Mavericks has rebooked punk rock band The Queers to play their venue on Feb. 21, despite the concert’s initial cancellation.
The concert’s original promoters, The Diamond Mine Agency, cancelled the show on Jan. 28 after local activists posted a petition online calling for it to be cancelled.
The petition accuses The Queers of “holding and perpetuating anti-Black and transmisogynist views.”
“We felt as though it was getting out of hand and we felt it was in our best interest and our communities to cancel the date for now,” the concert promoter wrote in a Facebook post.
The original change.org petition was created by Babely Shades, a local art and music collective made up of people of colour.
Babely Shades posted the change.org petition on Jan. 26 urging the promoter and venue to cancel the concert, stating it would continue to ostracize and create unsafe spaces for marginalized people.
The petition cites a 2014 Facebook post where The Queers’ front man Joseph King shared his support for Darren Wilson, the police officer who killed Michael Brown, an unarmed black 18-year-old man, in Ferguson, Missouri that year.
The Facebook post stated: “A man of peace in a world of mayhem. We are all behind you Officer Wilson. Thank you for your service.”
After the petition was posted online, many people came out against it, posting their support for The Queers on the concert’s Facebook page.
This eventually resulted in racist and sexist comments and threats against members of Babely Shades, said Corrina Chow, a member of the collective.
The threats they have received online have made Chow feel unsafe and uncomfortable going to any punk concerts in Ottawa, they said.
Many of the comments were made by fake anonymous accounts. Mavericks has since deleted all of the comments and deleted the concert’s event page.
Mavericks declined to comment.
“At this point, it’s really transcended Mavericks and become more about the scene in general,” Chow said.
Layla Brown, who is 34 and has been attending punk concerts in Ottawa since the early 2000s, said she is not surprised with the hateful attitudes Babely Shades has faced.
Being often the only person of colour at shows, she said she is familiar with a lot of the negative attitudes currently being expressed online by the punk community. In the past, Brown would have a lot of difficulty getting her white friends to believe the racist experiences she had at punk concerts, she said.
Although punk originated as a radical movement, it has become bastardized as people have taken from it what they want, Brown said. The punk scene in Ottawa does not give any consideration to important issues, such as race or gender, she added.
“Their idea of ‘fighting the system’ had really only to do with things that were in their wheelhouse,” Brown said.
The punk community is only concerned with superficial things in their own lives, said Hana Jama, a member of Babely Shades and Carleton University student.
Jama said it’s like the “Oppression Olympics” for them—it’s a game, but to marginalized people, oppression is life or death.
King has since created his own counter-petition asking fans to come to the concert in support of gay rights. In the petition King states he is gay and married to a transgender person, which he later said “was admittedly tongue-in-cheek to get a laugh out of the whole thing,” in an interview with For the Love of Punk.
When King posted the petition to Facebook, he wrote, “Some misguided mongoloid is trying to boycott our show in Ottawa.”
In addition to The Queers, Ottawa punk bands The Riptides and Shootin’ Blanx will be opening the concert.
The drummer in Shootin’ Blanx, Taylor Butler, who is a transgender man, said he feels completely comfortable playing with The Queers.
Butler received criticism from protestors after posting that his band has its own beliefs and opinions separate from the artists they perform with, on the Facebook event page.
One of the commenters accused Butler of “playing the trans card,” Butler said. “I don’t really know why he or she would say something like that.”
“I understand the message that they’re trying to get across, but the way they’re going about it is not right,” Butler said.
Every movement has issues and it’s possible to be a member of the LGBTQ community and still have those issues, Jama said in response to Butler’s participation at the concert.
“Going up against this issue is not necessarily attacking a trans person. You just so happen to be a trans person who is in this issue and you don’t care. We are circumventing you because we don’t need you,” said Brown of Butler.
Chow said Babely Shades is trying to tell the punk community they need to step back and consider why the things they say might be hurtful.
“There’s nothing wrong with being wrong,” they said.
People are more concerned with not being called racist or transmisogynistic than actually not being those things, Chow said.
“All you’d really have to do is apologize and then don’t continue to behave that way,” they said.
