“None of Us Are Free Until We Are All Free”: The Queer Punk Zine as Political Archive in Vancouver

By Melanie Budisusilo

How do you archive a community that is as ephemeral as a punk community, one in which bands and venues are in a constant state of flux, its members and locations oscillating and shifting from one month to the next? Punk as a subculture is ever-changing and its boundaries are constantly vague - a lineup for a show will often feature hardcore punk bands playing alongside Midwest Emo sets, sometimes happening in a proper music venue, other times in a suburban punk house that could barely fit a couple dozen people. It is difficult to narrow down where the community begins and ends, and what punk means to me can look completely different from what it looks like to others even within the same city. Punk scholars Kirsty Lohman and Anita Raghunath describe punk as a countercultural DIY scene built on a belief of decentralized resistance. This definition is useful and unifying, but I also recognize that there is more to it than that for me. So that I may better succeed in the imagining of an archive of this community I must explore what punk means to me, as a participant and now an aspiring chronicler of punk.

The core of punk as a movement, to me, is questioning authority and fighting for the values of the community rather than that of the rich or the individual, without appealing to institutional or state power. At the core of punk is a belief in liberation for all, in fighting sexism, racism, homophobia, and transphobia in any form, and in caring for those around you. I believe that punk is inherently political in its ties to anarchism, and so a project to archive aspects of punk necessarily must also be explicit in its politics. Punk is also necessarily queer: to be punk is to combat heteronormative ideals and to be who you are despite the social pressure to conform to a patriarchal society. Because of this, there is a heavy overlap between the politics and queerness of punk with the music. Many of this city’s venues are run largely by queer and racialized members of the community, and many of these community members participate in liberatory organizing outside of shows. The politics of the scene is intertwined with the music. For example, throughout the past few months, many local bands have either participated in or launched fundraisers for Palestine, channelled through the pro-Palestinian organizations that many participants also belong to, and Palestinian liberation and solidarity with various movements have become a core part of the scene’s identity. The slogan “None Of Us Are Free Until We Are All Free” is a staple of the local scene, alongside “Safe Supply Or We Die” and “123 Fuck the VPD.” These politics cannot be divorced from the scene, and so we stand to lose a core part of Vancouver punk if these aren’t documented. At the same time, it’s important to remember that such political organizing is often risky. There must be a balance to be struck between archiving punk for the future and ensuring the safety of activists within the scene.

With these considerations in mind, I suspect that that traditional archival methods aren’t the right form this project. Often, institutional archives are set up so as to divorce artifacts from their contexts, with the archivist imagined as separate from the archive as a whole. But as the person assembling a punk archive, I do have a voice and opinions about what goes on in the scene, and taking the role of a silent observer would be doing future users of the archive a disservice. Furthermore, many public archives are vulnerable to surveillance and incursion by the state. For various reasons, many in the community would prefer to keep their involvement within these scenes private, and safety concerns mean that it would not make sense for a local punk archive to be publicly available. To do the local punk scene justice, an alternative form of archiving must be used.

Luckily, punks have their own archiving practices. Across from the bar in the now-closed Rat Lab in Vancouver, there was a wall covered in zines on topics ranging from guerrilla gardening to anarchist economic theory to how to avoid arrests. Some were decades old, and detailed the exploits of previous generations of punks. As zine scholar Kirsty Fife explains, zines are often highly political and deeply personal, Their DIY nature means that access to zines is often self-selecting, with knowledge of a zine’s existence coming through participation in the scene. While the Rat Lab is now shut down by the city, the zines on the wall have found a new home in a different venue run by different people, a living, moving library of Vancouver punk history, continuously being added to by various groups coming and going. This is a community archive I have learned from and can contribute to.

That said, many of the local punk zines I’ve encountered were written by white men and rarely showcase the perspectives of queer, trans, and racialized punks, even though the scene is in fact incredibly queer. Often, as punk researcher Megan Sharp observes, queer and trans folks in punk scenes feel uncomfortable speaking up, being visible. The zine I want to make, then, would highlight the many queer bands and members that make up the Vancouver punk scene. It would also be the work of active queer participants in the scene.  The work to build a space for queer people within the scene has been ongoing since before I was part of it, and, as a queer member of the community, having a space that we’ve carved out for ourselves, one where we can feel safe, is important and needs to be highlighted. The fact that the people who run the venues, take the photographs, play in the bands, and organize the shows, are so often trans must be acknowledged.

Joseph Turrini says that zines and other forms of oral history can be problematic in how they portray themselves as genuine while failing to disclose their inevitable biases. I want therefore to recognize my own biases and make them as transparent as possible in the creation of this zine. I am a brown queer migrant and an anarchist, and this zine will be written from that perspective. The goal is for this zine to be one by punks, for punks, as a way to introduce those new to the scene to the community and its history, as a way to propagate popular and political education amongst punks in the city, and as a historical artifact for those in the future to see the world I inhabit today. Being a part of this community has pushed me to where I am today, and thus, my archival work cannot be separated from my personal feelings about the scene and those that I love in it. I don’t think it has to be. To archive community as ephemeral as a punk subculture, at a specific point in time, I must highlight my own role in this community. I am not divorced from what I am archiving, and what I am archiving is as political as it is personal. I think that zines are the best medium in which to explore the possibilities of punk archiving.