Hardcore Pride

As this year's LGBTQ+ Pride Month comes to an end, it's a good time to consider: The concepts of "pride" as a hardcore value and "pride" as a tool for queer liberation are more related than you think.

Limp Wrist, live at Damaged City Festival. The Black Cat. Washington D.C. April 7, 2018. Photo by Farrah Skeiky.

I.

June is also LGBTQ+ Pride Month, and as we approach its conclusion, I’ve been reflecting. Specifically, I’ve been thinking about the way I speak about my queerness in the context of my lifelong participation in the hardcore scene, and how I tend to focus on the work that still needs to be done and the struggle that goes along with being an out gay man—both inside and outside of the hardcore bubble. Make no mistake: It is a struggle. And those things do need to be talked about. As a matter of instinct, queer people have historically trained ourselves to be always on alert, and we are habituated to calculate the safety of being openly queer from moment to moment, multiple times a day. Unless you are a member of the LGBTQ+ community, and even if you are one of our greatest allies, it can be difficult to understand how living with this permanent loop of risk assessments running through your head can be thoroughly exhausting. But when you consider that a record 510 anti-LGBTQ+ pieces of legislation were introduced in this country last year alone—at least 75 of which have passed—there is simply no way of dancing around the reality that there are droves of horribly misguided people who see my very existence as a threat. And for as much as I want to believe that the hardcore scene is devoid of such foolishness, I also know that our community is not sealed in a vacuum. I know that there are people, maybe even people who read this zine or listen to my music, who would just rather I shut up about being gay. That’s not going to happen.

But if I’m going to be self-critical, perhaps this focus on only one aspect of my experience is too easy. Maybe there is another story to be told about how hardcore slowly, but surely, actually taught me to be my queerest self. And maybe that story could work towards a more joyful conclusion—because there is joy in being a queer hardcore kid, and because joy is an act of resistance, as they say. So this year, to commemorate Pride, I wanted to at least begin telling that story. In order to get there, though, I must first answer for myself the same question I ask of so many others in my interviews: What fucked you up to be here?

Three-quarters of Texas is the Reason. Within a year, the band would be no more and I would finally come out. Summer 1996. Photo by Josh Wildman.

II.

It should go without saying that nothing fucks you up more than believing you were born sick. By the time I began to suspect I was gay—and I’d argue I already knew when I was in elementary school—the more clinical term for my so-called condition, “homosexuality,” was widely accepted as a mental illness. It had been described as such by the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders since the 1960s, and even though members of the American Psychiatric Association voted to remove this classification in 1973, it somehow remained on the books until 1987. To provide a sense of scale to this, that means I’ve actually been a hardcore kid for longer than homosexuality has been free of being pathologized by the medical establishment. This is not ancient history I’m talking about.

It should also go without saying that the queer people I saw in the 1980s, when I was coming of age, were fighting for their lives—both politically, up against Ronald Reagan and an Evangelical culture-war coalition called the Moral Majority, and literally, up against AIDS, which failed to merit even a cursory acknowledgement from the Oval Office until 1987. Indeed, when Reagan’s second term ended only a year later, there were already 89,343 people dead in America—most of them gay men—and still no significant plans to address it. So let’s amend that first thought: Nothing fucks you up more than believing you were born sick and then watching people who you know are just like you being allowed to die without so much as an intervention or even feigned concern. The message they sent—that queer lives were worthless, that my life was worthless—came in loud and clear. By the time I found punk, I had already spent valuable years of my life feeling broken and ill and utterly expendable. I truly hated myself.

Hardcore didn’t exactly “fix” that right away. There would be another ten years of self-conflict after my first show before I could finally come out and begin my journey towards living a more authentic life. What hardcore did do was keep me alive long enough until I could muster up the strength to love myself. These are the things I feel like I need to talk about more, because these are most likely the same ways hardcore kept you alive as well. Hardcore empowered me to embrace my “freak” status on the outside, even when I was unable to share everything that was going on with me on the inside. (Tim Armstrong from Rancid once told me that the reason he tattooed his entire head was because he’d always felt like people already looked at him like he had a tattooed head and I felt that.) I was also vitalized by the current of this community’s insistence on the value of difference and scourge of sameness. Lyrics like, “I care too much to play along, I’m not like you!” may have hit me differently than it did most others, but it hit me just the same. Meaning that, even when I wasn’t yet ready to come out, I marked my differences from the outside world in other ways—by, say, being straight-edge or going vegetarian—and I allowed myself to feel pride for those nontraditional ways of being, in spite of the shame I felt for my secret. It helped.

