Queercore - How to Punk a Revolution, An Oral History - Liam Warfield/WalterCrasshole/Yony Leyser

 

Once again, this is a book that I simply stumbled upon and as I am not overly familiar with the queer punk rock scene as a scene (although I have obviously known quite a number of people with various identities over my decades playing music in different cities) and am always interested in learning more. As the subtitle implies, this is an oral history with numerous interviews taken from outtakes of a documentary of the same name - which is probably the best way a story like this should be told - by the people who made up the scene in their own words.

The books starts with an "Extremely Forward Introduction" by Lynn Breedlove and Anna Joy Springer that is kinda fun and certainly enthusiastic, but an outsider like me (an older, white cis-male that didn't pay a lot of attention to punk rock in general past the early 80's) was pretty lost and overwhelmed by tons of namedropping with no explanations. Warfield's "actual" introduction does actually introduce the concept of the book and its background, letting you know what you are in for and the parameters that the book is based on.

They first chronicle the late 60's/early 70's NY scene, "led" by Wayne/Jayne County, then move on to the mid-to-late 70's LA/SF scenes, which were, naturally, heavily queer, followed by - to me - an odd juxtaposition into the mid-80's Toronto scene, which apparently was literally a handful of people claiming that a scene existed, which caused one to form! In fact, the book tends to concentrate on Toronto, so I assume that people involved are from that area.

From there the chapters get a little more generic and give more of an overview of how various people dealt with being gay and being punk - which wasn't as easy even in the 80's as it was in the 70's. I have always thought about how hard it must be to find a gay partner in the music scene considering how difficult it was for me as a straight person to find someone and apparently many went outside of the scene for sexual relationships. 

Various activism is discussed, of course, and then the formation of all-queer bands - not just bands with queer members, but bands that we all about being queer, which was pretty revolutionary, despite some precedence. It turns out that zines were extremely important and influential, as well, which makes sense in those pre-internet times, as there were zines about pretty much any subject, so something as important as this was kinda inevitable. 

Naturally, the goals of the various individuals are unique to those individuals, as well, and are quite varied - and to be truthful, I'm not sure that I completely understand what some were saying (apparently some in the scene do not want things like marriage equality). But, again, I'm an old, white cis-male, so, even if I want to understand, maybe I'm not meant to.

Overall, a well-done, informative read on a specific, passionate scene that doesn't get a lot of overground press.