Gimme Something Better (62 page)

Billie Joe Armstrong:
I was standing there like a deer caught in the headlights, and these two girls came up to me in the middle of the mayhem and asked, “Do you have any records for sale?” Like, are you kidding me?

James Washburn:
Everybody was going full blast. The punks were like, “Skinheads out! Skinheads out!” We got ’em through into this lobby, and there was the front door after the lobby. Everybody was yellin’ back and forth, and once we got to the front door, they stopped. I was like, “Fuck this, they are goin’ out the door!” and I just started pushing my way through people, and there was a big skinhead, staring me right in the face. I reached back to punch him and saw out of my peripheral vision another skinhead, his arm cocked back to punch me. So I kept my eyes focused on the biggest skinhead, crossed my punch sideways and hit the other guy, knocked him out. That got the attention of the skinhead I’d locked eyes on. That made him stutter for a second, so then I just started whaling on him.

Billie Joe Armstrong:
James Washburn threw one guy to the ground, turned around, punched another guy in the face, turned around again and threw a chair over this one guy’s head. It was like a scene out of a Chuck Norris movie. James Washburn fighting all these skinheads single-handedly. This was one of our guys from Pinole.

Aaron Cometbus:
You’ve got to give credit where credit is due. It was Econochrist that made the difference. Those guys knew how to fight! A well-oiled machine. Tighter offstage brawling than they’d been onstage playing.

James Washburn:
Eggplant threw a garbage can and hit a skinhead girl in the face and knocked her out. We got ’em out the front door, and then they took off. We knew they weren’t gonna take a beating and just leave. They were gonna fuckin’ come back.

Ben Sizemore:
And then we’re like, “Let’s get out of town, this is their town.” So we all packed our shit up and tried to get out of there as quick as possible.

Billie Joe Armstrong:
When the cops showed up, we said, “You have to stay because these guys are gonna come back again.” And the cops were like, “Well, you all look fine.” And they left us there. Richard the Roadie: We started breaking the show down, everybody was loading out. I was talking to somebody, and I saw these little things, like way out in the field, coming towards us.

Billie Joe Armstrong:
Everybody had left, but for some reason we were lagging, loading out our equipment. So it was just us and a car of people from Pinole.

James Washburn:
John Kiffmeyer was going super slow loadin’ his shit. Like, “Dude, c’mon, they’re gonna come back!” We heard this
clump clump clump clump!
The sound of boots. We looked over and probably 15 skinheads were running down the street with chains, bats, knives, everything.

Billie Joe Armstrong:
Oh fuck, it was one of the scariest things I’ve seen. These guys were monster big.

James Washburn:
I remember Mike just yelling “Run!” and I started running. Man, I musta been outta shape or something because I was running as fast as I could, full adrenaline pumping, and Mike Dirnt was running in front of me. By the time I was out of breath and couldn’t run anymore, he was out of sight. I have never seen him move that fast in my entire life. Mike was running so fast because he heard
my
boots and he thought I was the skinhead. He was fuckin’ gone. I ran up onto somebody’s porch.

Richard the Roadie:
We locked the hall down. Billie Joe got stuck outside. One of ’em got inside Al’s Volkswagen van and took the keys. The skinhead got in the van with a knife, and I remember seeing Billie jump out the side window, like he got shot out of a cannon.

Billie Joe Armstrong:
I got into the driver’s side and one of these guys was grabbing my shirt through the passenger’s side. I thought I was gonna die so I dove out of the window, and he ripped my shirt right off my back.

Sergie Loobkoff:
He opened his driver’s door to get in the car, and then opened the passenger door, and he ran through his car. And the other guy was chasing him through his car. It was like this cartoon.

Billie Joe Armstrong:
I just started running, and I could see silhouettes of all these punk rock kids running as fast as they could. The skinheads slashed our tires.

Martin Brohm:
Some girl got beat the fuck down. Like five-on-one kind of thing.

Richard the Roadie:
This woman Sophie, who knew some of ’em, just got the shit beat out of her with a baseball bat.

James Washburn:
After things had calmed down and we went back, every single window was smashed out of Joey Perales’ station wagon. Joey had to drive home very cold.

