Forty years have passed since the inception of punk, yet interest in punk history has intensified within the last decade or so. Along with a proliferation of memoirs, scholarship, and exhibitions, students of the genre have seen a decided shift toward the documentation and analysis of local scenes. In other words, while punk was certainly a global phenomenon, overarching histories of punk are now outnumbered by case studies that examine specific scenes and their relation to local histories of music, other creative practices, and formulations of place, race, gender, and sexuality. As a byproduct of this phenomenon, generalized understandings of punk as rebellion, aesthetic, or attitude have become productively complicated, just as London and New York no longer occupy the center of the conversation. What we have now is a proliferation of punk histories rather than a singular or linear narrative.
This essay explores the implications of conducting localized research on punk for the broader conceptualization, historiography, and definition of punk. In particular, it examines the early Los Angeles punk scene from its emergence in 1977 to the beginning of its so-called second generation in the early 1980s. At that moment (and arguably beyond), punks defined themselves and their scene in relation to other categories of identity, making constructions of gender and sexuality central to the very formulation of punk. Rather than generating a cohesive or consistent politics of sexuality or gender, however, the scene was characterized by a discursive fixation on distinction, contestation, and at times purposeful ambiguity surrounding queerness and the performance of gender. This scene and others, however, can be defined internally and differentiated from others not because of a fixed, coherent, or identifiable politics of identity, but instead on the specific issues — like queerness — around which these deliberations coalesce. While remaining attentive to the visual, musical, and sartorial dimensions of the scene, I rely extensively on discursive analysis of historical print sources to apprehend punk’s internal dynamics. This approach reveals the ways in which punks talked about themselves and how they simultaneously identified the scene’s “outside,” as well as the contested boundaries that guided these distinctions.
By considering the scene through this lens, I consciously depart from bifurcating historical accounts that characterize the early LA scene as somehow either completely egalitarian or helplessly regressive in its formulation of punk identity. For instance, recent considerations of the diversity of Los Angeles punk, many of them relying on participant accounts, often fixate on dichotomous questions of whether the scene was or wasn’t racist, heteronormative, or inclusive.1 If it’s undeniably true, however, that “Punk Was Always Gay,” it’s also true that homophobic language was a fixture of the early LA scene, often voiced by gay punks themselves.2 If the LA scene was undeniably diverse, the discourses on race and sexuality within the scene often prove troubling in retrospect. This genre of historical account — including oral histories, participant testimonies, and the publications that draw extensively on them — are thus often selective insofar as their celebratory tone glosses over the less laudatory dimensions of a particular scene.
By the same token, critical scholarly accounts often focus on problematic aspects of the scene, while producing similarly monolithic portraits of it. Daniel S. Traber, for instance, has argued that L.A. punks adopted a “sub-urban” identity that relied on asserting proximity to and enacting stereotypes of racially and economically marginalized populations to affirm implicitly the centrality of whiteness, blunting punk’s ostensible rebellion from dominant society (Traber 2001). In a similar vein, Fiona I.B. Ngo has argued that punks in Los Angeles formulated their resistant subjectivities by claiming proximity to marginalized populations in Hollywood whose difference they simultaneously appropriated and marked as deviant.3 While these accounts offer valuable insight into the early LA punk scene, they also tend to characterize a scene as being homogenous in its demographic composition (an assumption of heteronormative whiteness in particular) and consistent in its politics relative to difference. That is, these critical historical analyses, even in their complexity and nuance, often function as a reverse image of the more celebratory participant recollections. But how do we account for the gray area between these positions, for the contradictory, at times disturbing dimensions of a scene that also enabled new ways of thinking through gender and sexuality? José Esteban Muñoz examined the ambivalent experience of a queer person of color listening to the song “Los Angeles” by the LA band X, which promised a “critique of normative aesthetics” as it simultaneously gave voice to racist and homophobic sentiments. My intention here is to produce a historical account that examines the internal dynamics of a scene that in some ways inevitably produced these effects.4
Rather than trying to determine definitively whether or not LA punk was inclusive, I argue that debates surrounding key categories and issues, including race, gender, and sexuality were fundamental to conceptions of punk operating at the time. That is, it was the discursive framework within which contested definitions were formulated, rather than any singular or consistent position, that enables us to understand the contours of a scene in retrospect. Whereas early punk has been associated with an ethos of rebellion, rejection, negation, and shock, I argue that the concomitant processes of distinction and internal contestation be understood as inextricable from the definition of individual and collective punk identity. Certain key participants in LA were openly gay, bisexual, or sexually fluid, including Alice Bag, Geza X (of the Deadbeats and Geza X and the Mommymen), Craig Lee, Kid Congo Powers of the Gun Club, Tomata du Plenty of the Screamers, Darby Crash of the Germs, Robert Lopez of the Zeros, and multiple members of Nervous Gender: Michael Ochoa, Phranc, Edward Stapleton, and Gerardo Velázquez. I am less interested in identifying queer participants per se than in examining how articulations and expressions of gender and (queer) sexuality were foundational to the definition and practice of punk.
