“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. Beneath that, they would add “CORE,” accompanied by a list of bands, a venue, and a date. 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.
Martin Sorrondeguy played more than his share of Homocore Chicago shows with his hardcore band Los Crudos. (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. “Historically, in America, the early punk clubs were actually gay bars,” he explains. In Chicago specifically, he recalls a gallery from the 80s called Hook Torture, run by Chris Kellner—later a Homocore volunteer and now vice president of performance-art space Defibrillator, which hosted a 25th-anniversary Homocore retrospective in late 2017. Hook Torture played harder, more eclectic music than most gay bars, and since it wasn’t actually a bar, it wasn’t regulated as closely when it came to things like age restrictions and nudity.
It’d be years before Brown, 53, would come to terms with her sexuality—in the late 80s, she began identifying as queer, and in the early 90s she decided she was a lesbian. As she figured out the boundaries of her identity, punk gave her reference points for many of her political, social, and sexual desires. She spent her free time at a record store, and she developed a rich network of pen pals through punk zines. In the mid-80s, when she visited friends in a Chicago anarchist collective, she knew it was time to relocate. The social scene she found here was influenced by exciting music and progressive politics, so after a year at a local college, she dropped out—she guesses it was 1986 and that she was 18 or 19—and moved to Chicago.
Sorrondeguy recalls, “Mark called us and goes, ‘Now I know now none of you are gay, but . . . ‘ And I go, ‘Well, how do you know none of us are gay? Mark, I’m gay.’”
In 2008, for instance, the city hosted an iteration of the Combating Latent Inequality Together Fest—better known as CLIT Fest. A women-centered DIY event that also spoke to intersecting concerns such as homophobia and racism, CLIT Fest started in Minneapolis in 2004. It invited other cities to take up its banner, and there have been CLIT Fests in almost a dozen cities coast-to-coast, from Brunswick, New Jersey, to Portland, Oregon.
“I personally felt like we were doing the white version of what Black and Brown is doing,” she says, “and that approach felt unnecessary. The reality is, it’s not that hard to be a white gay person in Chicago. Let’s reflect on that.”
