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Joe Biel – The Method Behind the Madness of Microcosm

I’ve know Joe Biel since the early 2000s. Joe rose out of the fragmented late 90s Punk Scene as an organizational power-house & created a personal DIY Punk Zine empire that continues to this day. While the aesthetics & tone of Microcosm were never my bag, I recognized that Joe was an empire builder despite the “keep it small” mentality of Punk, zines & DIY in general & I was very interested in this. I always felt bound by the rules of Punk, so much that I decided to drop out of the scene instead of breaking the rules. As I continued to pay attention to the scene, I saw Microcosm both following the rules on some level, creating new rules & then breaking the rules by growing rapidly & taking the business seriously. As Joe took slings & arrows for normal human foibles publicly & ultimately for breaking the rules, I was emboldened to take back the mantle of Punk & do things my own way as well. The issues of figuring yourself out, how your culture relates to you, how society treats you & what do we do & how do we do it on this Earth are all very important & especially if you’re running a business or really any project that is concerned with more than the bottom dollar, but has philosophical, moral & cultural elements - these things come up. David Ensminger interviewed Joe & here it is. x Sean

Joe Biel – The Method Behind the Madness of Microcosm

Joe Biel is a distinct kind of titan in the Do-It-Yourself community that has been a beacon of enterprising hope and a magnet of grave complaints; that is, he helped give rise to the 1990’s version of “xerocracy” – the loose-knit, thriving, democratic, and homespun network of fanzines that made global inroads for writers small and large, while his failed marriage became intensely scrutinized by Internet hordes.

Biel jumpstarted Microcosm, which initially acted as both a music label and raw amateur zine, in the mid-1990s. It roared to life during punk’s third decade in revolt, right as punk seemed to inject a new life code into millions of kids eagerly seeking cramped basement gigs and sweat-thronged rented halls from Cleveland to the Czech Republic. Microcosm was a major part of the dialog, action, and activism.

As CDs, cassettes, and Xeroxed self-publications became cheap and easy to distro, Biel became a force aggregator – he utilized the Internet to cut out the middlemen, took painstakingly time to develop sustainable business models that emphasized vivid content over mere profit, and formed a distro that became a lifeline to those seeking underground literary kicks. Plus, he helped pave the roads for zine symposiums and grassroots advocacy discussions across the land.

As chronicled in his new memoir Good Trouble, he navigated relationship woe, battled with his own undiagnosed Asperger’s, and attempted to cohere a collectivist approach, sometimes with intense personal pain.

This is a discussion that tries to peel back some of the layers of his life and a shine a light on the methods, memories, messiness, and occasional misery.

(David): First, you've attributed some of your success with Microcosm as a byproduct, in a way, of Asperger Syndrome; that is, you have analytical skill sets that help keep Microcosm afloat. Is part of that, though perhaps a byproduct of living in the industrial Midwest too, where they tend to instill strenuous work values?

(Joe): Yes, I would say that my success is a Molotov cocktail of Asperger's, my difficult childhood, and my Cleveland roots. I think that each taught me fundamental survival skills that carried me before I really knew what was going on. I wasn't familiar with his music (or much about him at all) but the place that I stayed last week had a copy of Jay Z's Decoded and according to him, to be successful on the streets you need: 1) To be able to do math in your head, which I can do because of Asperger's. 2) To be a good judge of character. My mom and many other people in my childhood lied to me daily, so I learned to do this quite young. 3) To be able to make quick decisions. Opportunities weren't often presented to me, so I learned to think quickly. Growing up in Cleveland as the steel mills were losing their business to Japan, I developed a strong work ethic. I had a paper route when I was 12, worked at Burger King from when I was 14, and was managing a restaurant by the time that I was 20—while I was simultaneously working full-time to also launch Microcosm. In the 1980s, everything felt somewhat hopeless and meaningless, so I took that as a cue to do the things that were important to me instead of worrying about nuclear winter. I figured that I could at least create some tools for the next teenage kid who was born into a hopeless world.

(David): You spent a bit of time focusing on the music scene that immersed the city, from the Pagans to Integrity, but how would you say that music scene taught you lessons, or opened your eyes, in ways that you carried to Portland and Bloomington?