Although I focus here primarily on conceptions of sexuality and queerness, my analysis demonstrates the ways in which debates about issues of identity and politics shaped punk scenes. If Tavia Nyong’o has argued that “alongside the ‘frozen dialectic’ between black and white culture that Dick Hebdige famously noticed in British punk, there is also a less frequently noticed but equally furtive set of transactions between queer and punk that is hidden . . . in plain sight,” this essay explores how those transactions operated within a specific local scene.5 Early punk scenes encompassed a range of positions, discourses, subjectivities, and practices that included music and performance style, fashion and graphic design. While I recognize that “to talk about any specific scene often means to freeze it in time and simplify all those tensions and divisions,” my intention is to do the opposite.6 Consequently, this essay offers a new perspective on the history of punk in Los Angeles, functions as a framework that might inspire other studies and proposes that punk paradoxically might be defined by the terms of ongoing, often unresolved debates about its very definition.
DEFINING PUNK I
To explain how conceptions of sexuality became central to the formulation of the early LA punk scene, it’s necessary to define what we mean by punk, and the specific unfolding of this phenomenon in this particular place. An identifiable scene emerged in Los Angeles in 1977. Several bands before this point were described by the press as “new wave” or self-identified as such, but they were not part of a recognizable punk scene per se. but no recognizable punk scene existed. This assessment, however, raises the question of what constitutes a scene. In the case of Los Angeles, several interrelated factors converged: a close-knit community of practitioners and enthusiasts; the embrace of the identifier “punk”; a collective sense of fashion through bricolage and vintage clothing; a vibrant print culture and the production of zines; a geographical epicenter (in Hollywood); the formation of bands; and events and (ir)regular venues at which these bands performed and the scene congregated.
In keeping with the do-it-yourself (D.I.Y) ethos of punk, the scene generated a prolific and diverse range of cultural production. Perhaps most obviously, the scene originated with an explosion of bands that formed, reformed, and often exchanged members: The Germs, the Bags, the Eyes, the Plugz, the Controllers, Black Randy and the Metro Squad, the Weirdos, F-Word, the Screamers, the Go-Go’s, the Dickies, and the Deadbeats, among others. One of the key catalysts for their creation was the Masque, a rehearsal and performance space opened by Brendan Mullen in the basement of a porn theater on Cherokee Avenue in Hollywood. Members of many bands had never played instruments, yet were empowered by punk to do so. Early shows at the Masque demonstrated the close-knit camaraderie between bands and what X lead singer Exene Cervenka has called the “blur between band and crowd.”7 In addition to the Masque, punk bands performed at local clubs, although bans at some venues drove bands to seek alternatives, from art shows to rented halls and private parties.
While music was ostensibly at the core of the scene, and has more broadly shaped historical understandings of punk as a genre or cultural phenomenon, punk also — particularly in its localized manifestations — encompassed a broad range of cultural production. Almost as soon as the scene crystallized, publications sprang up to cover concerts, conduct interviews with local and touring bands, review record releases, publish reader letters, and dish gossip. In Los Angeles, these ranged from professional publications, such as Slash and NO Magazine, to the collage aesthetics of Flipside and the rough-hewn, D.I.Y. zines, such as Blank Generation and Lobotomy. The cut-and-paste, handwritten, Xeroxed, and often rudimentary nature of some zines was mirrored in the aesthetic of concert flyers. In addition, several independent record labels sprouted up to release music emanating from the scene, including Dangerhouse, Slash, Posh Boy, and Fatima Recordz. Fashion also was a key part of the scene, from personal appearance to stage gear worn by bands. In everyday contexts, the eccentric assemblages of vintage clothing, homemade items, (ripped) t-shirts, bondage gear, and (for women) lingerie not only contributed to a group identity, but also was a purposefully disruptive presence in public.
