Fanzine
Buzzcocks, Pete Shelley
1978

Excerpt from Pete Shelley's 'Plaything' fanzine, 1978.

Writer and academic David Wilkinson writes:

"The early scepticism of gay liberation regarding clear-cut sexual identity, and the desire of its more radical elements to ‘change the sexuality of everyone, not just homosexuals’, may well have played a part in Pete Shelley’s repeated emphasis that the lyrics of Buzzcocks songs were deliberately non-gender specific in an attempt to maximise their potential for empathetic response. Shelley’s own fanzine, Plaything, was concerned with ‘personal politics’, one of the hallmarks of gay liberation and of the libertarian left in general. It argued that punk or ‘new wave’ was ‘not just about music’ but ‘a challenge to consider everything you do, think or feel…the way you react to the people around you. The ways that you love them, fuck them, hate them, slate them.’ "