QUEERCORE: HOW TO PUNK A REVOLUTION

A delightfully ragged documentary both documents a historical cultural movement in the LGBTQI+ community, and serves as motivation to create more inclusive, diverse spaces today. What happens when the community you need is not the community you have? Tell yourself it exists over and over, make fan zines that fabricate hordes of queer punk revolutionaries, create subversive movies, and distribute those movies widely – and slowly, the community you’ve fabricated might become a real and radical heartbeat that spreads internationally. This is the story that Queercore: How to Punk a Revolution tells, from the start of a pseudo-movement in the mid-1980s, intended to punk the punk scene, to the widespread rise of artists who used radical queer identity to push back equally against gay assimilation and homophobic punk culture. Interviewees discuss homophobia, gender, feminism, AIDS, assimilation, sex, and, of course, art. The extensive participant list includes Bruce LaBruce, John Waters, Justin Vivian Bond, Penny Arcade, Kathleen Hanna, Kim Gordon, and many more. Encompassing a breadth of history and influence, though interviews, clips from movies, zines, concerts, and actions iconic to the movement, steeped in the radical queer, anti-capitalist, DIY, and give-no-fucks approach as queercore itself, the movie reveals the perspectives and experiences of bands, moviemakers, writers, and other outsiders, taking audiences inside the creation of the community – and art – so desperately needed by the same queers it encompassed. (Sophia Lanza-Weil)