As even this cursory overview of the early Los Angeles punk scene suggests, punk is more than a musical genre, an aesthetic, an attitude, or a cohort of creative individuals. Rather, in addition to all of these, punk is a locally specific convergence of cultural and social rebellion, musical production, and a variation of the D.I.Y. aesthetic, as well as an assemblage of art historical connections and affinities. Overviews of early punk scenes, from New York to Austin, suggest the same, but with a difference.8 This expansive yet specific and flexible definition of punk offers a productive way of studying the historical contours of each scene and the dynamics that structured it. By attending to these various components manifested in specific locales, it is also possible to understand the terms on which the participants defined each scene. But if punk was founded in many ways on rejection, negation, shock, and rebellion, what implications did these stances hold for interrelated conceptions of politics and identity? For a scene that framed itself through explicit opposition to innumerable things — musical precedents, fashion trends, aesthetic refinement, and mainstream culture in general — the appropriate heuristic in this case becomes not only negation or rebellion, but also the specific distinctions that guided the terms of this rebellion.
DEFINING PUNK, PART II: DISTINCTION
“. . . don’t mutter bandwagon — there are also such things as influences, evolution, admiration, no? When did you get your new hair-style?”9
If punk encompassed a range of practices, its overall politics of rebellion and rejection, not to mention its emphasis on a new and definitive break from convention, meant that a variation on Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of distinction was central to the self-definition of the scene.10 Mark J.V. Olson has contended that this process of differentiation — including conceptually mapping out relations of proximity and opposition — is part of any scene’s self-definition.11 As with other spheres of cultural production or aesthetic practice, participation in the punk scene was contingent on the ability to recognize, master, and reproduce certain codes — aesthetic, musical, sartorial, and performative — that distinguished true punks from pretenders or poseurs. Of course, punk arguably reversed the “sublimated, refined, disinterested, gratuitous, distinguished pleasures” associated with the appreciation of fine art and instead embraced shock, ugliness, a lack of proficiency, and a D.I.Y mentality.12 Punk nonetheless thrived on distinctions and a unique cultural capital used to police the boundaries of community and to define the scene relationally against those that lacked the requisite “cultural competence.” By parsing social difference in this way, these distinctions in Los Angeles in turn hinged on conceptions of sexuality, queerness, and the performance of gender associated with the variable intersections of aesthetics, fashion, and music in the late 1970s.
Even at its very inception, arriving at a definition of punk consumed the pages of the punk press in LA and involved a concerted effort to declare it as definitively new, different, and with an identifiable set of characteristics. In 1977, this process included arriving at a word that would adequately describe or categorize the new scene and its music. The concept of “new wave” was already circulating because of the English and New York scenes and the use of this term by major record labels and the music press. Some accordingly asked whether LA was experiencing the new wave. In addition to now familiar categories of punk and new wave, other terms also arose. Was this simply new music? Or the new sound? Should it be called urban or regional rock?13 Urban folk music?14 Just as important, there was deliberation about ways to approach understanding this phenomenon. Was this an artistic or cultural movement? A political or social movement? Was it all of these at once? Or none of them?
Although participants eventually settled on punk as a descriptor of their scene, the thornier issue of defining punk locally was still a matter of constant deliberation. Part of defining a community was determining precisely who did not belong. A lot of early writing in Slash and elsewhere discussed the criteria by which “true,” dedicated punks might be distinguished from outsiders or so-called poseurs. The first use of the term “hard-core” by punks in Los Angeles referred less to a subgenre of punk than to authentic participants in the scene, those for whom it was a lifestyle rather than a hobby or passing fashion. As Slash editor Kickboy Face (Claude Bessy) wrote regarding the delayed U.S. release of the Clash’s first album by CBS: “Now we demand that this album be released immediately. So we can start telling the real punx and new-wavers from the sissies, the old from the new, the poseurs from the hard-core.”15 As this and other quotes suggest, the distinction between hardness and “sissies” as a barometer of authenticity held implications for conceptions of sexuality and the performance of gender within punk.
