History of the term "punk" as used with music, part 3 of 3 - 1970s

This is an edited version of the second part of an article on the history of the term "punk" as related to music. You can read the first part here.

The Rotten Etymology of Punk (Part 2 of 3)

by J.P. Robinson

Bangs’ description was undoubtedly important. For NME’s Nick Kent, “the whole concept of punk was his.” For Clinton Heylin, in From The Velvets To The Voidoids: The Birth of American Punk Rock, Bangs was “the godfather of punk journalism.” In 1975, Bangs wrote to a friend, admitting that he had “influenced a certain miniscule subculture of teenage misfits with rock’n’roll fanaticism and sometimes literary aspirations, who like to think of themselves as ‘punks.’”

However, in The MC5 review, Bangs didn’t use “punk” to call to mind a new spirit of rock’n’roll, but an old spirit of ill-informed journalistic excess... The Rolling Stone hype irritated him, and he paraphrased the earlier article, dismissing it with what would become his trademark sarcasm: “never mind that they came on like a bunch of sixteen-year-old punks on a meth power trip — these boys, so the line ran, could play their guitars like John Coltrane and Pharoah Sanders played sax!”

The word also seemed to conjure up Bangs’ own life. He was still then working on an autobiographical novel that he had begun in his teens, which he called Drug Punk... He discussed passages from Hunter S. Thompson’s Hells Angels, which had used the word “punk” frequently, with the San Diego Hells Angels chapter who lived next door. His friend Robert Houghton remembered that We’re Only In It For The Money, with ‘Flower Punk,’ was one of their favourite records of 1968....

After that MC5 review, through 1970, “punk” became popular. critics said Jim Morrison had a “street punk-choir boy voice,” or that The Rolling Stones had “a punk craftiness and sneering narcissism.” In the Fort Lauderdale News, there was the “lowest point in bad taste: the rock band of young punks at a remodelled nightclub which hung a placard on the bass drum with a phrase containing a four-letter word.” There are two types of kids: good kids and punks,” the Detroit Free Press suggested, though now “the good kids and the punk kids all have long hair.” In July 1970, in Fusion, Nick Tosches wrote a cover story called ‘The Punk Muse.’ For perhaps the first time, “punk” became more than a throwaway reference. It was now a recognisable, fashionable style.

“The Punk Muse”, 1970 (Source: Fusion/The Independent)

At the end of 1970, Bangs wrote a long essay called ‘ Of Pop and Pies and Fun: A Program For Mass Liberation In The Form Of A Stooges Review. Or, Who’s The Fool?,’ published in two parts in 2. Bangs called Iggy Pop “that Stooge punk.” As with The MC5 review, the description was both influential and called to mind earlier journalism; the previous year, in the Los Angeles Times, John Mendelsohn had described The Stooges’ first album as a collection of “whiny adolescently repulsive and barely distinguishable street-punk anthems.” Before that, in Fusion in October 1969, Iggy himself had described some of his audience as “punks.”

Bangs’ “Stooge punk” was a little different to the other “punks” of the time. This punk was “a pre-eminently American kid,” he wrote, vulnerable even, someone the “smug post-hippie audience” thought was “a fucked-up punk.” This was personal for Bangs: “his lifestyle was nigh-identical to ours,” he wrote later. In the issue of Creem that carried the second half of his Stooges essay, Bangs signed another review “Punko Bangs.” A few months later, he wrote that he felt “like some self-important punk’s notion of God sitting up here arbitrating the efforts of bands.” The same year, he called himself a “pompous punk,” someone with “pube punk fantasies.” For the first time in a couple of generations, someone had taken on the word willingly.

By the end of 1970, in New York, Suicide were advertising their early gigs as “punk music,” apparently inspired by Bangs. “I got the word from Lester’s piece,” Alan Vega remembered, “never imagining that punk would become a style of music.”

Punk was fashionable again.

Advertisement for Suicide in the Village Voice, October 1970 (Source: From The Archives)

“If punk America is dying behind the curdled MSG-free dregs of Hip and all the corny Experiments in New Designs for Living,” Bangs wrote in 1971, “then THE LESSON OF ‘WILD THING’ WAS LOST ON ALL YOU STUPID FUCKERS.” Punk seemed to suggest a wider malaise that could be delineated by rock music. This “punk America” caused him to turn to nostalgic rock’n’roll: “you can talk about yer MC5 and yer Stooges,” he said, but they couldn’t compare to the “sneering punk snarl” of The Troggs.

This nostalgic usage was already common, particularly about fifties rock’n’roll. Ellen Willis had called Elvis a punk in 1969, and The Everly Brothers, Gene Vincent, Jerry Lee Lewis and Eddie Cochran would all be punks over the next few years. They were seen as forefathers: in a 1970 article on violence in rock, Rob Partridge in Record Mirror drew the links between the “romantic” punks of the 1950s and The MC5.

However, as Bangs had hinted at, it was the punks of the 1960s who first coalesced into a genre. In March 1971, in Creem, Greg Shaw wrote about The Shadows of Knight’s “hard-edge punk sound.” In April, in Rolling Stone, he praised The Guess Who’s “good, not too imaginative, punk rock and roll.” The next month, Dave Marsh wrote his famous review of ? & The Mysterians, calling them a “a landmark exposition of punk rock.”

Both Marsh and Shaw felt they had originated the phrase “punk rock.” At the end of 1971, Shaw wrote about “what I have chosen to call ‘punk rock’ bands — white teenage hard rock of ’64–66,” and, according to the New York Daily News in 1976, he was “willing to take the credit for it even though he says he can’t remember the first time he used it.” Marsh remembered that, “culturally perverse from birth, I decided that this insult would be better construed as a compliment.” He was, he said, “happier every year” to receive the credit for “punk rock.”

However, despite their influence, neither Shaw nor Marsh was the first to use the phrase. A year before either of them, in March 1970 in the Chicago Tribune, Ed Sanders, formerly of The Fugs, described his first solo album as “punk rock — redneck sentimentality — my own past updated to present day reality.” (While working on the album in December 1969, he also recorded a song called ‘I’m Just a Tired, Lonesome Street Punk,’ or simply ‘Street Punk,’ which was only released in 2008.) “No one sent me a check for coming up with the term,” Sanders recalled.

Wherever it originated, this “quaint fanzine term,” as Shaw thought of it, was growing in importance. Bangs’ ‘Psychotic Reaction and Carburetor Dung: A Tale of These Times’ was published in Creem the month after Marsh’s Mysterians review, again praising mid-sixties punk rock, particularly The Count Five... He planned to use the article’s title for what the Detroit Free Press anticipated would “probably be the definitive book on punk rock,” though it was never published...

Both the word and the music spread further still when Lenny Kaye used the phrase in the liner notes to his 1972 Nuggets compilation of sixties garage rock . “The New Nostalgia is here,” proclaimed a Chicago Tribune review, “with an emphasis on a single genre: punk-rock.”... Bangs wrote that Nuggets “proves that psychedelia and punk zap are just as much a real cool time now as they were when we might have invested some emotional space-born significance in them.”... By the new year, some fans of Nuggets were calling themselves “punks.”

