In Toronto in the mid-'80s, two queer kids Xeroxed together a DIY vision of a punk scene that didn’t yet exist. Filled with heavy-handed gay erotica, illustrations of leather dykes, homoerotic snaps of a jockstrap-clad Anthony Kiedis, and an essential, rotating "Top Ten" list of songs by queer-fronted punk bands, G.B. Jones and Bruce LaBruce’s seminal zine J.D.s is rightfully cited as the starting point for queercore.
In the beginning, J.D.s operated in fantasy as much as in reality. While it was clear to Jones and LaBruce that early punk was rooted in queer lineage (the Germs, the Dicks, the Screamers, etc.), the miasma of homophobia was still a very visible element to the punk and hardcore scenes of the '80s, just as it was practically everywhere in Western culture at the time. "When we discovered a lot of resistance towards us and homophobia in the supposedly radical punk scene, we positioned ourselves against punk orthodoxy by calling for a return to the roots of punk, which were much more sexually revolutionary and experimental and of course homosexual," LaBruce said of J.D.s in an interview with Gothic Magazine. "So for me punk and homopunk… have always been more about strategy and spectacle than social reality."
The "strategy and spectacle" that LaBruce had in mind filled J.D.s’ inky pages over the following six years. Short for Juvenile Delinquents, the zine’s content was often giddily explicit and tongue-in-cheek while remaining rooted in a queer-centric moral code that railed against the very '80s, consumerist, heterosexual machismo that superseded punk’s open-minded policy of embracing nonconformists in the '70s. Over eight issues (six of which are now available in PDF form via the Queer Zine Archive Project), Jones and LaBruce compiled a cultural milestone of comics, erotica, playlists, and more content that delighted in pushing boundaries and returning punk to its queer-centric roots.
In the third issue’s "Top Twenty" list of tracks, number 20 reads: "This could be you!!"—the two were attempting to foment a scene, to encourage queer visibility and participation in the face of doubt and exclusion. Yet, by issue four, the pair of editors were themselves surprised by the zine’s popularity. "The response to J.D.s has gone way beyond our comprehension," they write, thanking readers for the mail orders and letters that have "poured in" since the zine’s inception before going on to call out local bookstores and magazines that have since denied them access. J.D.s had a diversity of content, including questionnaires, promotion for upcoming queer events, photoshoots with upwardly-mobile punk bands, and, in 1990, the first queercore compilation cassette, J.D.s Top Ten Homocore Hit Parade Tape, featuring bands like the Apostles, Big Man, Fifth Column, and others.
Despite its undeniable status as a pioneering force, J.D.s was also, perhaps unsurprisingly, a largely white one. Entrenched in a visual language of white queer people subverting heterosexism, J.D.s was more concerned with providing a platform for nonconforming sexuality and taboos that stemmed directly from Jones and LaBruce’s lived experiences (and those they culled from readers) in the mid-'80s punk scene than a racially all-encompassing one. Even the zine’s go-to, the reclaimative homoeroticizing and subversive use of skinhead imagery, which could have easily complicated perceptions of established institutional systems of white, racist discourses and privilege, often did little but bait taboos and provocation.
Still, there’s a sense of freedom zines like J.D.s evoked that remains salient and especially resonant. As the contemporary LGBTQ social movement fights for marriage equality and increasing representation in politics and mainstream media, the anti-assimilationist ethics behind J.D.s and much of the queercore movement can seem like little more than a relic of queer history. But perhaps, in some ways, it’s the other way around. As Joshua Ploeg, the former singer of Behead the Prophet, is quoted as saying in Out’s essential queercore oral history from 2012: "One of the things was not to necessarily make queer culture more acceptable, but to make queer people feel like they could do whatever they wanted. It’s not to be more included, but to feel like you’re able to do something, no matter how crazy."