In 1989, the seventh issue of DIY queer punk fanzine JD centered a giant photocopy of a picture of Sex Pistols bassist Sid Vicious reclining in a bed with manager Nils Stevenson, a dazed and suggestive look in both of their eyes. Emblazoned on the side of the page in all caps was the declaration ALL PUNKS ARE GAY, directly confronting the reader and forcing them to question the two men's presumed heterosexuality. To the normative heterosexual gays, this declaration might seem jarring, but if you know the real history of punk, it only confirms what most of us already know to be true.
Queerness has always been intrinsically linked to the punk movement, both overtly and covertly. As Alexander Doty writes in Making Things Perfectly Queer, queer readings aren't alternative readings or reading too much into things. They result from the recognition and articulation of the complex range of queerness that has been in popular cultural texts and their audiences all along. The word punk has a deep and storied queer lineage. The term punk was documented to first appear in a medieval folk song called Simon the Old Kinj, also called Old Simon the King, which was eventually recorded in 1991 by Maddie Pryor and the Carnival Band on a compilation of medieval carols.
And in the song, the word punk is used to refer to a sex worker. So fellows, if you be drunk, the frailty it is a sin or for to keep a punk. The term was later picked up by Shakespeare, who used the word in Measure for Measure, where Lucio says to the Duke, My lord, she may be a punk, for many of them are, neither maid, widow, nor wife. The most problematic use of the word punk was in the 1930s, when a slang-obsessed clarinetist named Mez Mezro defined punk as a young man who plays the feminine role in a homosexual relationship. Queer rock and roll pioneer Little Richard has a famous quote that reads, I went through a lot when I was a boy.
They called me sissy, punk, freak. Later in the 60s and early 70s, queer male inmates in San Francisco in New York prisons began to wear the word punk as a badge of honor. Bands like the Stooges, the New York Dolls, and the Velvet Underground all had members who were formerly incarcerated, as well as members who were queer and had connections to queer art scenes, specifically the Velvet Underground and their work with Andy Warhol and superstars like Candy Darling, Holly Woodlawn, and Jackie Curtis. These bands also experimented with gender fluidity and nihilistic camp, which as Nathan Lye writes in Afropunk, presented a version of rock that was free from the musical pretensions and relentless heteronormativity of the prog generation.
The queer roots of the punk movement in New York can be traced back to Jane County, the visibly transgender performance artist and frontwoman of CBGB and Max's Kansas City residence, The Electric Chairs. Jane County and her rebellious, unabashedly queer, irreverent performance style influenced all of the punk movement to come after her, including one of the most important musicians of arguably any generation, which was David Bowie. According to County, soon after witnessing the goatee spectacle of Warhol's Pork in 1971, Bowie upped the ante of his stage shows, adding makeup and sparkly accoutrements to his queer sensibility, which was already visible on the cross-dressing cover of of his album The Man Who Sold the World in 1971. Fellow glam rockers the New York Dolls did the same, regularly dressing in drag while singing the songs Trash and Personality Crisis, a schtick that garnered them quick notoriety, including with tastemaker Malcolm McLaren, who enamored with the Dolls'crappy old lipstick and tardiness was inspired to bring punk back to the UK, eventually becoming the empresario of the Sex Pistols.
Even the skinny jeans, white t-shirt, and leather jacket look that came to be identified with such punk rockers as the Ramones bore striking resemblance to the clothes worn by gay male hustlers at the time, giving this look its own queer connotation, at least for those in the know, who was anyone paying close attention, as at least one member of the Ramones, Didi Ramones, spent time as a gay for pay hustler in the early 1970s. He later recorded his experience in the song 53rd and 3rd, named after the famous cruising spot where he worked, and told an interviewer that The song speaks for itself. Everything I write is autobiographical and really real. Omnisexuality is also referenced in the Ramones'We're a Happy Family, which undercuts the presumed heterosexuality of the idealized nuclear family by surprising listeners with the revelation that daddy likes men.
This element of queerness in punk was very much present in cinema as well, with directors like John Waters and stars like Divine. The In some of Waters most famous films like Pink Flamingos, Female Trouble, and Multiple Maniacs. I always identified with the punk community, which was gayer than it ever admitted.
Pink Flamingos was a punk film, but we didn't have a name for it yet. Give us some of your political beliefs. Kill everyone now! Condone first degree murder! Advocate cannibalism!
Shit! Filth are my politics! Filth is my life! There were also Andy Warhol films like Hustler and Women in Revolt. And of course there was the most notable cult film and musical Rocky Horror Picture Show, where the recently engaged couple Brad and Janet represent the quote-unquote pure heteronormative ideal and Frankenfurter and his ilk represent queerness, the sexually liberated, the quote-unquote other.
