oh god, calling it "the OTHER gay culture" is just perfect, and captures what I've been trying to articulate about it for a long, long time. Very much a form of queer culture for people who were not cishet, but never QUITE fit in with the more familiar gay culture.
It was a queer culture that wasn’t focused around cis gay men, but around genderfuckery, transness, and powerful femininity
Coupled with a much more casual but deliberate dismissal of societal norms than the punk it descended from, and more than a little bonded to the deconstructive art philosophies of Dada
yessssssss this exactly~
I was in it, and drifted around other queer culture spaces for decades. so I was kind of all over the place, but music subculture in general was kind of my primary spot most of the time.
Basically same, and in my town all the skaters, freaks, goths and the like all hung out together, so I got a good sample of each