![]() (He also fronts Limp Wrist, an explicitly queer group formed in 1998, but they gig infrequently due to living in different cities and thus didn’t participate in the series.) He says Homocore wasn’t the first local effort to connect punk and queerness. Martin Sorrondeguy played more than his share of Homocore Chicago shows with his hardcore band Los Crudos. Brown and Freitas’s labors over the years helped carve out space for a multifaceted, intersectional punk scene that continues thriving today. ![]() By the mid-90s, Homocore organizations had started up in Detroit and Minneapolis, and in 1994 Homocore Chicago booked several shows in Manhattan clubs. Homocore was a way to say, “We’re here, we’re queer-and if you don’t like it, fuck you.” Over its nearly decade-long run in Chicago, it booked the likes of Vaginal Davis, Bikini Kill, Pansy Division, Tribe 8, the Lunachicks, God Is My Co-Pilot, and Heterocide at a variety of venues-not just Czar Bar but also the Fireside Bowl, the Empty Bottle, and DIY spots such as the Autonomous Zone. But being queer also meant having needs and ideas that mainstream institutions could never contain. Mainstream gay culture meant being open to assimilation: pushing popular culture’s boundaries just slightly to accommodate same-sex relationships. Same-sex marriage seemed an impossible fantasy, and there was little discussion of trans experiences-and even less about trans rights. states still outlawed consensual sodomy, the AIDS epidemic was piling up bodies faster and faster, and gays were barred from the military. Homocore Chicago hosted queer punk nights once or twice a month at its peak in the mid-90s-a time when most U.S. ![]() Jones, is also a filmmaker, and in 1985 she and director Bruce LaBruce founded influential Toronto queer punk zine J.D.s, which coined the word “homocore.” Brown and Freitas kept the series going till May 20, 2000, when it went out in a blaze of glory with Le Tigre’s Chicago debut at the Preston Bradley Center in Uptown-a show that not at all by coincidence also featured a screening of Jones’s short films. Homocore Chicago debuted on November 13, 1992, with a Czar Bar show by Toronto queercore band Fifth Column. It was the early 90s, and young queer punks Joanna Brown and Mark Freitas used those flyers to announce the kinds of shows they’d always dreamed of attending: rowdy all-ages rock nights where it was OK to be gay. Beneath that, they would add “CORE,” accompanied by a list of bands, a venue, and a date. “HOMO.” That’s what the flyers would say, in four-inch-tall letters-dozens of them, stapled to lampposts, telephone poles, and bulletin boards in and around the Wicker Park neighborhood. Best of Chicago 2022: Sports & Recreation.Click here to join the Reader Membership Community today! Close
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