The LA punk scene also has a deep queer lineage. One of the most influential figures was Vaginal Davis, a black queer intersex performer who emerged on the LA scene in the late 70s with her band the Afro Sisters, who opened for the Smiths at one point. Davis's campy, satirical stage performances took jabs at white privilege, patriarchy, and heteronormativity.
Her combination of queercore punk sensibilities and studio glamour was lovingly dubbed terrorist drag by queer academic scholar Jose Esteban Muñoz. She was also on the forefront of queer zine making with her self-printed and self-published zines Crude and Fertile LaToya Jackson. Other influential queer punks were Alice Bagg from The Bags and of course Darby Crash from The Germs. Alice Bagg is a queer feminist archivist and Darby Crash was one of the seminal figures in the LA punk scene.
But it wasn't just his attraction to men that made him a queer. queer icon. It was also the mentality that he lived by. Another important part of his legacy is the intense cult-like community formed around the germs and their audience. The essay Annihilation and Innovation in the Punk Rock Commons by queer punk scholar Jose Esteban Munoz is one of the earliest written works to pave the way for modern day queer fandom studies.
Munoz writes about Crash filling the role of the sympathetic pariah. and the struggle to separate the autobiographical from the mythical figure of Darby Crash. I am interested in the ways in which the germs, their iconography, and their music allowed a kind of punk rock commons, a being with, in which various disaffected antisocial actants found networks of affiliation and belonging that allowed them to think and act otherwise together in a social field that was most interested in dismantling their desire for different relations within the social.
Crash had a fantasy about a germs burn, which was a unique ritual that imagined a certain futurity through the act of burning a circle onto the flesh of the germs devotee with a cigarette. The afterlife of Crash's ritualistic scarring is the stuff of punk rock legend. Figures like Crash, Davis, and Alice Bagg paved the way for the queercore movement Queercore is a punk movement that took place in the 80s and 90s in the midst of the AIDS crisis, trans erasure, and Bowers vs Hardwick, when queer people and punk began to create their own spaces that catered to the needs of queer people who weren't interested in assimilating into mainstream culture.
These bands included the likes of Limp Wrist, Pansy Division, Los Crudos, Team Dresh, The Butchies, Fifth Column, Tribe 8, and Excuse 17. Carrie Brownstein's former band before Slater Kinney. Like their peers in the riot girl movement in places like Olympia, Washington and DC who brought feminism to the forefront of underground rock, Queercore brought explicit queerness to the forefront of punk. The terms Queercore and Homocore first appeared in the queer punk scene JD's in 1985. The zine was started by GB Jones from the influential Toronto Queercore band Fifth Column.
Bikini Kill frontwoman Kathleen Hanna has even cited the work of Fifth Column as one of Bikini Kill's most formative influences. GB Jones became friends with gay filmmaker Bruce LaBruce, and they stayed up all night writing zines and creating a homopunk paradise. within its pages.
Fifth Column was essentially the decade-older Canadian predecessors of Riot Grrrl bands like L7, Huggy Bear, and Bikini Kill. Bands who followed Fifth Column in the queercore movement included the Butchies, Tribe 8, and Team Dresh. One of the biggest queer punk bands was Pansy Division who collaborated with Steve Albini and also scored an opening slot on Green Day's Dookie Arena tour.
So why don't people know about this? The easy answer would be because they were likely sidelined in favor of the bands who borrowed their ideas and got popular off of them. Bowie didn't start upping the ante with his elaborate performance art and stage production until he saw Jane County perform.
So you really cannot address the history without addressing the queer communities who were innovating long before the New York Dolls or Bowie. Punk and queerness go hand in hand. They both represent a communal commiseration of outcasts and social pariahs. There's also a sort of nihilism and boundary pushing related to sexuality and anti-conformist ways of thwarting respectability politics and coming together to rebel against assimilation.
To quote José Esteban Muñoz, we should resist the impulse to simply queer an object, phenomenon, or historical moment and instead attend to it with the understanding of lines of queer genealogical connectivity as something other than tautological. Queerness is not a subtextual or alternative reading of punk. Queerness has always been there, and you really cannot address the culture of punk without acknowledging the queer creators from musicians to DIY zine makers and writers who helmed the movement.
This barely even scratches the surface of how many LGBTQIA musicians have influenced the trajectory of music history. It is not uncommon that queer people end up having to mine our own history. Punk has become commodified, watered down, and straight washed so much, and that has been happening ever since people like Malcolm McLaren and Vivienne Westwood opened up shop. But it shouldn't be any surprise that punk, a culture and a DIY community that catered to people outside the status quo, that mainstream society never served, has always been inherently queer.
And this new wave of queer punk bands surfacing in the digital age is not a new thing. It is simply part of the reckoning where everyone is collectively recognizing that queerness has, as Alexander Dottie so swiftly put it, been there all along. It is here to stay and there's nothing you can do about it.