Oh you don't know the shape im in!: March 2009

QUEERCORE is a cultural movement started by punks that were too gay/gays that were too punk. The term was coined in the mid-1980's in a zine called JD'S. This term is also often associated with the punk music genre homocore.

Vancouver needs a Queercore scene again!
Some folks have pointed out that music has little to do with sexual orientation and to develop a genre of music (or even a sub-genre like hardcore punk) around a particular sexual orientation or set of orientations, is foolish. Perhaps, in a perfect world I would agree that music should be about music and not about other things. But we don't live in a perfect world. We live in a white supremacist, homophobic, patriarchal world. So if we can use music to help confront those structures of oppression, let's do it! And besides punk rock, like rock n' roll, has always been about sex!
In the early 1990s that Riot Grrrl emerged. "In many ways the angry- girl genre owes its existence to punk homocore 'zines.." writes Emily White in Rock She Wrote. It follows that many of the participants, their zines, and bands like Excuse 17 were involved in both movements ^[10]. Along with Outpunk, independent record labels such as Alternative Tentacles, K Records, Kill Rock Stars, Lookout! Records, Yoyo Recordings and Candy Ass Records also supported and released material by queercore artists but in the mid to late 1990s several other small labels, alongside Outpunk, sprung up solely devoted to queercore.

Donna Dresch's zine Chainsaw became a record label as well, and began to release recordings by newer bands such as The Need, The Third Sex and Longstocking. Heartcore Records is another label, whose bands have included The Little Deaths, Addicted2Fiction, Crowns On 45 and Ninja Death Squad. These bands, many of whom are no longer together, constituted the 'second wave' of queercore bands which also included IAMLoved, Subtonix, Best Revenge and Fagatron from the U.S., Skinjobs from Canada and, from Italy, Pussy Face. Of these early queercore labels, Chainsaw and Heartcore are still active and are still releasing new material.

By the mid 1990s, zines in the U.S., such as Marilyn Medusa, and in Canada, This Is The Salivation Army, began to link queercore with a pagan sensibility; at the same time, other strands in queercore began to link themselves with Riot Grrrl, and still others with anarchism. Mainstream media coverage intensified when Pansy Division toured the U.S. with Green Day, but nonetheless, queercore remained a grassroots movement in flux. In 1996 in San Francisco, the Dirtybird 96 Queercore Festival presaged other queer music gatherings which occurred in the following decade. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, DUMBA provided an ongoing venue in New York for queercore bands, continuing in the path of Homocore Chicago and leading the way for other, similar clubs to come in the 2000s.

Check out these Chainsaw artists:

I'm going to try and do my Queercore part May 12th at the Cobalt, a very special Queercore BOOSH! Featuring FORSORCERERS www.myspace.com/forsorcerers (ex dresch members and Queercore Portland)
LOVERS myspace.com/loverstheband and theirwebsite www.holdmyclothes.com
with JUDY www.myspace.com/judyonjudy
Hopefully the local support will be 99 PROBLEMS?!! Im waiting to confirm them still.

If you want to get more involved in the Queercore scene you can contact: www.myspace.com/queercore3