Mike Newmark ’08
No one can be blamed for believing that “gay music” doesn’t really exist, or that it ever really existed at all. Modern music is commonly divided along the lines of musical aesthetics, or sonic signifiers that slot bands under a given genre umbrella. Besides the fact that this makes it easy for a consumer to find CDs similar to the ones that he or she likes (“If you like X, try Y!”), it’s also mainly just the most instinctive way to do things: Bush sounds like Local H sounds like Everclear sounds like Live, but instead of separating them based on lyrics or intention, the powers that be went ahead and called it all grunge. Whatever.
Yet gay music was a viable—if not prominent—force within the underground community in the not-so-distant past, united not by a shared sound, per se, but by a shared ideal. In 1985, gay multimedia artists G. B. Jones and Bruce LaBruce laid the groundwork for this ideal with the completion of the indie zine J.D.s (short for Juvenile Delinquents), a scrappy-looking publication that was more well known for what it helped to mobilize than what was actually in it. The J.D.s editors viciously attacked both mainstream straight and gay cultures, especially the latter, which they believed was isolating itself and shunning diversity. In the next few years, other magazines dedicated to the cause would crop up and bands would begin to crystallize, culminating in the J.D.s’ first musical offering in 1990, J.D.s Top Ten Homocore Hit Parade Tape.
The word in that title that knocks people over is “homocore,” of course. Unbelievably, that word was abandoned early after its inception for being too emblematic of M.O.R. homosexuality. The more inclusive “queercore” replaced it, although some of those who are still involved with the movement use the term “homocore” with a sort of nostalgia. Queercore was born during the waning days of the fed-heavy Reagan administration and at the tail end of punk rock’s prime (when the genre began to welcome a number of left-field punk variants), which made the new movement a near-perfect fit for its surrounding milieu.
Queercore bands were fiercely independent and usually experimentally punkish, deviating from the “hard, fast, and short” rule of 1980s hardcore. The sounds of these bands might have been disparate within punk rock (The Apostles flirted with metal and industrial while Bomb was decidedly neo-psychedelic) but all were unified by the goal of expressing themselves—if not to be accepted by the mainstream, then at least to be heard and understood. However, queercore bands still had trouble making inroads into the wider independent music scene (their shows were limited mainly to cities in Canada and along the Pacific Coast), but the punk community and indie record labels such as K Records and Kill Rock Stars were willing to embrace them.
A slightly more successful relative of queercore was “riot grrrl,” a post-punk subtype consisting mostly of females from the Pacific Northwest nearly always dealing with issues of feminism and women’s rights. Led by the uber-charismatic Kathleen Hanna of Bikini Kill, the movement began similarly to queercore—with an influential zine (also called Riot Grrrl, that Hanna helped to create), and a crop of charged, punky bands that followed in its wake.
Some riot grrrl acts were short-lived but incredibly influential (Bikini Kill), while others had careers that stretched well into the 1990s (Scrawl, Sleater-Kinney). The grrrls’ success relative to queercore seemed to have less to do with their sound and more to do with their feminist ideals, which were easier for most people to swallow than out-and-out homosexuality. After all, feminism gained sufficient traction in the 1960s, decades before the gay community had even begun to become visible.
A handful of queercore bands finally broke the ice in the early-to-mid ‘90s, bringing straight listeners face-to-face with the cantankerous movement. The farthest-reaching band in terms of pure popularity was Pansy Division, a pop-punk band whose sound would be instantly familiar to anyone who grew up on Weezer, but whose songs unfalteringly dealt with homosexuality in all its forms, from wishing their old boyfriends well in other relationships to extolling the joys of jizz.
Pansy Division took a slightly different approach than most queercore bands, trading in blunt force for wry humor, but their insistence on revealing their gay lifestyle without trying to proselytize anyone perfectly encapsulated the original queercore manifesto by the J.D.s editors. Ironically, it was Pansy Division’s fluke entry into the mainstream that finally brought the queercore movement the amount of attention it sought when they opened for Green Day on their 1994 tour. As a band, Pansy Division was short of remarkable, but the exponential exposure they precipitated explains why present queercore bands and fans speak of the Bay Area pop-punkers with the reverence usually reserved for rock and roll legends.
Another important gay band was God Is My Co-Pilot, who weren’t the most successful of the queercore lot but doubtlessly the most ambitious. Openly bisexual couple Sharon Topper and Craig Flanagin pulled out all the stops across their 33 (!) records, incorporating noise-rock, free jazz and cowpunk (among other wacky genres) into their fractured pop pastiche, and singing a number of their songs in foreign languages, including (but not limited to) Finnish and Yiddish. God Is My Co-Pilot catapulted queercore into previously unimaginable realms by scaling artistic heights while staying true to the issues of sexuality that the movement sought to address. In retrospect, God Is My Co-Pilot may have been too experimental to be leaders of a movement that wished to exhort an ideal above all else, but they were still a galvanizing force, injecting the genre with a kind of erudition it had previously never seen.
By the late ‘90s, queercore had sunk back to the most underground levels. Queercore shows happen sporadically across the country, publicized—as it was two decades ago—by zines and cassette tapes even in the technological age. Fans lament the passing of their 1990s heroes that brought queercore its too-brief 15 minutes of fame, and continue to fight for the genre even as they know it is doomed to remain below the radar. However, gay music still finds a home in the work of some singer-songwriters (most notably Ani DiFranco), and some listeners are now drawn to the music of queercore notables, hearing it less as a form of social protest and more as a document of a zeitgeist that wasn’t actually so far away. The way most of us admire gay music of the ‘80s and ‘90s is peculiar: we may not put it on our iPods, but it surely deserves praise for its adherence to its ideals of justice, liberation and acceptance. That’s something we can all appreciate.