Before long, punk was used to describe contemporary music. “Punk-rock has become the favoured term of endearment,” Ellen Willis wrote in December 1972, for “the mythic crudity and crassness reputed to be at the heart of rock and roll.” Willis particularly liked what she called the “neo-punk sensibility” of Five Dollar Shoes, who she saw at the Mercer Arts Center in 1972, in one of the earliest references to underground New York rock as punk. (Lynn Van Matre had called Moogy And The Rhythm Kings “New York punk rock” in the Chicago Tribune that summer. Lillian Roxon also frequently praised a band called Street Punk, regulars at Max’s Kansas City.)

Although it was often used for artists that are now thought of as punk’s forebears — Lou Reed, The New York Dolls, Flamin’ Groovies —the word refused to be pinned down in the first half of the seventies, such was its ubiquity. Punk was used for a kind of “back to basics” blues rock.., heavy metal..., progressive rock..., and dozens of pop and rock acts with little else in common... The Monkees were “what punk rock is all about.” “Dion was the original punk,” according to Greg Shaw in Rolling Stone. For the Philadelphia Daily News, Connie Francis’ ‘Lipstick on My Collar’ “epitomized the adolescent worst of punk rock.”

“What Punk Rock Is All About”, 1973 (Source: Hartford Courant)

Soon, bands began to adopt the term. The Who included ‘The Punk and The Godfather’ on Quadrophenia in 1972. As well as Street Punk in New York, a band called The Punks formed in 1973 in Detroit. “Patrician rock is going down now,” Don McLean said that year, trying to shake off the success of ‘American Pie,’ “I like punk rock.” Brownsville Station released School Punks in 1974 and told journalists that they were “punk rock.” In 1975, Lowell George of Little Feat, once of The Standells and The Mothers of Invention, claimed that his current group, five albums in, were “just another punk band from L.A.” That year, The Tubes released ‘White Punks on Dope,’ reportedly about Jefferson Starship.

For much of the seventies, punk was often interchangeable with glam rock. For the New York Daily News, “punk rock” was a “subdivision” of “glitter rock” or “drag-rock.” Marc Bolan, David Bowie, Slade, and The Sweet were all called punk, and Roxy Music were “punk rock in space.” According to the Los Angeles Times in 1975, hitmakers Chinn and Chapman were “the masters of the English punk-rock sound,” but were “tired of the punk-rock wave that they rode to success in England.” In the British music weeklies, as Simon Reynolds observed in Shock and Awe: Glam Rock and Its Legacy, from the Seventies to the Twenty-First Century, groups such as The Sensational Alex Harvey Band and Heavy Metal Kids were “punk before punk.” One headline about Harvey suggested “Thou Shalt Have No Other Punk Before Me.”

Indeed, the word was used frequently in the British press. As early as 1972, Charles Shaar Murray had described The MC5 as “punks,” after quoting Lester Bangs’ Rolling Stone review. Mick Farren often used the word for 1950s rock’n’roll, or those influenced by it. By 1973, NME was writing about “rock ’n’ roll’s punk-junk revolution.” In 1974, Melody Maker discussed “these brash new Manhattan bands and their shameless punk rock,” and NME reported that record companies were actively searching for “punk.”

More than anyone else, Alice Cooper was the most high profile punk of the early seventies. He was “archetypal punk rock” for Grace Lichtenstein in The New York Times, and “mainstream punk raunch” in Rolling Stone. Punk was “a style that began and should have ended with Alice Cooper,” the Tampa Times argued. In Creem, Cooper won the new “Punk of the Year” category in the 1972 Readers’ Poll, with Lester Bangs placed in sixth. The next year, Billion Dollar Babies was “the Sgt. Pepper of punkdom.” After seeing a disappointing Alice Cooper show, a critic in Ontario wrote, probably for the first time, “punk rock is dead!”

Despite its popularity, punk still often betrayed the attitudes of those who used it, riddled with the problems of its etymology. In 1970, Huey P. Newton wrote to members of the Black Panthers, in a letter widely republished in the underground press, urging them to see the “women’s liberation” and “gay liberation” movements as allies, and that “the terms ‘faggot’ and ‘punk’ should be deleted from our vocabulary.” Even where the word had come to mean a delinquent, it still sometimes echoed with homophobia or misogyny; liner notes to a 1973 compilation of The Sonics suggested that “it’s like if delta blues oughta be played by old black men, and if fag rock oughta be played by real queers, then it stands to reason that punk-rock oughta be played by punks!” For Ellen Willis, in 1974, “nouveau punkism… became an excuse for blatant male chauvinism and nihilistic trashing of every value and aspiration beyond (male) orgams and (male) violence.” In 1975, Let It Rock noted that “the term punk is bandied about an awful lot these days, it seems to describe any rock performer who camps it up to any degree, on or off stage.”

Lester Bangs became sceptical about the term. In 1975, he wrote that “I try to completely dissociate myself” from people who think of themselves as “punks,” “because I don’t want to be the king of the punks or the king of the rock critics or any other such thing.” “This is punk?” he asked, when his friend Billy Altman took him to CBGBs for the first time, to see Talking Heads and Television. “This is just San Francisco all over again.”

“When there are no more punks,” Sid Vicious said, in January 1978, on the day of The Sex Pistols’ final concert, “that is when things are going to be okay.” The word had dogged the band, through tabloid controversy and critical admiration.

In America, the word had been attached to something recognisable as modern punk since at least Trixie A. Balm’s June 1975 review of The Dictators’ debut album in Creem, in which she praised their “punk aplomb” and “vinylized punk menace.” At first, calling The Sex Pistols “punk” was not to suggest they were new, but to compare them them to prevailing rock critical trends; in their first major review, in NME in February 1976, Neil Spencer said they played “60’s styled white punk rock as unselfconsciously as it’s possible to play it these days i.e. self-consciously. Punks? Springsteen Bruce and the rest of ’em would get shredded if they went up against these boys.” In May that year, Time Out described their set as “a mixture of Anglo-American teen/punk classics.” For Paul Morley, in his Out There fanzine, it was “controlled chaotic punk muzak.” Even for Greg Shaw, reviewing a gig at the 100 Club, “their sound is a straight blast of tortured punk rock.”

Read the complete article here.

History of the term "punk" as used with music, part 2 of 3 - 1920s to 1960s

This is an edited version of the second part of an article on the history of the term "punk" as related to music. You can read the first part here.

The Rotten Etymology of Punk (Part 2 of 3)

by J.P. Robinson

Occasionally, with a familiar sense of irony, “punk” became a positive description. In 1929, a critic for the Asheville Citizen-Times described a song called ‘That Empty Pantaloon’ as “so punk, it is refreshing.” Ten years later, the Pittsburgh Press went further: “Americans wouldn’t be likely to know whether a singer was good or bad and would prefer him fairly punk, because sour notes are the sound of native music that Americans like, such as jazz and swing.” When the story was reprinted elsewhere, some used the heading “We Like It Punk.”...

