Punk fan fiction
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In 1983, the Cometbus fanzine was started. This small yet influential fanzine included fan fiction based on punk musicians. It was still around in 2000. [1]
Starting in the 1970s and 1980s, there was the anomaly to the traditional middle class and upper class fandom. This anomaly was the punk music community. There were numerous fannish communities based on different punk bands. Most of the membership for these fandoms was working class. These working class fen used their extra money to attend music sessions by their favorite local punk artists. They were male and female. They were misfits. This group of fen used Xerox machines to produce fanzines. Ones like Cometbus frequently included samples of fictional stories about the band. Some of these stories according to fannish lore featured musicians not just written as being involved in same sex sexual couplings but as homosexuals; they were written and coded that way. This was frequently done with the knowledge of the band members involved as many of those fen had access to the artists. While they may not always have supported the material and have actively considered them rubbish, they did not apparently step up and crack down on those materials. The reasoning for this is that music played with those gender issues, those orientation issues, operated on the cultural fringes, with a number of artists in the community being out, out like people in other fandoms could not be. This type of fannish behavior and related attitudes stayed with the community well into the 1990s.
[edit] Sources
- http://www.operationphoenixrecords.com/cometbus2.html
- Colegrave, Stephen, and Chris Sullivan. Punk. New York: Thunder's Mouth P, 2005.
- Leblanc, Lauraine.“‘The punk guys will really overpower what the punk girls have to say’: The Boys Turf.” Sexuality and Gender. Blackwell readers in sociology, 7. Ed. Williams, Christine L., and Arlene Stein. Malden, Mass: Blackwell, 2002. 167-173.
- Yearwood, E. (2002, March 3). Pop artists star in fans' online fiction. Times Colonist (Victoria), p. B11.
