Submission by A.M. Bowen, TNG contributor

A bunch of punk rockers in DC made a nearly ideal queer music scene–just not ideal enough for most queer people to take notice. Check our Bowen’s first entry here: Part 1

The D.C. punk scene is less centered now than it was even ten years ago. Fugazi hasn’t played a show since 2002, and several other big bands broke up around that time. But it’s still worth considering the scene’s accomplishment: a lot of people, queer and not, worked very hard, and against some violent people, to make an inclusive space—something resembling the punk that Bruce LaBruce and G.B. Jones wrote about. The city’s scene nurtured the Riot Grrrl movement, which, as Sara Marcus argues, largely rejected pat identification of sexuality.

Nevertheless, while the D.C. punk scene was open to queer people, it wasn’t particularly notable for its queer population or queer bands. Among the people interviewed for this article, a recurrent theme they spoke to was this lack of specific queer presence in the D.C. scene.

With regard to the Riot Grrrl era, Sara Marcus said, “I didn’t have a sense of the DC punk scene writ large as being particularly queer at all—neither in the period I was writing about nor during the time that I was a teenager in the scene.” The Riot Grrrl DC scene was not the queerest of the Riot Grrrl scenes, Marcus noted. Furthermore, she recalled, “I can’t remember any punk bands during my time in DC that made a thing about being queer at all. I don’t remember…bands based in DC that were queer or even explicitly feminist (although I’m sure all the musicians involved did consider themselves feminists and queer-‘friendly’).”

Jon Ginoli of the San Francisco-based band Pansy Division—itself part of a punk movement called “queercore”—looked upon the DC scene fondly. Ginoli recalled playing “a queer and queer-friendly rock show” with the Dischord band Circus Lupus before the 1993 March on Washington; he even referenced Fugazi’s album Repeater on the Pansy Division song “Smells Like Queer Spirit.” Ginoli said that the size of D.C. punk’s queer following “depends on if you slot Bratmobile and Bikini Kill as D.C. bands, or Olympia bands, cause they both had big queer followings.” When it came to Dischord, though, he said, “I’m not aware of any overtly queer bands on the label….”

Hugh McElroy’s band Black Eyes was not exactly a “queer” band, but several of the band’s songs discussed queer issues. McElroy nevertheless echoed the notion that DC wasn’t exactly a Mecca of queer punks, relative to other cities. “I didn’t know a lot of queer punk dudes in D.C.,” he said, “But I had a lot of queer punk friends by mail in Vermont, and Tennessee, and New York, and Philadelphia.”

Thus, there is the “no strong queer presence in the punk scene” theory, and then there’s the “mainstream queer people, especially gay male people, don’t like DC punk music” theory.

Ryan Little, of the latter-day band Tereu Tereu, argues, “D.C. punk’s a niche, regardless of your sexual identification. So it’s not like it’s this big thing that other people get, because they don’t. I don’t think D.C. punk fits in with a lot of aesthetic preferences of gay culture. It’s not anywhere near the typical aesthetic preferences of queer culture. It’s not dancey, it’s really aggressive. It’s the opposite of glamorous or fabulous or whatever. It just doesn’t fit in with what’s mainstream in queer culture according to what’s idealized.”

Thomas Redmond, of the extant band True Womanhood, echoes Little, in saying, ‘[O]ne of the unique things about D.C.’s take on [punk], was there was an anti-fun element to it for awhile. Any time I talk to people who are from New York or Philly, they’re like, ‘Oh man, D.C., you’re not allowed to move, you can’t dance.’

“For some people, music is fun and recreational…. It’s not necessarily your reason to exist. For some people, they’re just like, ‘I want to have a good time and go out and dance, and I can’t do that at these shows.’”

All of these theories make good sense, and they both tie in, in different ways, to the other prevalent theory among interviewees: that mainstream gay and lesbian cultures tend to be quite conservative, and given the reach of those cultures in Washington, DC, the vegetarian-to-vegan punks of Washington, DC have a huge barrier, if they’re to connect to masses of gays and lesbians.

Perhaps the simplest formulation of the queer-punk divide in Washington, D.C. is a quote from Caroline Ely of the mid-80s band Broken Siren, found in Mark Andersen’s Dance of Days. Said Ely, “The dykes wouldn’t come out to see us because we were too punk—and the punks wouldn’t come out because we were too dykey.” This statement is, like all the others, rooted in one person’s experience at one point in time, but it speaks to an historical conservatism on behalf of some lesbian and gay people in the city.

Ian MacKaye recalled that experiences of a friend spoke to a conservatism in the city in the early 90s: “I had a friend, a woman who moved here from the west coast, and she’s a gay punk rock person, and she said the gay scene here just was so straight it blew her mind. This was in the early 90s. The women were all government people, and everybody was, the lesbian world [had] no vegetarians. She just couldn’t believe it.”

Hugh McElroy said, focusing on mainstream gay male culture of today, “There’s a political passivity to a lot of mainstream gay culture that doesn’t encourage the kind of active engagement with life” that punk does. He continued, “There are plenty of people who are all up into dancing to Junior Vasquez at Cobalt every Saturday night who are also deeply awesome members of the community who do cool shit. But that strand of gay culture doesn’t…engage with those questions at all. It’s not necessarily its job to, but…that cultural space doesn’t necessarily engage those things that are really important to me and a lot of people in the punk scene who identify with some aspects of it, growing your own food, being vegan, caring about prisoners’ rights, and a whole host of other shit that gay politics doesn’t speak to. Again, isn’t necessarily its job.”

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