(Ernest) Nelson was then twenty-one, and had formed the band (Oregon Loggers) a couple of years before, in 1930, with five other part-time lumberjacks.... Nelson called himself “Whistle Punk,” a logging term for the young, often teenaged, worker responsible for signalling other members of the gang. Sometimes Nelson cut it short, to “Punk.” He was probably the first musician to call himself a punk.

The Oregon Loggers, 1932. Ernest Nelson is bottom left, with his harmonica (Source: The News-Review, Roseburg)

This was not a punk in the Shakespearean sense, nor the poor quality punk of Otto Wise. Through the first couple of decades of the twentieth century, punk had become a term for a young person, often a delinquent, sometimes a young gay man. Inevitably, the word was applied to musicians; writing in his 1939 autobiography, Benny Goodman remembered being called a “little punk” when he was twelve, in about 1920. In Really The Blues, clarinettist Mezz Mezzrow’s 1946 autobiography, “punk” was included in the glossary of jazz slang; Mezzrow said it meant a “young man who plays the feminine role in a homosexual relationship.” “Punks and skunks,” he wrote, could also mean “there’s nothing very exciting to report.”

The “poor quality” sense of the word still lingered. A feature in Ballyhoo magazine in the early thirties asked readers to decide if Bing Crosby and other musical stars were “‘punk,’ ‘lousy’ or ‘marvellous.’”...

By the fifties, the “delinquent” sense of the word became ubiquitous. Newspapers across the country worried about “grisly whodunits, horror films and cinema and airwave glorification of punks.” According to the San Rafael Daily Independent Journal, Elvis Presley was cast as “a hot-headed punk” in Jailhouse Rock. “This punk can’t smile,” a correspondent to the Pittsburgh Press wrote, “he has a nasty curled lip, a mean eye and those sideburns remind me of a hoss-rustler who was hanged a long time ago.” Presley himself used the word; in 1957, he threatened a young Marine with a prop pistol, and called him a “punk.”

Presley as a punk, 1957 (Source: San Rafael Daily Independent Journal)

Presley also inspired what was likely the first television reference to “punk” music. It came in 1956, on The Steve Allen Show, the week after Presley made his famous first appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show. In a dig at both Presley and his main television rival, the announcer said there was a “peculiar trend” in music, where “some of the new singing groups look like four fellas you’d hate to meet in a dark alley.” That night, the announcer said, they had “the ultimate in the new trend,” a group called “The Four Punks.” Allen came onstage wearing leathers, with a low slung guitar, swinging his hips, joking about petty crime, before the group performed a song he called ‘Misery Motel.’

By the 1960s, punk was so closely associated with young music fans that, when a seventeen year old “psychedelic painter” was beaten and robbed in Arizona, while hitchhiking from Los Angeles, his assailants cut off his hair and carved “punk” into his back with an empty beer can. Even high-school students in Delaware, campaigning to raise money to renovate the school roof, were called punks: resisting the name, one told his local newspaper that “punk-ness is in the eye of the beholder.”

“The professional punk”, 1968 (Source: Chicago Tribune)

Through the sixties “punk” became a journalistic failsafe. Musicians were often dismissed as punks, with The Beatles at the forefront. “They know they’re punks. They admit it,” the Austin American-Statesman argued in 1964. They were “immature punks” in the Uniontown Evening Standard, and “just punks with long hair” in the Fresno Bee. The San Bernardino County Sun complained that “these four little punks’ fad-fed bank accounts have gone to their heads.” Even in the countercultural Berkeley Barb in 1968, they were “punk millionaires.”

“Punks’ Haircuts”, 1964 (Source: The Salina Journal)

Other musicians had the same treatment. In 1965, one news agency ran a story from the Whisky-A-Go-Go, Los Angeles, criticising “punks who can burp into a microphone and produce a hit record.” In 1967, a journalist who had recently returned from Vietnam complained that “we’ve got kids out there dying without a sound and we’ve got punks here who dress up like girls and make millions of dollars doing it.” The same year, Mel Torme called The Rolling Stones “dope-ridden punks.” In 1968, Mike Butterfield told Hit Parader about walking into his first session with Bob Dylan “like a dumb punk with my guitar over my back, no case.”

“Young punk” in Dick Tracy, 1965 (Source: Great Bend Tribune)

The word was also used by specialist music journalists, on both sides of the Atlantic. At first, it appeared in reported speech: in 1967, according to Derek Taylor in Disc and Music Echo, “a young artist” in Los Angeles, painting a sign for the Monterey Pop Festival, was told to “get a haircut, punk” by a passing driver. In 1968, in The New Yorker, Ellen Willis reported that staff at the Newport Festival mistook the Village Voice critic for “just another of those young punks.” In Melody Maker, in February 1969, Chris Welch imagined executives at Motown calling him a “Limey punk.”

The old “poor quality” meaning was still occasionally used about music. In 1966, the New York Daily News recalled “there was a middling popular and middling punk song some decades ago called ‘I Surrender, Dear.’” In 1967, the Indiana Gazette discussed “a number of the big names who are by any standards of real musical judgement pretty punk performers. Yet these fairly punk performers sell hundreds of thousands of records.” In July 1969, the Indiana underground magazine The Spectator argued that the 5th Dimension’s ‘Don’tcha Hear Me Callin’ To Ya’ was “so hilariously punk” that it could be a pastiche.

“…it sounded awful punk…”, 1961 (Source: Danville Bee)

Gradually at first, punk became part of a wider, critical argument, with“punk” musicians in opposition to high art or the mainstream music business. In 1967, in the Indianapolis News, Misha Dichter, a pianist with the Boston Symphony, was said to look “like a cross between a punk and a poet.” In 1968, the Los Angeles Free Press suggested Frank Zappa’s work was an angry response to his a time as a “teenage punk” listening to the bands of the late fifties and early sixties. Writing in New York in December 1968, and published in the Sydney Morning Herald, Lillian Roxon described “Dylan’s switch to rock” as “the beginning of a new golden era when the punks and the scruffies and the weirdos would take over Tin Pan Alley.” A month later, the St Louis Post-Dispatch said Dylan was “half-punk, half-guru, probably America’s best young songwriter, possibly its best young poet.”

The word also crossed over to the music itself. In 1967, Simon & Garfunkel released ‘Punky’s Dilemma,’ about a Californian draft dodger. The same year, Bonzo Dog Doo Dah Band used the word on ‘Big Shot.’ In 1968, The Mothers of Invention included ‘Flower Punk’ on We’re Only In It For The Money: “hey punk,” Zappa sang, to the tune of ‘Hey Joe,’ “where you going with that flower in your hand? Well, I’m going up to Frisco to join a psychedelic band.”

Probably the most widely read reference to “punk” and music in the sixties came in March 1969, on the front page of the Los Angeles Times. Rickey Ivie, a seventeen year old from Fremont, California, was interviewed about a “series of boycotts” that had been organised at his high school. As co-chairman of the Fremont Black Students Union, he railed against the “ghetto educational system” and its “racist training.” “In the world of music,” he said, “we want to hear about black composers, about the Supremes, Ray Charles and Marvin Gaye,” not Bach, “that old, dead punk.”...

