WHEN I LIVED in Michigan in the early '90s I played bass in a post-punk band with three other women. We were doing something important beyond the music we were playing, especially for the girls that came to our all-ages shows, by being visible in that typically "boys' club" scene. More and more girls started coming out to underground shows, and they all talked with us after we played. Some were learning to play guitar, some were starting bands. It was rewarding to see.

I had my first exposure to queer punk with that band. We often played with all-women touring bands from the West Coast when they came through Flint and Detroit. I don't think any band we played with during that time had as dramatic an effect on me as the San Francisco-based band Tribe 8. When we played a show with them in 1994 the hall was packed shoulder to shoulder with people. It seemed like every queer in the state had come out of the woodwork to witness their wild, shockingly un-Midwestern show.

Tribe 8 was loud and raucous and raunchy and aggressive and sloppy the way testosto-punk bands are. They took off their shirts. The singer unzipped the fly of her leather pants and pulled out a giant cock. A sea of sweaty lesbians lined up for a chance to suck it. It was gender bending, to say the least. My eyes bugged. My mouth was agape. The music faded into the background, and my attention focused on the stage antics.

They were the first uncloseted queer punk musicians I had ever seen, and I watched them excite a roomful of oppressed Midwesterners into a near frenzy. It blew my mind that this band had pulled into town and, by their very presence, created a queer safe space among all of these strangers. It was especially powerful because – though more progressive than where I grew up in Texas – Michigan was not a safe place to be openly queer. I went home after that show reassured not only that I wasn't the only queer person in the region, but also that there were radical queer punks out on the West Coast who were doing something meaningful and effective beyond their music just by being themselves on the road.

I came to the Bay Area a couple of years later because I was finding it hard to make music and make art and have good fun in a place where my sexual orientation was a huge issue. There was so much going on musically when I moved out here it was overwhelming. There were a dozen music practice spaces in San Francisco alone, each with 50 to 100 rooms and long waiting lists. A lot of bands are packed into those seven square miles, and there are tons of bands all over the rest of the Bay Area, too.

As someone who viewed San Francisco as a queer mecca, I found it surprising that there wasn't a defined queer punk music scene. The Bay Area wasn't full of a next wave of Tribe 8s and Pansy Divisions. Those pioneering queer punk and pop punk bands are still in action, but there are only a handful of other punk and underground bands in the area that have only queer members. It seems the mixture of queer- and straight-identifying people in our neighborhoods and workplaces is at least superficially present in music circles as well.

What I would call progressive punk – contemporary new wave, no wave, noise, dark punk, and Goth punk – takes punk musical and political ideas to new levels. Bands like that in this area are saturated with women and have a lot of queer members and queer representation. Those groups make up what is probably the "queerest" local punk music scene. It would be really hard to call it a queer scene, though, considering that the bands have plenty of straight members, too. The more notable thing about this music community might be its unique integration of people across the lines of sexual orientation and gender. For the most part the progressive punks don't band together solely over their sexual identity or sexual politics.

That is not to say that the local underground music community isn't unified over politics. People have become tightly knit over the local economic and housing crises. Musicians are touched by the class war in the city of San Francisco and the surrounding areas in one way or another, and they are clinging together for support and unifying in protest.

The "urban renewal" bringing about the gentrification of our neighborhoods and the closure of local arts organizations spreads over into the closing and censure of live music venues where queer-positive punk and underground music happens. People moving into the renovated live-work lofts and condos in traditionally nonresidential areas seem to be doing their best to change the nature of the long-standing club and live music strips. It was a brand-new resident in the SoMa district, for example, who repeatedly phoned the police about the "noise" coming out of the predominantly queer Coco Club, one of the few places in the city of San Francisco where we could have underground shows. That Silicon Valley transplant eventually forced the club to stop letting bands play. There are now only one or two clubs that will actually let this thriving queer-filled punk scene have shows.

These same renewal efforts are also forcing drastic rent increases and barely legal evictions that make it nearly impossible to live in San Francisco at all if you're not wealthy. Two of my queer friends, Jesse and Michelle, were living in a space above Market Street downtown where they were able to put on progressive punk shows, including a large show for this year's Gay Pride. We had affectionately dubbed their space the Whorefield because of its location upstairs and down the street from the mainstream music venue the Warfield. They were recently evicted so the building could be renovated and converted into (presumably dot-com) office space. We saw the potential for the creation of art and music within those walls go down the drain. I live in Oakland and see the same developmental craze starting to happen here. Many of the local progressive punk bands have come together to hold benefit shows to combat unfortunate evictions and club closings in addition to putting together anti-gentrification demonstrations and generator shows.

In my mind, beyond a political unity, it is also important to achieve a queer unity in the Bay Area underground community. This has a lot to do with how we affect people outside of the area. When you live in an area so full of great artists and musicians, it's easy to miss out on the impact you can have with your music and art elsewhere. Often it's not until I go on tour that I remember the effect seeing queer people playing music had on me before I lived here. Not only was it affirming, it was historic. It can't hurt for me, as a queer musician, to attempt to share that feeling and do that for someone else.

The great thing about most of the bands I love to see and the people I play music with is their willingness to take things on the road. I was talking with Claire, who plays guitar in the San Francisco-based band the Little Deaths, about her band's experiences traveling across the country playing underground shows. She described playing outside of the Bay Area and feeling especially good about the queer presence of her band. People would come up to them feeling really excited and positive after their shows. In some places people had never seen bands with openly queer members, and Claire said she felt like she was doing something important, independent of the music they were playing, by having a queer presence in those towns.

Being visible in places where people normally aren't is an achievement for queers in underground bands, however secondary to the music. I'll be touring in August with Subtonix and then with Erase Errata and California Lightening. As cheesy as it sounds, I look forward to being subversively "out and proud" in Washington, Louisiana, Nebraska, and the rest of this conservative country while playing in my bands. Hopefully, when we return, no more of our venues will have been shut down in our absence.

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