The clearest and most visible marker of difference within the early scene was fashion. Of course, fashion was eclectic and didn’t necessarily involve a punk “uniform” or list of agreed-upon articles of clothing. What quickly emerged, however, was the construction of who was not punk based on physical appearance. An early editorial in Slash epitomizes this attitude: “What to wear on a Saturday? First what not to wear — burn your flared pants, denim coordinates & anything else left over from your Earthshoe phase. After discarding all those useless items, stand and face yourself in the mirror . . . look vicious, mean, uncaring . . . remember, it’s your STANCE that’s all important . . . dig up some pegged pants & some cruel looking shoes (kats, pointy toes — kittens, spike heels), then rape the shit out of the ugliest shirt you’ve got (tape it, tear it, adorn it with anything that’s offensive!). Don’t forget your hair (see Screamers interview for tips)”16
Chief among these considerations of personal appearance was hair. At the end of a decade that had witnessed the ascendency of hard rock, the gender bending of glam, the Los Angeles folk-rock scene, and residual traces of hippie culture, short hair — for men and women alike — marked a bold, definitive break from all of these and a comparative marker of “toughness.” Given prevalent fashion trends, the sudden appearance of youth with short hair, often irregularly cut or dyed various colors, produced the aesthetic shock (and school expulsions) with which punk became synonymous. Even the timing of a haircut could distinguish authentic punks from recent converts. Defending his band from accusations that its members had only recently jumped on the punk bandwagon, John Denny of the Weirdos assured readers that “we’ve had fucking short hair for years. You never caught me at a love-in. The ‘60s ended in ’70 for me. We think hippies are deplorable.”
As such markers of fashion imply, certain styles of hair and clothing were closely associated with particular music scenes. The punk press’s equation between style, fashion, and specific music cultures also demonstrates that these factors were inextricable for punks. As one might infer from the rejection of long hair, both hippies and fans of mainstream rock were regarded as an anathema to punk; both Yes and Aerosmith became key touchstones in this regard. The softer sounds of John Denver and other radio pop stars became objects of derision without debate. And, given its popularity and musical disparity from punk, disco also was rejected, as the Bags song “Disco Is Dead” rather unambiguously declared. The rejection of all of these genres and bands enabled punks to declare that their movement was a definitive break from the past. Denouncing the way that other music magazines indiscriminately placed Kiss, Bruce Springsteen, and Todd Rundgren on the same cover as the English punk band the Clash, a writer for Slash proclaimed: “You cannot pretend for a second these groups or individuals have any artistic goals in common, no matter how wide an audience you’re trying to reach and unify. The old wave and the new wave are like oil and water: they do not mix.”17
If punk and its press culture drew comparisons with national trends and local scenes to situate punk within the musical and cultural geography of Los Angeles, punks also mobilized their own specific amalgamation of fashion, attitude, music, and place to define Los Angeles in relation to concurrent punk scenes. Reviews and articles regularly dismissed New York as pretentious, arty, and self-important. Whereas many considered New York the epicenter of punk’s emergence in the United States, Los Angeles worked to stake its own claim as a unique and even superior scene. Aside from barbs launched in the press, the rejection of New York was also immortalized in song. The Randoms recorded “Let’s Get Rid of New York” for Dangerhouse Records, while Fear notoriously performed “New York’s All Right if You Like Saxophones” during their raucous 1981 appearance on Saturday Night Live. The song’s lyrics explain the basis for their lampooning of the city: “New York’s all right if you wanna be pushed in front of the subway/New York’s all right if you like tuberculosis/New York’s all right if you like art and jazz/New York’s all right if you’re a homosexual.” Even the title of the foundational Dangerhouse compilation “Yes L.A.” was a retort to the Brian Eno-produced compilation “No New York.”