William Buckley’s Los Angeles Times column, as it appeared in The Billings Gazette, Montana, 31st March 1969

Three weeks after the Rickey Ivie story, and the week after Buckley’s column, Lester Bangs’ byline appeared for the first time in a national publication, for his review of The MC5’s debut album in Rolling Stone. He panned the record, saying the band looked like “a bunch of sixteen-year-old punks on a meth power trip.”

Read the complete article here.

Read part 3 here.

History of the term "punk" as used with music, part 1 of 3 - 1890s to 1910s

This is an edited version of the first part of an article on the history of the term "punk" as related to music...

The Rotten Etymology of Punk (Part 1 of 3)

“Punk” has been used to describe music since at least 1899

by J.P. Robinson

As Otto Wise exhaled, one night in the final few months of the nineteenth century, the smoke from his cigar curled towards the ceiling of B’nai B’rith Hall, San Francisco. Wise, a twenty-seven year old attorney, was “director” for that nights’ “smoker” at the fraternal lodge, encouraging attendees to do a turn for the entertainment of the two hundred other guests...

Wise turned next to Eugene Levy, a fellow attorney. Levy, who was thirty nine, sang as requested....

Whatever the song, it was bad. Before Levy could sit down, Wise mocked it. Wise was a consciously cultured man — he gave public lectures on Jewish literature and “the social life of the ghetto” — and this song, he thought, was so bad that it needed a new word, a word that probably hadn’t been used about music before, at least not in print, a noteworthy word, more noteworthy than the song itself. It was, he said that night in October 1899, “the most punk song ever heard in a hall.”

“The most punk song ever heard in a hall,” 1899 (Source: San Francisco Call)

Many punk historians have tried to capture the complexities of the word “punk.” “Ask forty punk rockers how they define punk and you’ll get forty different answers, and they’ll all be right,” Bob Stanley suggested in Yeah Yeah Yeah: The Story of Modern Pop. It is a “notoriously slippery term,” Nicholas Rombes wrote, in A Cultural Dictionary of Punk, “unstable, ambiguous, loaded with so many suggestions.” According to Richard Cabut, in an introduction to Jon Savage’s ‘Punk Etymology,’ in Cabut and Gallix’s Punk Is Dead: Modernity Killed Every Night, “at the beginning — and at the end — is the word.”

If the story of punk’s etymology is told at all, it is normally told this way: at the very end of the sixties, and the very start of the seventies, the word bubbled up in rock criticism, most notably when Lester Bangs referred to The MC5 and Iggy Pop as “punks.” In 1971, they say, Creem editor Dave Marsh coined the term “punk rock,” in a review of ? And The Mysterians. The next year, the future Patti Smith guitarist Lenny Kaye used the phrase to describe Nuggets, his compilation of mid-sixties garage. By 1976, it was used for the bands who played at Max’s Kansas City and CBGBs, via a New York magazine called Punk. The term re-crossed the Atlantic, and was used to describe London bands....

Those that mention any older history might suggest that Bangs got the word from William Burroughs — who is sometimes quoted to suggest punk meant “someone who took it up the ass” — or that Shakespeare used the word to mean “prostitute.” Any older musical history of “punk” is lost, with only faint smoke trails lingering, through forgotten journalists in regional newspapers, underappreciated female critics and rock crit faves, back to Otto Wise and his cigars, and further still, through centuries.

Lester Bangs and Lillian Roxon (Source: Robert Milliken, Lillian Roxon: The Mother of Rock)

Punk was already mean and ironic by the time Shakespeare used it. His punks were flashy and transgressive even at the end of the sixteenth century. “This punk is one of Cupid’s carriers,” he wrote, in The Merry Wives of Windsor around 1597. “She may be a punk;” Lucio says in Measure for Measure, “for many of them are neither maid, widow, nor wife.” In All’s Well That Ends Well, the Clown mentions a “taffeta punk” for whom the “French clown” would be “fit.”

According to the Oxford English Dictionary, punk was first printed in 1575, the year Shakespeare became a teenager. It appeared in a song, a ballad called ‘Simon The Old Kinge,’ or sometimes ‘Old Simon The King.’ The song’s narrator suggests that being drunk is “a sin, as it is to keep a punk.” It seems to be a joke, a drinking song disguised as a morality tale, or vice versa. The song was popular, and was reprinted often, becoming a standard for hundreds of years. According to one writer in 1776, it was played drunkenly in taverns, with “half a dozen fiddlers” playing “till themselves and their audience were tired.” Despite its “harsh and discordant tones,” “people thought it fine music.”

Meanwhile, on the other side of the Atlantic, a new meaning for punk grew, a meaning that had never been used in Britain: punk as rotting wood, used for tinder, and eventually other things that smoulder, like fuses and incense...

Eventually, the word became a standalone adjective, meaning poor quality, and was applied to the arts: there were “punk shows” in theatres in San Francisco by 1889. Newspapers speculated about the word’s origins... Some said it had come from “hoboes,” “passed along thousands of miles of railroad,” or from “our colored brethren,” or noted it was used by young people, complaining about “punk” plays with no “hot stuff in dem.” This seems to be the sense in which Otto Wise used the word in the B’nai B’rith Hall, earning cheap laughs in a well-to-do setting with a youthful, working class word.

Although it was used across America, it seems small-town Kansas was a particular hotbed for early references to “punk” music: there was a “punk orchestra” in Emporia in 1898; a “punky band” paraded down the street in Waverly in 1899, most likely a theatrical group in blackface; Iola had a “punk concert” in 1901, and Hutchinson had a “punk band” in 1902.

By 1901, according to the St Louis Republic, punk was “everyday twentieth century slang.” In 1907, the Los Angeles Times mentioned a campaign for “punk music by union men,” on its front page. In 1908, there was a “punk opera” in Nebraska. “Punk music” was played in New York, by “a man violinist and his wife accompanist,” and in Utah, by a “cross-eyed accordion player.” In 1913, according to the New York Evening Telegram, a woman “an inch deep in make-up and all swathed in violet chiffon veils and chinchilla” sailed across the Atlantic, “strumming on a guitar in the moonlight and humming French songs. Her voice was punk.” At least one vaudeville performer fought a critic over the word’s use. The first cinematic punk appeared in 1916, in Pedro The Punk Poet.

Advertisement for Pedro The Punk Poet, 1916 (Source: Hot Springs New Era)

The word was used so often, it began to sound like a genre in its own right. “It is little wonder that the managers send us punk music shows,” the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette grumbled in 1914. “These draw audiences of great size, while the sane and intelligent exercise of stage art goes unattended.” According to the Tampa Times in 1917, “the latest war song, ‘Send Me Away With A Smile,’ is very punk and therefore very popular.” “The popularity of a song depends upon its punkness,” the article suggested. “The demand of the day is ‘punk songs for punk people.’”