Billie Joe Armstrong:
Coming home, I think there was some sort of solidarity that came out of that. The scene had been a little disconnected, but everybody knew each other a little better after that, and became a little bit tighter.

Jello Biafra:
In the very early Mabuhay scene, many people were openly gay and it wasn’t a big deal. Theater was part of what you did. You weren’t supposed to cop a rock star attitude, but when you were onstage you better be a fucking star. And offstage you were just a regular person in the community like everybody else. That was the way it worked.

When punk morphed into hardcore, and
MRR
got really doctrinaire and Gilman Street became very anti-rock star, people became more strict about what music they wanted and how they wanted people to look. It took away some of the flash. People were less likely to be outrageous for the sake of being outrageous. Theater kinda got stamped out.

Matt Wobensmith:
AIDS took its toll, and a lot of people were dying, and it really affected the San Francisco artistic landscape. But there were still little pockets of stuff going on. One of the things that was interesting in San Francisco was actually right down the street from my apartment.

I had just turned 19 and I couldn’t go to bars. The only place that would let me in was this place called the Crystal Pistol. It was called Klubstitute, and it was the home for this drag-punk-weird art-performance-literary-cabaret spoken-word thing, run by the Popstitutes. Diet Popstitute, Reemix Popstitute, the whole bunch. It was a freak show. I could watch weird performance art and see a punk band. All kinds of drag, just crazy shit.

Jello Biafra:
In a way
Homocore
and Diet Popstitute and Klubstitute helped rebuild some of that sense of fun that had been missing from punk and hardcore. It even challenged a newer generation’s attitudes towards different sexual orientations and practices. Shawn Ford: Tom Jennings started up
Homocore
towards the end of my time at the first Shred of Dignity warehouse.

Richard the Roadie:
Tom was a punk and he was gay, but at that point those worlds didn’t really intersect.

Matt Wobensmith:
Homocore
was one of the original big gay punk zines from the late ’80s.

Tom Jennings:
I was the editor, along with Deke Motif Nihilson, from 1988 to 1991. We kinda messed with a queer/punk hybrid thing, based upon anarchist principles, discordian silliness, distaste for de facto separatist gay culture, and a burning desire to get laid. We also put on a bunch of
Homocore
shows. It was sort of a big deal for awhile, now no one remembers it.

Shawn Ford:
Tom got really involved with the Radical Faeries movement, and a lot of Faeries started coming through the warehouse. With the Radical Faeries and
Homocore
, the gay punk identity became a lot more solid and recognizable as a distinct part of the punk community.

Ian MacKaye:
Fugazi did a lot of shows with
Homocore
. These people were deeply creative, deeply visionary.

Tom Jennings:
We used the “stone soup” method of organizing events. We worked with absolutely minimal tools and components, silkscreening T-shirts with cardboard stencils and spray paint. We have the honor of having the last actual punk show at the original Deaf Club.

 

 

Lynn Breedlove:
The whole thing about San Francisco—with there being dykes and fags in punk—is we all felt this void. We’d go to straight punk shows and we’d be the only queers there. All of the other queers would be down at Amelia’s having just finished playin’ softball, rockin’ out to “Push it! Push it real good!” We’d be listening to KALX on the way to the bars, and then we’d have to listen to disco to hang out with other queers. It was terrible. Matt Wobensmith is a big fag and he’s a punk. He’s all tatted up. He felt that alienation.

Matt Wobensmith:
In 1991 I started working for
Maximum RocknRoll
. I was also helping with the last issue of
Homocore
. And I met this crazy punker kid named Jux at Gilman. Bisexual, according to him. Really fun-loving and filled with grand ideas. I made a fast friend.

At the time, there were all these dudes moshing at shows, this little macho thing going on. So Jux and I came up with this idea to subvert it by square-dancing in the pit. Or by doing ballet, or interpretive dance, or same-sex dancing. We would do that at Gilman.

