“Punk”

Ending my time at The Wake the same way I began: trauma-dumping

Quinn McClurg

“Punk.” Man, do I have a complicated history with that word. Two years ago, I may have hesitantly accepted it. More than two and a half years ago, I wouldn’t have touched it. But—like a messy, unlabeled, awkwardly long relationship—sometimes it’s easier to just call things by what they functionally are: “partners,” “punk,” or otherwise.

As a white person privileged enough to attend college, I exercised great hesitance around the word “punk” out of fear of appropriation. Sure, the first thing I did within the Twin Cities was throwing myself into the world of DIY shows with reckless abandon, but I still felt like a lame, out-of-town kid: trying too hard, looking like a poseur (worse, a “trust punk”). It certainly didn’t help that I was somewhat closeted at the time (I arrived here as a he / they catastrophe).

Later (sophomore year), my feelings toward the scene grew more complicated—working as a journalist within it made me feel like an outsider, extracting and exploiting every piece of culture I touched. But then, someone told me that being punk isn’t just about tall bikes, patch jackets, and pissing off police, but rather embodying specific political ideologies: those of mutual aid, anarchy, and non-hierarchy—of anti-capitalism, anti-colonialism, anti-racism, and anti-fascism. These were things I had already agreed with and practiced, but two things helped me get realized more than anything else simultaneously: community and Cultural Studies & Comparative Literature (CSCL), my second major.

Increasingly, I found community among the DIY, punk, and poetry scenes near campus. House shows lead to dinner parties, then to clothing swaps and community gardens, and, before you know it, the zine scene and [DATA EXPUNGED]. Put a pin in this.

As for CSCL, the light of my (academic) life, its critical theories and radical histories got me the rest of the way to where I needed to be, both nurturing a rich inner life and encouraging the decolonization process in my little, white, raised-by-QAnon-freaks-in-Wisconsin head. In short, CSCL and curiosity gave me my theory and history, and community gave me my praxis. And it all came to a head in my hedonistic summer of 2023—I’ll spare the lurid details, but TLDR: From April onward, “punk” became inseparable from every part of who I was, then with August came the incomprehensible weight of REAL violence to make it all-the-more unspeakably concrete.

I’m not sure how to advance here, especially since I don’t want to make it seem like it’s all about me. It was a hate crime. One person is dead, a backyard-full of people (friends, lovers, bandmates, activists, community members) is forever traumatized, and two teenagers will be in prison for a very, very long time. None of it should have happened. None of it should have ever happened.

Coming face to face with such senseless violence does teach you a thing or two. You knew it before but *feel* it now—the hatred that enabled such an attack is the very same that packs our senates, courts, and corporations, our Congress, military, and police force. Fun fact! Did you know that, since its inception, our country never stopped commiting genocide? Did you know it’s happening now on Twin Cities streets, specifically to unhoused Indigenous people?

Whatever—my radicalization was expedited—time moves in a blur. But there were railroad tracks and boots on the ground and [DATA EXPUNGED] and too many cops and a gnawing pit in my stomach whenever I was in class. And there were more punk shows and sewers, billowing fires and an eclipse, the late-April encampments and then… an organizational falling out. 

Almost the rest of 2024 was crippling loneliness, unemployment, housing insecurity, and trauma recovery. My support system dropped to one. We drank together through the election

But here I am, a year later—picking up the tatters of my community, starting with the old friend groups (minus a few people). Part of me feels like I turned in my “punk” card (more like ripped out my punk organ) a year ago, but I’ve been barely surviving, somehow supporting those immediate to me in the process. I keep reminding myself that what I am doing—being visibly trans, boycotting, supporting others, distributing food, barely showering, and helping run a radical, independent publication—still makes me a punk, especially in a country that becomes increasingly dangerous to the non-normative everyday. 

So, even if I wasted this last year (I didn’t), I spent it getting one year closer to graduation—after which I’ll finally be able to resume building the life I desire. And I’ve got plans, big punk plans; what’s more punk than building a better life from the ashes of the old?