Read the complete article here.

Read part 2 here.

Interesting description of the Midwest!

Article on the 80s Bloomington, Indiana, punk scene

This is an edited version of an article on the punk scene in Bloomington, Indiana, in the 80s...

Since the ’70s, Bloomington Has Been a Midwestern Haven for Punk

by Sierra Vandervort

Bloomington’s thriving punk scene of the ’70s and ’80s paved the way for today’s punk bands. Pictured here, Seven Seconds performing at Ricky's Canteena, a Bloomington all-ages club, in 1984. | Photo courtesy of Chris Crewell

It’s 1976: The Ramones have just released their first studio album, and the Sex Pistols are still a basement nightclub band in Sheffield, England. Before punk rock seized American counterculture, the Gizmos had already recorded their first EP in Bloomington, their hometown. The protopunk band sent some of the initial shock waves of punk throughout Bloomington, inspiring young musicians across the city to join what would become a revolution in music.

Soon, punk and new wave groups started popping up throughout Bloomington and Indianapolis. The Dancing Cigarettes, Moto X, Rosebloods, Walking Ruins, The Slammies, Pit Bulls on Crack, Dandelion Abortion, the Zero Boys — suddenly everyone was starting a punk band.

“Most everyone was just happy to be part of something that was fun, rebellious, and socially satisfying,” says Indiana-music historian and ’80s punk musician Rick Wilkerson. “Before punk, it wasn’t really possible to start playing in a band unless you were already an accomplished musician. Punk allowed that rule to be broken. All you needed was an instrument and desire.”...

With few local opportunities to play professionally, most Bloomington bands had to play in friends’ basements and bars to be heard. Eventually, more venues started popping up around town to accommodate the growing counterculture. Bullwinkle’s nightclub, which was located in the basement of the building where Serendipity is now, became associated with the punk and new wave scene in the early ’80s, when longtime DJ Gary Indiana started booking shows upstairs, which soon became Second Story nightclub.

Before he went on to play guitar for nationally acclaimed groups, including the Lemonheads, John Strohm was active in Bloomington’s punk scene in the ’80s and has since chronicled his time in B-town in a series of blog posts for the Indy nonprofit Musical Family Tree.

“Those shows were life-changing,” he writes in his blog of the punk culture in Bloomington, which is often looked to as one of the most progressive in the country by musicians and fans. “I wanted to be a part of that world more than I’d ever wanted anything. … That became the singular, driving force in my life, which continued to be the focus for the next fifteen years.”

Wilkerson started his punk career when he bought his very first Korg MS10 synthesizer. By early 1981, he and his band, Amoebas in Chaos, were performing at Bullwinkle’s alongside some of the peaking local punk bands of the time. It was a small but welcoming community, he says.

“Everyone seemed to be glad to find kindred spirits,” Wilkerson says. “It was still a very small and marginalized subculture that was isolated from the mainstream.”

With their multicolored mohawks, safety-pin piercings, and aggressive fronts, the punk kids of the ’80s were a far stretch from the hippie counterculture of their parents. With the punk scene came a whole new world of invention and visual expression. Mike Whybark, who chronicled the ’80s Bloomington punk scene for The Ryder, and still does on Musical Family Tree, says this helped make the “punk experience” more authentic and intimate.

“It was all new, so it was explicitly cast outside of the mainstream marketing channels of American pop culture at the time,” he says. “It was disruptive and threatening to day-to-day political, behavioral, and sexual norms.”...

Read the complete article here.

Interview on the South African 70s punk rock scene

 This is an edited version of an interview with the creators of a film about 70s South African punk. The rest of the interview talks more about how the film was made. I just stuck with the stuff about the punk scene.

Punk in Africa: 3 Chords, 3 Countries, 1 Revolution… and a Facebook Page

by Curt Hopkins

Punk in Africa

What is punk, and how did your understanding of it affect the way you made the film?

Punk is an attitude of showing a middle finger to everything that is deemed important to others. It is about doing things for yourself independently on your own terms. If you put a soundtrack to that approach to life, you have punk.

How did punk reach Africa? For instance it [arguably] reached the UK via the Ramones tour. Any similar event of that nature, or was it more a slow seepage?

There was no single event or incident that caused to punk to reach Africa – the birth of the punk movement was more of a process, a slow build-up against the stifling conformity of the times. In the early 70s, Southern Africa still remained the last bastion of colonialism and censorship and social disapproval of popular culture was rampant. At the time the changing socio-economic situation in the UK caused a last wave of immigration of skilled tradesmen to South Africa, where they were welcomed by the apartheid government of the time due their skin colour. This also brought with it certain cultural influences, including the NME which was sold in South Africa six weeks after publication. Punk provided a necessary release from the imposed boredom of the times.

What kind of venues were found and what kind of ecosystem existed, or developed, to nourish these bands – if any?

Punk developed at first separately in each of the three main South African cities – when the musicians from various places began to meet each other, a network of small venues and later fanzines developed. Most of the scene was rooted in live performances and few records were available. The first attempt to do a punk / New Wave tour took place in December 1979, with Wild Youth from Durban, National Wake from Johannesburg, and Housewife’s Choice and Safari Suits from Cape Town. Most of these bands also played in townships and did semi-legal downtown street gigs, as the venues that would host multi-racial gatherings were limited.

Did punks get arrested for the political aspects of either their lyrics or the default politics of two-tone bands existing?

The politics of maintaining a racially mixed band was even more difficult for them and the police essentially hounded them out of existence and more or less even out of the country, apart from banning their album, which should be as well known as The Clash or The Specials today were it not for the way the apartheid government banned their music

Actual arrests were rare, but police harassment was part and parcel of the entire scene. Bands were forced to change their lyrical content or remove songs from their releases – notably National Wake, whose lyric sheet was censored due to government interference. The politics of maintaining a racially mixed band was even more difficult for them and the police essentially hounded them out of existence and more or less even out of the country, apart from banning their album, which should be as well known as The Clash or The Specials today were it not for the way the apartheid government banned their music.

What were the audiences like? Mostly white, mostly black or mixed?

Punk was the second important multi-racial music scene in South Africa apart from jazz. Rock music is generally a mostly white audience everywhere but in Southern Africa racially mixed bands were present from the beginnings of punk. Punk also often takes on local roots and draws on local music forms, and so there was an African identity present in the lyrics, music and visual style in the punk movement in all three of the countries we looked at.

Was African punk political from the get-go – something in the structure of the societies you cover – or did it move that way during its lifespan?

It was totally political from the start. During the 1980s in South Africa, the early 90s in Mozambique or Zimbabwe today, being involved in the punk movement was already a political statement.

Who were the primary opponents of punk in Africa? Were they religious leaders, political leaders, the police?

Definitely the police and the state. The scene was too underground to really have an impact on religious society as a whole. The government were always suspicious of the punk scene in all of the three countries we cover, with security police around gigs and so on.

How was punk regarded by musicians from other genres at the time?

