Johnny Noxzema isn’t just another pretty face who has branded himself with the name of a beauty product. This kid is one pissed-off queer punk from Toronto (“Home of the Coma”) who publishes Bimbox (“Free to Those Who Deserve It”), an underground fanzine (“All material is anti-copyright”) that serves as a soapbox for “queers” and “dykes” as opposed to gays and lesbians. Bimbox is dedicated to “the absolute destruction of lesbian and gay culture.” In a recent issue, under the heading “people who should have their heads bashed in with lead pipes,” it listed the entire editorial staffs of five mainstream lesbian and gay publications. “We will not tolerate their voluntary assimilation into heterosexual culture,” Johnny declares.
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He’s also unhappy about “crazed psycho-Christian suit-wearing sub-human slime.” Bimbox “is not for the masses. The masses elect oppressive governments. The masses buy newspapers. The masses watch television. In short, the masses are scum.” The Noxzema solution is to eradicate “EVERYTHING that is heterosexual, from organized religion to zip-lock freezer bags.”
“What is the University of Chicago doing here?” a professor on the panel asked herself out loud, flaunting her self-consciousness. “Maybe if I wore a blond wig,” she suggested, “I’d have a way of putting myself in quotation marks.” Wearing her real hair (black) and dark sunglasses, she touched on “improper spectatorship” and “dismantling the regimes of censorship.” But the big question was “how to keep subcultural queerness from being appropriated by inappropriate audiences.”
A few days earlier the word “queer” had been hurled through a car window at another ‘zine publisher. When the queer in question embraced the epithet in a belligerent tone, the basher got out of his car and made his point with a knife several times in the queer’s back.
