rock than Green Day and The Offspring videos,
that's for sure.
- Green Day were kind of like, "They need to know
"we're not like one of those mainstream rock acts.
"We're something different and if you doubt that,
"here is Pansy Division."
- [Jon] That was the biggest thing in popularizing us
'cause we had never expected to play at 15,000 seat arenas.
We were thinking that 150 people to see us
was a really big crowd.
♪ Unless you'd rather go home and masturbate ♪
♪ Reciprocate, reciprocate ♪
- A lot of Pansy Division audiences are straight punk kids,
and it always bewildered me, they have more straight fans
than gay ones.
But, other times they got stuff throwing at them and all,
but Green Day were like "As long as you can take it,
"we're are proud to have you."
And I know Pansy Division they treasured that
until this days, and Green Day,
they still remember it, too.
I think it was a pretty awesome thing.
- Everybody is a fag, haven't you realized it?
The whole goddamn world's a fag,
don't you know that even yet?
(electronic pop music)
- As far as I know no one called this movement Homocore
until it was kind of over, really.
And people who weren't involved, got involved.
And the Queercore thing I'm pretty sure specifically came
out of Chicago.
- There was a kind of crossover between
the idea of a gay punk movement and
these kind of queer radicals
who were more within the gay scene.
So there was a kind of a merger at a certain point.
- [G.B.] I just started out with the name Homocore,
but it began to be obvious that a certain type
of male audience thought it was only about gay men.
So I thought, "Oh my god I gotta do something.
"It can only be interesting and valuable if it
"includes everyone, so if we have to change the name,
"we'll do that."
- From about 90, 91, 'til about '95 which is
contemporaneous with riot grrrl, there really was
a more finite number of bands, but then there
was just an explosion.
♪ Cross-dressing punks will make Jayne County cream ♪
♪ Orgasm addict with Pete Shelly I sing ♪
♪ Dicks like Gary Floyd I truly adore ♪
♪ I want Biscuits from the Big Boys knocking on my door ♪
♪ For You ♪
♪ For you ♪
♪ Limp Wrist sings this song for you ♪
♪ Put me in a pit with Mike Bullshit, let's go ♪
♪ Want the kids from Warpath hanging at our shows ♪
♪ Nikki Parasite can sing a medley for me ♪
- [Narrator] By the mid-1990s, thousands of people
belonged to the international movement.
They changed the name from Homocore to Queercore.
The band Extra Fancy was signed to a major label
and then dropped a few months later
after news outlets published the lead singer's
HIV positive status.
Record stores had an ever expanding Queercore section.
Some musicians tried to reclaim the pink triangle.
The bands didn't really have a unifying sound,
but they shared a strong political vision.
What had come to be was maybe something that G.B. Jones,
Bruce LaBruce, Tom and Deke hadn't intended,
the first generation was ready to move on.
At the height of its popularity Bruce wrote:
"Queercore is dead, our son is dead.
"I killed him.
"Utopian ideologies hatched in cold basement apartments
"on long lonely nights never really stand up
"to the light of day."
But it didn't really matter to the audience or the bands,
they kept playing and the message was loud.
(punk rock music)
- [Man] Action!
(woman speaking in German)
- I always had the drive of cinema.
When I did Queercore I made Queercore films
and then I still make Queercore style films.
And there's still a lot of cool people doing cool music.
♪ Suckin' on my titties like you wanted me ♪
♪ Callin' me, all the time like Blondie ♪
♪ Check out my Chrissy behind ♪
♪ It's fine all of the time ♪
♪ Like sex on the beaches ♪
♪ What else is in the teaches of Peaches ♪
♪ Huh ♪
♪ What ♪
♪ Fuck the pain away ♪
- I definitely started Peaches thinking about
how can I bring back the riot grrrl attitude
and the, um, just rock riffs but new, new sounds
from really arty electronics and things like that.
But I felt really sad about riot grrrl culture
because it became such a media hype and then
of course it had to die out in the media sense
and then it turned into the Spice Girls.
♪ No matter how old, how young, how sick ♪
♪ I mean something, I mean something ♪
♪ You can push me, no stare down ♪
♪ Plug it up, no me, no shut down ♪
♪ I'm on a rampage, it's my new rage ♪
♪ Crisis but I'm singing in the mid-range ♪
- Peaches and Beth Ditto and The Knife,
and I mean they've all broken through
slightly more mainstream, which is great.
(punk rock music)
- I feel really fortunate to be a part of the queer scene,
because I came from a place where there
wasn't a queer community, it was like
me and another kid and maybe a couple of other kids.