Southern Africa is extremely rich in musical heritage, and even most rock musicians are taken quite seriously. A lot of cross-pollination always took place between jazz, reggae and African bands and the punk scene. More African-oriented musicians such as Mac McKenzie from Cape Town viewed the punk scene of the 1980s as a vehicle to reach broader audiences and different people but retained their musical chops and brought real musical skill to the punk style.

The punk scene in Southern Africa always took a lot of influence from local indigenous music everywhere it appeared, so the bands are instantly recognisable as coming from a specific place due to their sound.

How did punk change from country-to-country as it responded to the specifics of the society, events and politics of each place?

The punk scene in Southern Africa always took a lot of influence from local indigenous music everywhere it appeared, so the bands are instantly recognisable as coming from a specific place due to their sound. The politics and DIY aesthetic of the scene remained fairly intact everywhere...

Was there a “capitol” of punk rock in Africa in the 70s and 80s?

This was split between Johannesburg, Durban and Cape Town, each of which had its own scene with its own specific influences. Johannesburg was always more innovative but the other places had strong punk movements in their own right, all with their own unique characteristics...

What kind of response did you get – from the musicians you featured, and from others – when you said you were making a documentary on punk in Africa?

In the beginning people were quite resistant as a lot of them were traumatised by their involvement and in some cases had even left the country. But on the whole people were generally supportive and keen to be of help – in the end we were able to speak to almost everyone we wanted to get into touch with, and most were extremely helpful and generous in terms of sharing their stories, lives and archival sources with the project.

How did the musicians you featured react to the finished film?

The reaction has been hugely favourable from all of the musicians featured. One striking comment has been that across the various generations, many have commented that they finally understand their place in the larger history of local music, which is of course very rewarding. Until now much of this was completely undocumented.

Read the complete article here.

Description of a Cleveland band and the Cleveland scene

This is an edited version of an article that I felt captured the midwestern punk scene well...

True Midwest Punks: The Flat Can Co. Embodies The Workingman's Bohemia

by Justin F. Farrar

Miss Melvis of Cleveland's Flat Can Co. She'll slay you.

In the late '70s and early '80s, most punks from the East and West Coasts agreed with their counterparts in the U.K.: Punk was a rejection of classic rock. Ramones vs. Aerosmith. But L.A.'s Black Flag screamed Fuck that! They dug the Sex Pistols and the James Gang. They worshiped all loud rock, regardless of hair length and fashion. If it rocked, it rocked -- plain and simple.

Black Flag should've hailed from Ohio, Michigan, or (gulp) Indiana, because their philosophy is a long-standing tradition among midwestern punks. Many of the best underground bands in Cleveland grounded themselves in a fusion of avant-garde weirdness and gritty, Friday-night bar rock. Rocket From the Tombs looked to Pere Ubu's new-wave futurism while nicking riffs from boogie monsters like Humble Pie. Cobra Verde concocts grand allusions to obscure European cinema, but grooves as if they're a bunch of surly drunks working third shift at the Dickey-Grabler Company.

Here, in middle America, there's nothing wrong with sucking down PBRs, cranking Double Live Gonzo!, and reading the 1924 Surrealist Manfesto -- all at the same time, mind you. You can dig high art and not have to abandon your working-class roots in the name of all that's hip in downtown Manhattan. That's a cool thing.

The Cleveland band that currently embodies this unique freedom is the Flat Can Co. Even the name sounds as if it was ripped from one of the decaying billboards painted on the sides of countless brick warehouses and machine shops in the Flats...

These four have never bought into the punk vs. classic-rock myth. In high school, sometime in the early '80s, I believe (Scott doesn't clarify), the Pickering brothers were wailing metal dudes, whose bands played punk shows. They were influenced by the legendary Pagans and Chicken Shack, a bombastic blues-rock outfit from the hippie era. Miss Melvis, meanwhile, has become a local guitar goddess, renowned for wrestling searing atonal noise from her six-string as if she is a cross between Sonic Youth's Thurston Moore, free-jazz freak Sonny Sharrock, and no-wave idol Rudolph Grey. But here's the kicker: She doesn't listen to experimental guitar. She's a Cleveland bar rocker through and through.

Live, the Flat Can is something of a throwback to the late '80s/early '90s, when the Midwest underground ruled the indie scene with redneck punks like Halo of Flies, the mighty Cows, and the acid-fried Butthole Surfers. The six-foot Miss Melvis even resembles a Butthole, wearing a naughty nurse's outfit -- or sometimes even less -- while rolling across the floor straddling her axe. It's a true performance-art spectacle, even more so because Donadio and the Pickering brothers are so n-o-r-m-a-l-looking. Sporting all black (and not hip all black), these dudes resemble professional movers, not indie musicians.

But the utilitarian threads make perfect sense. Beneath the group's industrial-strength feedback, artsy use of extended improvising, and raging psychedelia lurks a beer-guzzling workingman's rock. Sure, it makes the head swim, but it also makes the ass shake. And that's what Cleveland has always been about.

Read the complete post here.

Quora answers to "What was it like to be transgender in the 1980s?"

This is just an edited version of a Quora post where someone asked, "What was it like to be transgender in the 1980s?"...

What was it like to be transgender in the 1980s?

What was it like to be transgender in the 1980s?

Did you have a vocabulary and concepts for your identity and who you were as trans? Who did you identify with? Who were your role models? How did the culture of the 1980s make your life easier or more difficult? What other aspects of the 1980s shaped your identity as trans? How do you think your experience then differed from the experience of people now who have greater internet access to support and visibility in the media?

Anonymous

I was in my 30’s during the 80’s and it was a fabulous time, the dawn of what I consider the modern era in popular culture. At that point, I could still pass for a gay boy in his mid-20’s, but my trans side was becoming harder to suppress. In the 70’s, glam-rock androgyny provided an easy cover for being femme and flashy. By the time the 80’s arrived, that trend had migrated out of gay subculture into the pretty boy new-wave scene and I did too. There were lots of drugs and sex as well, and I was a pretty promiscuous crossdresser. But one step I was not ready to take was transitioning for real, to admit to myself that I didn’t just want to dress like a girl and party.

In retrospect, it’s obvious that I really wanted to be female all along. But in the 80’s, that was too scary a prospect to deal with. I dreaded electrolysis, knew I could never pass, and was afraid I’d be alone forever. There was no trans movement, no internet to research, and nothing but contempt and ridicule for outed transsexuals. The 80’s were politically reactionary, with both feminists and fundamentalists raging with openly transphobic bigotry and judgmental psychiatrists who denied hormones and surgery to all but those who could act like prim and proper straight girls. I was a skinny punk bisexual freak who could not even caricature that kind of standard.

But the 80’s finally gave way to the 90’s, the emergence of gender activism and third-wave feminism. What really broke the ice was the increasingly public visibility of genderqueer dykes and trans men, unheard of in the 80’s. The jargon changed as well, with people openly identifying as queer and transgender, and the political formation of the LGBT alliance. While trans people were still marginalized in both straight and gay worlds, there was finally a queer alternative where you could transition without having to go full-time stealth in heteronormative mainstream culture.