Given the longstanding comparisons between the cities, San Francisco also served as a negative frame of reference by which to define Los Angeles punk. Of course, the traffic of bands and fans between the two cities was a regular occurrence; although most of the early LA groups lacked the resources to go on extensive tours, they at least played in San Francisco, usually at Mabuhay Gardens. Nonetheless, a friendly rivalry existed between the two scenes in a way that allowed each to define itself relationally. Much of this rhetoric predictably relied on stereotypes of both places. As Peter Urban explained in an early issue of Blank Generation: “The SF scene is older, artsier, and gay-er than the general LA scene. But SF is that way in general, so maybe that isn’t so unusual.”18 Screamers lead singer Tomata du Plenty reiterated this characterization when the band was in San Francisco on tour: “Up here, it’s the four H’s — hippies, heroin, homos, and Howie Klein. And they’re all waiting backstage, to get us”19 The distinctions between long hair and short hair, hippies and punks, New York and Los Angeles consistently were expressed through oppositions between punk’s supposed toughness, whereas other scenes or practices were derided as “wimpy,” “sissy,” “queer,” or “homosexual.” The persistence of these distinctions across media and practices clearly conveys the centrality of intertwined conceptions of gender and sexuality to the definition of punk, not to mention the broader landscape of music and popular culture. However, the distinctions made by LA punks — whether discursively or across practices–were hardly consistent, but instead riven by internal differences and contestation in which conceptions of sexuality and queerness nonetheless remained central.
DEFINING PUNK III: INTERNAL CONTESTATION
“What’s the worst social affliction?
◻ art damage
◻ old-fashioned booze and drug damage
◻ New York damage
◻ Slash clique damage
◻ gay damage
◻ poetry damage
◻ Politix damage
◻ the damage theory itself”
“The First Annual Slash Readers’ Poll, or ‘It’s Time To Get To Know the Idiots”20
While discursive maneuvers and aesthetic distinctions allowed for a relational definition of punk, the often ambivalent, variable, and contradictory formulation of these distinctions makes it impossible to ascribe any clear, stable, or singular position to the scene. So, while we may be able to identify a scene, that scene itself is split by internal contestation, aesthetic difference, and shifting boundaries. Paradoxically, it is this dimension of early punk that prevents us from regarding a scene as monolithic, but we might also conclude that the centrality of certain distinctions — the contested and unresolved fixations specific to each scene — become a way to characterize it. In the case of Los Angeles, queerness tied to the performance of gender guided punk’s distinction from external phenomena, just as it enables us to map internal fissures and differences retrospectively. In other words, queerness, sexuality, and the performance of gender were inextricable from LA punk’s brand of shock and negation, although hardly in a way that produced consistency or consensus.
To begin with, despite concerted efforts to define punk in relation to other genres or scenes, the boundaries of punk remained at times unclear. Contention and ambivalence in particular emerged around punk’s relation to its immediate predecessors and obvious influences. The place of punk within the history of rock music, for instance, generated a range of opinions. For some, the newness of punk implied the complete lack of any precedent and a negation of all that had come before. For others, however, punk was clearly a revival of rock n’ roll’s very inception, a return to the rawness, vitality, and rebellion that had been disarmed and sanitized by corporate radio and the music industry (frequently coded as feminine or “wimpy”). Masque founder Brendan Mullen, for instance, declared punk the rebirth of “wild rock and roll” that had been dormant for nearly two decades.21 Bands like X referred to Elvis and others as clear precedents, or cited Gene Vincent, Eddie Cochran, Chuck Berry, Jerry Lee Lewis and other early rockers as key influences.22 From a more contemporary perspective, the genre of power pop — epitomized locally by Greg Shaw’s record label Bomp! (founded in 1974) — became a frequent point of contention. Even though LA punk fixtures like the Zeros and the Weirdos released singles through Bomp!, there seemed to be some agreement that power pop was nonetheless distinct from punk. As one Slash reader complained about the magazine’s interview with Shaw: “How can your writers and contributors condemn the dreadful disco craze and then stand idly by when an equally mindless wimpy music is looming in our own backyard?”23
