Even in her thrift shop duds, G.B. Jones can’t play down the glamour. Statuesque, with her long hair a shade between fuchsia and Miss Clairol’s Sparkling Sherry, this artist, filmmaker, guitarist, and self-described “dyke from hell” easily holds the rapt attention of a roomful of surly punk kids.
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“Instead of using a mainstream middle-class heterosexual model, ‘queer’ really celebrates more the real perversity and diversity of sexuality in general,” says Steve Lafreniere, a Chicago promoter and publisher of his own queer zine, The Gentlewomen of California. “But within queer culture, homocore kids who like punk rock are even more marginalized. They’re like a subculture of the queer subculture of the gay culture. It’s more than just a taste in music. Punk filtered through queer is a very different idea than punk that was filtered through middle-class America or working-class England when it was originally happening. It’s not just gay people getting into punk. It’s using punk as a form of music to express a whole other set of concerns, desires, anger. And fun things, too.”
“It was kind of an obvious idea,” says Mark Freitas, one of the Czar Bar homocore party organizers. “But someone needed to actually vocalize it and give it a terminology, an aesthetic, and a look. And they did that.” Through mail and word of mouth, JDs (short for “juvenile delinquent” and J.D. Salinger, among other things) became a cult classic and begat other queer zines with names like Homocore and Holy Tit Clamps.
But if Azar’s between-song patter sometimes borders on ranting, at least there’s never any dead air. Taking the stage at Czar Bar, she surveyed the crowd from behind bangs and thick black-framed glasses, and kept up a running monologue decrying patriarchy.
Although the crowd at Czar Bar was familiar with much of the material and yelled for favorite tunes, Fifth Column’s influence only reaches certain circles. Without the distribution clout of a major label behind them, many of the band’s releases are difficult to track down. And audience turnout at the band’s live appearances seems to be a hit-or-miss affair. This was evident when they played on a three-band bill at Cabaret Metro the night after the Czar Bar gig. The mob that would pack the house for the Mekons had not turned out in force when Fifth Column hit the stage in the evening’s opening slot, and the people in the sparse crowd didn’t appear to know their music.