Sarah Phillips, Woman of trans experience

It was hell.

I turned nine in 1980

I had no useful vocabulary to define what I was. I was different. I knew that, physically, I was not a girl. I knew I liked being around girls and doing things that girls did. I knew it would be ‘bad’ to share that with anyone.

I had a sterile dictionary definition of transsexual, no idea how I’d even heard of the word. I knew roughly what a transvestite was. I saw my body self destruct and I didn’t have words for it. My voice broke. My mother said I became quieter. I withdrew. I was unlike anyone else I knew.

Boy George and similar others were making music. I didn’t really notice them. I didn’t feel it was anything to do with me. I didn’t really notice that they were doing anything unusual, I filtered it out.

I identified with no-one. I had no role models. Whilst Caroline Cossey might have been publicly outed in 1981, that news missed me. My parents didn’t read The News Of The World. Apparently, neither did anyone else I know, or else they just weren’t talking about it. I could not have named a single transsexual in the 1980’s.

When I turned sixteen, I started to grow my hair. That was, at least vaguely, culturally acceptable. My mum accepted it. My dad made fun of me. My grandmother hated it and tried to bribe me to get a haircut. I started sixth form college and first met people who identified as gay. I looked at them, was indeed friends with them, but knew that I was not gay. They were different. They saw themselves as men and I did not.

In 1989, I turned eighteen and started university. There was the lesbian and gay society (became the LGB Soc in 1990 and, I assume, the LGBT society around 2000). I had decided I wasn’t gay so I didn’t sign up. That position became difficult soon after when I started being attracted to boys/men.

There was no publicly available internet. There were no “lifestyle” programmes, that I can recall. It was almost a vacuum. I did find an item in one book that said, and I paraphrase slightly, there was a man who got a sex change, lived as a woman, was raped and went back to living as a man again. It was not encouraging.

That was part of my problem. There was very little information about being transgender. What little there was was not encouraging. It was almost organised transphobia in the media, designed to keep me in line. I saw graffiti in public toilets either depicting scenes of men in lingerie performing sex acts on each other or, apparently, transvestites soliciting for sex. Either way it made me uncomfortable and wondering, “I this me? Is this what I’m going to become?”

Given how much negativity I was subjected to in the 80’s I’m amazed I ever transitioned at all and didn’t just give up and take my own life. Fortunately the 90’s gave me a lot more information, some of it even positive.

Anonymous

Seeking help. Small College town. There is a doctor that can help your son. Doctor is contacted. He says he charges $200.00 an hour to help me. My mother realizes she cannot afford it. This doctor is at the college, now a university.

The son goes to the local library. There is a book. It mentions Dr. Money. Speaks of how Dr. Money has treated children who are intersex, damaged from circumcision. How they are raised female. Also speaks of Transsexual. The first time he learns about people who live as the opposite sex.

Through reading, the young person learns that the testicles are the reason he has become so masculine. He then realizes it is time to stop the process and tried to amputate them. Ends up in and out of the hospital. Multiple amputation attempts.

Seeking any help she can, she try’s to find help for her son. He is suicidal and mutilating his genitals. To no avail. There just is no support for a young man who is in need of effective therapy. After all what is transgender? No one has ever herd the term in small town USA. He is then considered Gay. Never given the chance to be recognized accurately. He lives with the stigma of being a gay man who wants to be a girl.

He try’s to work. No insurance. Unable to hold down jobs he ends up back at mom’s house. His father lives on the other side of the country and has turned against him because he is a sinner. His son is a terrible child. His father is a reverend of a Pentecostal church in Arkansas. He abandons his son and never speaks to him again.

Now time goes on and mom dies. Eventually I transition, it is the 90’s.

Today I struggle from the memories of the lack of support in the 80’s. Mutilation and suicide attempts.

Life was hard. I was confused and reactive to the hormones bathing my brain and body. I felt like I was going insane. I have major scars and my mother and I were all alone against a system lacking is support.

I am alive. I survived. I have memories. I have scars.

Today, the support available is a miracle compared to what I didn’t have in the 80’s. I only hope it continues to improve. That any stigma or labels that are hateful and derogatory fade in time and we are no longer killed or treated as if we have no rights for being born the way we are.

The 80’s were a nightmare as a transgender person/woman. Thank goodness they are past.

Read the full post here.

Trans woman talks about what it was like for her in the 80s

An article where a trans woman describes her experiences living as trans in the 80s...

My experience during the Trans Dark Ages

by Allison Washington

The author in 1989, one year after beginning her transition.

This question was going unanswered on Quora:

What was it like to be transgender in the 1980s?

Did you have a vocabulary and concepts for your identity and who you were as trans? Who did you identify with? Who were your role models? How did the culture of the 1980s make your life easier or more difficult? What other aspects of the 1980s shaped your identity as trans? How do you think your experience then differed from the experience of people now who have greater internet access to support and visibility in the media?

I am intrigued that this question has been sitting here for 2–1/2 years, unanswered by any of my (1980s) trans generation…I conclude that a) there are very few of us; and/or b) we are all woodworked. Probably both…

I think of the 1980s as the latter part of the Trans Dark Ages. Perhaps someday we’ll see the present time as the Middle Ages leading to the Enlightenment. I hope so.

I cannot speak to how it was for everyone everywhere, but I can say how it was for me, as a trans woman, where I was, and what I saw happening around me. With the caveat that I was, in many ways, the exception to the rule, and I’ll summarise and contrast that at the end.

But first, here’s my story:

I began my transition in 1988 and ‘completed’ just over twelve months later, in 1989, at age 32. If this seems quick, it was: it had to be. And this kind of haste was usual in the women I knew.

I was in a larger, relatively liberal city in a western country. Nevertheless, it was bloody dangerous to be trans (and yes, it often still is). I was very fortunate, in that I achieved something like 90% passing privilege within 6 months. I was also very careful. Nonetheless, I was assaulted more than once during the early months, and escaped what could have been severe beatings.

The greatest hardship by far, then vs now, was the complete lack of information. I know for certain that I’d have transitioned 10 or 15 years earlier had basic information been available (as it is now). As it was, by the most unlikely chance I came across some printed material about gender dysphoria and treatment for same. Had that bizarre fluke not happened it could easily have been another decade or more before I learnt that transition was possible. On the unlikely chance that I survived that long (I was in bad shape, gender-wise).

Once I learnt that transition was possible, it was very, very difficult to locate caregivers and other trans people. I ended up by telephoning across several countries, tracking down people-who-knew-people, until I was finally put into contact with the tiny trans community in my city, and through them got access to an appropriate therapist and endocrinologist and, ultimately, a surgeon. It was all semi-underground.

There was a small, hard to locate, rather secretive support group that met weekly, through which I found access to caregivers. We met in the evening. Women came separately, in ones and twos, so as to be inconspicuous. Afterward, departures were staggered, with women leaving discreetly in pairs, to reduce visibility and the chances of assault. The meeting location had to be changed at one point after we were ‘discovered’ and began getting unwanted attention.