More interestingly, though, I’ve come to realize that almost every understanding I ever had about the meaning of “pride” as a young person came from a hardcore song. There were already so many hardcore songs about “being proud of what I am, what I say, and what I do” or having a “rebirth of hardcore pride.” It was because of hardcore that I internalized the idea that being proud of who you are, whoever you are, is an instrument of survival. That self-worth, and not nihilism, is a punk principle. Someday, I thought, someone would sing a song about being proud to be queer and it would be hardcore as fuck.

Brian Cook, live with Botch. Roadrunner. Boston, MA. November 17, 2023. Photo by Adam Tanner.

III.

When Botch played what was supposed to be their final show on June 15, 2002, you could have probably counted the number of out queer kids who played in wildly aggressive hardcore bands on one hand. Or maybe even only a few fingers. Botch bassist Brian Cook was certainly the most visible, if not also the most bold. But it wasn’t always that way.

I’m a little older than Brian, but we both started coming out to people in the hardcore scene at around the same time, in 1997. By that point, there were precedents. I don’t pretend to have knocked down any massive walls, and I don’t suppose that Brian sees himself in that way either. And yet coming out in the scene was still a major event back then. Sometimes, hardcore kids like to overemphasize the idea that “it’s no big deal” when you come out to them—but that’s their perspective, not ours. For me to get to a point where I could say the words “I’m gay” out loud, that was a process that took more than two decades of my life to get to. For me to get to the point where I could say the words “I’m gay” out loud with all the matter-of-factness of saying “I’m right-handed,” that took even longer. Being part of a scene that favors the socially discarded doesn’t immediately diminish a lifetime’s worth of fear. But it does provide a kind of emotional scaffolding that, for many of us, can become a lifeline that makes a queer hardcore future possible. For Brian, that scaffolding was a gift that he hopes to preserve for future generations.

“You know, I was a late bloomer,” he tells me, during a conversation that will be published in full on Thursday. “It was a lot of just not understanding, and a lot of fear of coming out, because it was just so taboo and different in the early nineties—especially coming from my [religious] upbringing. But I think punk was really important because records like Minor Threat or Dead Kennedys or Operation Ivy—or any of that stuff you first hear when you’re getting into punk music that has a very strong message throughout it—the recurring message is: No. The world around you is wrong. You being yourself is the good thing. Having to change who you are to please other people is the bad thing. And having that notion ingrained in me over and over again was the reason punk meant so much to me. I think, subconsciously, that’s why I’ve kept at it. Because I feel like it continues to provide a space for people to be themselves.”

Over the years, I’ve made similar assessments about my own ongoing participation and commitment to hardcore. But a sense of indebtedness to the community is only one of the reasons that I feel compelled to be so vocal about improving the experience of queer hardcore kids who came to this scene as a refuge from the hostility of a world that rejected us. More crucially, I want to be here to protect the ideas that kept me alive so that they remain available and readily accessible for the next young and at-risk queer kid who needs them.

IV. 

That day, when someone would write a hardcore song “about being proud to be queer and it would be hardcore as fuck,” came much faster than I ever thought it would—in 1990, to be exact, when GO! released “A Day To Fight For.” It wouldn’t be the last one, either. Limp Wrist’s “Brotherhood,” just one among dozens of queer songs in their catalog, is an unambiguous call for LGBTQ+ hardcore kids to step out of the shadows with pride, while G.L.O.S.S.’s eponymous anthem, subtitled “We’re From the Future,” is likely to remain the most brutal queer and trans hardcore rage track ever written. We are, indeed, living in the future.

Queer hardcore joy is knowing these songs finally exist, and knowing that queer and straight people alike can love them, validating the faith I had as a kid that I could grow up with the hardcore scene and that this scene could, in turn, grow up with me. Queer hardcore joy, in my unique experience, is living long enough to go from being deathly afraid to come out in one band to joining an already popular band with another queer member 25 years later—and not having anyone think twice about the fact that there are two gay men in the lineup. Queer hardcore joy is also being in a relationship with the same man for over eighteen years after discovering that he used to go to the Anthrax in Connecticut and still owns a Kraut 7-inch. I never thought such joy would be possible for me.

Queer hardcore joy is also being able to write about gay pride to a subscriber list of thousands of fellow hardcore kids, and feeling confident—if not certain—that the overwhelming majority of you can relate to the very queer feeling of finally being able to say “fuck you” to everyone who ever tried to tell you who you are so that you could set yourself free. In the ongoing debate over what is or isn’t hardcore, I think we can all agree that knowing who you are and being able to tell your own story is the very definition of hardcore pride. In fact, it might not actually get more hardcore than that.

Coming on Thursday to Anti-Matter: A conversation with Brian Cook of Botch.

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