On the other hand, glam rock and the “glitter” scene fostered by Rodney’s English Disco in Hollywood required perhaps paradoxically the most insistent and repeated claims of a break given its affinity to punk, its temporal proximity to the emergence of punk, and the participation by many punks in the glam scene. Not only had many been devoted fans of David Bowie, Elton John, Queen, and Lou Reed, they had also embraced the makeup, glitter, platform shoes, extravagance, and androgyny of glam only years earlier.24 Nonetheless, Mullen asserted difference through a comparison of the dance styles supposedly typical of each scene: “Pogo is only a tribal celebration. More primal and more therapeutic than the homosexual dance of the disco.”25 Describing the boundaries that defined those outside the scene, Bags member and journalist Craig Lee recalled, “Hippies that dared to go in the Masque might find their hair ‘accidentally’ burned off. Polyester? Forget it. Disco fags? Laughed back to West Hollywood.”26 As Philip Auslander argues, the performative dimension of glam and its implications were a key dimension of its transgressive potency: “glam masculinity, like Mod masculinity before it, alluded to the possibility of homosexuality or bisexuality.”27 Some punks sought to disrupt this convergence through the assertion of vehement opposition to its immediate predecessor. If punks and punk print culture endeavored to establish definitions and distinctions, the incessant reiteration of these perhaps counter-intuitively points to the difficulty of sustaining them. As an ambivalent review of a power pop showcase explained, “Tricky business, playing for these new wave audiences. One wrong shake of the hips and they dismiss you as glitter. One whirl of your lovely jet black hair and they start doubting your manliness. Even if they pogo to your music, you can’t trust them.”28
Beyond the porous and ambiguous boundaries of these distinctions, however, varying or contested attitudes toward musical genres, local scenes, and the aesthetics associated with them reveal multiple ways of being, sounding, or looking punk. For instance, bands that alluded to rock precedents (such as X or the Controllers) or that released singles on Bomp! (including the Weirdos and the Zeros) displayed these influences through conventional rock instrumentation, a verse-chorus song structure, and a reliance on power chords and guitar solos. These bands differed markedly from the searing synthesizers and orchestrated theatrics of the Screamers or the shambolic, funk-laden performances of Black Randy and the Metro Squad. All of these again differed from the frenetic time changes and chaotic improvisation of the Deadbeats’ pioneering fusion of punk and jazz. More than musical or stylistic diversity, these differences were inextricable from evocations of queerness and sexuality and the way that each band or individual inevitably mobilized these elements as part of punk identity and rebellion, although in very different terms.
For instance, the Bags pioneered a fierce, fast-paced sonic and performative assault that some have credited as a precursor to hardcore. Lead singer Alice Bag combined aggressive, manic performances with a style that at times mixed fishnet stockings, ripped t-shirts, and lingerie (one early Slash review described her as a “dark, raunchy and romantic girl doing loud queer things with her voice”).29 Scholars have justifiably cited her as a key example of punk’s enablement of new models of femininity, or an example of an incipient Chicana feminism.30 Indeed, band members in interviews often worked to uncouple and complicate prevailing associations between gender performance and sexuality. In one instance, Alice and bandmate Pat Bag explained that the assertive and often combative stage presence of the band led audiences to conclude that they were lesbians. Pat explained: “They’ve done that to Alice and me. If they see us so tough and they see us fighting each other backstage or something, physically fighting, then they see us with guys and they realize it’s not true, it takes them a while, usually. That’s they’re first instinct ‘cause that’s what they’ve been brought up on. Or else you’re a Linda Ronstadt. Not me!”31 While implicitly arguing for a gender identity that eludes the dichotomous categories of butch lesbian and heteronormative femininity (represented here by Linda Ronstadt), Patricia and the rest of the band distanced themselves from both. In another interview, Alice Bag and guitarist Craig Lee aligned her challenge to conventions of femininity to non-normative sexuality, describing her penchant for “auto-sado-masochism” and carving maps into her arm:
“A: It’s like masturbation. It’s great. You should try it some time. Sit around and draw maps on your arms.