♪ First you tell me you're hurting ♪
♪ Then you tell me you don't even need me anyway ♪
Stay strong and find your people.
That's what I did, I found people that were fucking rad
and amazing, I can't believe I found them,
I can't believe I even met them in Arkansas.
Find your people, stick to our people,
trust them and stay together.
- When the Gossip first started out they were definitely
more of a punk rock sound and now I think
it's more of, a like disco,
housey-soul kind of sound, pop almost, in a sense.
But definitely the idea
and the identity of punk rock is still really huge with us.
♪ I knew that it was ♪
♪ In the picture perfect world ♪
Through music I think there is so much to say,
and queer music definitely saved my life
when I was teenager so I know that it has that
affect on other people,
and when I meet fans and they tell me that,
it is the best feeling in the world
to know that I've inspired somebody or helped them
through their experience, like helped them feel not
so alone or not so stigmatized or to see a person in
the public eye being who they are and talking about it,
not being ashamed.
Getting out there to a wider audience is awesome.
- I definitely think that a lot of us would have
kept on doing drugs and would have died, and wouldn't have
ever put a band together if we hadn't of had the support
of an entire community the way we did.
It was super.
It was really brilliant, and healing and amazing
to have that happen when you grow up queer,
and like you're all having crushes on girls and stuff,
and everybody is like not really.
You know there is a lot of damage that happens
and like, you kind of hate yourself.
That's why I did drugs and drank, I was like,
"Oh, I suck, everyone thinks I suck."
And then jumping on stage and being like
"Actually we don't suck, we're fucking awesome",
and having everybody go "That's right, you are."
It's like, we're awesome.
It's awesome to be queer.
It changed everything, you know.
- [J.B.] Queercore was probably the last cultural movement
that queers participated in.
The amazing thing I think is that it was not just zines,
not just music, it was pretty much every medium.
And as a cultural movement I don't think it can be rivaled
by any other queer movement that's happened.
(punk rock music)
- Queercore was a socio-political movement really.
I mean, it brought a lot of cultural visibility
to the gays, to the queers, to the freaks.
And that definitely helps with all the people working
on the political angles, political representation,
and civil rights issues.
And people that they are doing the technical work
to move those things forward,
they need the freaks on the edges doing the cultural work.
That was us, freaks on the edges.
- It's very tempting, I think, to say that the revolution's
been won and now just everybody live happily ever after.
I think that's a dangerous way to, to, to look at it.
On one hand, you can think , well, that's great,
you know you no longer need to live in a ghetto,
you no longer need to only hang out with your own kind,
and yet something seems to be lost at the same time too.
What I feel is that people are still gonna have
to keep reinventing themselves, and I would really hope
that people keep pushing and keep you know, challenging.
I think there's still plenty of room for that,
I don't know if somebody is gonna start, you know,
the 21st century version of queer punk or Homocore
or if it's necessary or even possible,
but people need to keep moving boundaries
and exploring new territories.
That's kind of what it is to be a human being.
(punk rock music)
♪ Listen to the girls, listen to the girls ♪
♪ Listen to the girls, are you listening ♪
♪ Listen to the girls, listen to girls ♪
♪ Listen to the girls, are you listening ♪
♪ Take it like a man, girl ♪
♪ If that's what you are ♪
♪ And your second rate opinion ♪
♪ Won't get you very far ♪
♪ Now is it time to pretend you've got the winner's blues ♪
♪ Or is it time to up end 'cause you've got nothing to lose ♪
♪ Before you choose ♪
♪ You ♪
♪ Listen to the girls, listen to the girls ♪
♪ Listen to the girls, are you listening ♪
♪ Listen to the girls, listen to the girls ♪
♪ Listen to the girls, are you listening ♪
♪ Oh ♪
♪ Oh, what ♪
♪ Now all the boys in the band who were holding your hand ♪
♪ Should take a good look down into the shit ♪
♪ Where they stand ♪
♪ What about the girls in Vietnam ♪
♪ What about the bitches in Vietnam ♪
♪ This aint no house of style ♪
♪ Better get out your phones and start to dial ♪
♪ 1-900-Punk-Punk-Punk ♪
♪ What the fuck rhymes with punk ♪
♪ Listen to the girls, listen to the girls ♪
♪ Listen to the girls, are you listening ♪
♪ Listen to the girls, listen to the girls ♪
♪ Listen to the girls, are you listening ♪
♪ Listen to the girls, listen to the girls ♪
♪ Are you listening ♪