We are delighted to meet all of you again for this month's Erotic Punk article of Tevun-Krus. As the name suggests, we'll dwell deep inside the layers of erotica and make you moan with pleasure. On reading the article, of course!
"If punk had to have a motto, it wouldn't have been 'let's fuck,' but 'fuck you,'" cultural critic Carlo McCormick wrote in the introduction to Punk Lust: Raw Provocation 1971-1985, the exhibition he had co-curated with writer Vivien Goldman and Lissa Rivera, Curator at the Museum of Sex in New York. "Forget the romance, this was urgency, necessity, born as much of boredom as from desire."
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Punk Lust begun as the embers of the Free Love movement, one of the many movements of the 1960s, when slapped by the cold, hard hand of reality. It was an acute reaction to disappointment of the free loving heterosexual '60s in America.
In England, factory work and garbage strikes were disheartening to make anyone rip themselves out of their clothes. Children were frustrated and angry at the problems they inherited-- post war immigration tensions in England and post Vietnam disillusionment in America. People became more nihilistic. It was more about living in the moment, without concern for the future. There was something very aggressive and raw. People were using the language of sexuality as a form of confrontation rather than seduction. People were sexually expressive but not romantically inclined.
On both sides of the Atlantic, punks deployed everything they could control: music, clothing, gender, art, love, and sex(which has nothing to do with fucking). Despite all the sexual imagery and band names blatantly referencing genitalia—The Sex Pistols, The Slits, The Buzzcocks, Punk rejected cock rock, even as cocks dangled before audiences.
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As the LGBTQ Movement took hold, another underground world simultaneously came to the fore. Pornographers, who had fought the US government and won, flourished during the 1970s. Movie theaters and magazine stores opened for business in decaying cities across the nation, perhaps most famously Times Square — creating the perfect storm for a film like Deep Throat to set record-breaking numbers at the box office.
Stores were so important for meeting people. And that's where people would post flyers. Tish and Snooky's punk rock boutique Manic Panic [today a cosmetic empire] on St. Mark's place downtown served similar networking needs in New York. People could find each other and a place to crash. Atomic Books in Baltimore, where John Waters still receives his mail, was also an important address for an underground base of operations. The SEX boutique and Manic Panic marked the commercialization of punk from its DIY roots.
