Queercore: The distinct identities of subculture

Several subcultural allegiances can intersect in queercore, as writer, sex worker, full-time goth, and sometime drag king Danielle Willis makes clear: " [Queercore] is really diverse. There are goth kids, straights, punks, bisexuals, rockers, fags, dykes. Look at me, I'm a female who dresses like a rocker boy so I can go out with transvestites" (interview in Cooper, "Johnny Noxzema" 33). Willis cannily envisages the moment when queer will lose its "core" identity and become, in the words of Garbage, "nothing special": "But I'm afraid the scene's becoming too homogenized. I guess that was inevitable, though, because most people are conformists. I'd say there's maybe another two to five years of vitality in Queercore, then we'll see what's next. It's already starting to produce clones. Ugh" (33). (This was in 1992!) The fear of "clones" taking over the sphere of queercore is frequently reiterated, and indicates how jealously guarded subcultural distinction can be. Jena von Brucker and G.B. Jones (frontwoman of the band Fifth Column) declare, "we are angry with those awful people at Queer Nation . . . They stole our word. While there is [sic] a few o.k. individuals at Queer Nation, they are for the most part clones in queer's clothing" (BIMBOX n.p.). In a discussion with Johnny Noxzema, Jones twists Warhol's famous bon mot to proclaim, "In the future everyone will be queer for 15 minutes" ("Naked Lunch" 244). Bruce LaBruce, one-time associate of Jones and Von Brucker, serves notice of the definitive end of queercore: "'Queercore' is dead. I know, because I say it is" (LaBruce 186) and adds, "No, I'm not `queer,' and I don't know why they had to ruin a perfectly good word, either. They are so gay" (194).

"Queercore" may then have had the function that Pierre Bourdieu attributes to avant-gardes, which is not to say that queer-punk emerged solely as a variant on an ongoing and uninterrupted Western avant-garde tradition. (For examples of the latter, see Marcus, Berlant and Freeman 221, and Viegener, "Revolting" 31). Bourdieu details how the history of the field of cultural production is determined by struggles over difference and distinction: On one side are the dominant figures, who want continuity, identity, reproduction; on the other, the newcomers, who seek discontinuity, rupture, difference, revolution. To "make one's name" [faire date] means making one's mark, achieving recognition (in both senses) of one's difference from other producers, especially the most consecrated of them; at the same time, it means creating a new position beyond the positions presently occupied, ahead of them, in the avant-garde. To introduce difference is to produce time. (106) Queercore introduced or created such a new position ahead of "consecrated" (Bourdieu 78) lesbian and gay cultural and political monopolies, and as evidence of the struggle which Bourdieu outlines, "queer" has been almost universally understood as a generational issue. From Linnea Due, who notes-as apparent fact-in her work with Queer Nation that "many of the QNers were terrified of older gays" (xv) to Judith Butler, who describes the adherents of the term "queer" no fewer than three times in as many pages as "younger" and particularly a "younger generation" (228-30), there has been almost no reflection on what such an assumption of youth might mean, other than the banalities of biological age. This is why we believe that subcultural theory, which has long interrogated "youth" as "metaphor for social change" (Clarke, Hall, Jefferson, and Roberts 17), is so useful.3 Queercore was not, in effect, about the chronological ages of its adherents or opponents; rather, it revealed the "social ageing" (Bourdieu 59) that accompanied the ossification of a lesbian and gay public sphere into what BIMBOX denounces as "a generation of misogynist capitalist swine clones and half-baked numskull [sic] granola feminists over 30," "a complex network of selfish, over-educated, self-appointed rich people overseeing a vast fake-democratic lesbian and gay multi-national bureaucracy that dictates how we think, dress, act and fuck" (n.p.).