Guidance for how to deal with caregivers/gatekeepers was circulated amongst trans women at these meetings. Experiences with each doctor and therapist were shared and compared. It was understood that stereotypical hetero-, cis-normative expectations were to be met. New women were advised to be well dressed and made-up when going to appointments. A sample questionnaire with the ‘correct’ answers filled-in was passed round.

As to the availability of caregivers, then vs now, here is one measure: In the city I was in there were, at the time, three psychotherapists who offered gender transition as part of their practice. I’ve just now done an online search, and in that same city more than 200 therapists list gender transition among their services. This search took me all of a couple of minutes, compared with the weeks of determined detective work I did in 1988. The problem now would be narrowing down the choice of caregiver; the problem then was finding one at all.

Medical transition was mostly not covered by public health / medical plans (and this hasn’t changed in many places). If you (and your willing doctor) were clever, you might be able to get coverage for doctors’ appointments and hormones, maybe psychotherapy, but that still left all the rest to pay for, from hair removal to surgeries.

And you had to have ‘the surgery’ to get documents changed — that was absolute — and you needed the documents in order to have any kind of a life. I didn’t know anyone who didn’t plan on having surgery as soon as possible. I did know women who didn’t have the money, god help them.

Money was a big deal — the big deal. Once again, I was fortunate; I had a well-paying job at a mid-sized company (~4000 employees), where I was in a key position. Transitioning in public was not something that happened in the 1980s, but we did know of one case of a trans woman who had managed to transition at work in another company, in a different city. I couldn’t bear to delay my transition (my dysphoria was very severe), and I needed the money — I decided to risk a public transition. For all I know, I may have been the second ever ‘out’ transition in my country.

Upper management tried very hard to fire me, and would’ve succeeded easily had it not been that, due to my key position at a critical time in a critical project, the risk to the company was too great — I got lucky again. (You should’ve seen them going through fits trying to figure out where I should pee — there was actually a top level meeting with the CEO &c to discuss my bodily functions.)

In the end, the pressure of being ‘out’ as trans, even if only at work, was just too great. The scrutiny and hate were intense, and there would never be any future for me, not to mention that I would be up for dismissal just as soon as my utility became noncritical. I completed my transition, saw the project to completion, and left the company. I got a new job in a different city, sold my house, severed all my connections, moved, and went deep stealth, where I’ve remained. That was just how it was.

There is one other consequence of ‘how it was’: Living in stealth thereafter, I had no knowledge of the trans world and no awareness of how things were changing. I recently reencountered the trans community, once again by chance. In a very real sense, I arrived here, in 2016, directly from 1990. I wonder how many more of us remain isolated. This, I suspect, is why no one else from my trans generation has answered this question.

So I had many lucky breaks, which allowed me to transition with relative ease during the 1980s, when so few could. In summary, here are the things which set me apart from those who could not transition, and from those who did transition, but with greater hardship:

Information — I happened onto an obscure booklet on gender dysphoria by the purest chance (and that is a story in itself). The other women I knew had similar miracles. The vast majority of trans people got no such break, and either succumbed to their dysphoria or waited years and decades before having their chance at life.

Money — I had a ‘safe’, well-paying job in which I could transition — something essentially no one else had at the time. Women I knew transitioned as far as they could in secret, putting on the agonising man-suits to go to work, and sometimes failing and getting fired. Others saved and saved, delaying their transitions until they could afford to go undercover to transition. Still others scraped by doing menial jobs and sometimes, if they were pretty enough, sex work.

I also had a house that I could (and did) mortgage to help cover transition costs. I estimate that my transition cost the equivalent of 60.000 € in today’s money ($71.000), and I did pretty much the minimum.

Privilege — Most actively-transitioning people were white, able-bodied, relatively educated, and middle class (or at least we started out middle class; for many women that changed, sometimes unexpectedly and catastrophically), in our peak-earnings years (age 30–50), often with money saved. The women who were near the lower bound of this class had a very hard time.

Passing privilege — ‘Success’ was defined by ‘passing’, as were safety and one’s life options. Along with surgery, passing was a must — an inability to pass was viewed as a ‘failed transition’, leaving one without acceptable options — a brutal fate that was a great source of fear for all of us.

Cisnormativity, beauty and youth — Cisnormativity was expected, and either came naturally or had to be faked; luckily for me, it did come naturally. Then, as now, hormonal transition was quicker and ‘more complete’ if one was young, and in my case, 32 was young enough. And, then as now, society gives the beautiful more access and kinder treatment than others. These three factors gave me a huge advantage unavailable to many, perhaps most.

Luck — In every regard, at every step of the way, I was unbelievably lucky — where, during the 1980s and earlier, so very few were. In effect, I won the transgender lottery.

You can find the article here.

Reviewer description of the midwest's punk scene

An edited version of a review I found where the guy gives some good description of music and the scene in the midwest...

The Inarguable -  Cornfields and Black Lace: The Midwest Post-Punk Resurgence

When one thinks about the Midwest, only two things come to mind: Chicago...and endless cornfields, because apparently that's all that happens to be out here. If that isn't bad enough, the general consensus about music out here runs the gamut from Nachtmystium to Slipknot. Yes sir, we Midwesterners sure have an outstanding reputation. Deep beneath the wallet chains, Tripp pants, and drug addictions, something much more glorious (and legitimately downtrodden) in seedy late bars and warehouses throughout our fair land. Call it post-punk, peacepunk, goth rock, or one of its many other names, it is impossible to deny the presence of such new greats as Cemetery, Anatomy of Habit, Population, and Kam Kama (more on the last two later), among many others, in this burgeoning Midwest scene.

In post-punk's early '80s heyday, the Midwest United States proved to be one of the most reserved regions in the country. With the no wave scene to the East, deathrock to the West, and darkwave's earliest beginnings with San Antonio's Lung Overcoat to the South, Middle America found itself in the position of the middle child: appreciated, but only in passing. Though success found itself by way of notable Lincoln, Nebraska act For Against, the first to blur the line between post-punk and "dreampop," many groups like Chicago's short-lived DA! ended up swept under the proverbial rug...

Kam Kama's scope strays from post-punk's usual "doom and gloom" outlook for something much more...nostalgic, which is exceptionally fitting for Middle America. I don't know if many of you have ventured outside the Chicago area, but most of the Midwest hasn't been able to keep up with its concentrated metropolitan areas, leaving most places somewhere in the mid-to-late 1980s, complete with bright, albeit fading, neon clothing, boom boxes, and headbands. Sounds straight out of a John Hughes movie? Well...it kind of is, and Kam Kama's The Tiled House carries that sort of happy, albeit faded feeling which accompanies those sorts of memories. The Tiled House's ethereal, subdued guitars and nasally, endearing vocals (courtesy of bassist and Fosdyk Well member Scott Ferguson) echo the sort of nostalgia one feels when flipping through their high school yearbook's yellowed pages or watching a dusted VHS of home movies. It's a happy sort of sensation, but with a longing for times past.

Read the complete review here.