Queercore: How To Punk a Revolution

Dissatisfaction with "bourgeois" aspects of the gay rights movement and machismo in the 1980s punk scene triggered the emergence of a movement known as queercore, a portmanteau of queer and hardcore. Queercore: How to Punk a Revolution documents the development of this anarchistic, alternative punk/gay culture. It embraced the DIY attitude of punk: making fanzines, distributing your own records, inventing and expressing your own aesthetic, and addressing revolutionary gay politics in homemade magazines and experimental films. Started by Bruce LaBruce and G. B. Jones in Toronto, the movement spread to San Francisco, where following the model of the magazine J.D.s, the magazine Homocore was launched. The documentary is made up of the partly animated content of these magazines, experimental films from the 1980s and 1990s, interviews with the people involved, and archive footage of bands such as Pansy Division, A.S.F. and Tribe 8. It also questions whether the queer community has become too mainstream—shouldn’t it be reemphasizing its outsider position?