If someone got really really aggro and violent, we would go hug them. We called ourselves the Huggy Crew for awhile. It wasn’t just us, lots of people started doing it. Then one time, when Jux and I were dancing or doing something really silly, this kid ran out of the pit screaming, “There’s a faggot in the pit! There’s a faggot in the pit!” We thought that was the funniest thing, so we made a record about it.

There’s a Faggot in the Pit
was an exploration of gender roles in punk. Most of the bands on it were not gay bands, but they were supportive East Bay bands. That spawned me doing gay punk records with Outpunk, from 1992 onwards.

Tom Jennings:
There’s a Faggot in the Pit
was the first local queer punk 7-inch I remember seeing in San Fran.

Matt Wobensmith:
Outpunk put out 15 or so records, and seven issues of a zine. The first Outpunk record I did was
There’s a Dyke in the Pit
, ’cause I figured we ought to have a companion record.

I did a queer issue of
Maximum
in early ’92. Tim let me be a guest editor. I did this whole thing with articles on Tribe 8 and Pansy Division, etc., etc. And the
Maximum RocknRoll
-Epicenter world were very supportive of me doing my label and doing gay punk stuff. As I got older and a little bit more evolved, I got hugely into the riot grrl movement that was happening in the early ’90s. Bikini Kill was a fucking life-changing event for me.

Davey Havok:
The whole riot grrl movement was the Rosie the Riveter version of punk rock. It’s something a lot of people don’t know about. If you weren’t there to see it, it kind of disappeared. But people talked about it a lot back then. I remember being frightened to go to Bikini Kill shows as a young, small, frail boy. ’Cause the girls were scary. Kathleen Hannah saying, “You boys, get the fuck back! This isn’t for you.” The Bay Area scene was very pro-female and anti-misogynistic. They went very far left in that scene.

Dave Dictor:
It was really the natural flow of things. You know, 75 different scenes came out of the punk hardcore scene—everything from dykecore and homocore to eventually riot grrl and everything that came out of that.

Matt Wobensmith:
I noticed that Tim and
MRR
was really bristling under this whole new wave of feminism. They weren’t covering it. I started writing a little bit about it in my fanzine. I challenged the machinations of the punk scene. In some cases, I was just trying to unearth the hidden history of homosexuality in punk and hardcore. You find out about Gary Floyd from the Dicks, and Biscuit from the Big Boys, and Karen Allman from the Arizona band Conflict. Little factoids here and there. It seems inconsequential, but it was a big deal when you found out that the lyrics were gay.

Gary Floyd:
I got interviewed one time by this big gay journalist and he said, “You’re openly gay but your songs are not openly gay.” My songs are gender-free. Why would I let anyone dictate my art?

Matt Wobensmith:
There was a lot of animosity because I was young, bushy-tailed and occasionally naive. Which worked to my benefit sometimes, but you’re dealing with a lot of people who are jaded and older and who want to kill your enthusiasm. So I got a reputation of being somebody who was too PC and humorless. But I felt Tim was trying to control the punk scene. I believed in what I wrote and I stood by it. There were a lot of hard things that needed to be said. Tim was spotted at Epicenter hiding my magazines behind the racks so no one could find them.

When riot grrl started getting media press, so did queer punk. I was often asked by reporters, “Can you send us pictures of gay punk clubs and gay punk mosh pits?” I explained, “You don’t really understand.
Outpunk
is literally just me sitting at home listening to a record, writing a zine, and putting it in the mail.”

Michael Hoffman:
My first Gilman show was Friday, March 25th, 1994. It was Tribe 8, Pansy Division, Mukiliteo Fairies from Olympia. It was an Outpunk Records showcase, all queer bands. It was really amazing. And at the end of the show the lead singer of Tribe 8 pulled out her bloody tampon and flung it into the crowd. I was 13. That was the most incredible thing I’d ever seen.

Lynn Breedlove:
I like to skeev people out and make ’em twitchy, so I just whipped it out and kind of twirled it around my head a couple of times and
whip!
It did seem to me like it skipped over people’s heads—
thwp, thwp, thwp
—like a stone skippin’ on the beach. It was a good solid tampon, though, probably o.b. It wasn’t going to splash around.

Gary Floyd:
I really, really loved Tribe 8.