C: Yeah, you can only whack your meat for so long until it becomes predictable. New avenues of sensation”32
Not coincidentally, retrospective accounts of the scene suggest that sexuality and gender were part of punk’s rebellion and rejection of convention. As Pleasant Gehman recalls, “My crowd’s prurient interests . . . included but weren’t limited to fluid-gender identities and nonspecific sexual roles, uniform fetishes, multiple partners, and, especially, openly gay and bisexual experimentation.”33
In a similar vein, the intentionally shocking and radically queer performances of Nervous Gender combined costumes (including bondage gear and fascist military gear), provocative video art, and lyrics about violence, sex, and (sac)religion. Driven by un-tuned (or out of tune) synthesizers, the band departed from the conventional instrumentation of rock while pushing the boundaries of song structure in a way that made for difficult listening, even from the perspective a punk scene driven by guitars. Likewise, this brand of sonic and performative provocation would explain how Nervous Gender, as LA’s first openly queer punk band, often found its aggressive, abrasive vision of queerness at odds even with many gay audiences, compelling the band to gravitate instead toward cultural circles in which performance art, leather and bondage aesthetics, and electronic music converged. Distinct from the more playful performative queerness of the Bags, Nervous Gender trafficked in confrontation, discomfort, and explicit references to (deviant) sexuality generally absent from the songs of their peers.
For other bands, sexuality and queerness enabled very different performative possibilities in line with the impulse to shock. In one rather indecipherable mission statement published in NO Magazine to promote his flexi-single “Mean Mr. Mommy Man,” Gexa X described the origins of his music as a combination of Xavier Cugat, masturbation experiments, self-torture, and a desire to “alter the gay protest anthem to make it broader for all humanity.”34 Appearing in a magazine that regularly alternated between coverage of conceptual art, band interviews, sexual subcultures, absurdist cartoons, and images of human disease and mutilation, the statement was accompanied by a photo of Geza reclining nude, pointing his penis directly at the camera. In this context and others, Geza allowed the boundary between shock value and sexual politics to remain purposefully ambiguous (or incoherent), in keeping with the sonic and performative absurdity for which he and his bands were notorious.
In an entirely different vein, the band Fear infamously hurled homophobic and misogynistic insults at audiences during performances, and various members alternately claimed to be gay while also insinuating that their hateful rhetoric was merely a performance intended to provoke. Even while deriding the “homosexuals” of New York in their aforementioned SNL performance, guitarist Philo Cramer sported a dress, gesturing toward (or satirizing) the capacity of gender performance to shock or disrupt. Nonetheless, the SNL performance drew individuals from the nascent hardcore world (Ian MacKaye, Tesco Vee, and John Brannon) who notoriously trashed the studio. Lead singer Lee Ving himself embodied the violent, white masculinity that would soon become synonymous with the genre; often posing shirtless and sneering, he regularly extended an aggressive middle finger towards photographers. Nonetheless, the band’s attitudinal “middle finger” evinced a recognition of the offense that resided in a confrontational evocation of gender performance and sexuality. As Ving boasted in a NO Magazine interview: “We have a lot of crowd that is gay and love us and we have a lot of crowd that is gay and hates us but we don’t have any gay crowd that ignores us.”35 Ironically, members of Nervous Gender perceived an affinity with another band dedicated to relentless shock — they once joked that they had briefly considered becoming the “new Fear.”36
CONCLUSION
Because it is possible to wield sexuality both an insult and a tool with which to shock “straight” society within the early scene, its centrality to definitions of punk remains perturbing for various reasons. From a contemporary perspective, it is difficult to square retrospective accounts of the scene as an open creative space in which differences were ignored or altogether irrelevant with the scene’s overdetermined fixation on (homo)sexuality as a constant, and often negative point of reference. To begin with, looking for consistency or clarity of position from a scene premised on offense, rejection, shock, and rebellion might be impossible. The illegibility, contrariness, confusion, and elusiveness of punk was likely intentional, part of an overall impulse to evade or refuse meaning in a conventional sense. As Geza X once opined about punk,
“But it’s not exactly an organized social or political movement . . . It’s an attitude that’s reflected in the music, in the styles that come and go. I secretly believe that its roots are in Dadaism because it’s so many things and their counterpart, sort of — not exactly surreal but not quite real jokes piled one on top of the other. So many contradictory and confusing whims and attitudes placed into a sort of living structure that’s a sort of very coarse amusement. It’s a weird thing, like somebody’s pulling a joke on the world.”37
Second, homophobic language was arguably among the techniques punks used to offend and shock, to defy social convention. This explanation corresponds to the “equal opportunity offender” defense often voiced since the inception of punk, the notion that everyone, regardless of their identity, is a potential subject of ridicule, critique, and derision. It is this logic, for instance, that for some explains the penchant of many early punks to wear swastikas for pure shock value, a tendency that has generated many interpretations.38
It’s also possible that the politics of rejection implicitly gesture towards a different future, a reconfiguration or destruction of existing categories. One Slash editorial voiced this potential of punk in general terms: “So what the hell does it all mean? Don’t really know. Means a big definite NO to a lot of things we had taken for granted, which is good. It means a big question mark as far as future directions, and that’s probably even better.”39 To this extent, the contextually specific evocations of “homos” and gay culture may be a rejection of existing formulations of sexuality as a means of forging new paths of radical queerness or new subjectivities. Perhaps some punks were, intentionally or otherwise, rejecting “the normalizing effects of all such progressive and inclusionary ambitions and to instead proclaim a queer radicalism located outside politics as conventionally conceived, perhaps even outside of politics.”40 In a similar sense to its stance toward music and fashion, in other words, punk’s central impulse was to explode and evade existing categories, including those tied to sexuality and the performance of gender.
