Homocore is a term for various queer punk movements.
In the mid-eighties, bored Toronto kids G.B. Jones and Bruce La Bruce were listening to their punk records and noticed a strange obsessive thread creeping through them. "Hardcore? I don't see why they don't just call it Homocore," Candy von Pauker is reported to have quipped. Upon this meme G.B. and Bruce launched their zine, which described a queerpunk scene that did not yet exist - but which soon would. When San Francisco anarchists Tom Jenning and Deke Nihilson visited Toronto, they brought the idea back with them and in a short time hundreds of queer punks all over America and the world started to join in with their own zines, bands, radio shows, bar nights, and the like.
Out of this movement and the affiliated Riot Grrrl movement came bands in a wide range of bands such as The Fifth Column, Team Dresch, Pansy Division, Vaginal Davis/Pedro Muriel and Esther, Tribe 8, Heterocide, Sleater-Kinney, Bikini Kill, Behead the Prophet.
Inspiring influences for Homocore include Lou Reed, Iggy Pop, Patti Smith, Joan Jett, Darby Crash, Wayne (Jayne) County, The Buzzcocks, The Dicks, The Big Boys, and Nervous Gender.
Homocore was created as a critique of homophobia and sexism in the punk community. It also sought to reclaim punk as a movement that in its infancy was closely affiliated with 70's gay subcultures. Malcolm McLaren and Vivienne Westwood's early store "Sex" outfitted the Sex Pistols with clothing drawn from gay male fetish culture. Some of the earliest venues and hangouts for punks were gay bars. And of course the word punk has earlier meanings that can't be ignored!
This idea and critique became a real community, and in the 90's, influenced of groups like queer nation, was renamed queercore. The focus was broadened, and queer punks attacked assimilationist politics in the lesbian, gay and transgendered communities, even as they battled closed minded attitudes held in some punk quarters.