everyone's not welcome

from MRR #321 FEB 2010

I work with this 18 year old girl from Mobile, Alabama. She moved to New Orleans a year ago, looking for a more open-minded place to exist. We sling coffee together, bitch about customers and talk about feminism and music. She told me that when she was younger, her older sister played her Hole and then from there she learned about Bikini Kill and started to teach herself about feminism. She told me the first guitar riff she ever learned was "I Like Fucking." Since I set up shows in New Orleans for queer/girl bands, I've been trying really hard to get her to come. After the last one passed and she didn't show up, I had to know why. I kinda had the feeling that she wasn't going because she felt like she wouldn't feel comfortable, so I just straight up asked her and she said, "Yeah, I don't really look like a punk anymore and I haven't been to a show in so long..."

It bummed me out because in my mind, or in theory, someone like her should be easily attracted to that type of show. She's young, white, straight and likes punk rock but somehow she still feels alienated. Then I started thinking about my friend and bandmate, this girl Takiaya, who's black, 20 years old, just found out about punk a little over a year ago and is traveling around the country, playing in bands, meeting all these people and just being a completely free & beautiful person. Activists and punks are always talking about trying to make spaces "inclusive". I've talked that kind of talk myself. But in reality, you really do just have to work with what you have as far a community goes. If you're punk, you just are, and if you're not, you're not. I don't think you can really recruit people into this shit unless they were headed in this direction already. We can make all kinds of guesses & judgments about why that is, but it just seems to be a fact of life. If you're black and you're attracted to punk rock, you're not gonna be like, "Oh, I would be punk but there's waaay too many white people." You're just gonna roll with it, for better or for worse, at lease for a while.

My whole thing with No More Fiction Shows was to create this utopian punk scene in New Orleans where you look around and you see all different types of people. Not just all queer people of color or whatever, but all kinds of different backgrounds and experiences. It's something I do for purely selfish reasons. I'm a black queer woman in a band. I really don't wanna have to look out at my audience and see a bunch of straight, white men. So booking shows for bands with women & queers in them really does help bring more women & queers to shows. It's just that the crowd remains overwhelmingly white which isn't ideal, but I understand that that's just the nature of the beast. (The beast is white!)

The one thing I will say truly makes a difference are the bands themselves. There's this picture someone took of my old band, New Bloods, playing a show at this bike shop in San Francisco and like everyone in the audience is brown & queer (or at least everyone you can see in the picture). Granted, they were all me & Adee's friends (haha) but still that was a magic moment for me. And it made me realize, if you want to see yourself represented, you have to represent yourself. White ladies love to watch other white ladies play music. Same goes for everyone else. Black people, Asian people, fat people, people in wheelchairs, gay people (especially gay people.) As long as the majority of bands and zine writers and other culture-creators are white, the scene's gonna be real white. But just like how riot girl was kind of a niche in punk rock and not at all representative of the majority of punk rock at the time, I feel like we're making our own niche now. Brown kids, queer kids, white kids who are sick of the same old scene.

Sometimes I feel like I'm being a little bit disingenuous when I write "No More Fiction: shows for ladies & queers," because those shows truly are for everyone, not just ladies & queers, and I'm not really interested in an all-anything scene anymore. But I've found that there is a certain power in putting those words on a flyer. The whole vibe of the show ends up different. The kinds of dudes that show up tend not to be douchebags. It puts a little bit of meaning into the fun. It's not empty, like just going to a bar or something. I think that people who are truly down, don't see it as exclusive to say "a zine for black punks" or "shows for girls & queers." Most people get it and I feel like most people benefit from it.

(I don't mind admitting that this is yet another column encouraging brown kids, queer kids, disabled kids, ladies, everyone on the margins, to step up and participate.)

No More Fiction Shows: shows for ladies and queers ONLY!
nomorefiction@gmail.com