Given the longstanding debates within punk about race, gender, and sexuality (and I have here only touched upon the last two), we might more productively speak of varying punk subjectivities rather than understand the phenomenon — or even a single scene — as somehow having a monolithic composition. It is for this reason that accounts that retrospectively either condemn or uncritically celebrate early LA punk tend to overlook this fact and the unruliness of these ongoing tensions. That scene, like most others, harbored problematic attitudes toward sexual difference, just as it contained the possibility of new ways of thinking about identity and community. What did remain consistent was the contested centrality of gender and sexuality to these formulations.
What ultimately defines punk politics, then, is less a stable set of characteristics or identifiable positions. Rather, it is the tacit agreement of scene participants on the terms, issues, and concepts upon which they may never agree but that nonetheless frame the basis on which competing definitions are fashioned. Put another way, there may be no consistent agreement within early LA punk about the place of sexuality, but it is undeniable that conceptions of sexuality, gender, and queerness were central to (contested) efforts to define punk. This consideration should be inextricable from any historical understanding of the scene. This also holds historiographic implications for its study. Namely, identifying this range of relationships to queerness directs us towards distinct connections, networks, and affinities relative to individual participants within a single scene, from Fear’s position in the national hardcore landscape of the 1980s to Nervous Gender’s place within the history of performance art in LA.41
Approaching punk politics of identity in this way also provides a framework through which to analyze other historical scenes and to parse the differences between them. Among its other unique attributes, for instance, one could typify the East LA scene of the late 1970s and early 1980s by debates about racial discrimination within punk and the relation of the scene to conceptions of Chicano identity and politics. Indeed, these debates have raged among scene participants for nearly forty years, with vehement disagreement about these issues paradoxically acting as some of the connective tissue holding the scene together.42 Along these lines, we might also consider both Riot Grrrl and queercore movements as more explicit interventions in longstanding contestation surrounding gender and sexuality, dynamics evident at punk’s very inception. And, even as recently as 2017, the foundational LA band the Dickies made national headlines when young protestors disrupted their Warped Tour performance, accusing them of sexism and misogyny. This action (and the band’s unfortunate response) reignited familiar debates about the definition of punk and its relationship to shock, social conventions, and gender, this time filtered through generational difference and the specter of “political correctness.”43
Punk’s grounding in the interrelated processes of distinction and contestation suggests that however else we might define punk, one of its key characteristics is both the difficulty of arriving at a consistent definition and the simultaneous attempt of various parties to do exactly that. The specific terms of these debates enable us to characterize and historicize local scenes, while gauging their relation to other categories of identity and cultural production. Punk’s apparent incoherence often makes it counter-intuitively coherent as an ongoing, site-specific arena of struggle over specific aesthetics, sounds, styles, cultural practices, identities, and politics. Debate, disagreement, and the punk propensity to argue are some of any historical scene’s key attributes. Accounting for these doesn’t necessarily let us mark consistent or singular positions, but instead permits us — as in the formative place of sexuality relative to LA punk — to identify the central issues around which a scene coheres, even if ultimately no one can agree on why.
- © 2018 by the International Association for the Study of Popular Music, U.S. Branch (IASPM-US). All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press’s Reprints and Permissions web page, www.ucpress.edu/journals.php?p=reprints.
Notes
Vol. 30 No. 1-2, March-June 2018