(Joe): The punk scene was where I learned and developed morals and ethics when I was 15 years old. It disrupted—in the best way possible—my nihilistic youth of shoplifting and getting drunk and vandalism. The punk scene taught me that other people weren't selfish soulless demons and that they could care for me and about me. It also taught me firmly held politics, which I took to didactic extremes. The scene taught me that I liked reading and learning and about social issues. As a teenager, the scene taught me how to respect other people and why that was important. It taught me the value of protesting and fighting for the disenfranchised. In every way, those were the values that shaped Microcosm and are things that I still carry as important to this day.

(David): You say that punk led you to the politics of didactic extremes. What does that mean -- trying to live a "pure ideology" culled from impression of Crass records? But didn't punk, in very DIY ways, teach you about pragmatism -- getting things done, despite the odds?

(Joe): Because of my Asperger's, I was pre-disposed to didactic extremes. Punk was very nurturing of this kind of thinking -- e.g. RVIVR good, George Bush bad. Because I learn by failing and trying again until I achieve positive results, didactic thinking was very encouraged and I fell into a deeper and deeper slump of it until I became influencing other through that same spiral e.g. We used to sell the "Make Up is ugly" image but it doesn't leave a whole lot of room for individual thought or expression and the conflict in the message was really confusing to me when it began to upset people. Were they wrong? Was I wrong? Was it possible that we were both entitled to our own opinion? This kind of thinking was not happening for me until my 30s. Honestly, getting that perspective was important because previously I had been solely "getting things done" without always thinking things through. I could think quickly but I was doing that from a very young age before my views were quite formed. (David): Like me, you grew up in the 'burbs, distanced and detached, though this was meant to provide us a life of relative leisure and quiet that perhaps our parents lacked growing up. Is the hidden history of punk in America, in some ways, carried on the backs of people like us, in basements and ranch homes, and not just by the inner city tribes routinely chronicled in books like Please Kill Me? (Joe): 81% of the population of Cleveland now lives in the suburbs and that doesn't even count the far-reaching exurbs, which have replaced farm land almost all the way to the next city in any direction. Those suburbs, in particular, were created directly out of xenophobic fear and racism. The eventual result was to hide the violence inside seemingly tranquil homes and allowing neighbors to deny that it's happening. While writing the book, I did quite a bit of research on the city's history and remembered that my former high school had a major scandal when a treasurer had either lost, stolen, or lied about over $20 million dollars missing from the treasury and successfully sued the city when he was fired. That is the legacy of the City of Cleveland and the people who escaped to the suburbs largely did it and carry it on by climbing on the backs of their fellow workers.

Nonetheless, I had other punks my age in walking distance and on my street and never felt disconnected by much other than the incredible planned sprawl of the city and its car culture nightmare. I knew kids all over the world, and the DIY venue that I was most involved with, Speak in Tongues, was on the far side of the city from me. I think it was the first place where I saw a car set on fire and learned not to go buy beer across the street alone or I'd be mugged. I feel like I got credit for my contributions, as there is even a book, Escaped to the Future by Ken Blaze, about that era of Cleveland, and I'm photographed and quoted in it extensively. But I did feel like the music that came out of Cleveland in the 70s, 80s, and 90s was better than elsewhere. Perhaps that was a product of my age and general enthusiasm, but when I listen to those records today, they still hold up even if they aren't household names. So, in some ways, The Unknown, Snarkout Boys, Grain, Cripple Kid, and Blue ... Max are my best kept secrets that no one cares about.

(David): No doubt, the racism embedded in Northern cities, especially in areas like housing, education, and policing, is a not-so-hidden scar of America. And you mention the violence of the 'burbs, which often goes unnoticed, or ignored, hidden behind the facade of "good homes." For me, it was molestation: for you, it was familial physical abuse and verbal degradation. When I attempted to tell neighborhood kids, they taunted me, so punk rock became my counselor. What people, or music, or magazine, first taught you to channel anger, cope with fear?

(Joe): My dad had two strokes in 1983 and became permanently confined to a wheelchair and incapable of speech or unassisted living so I did get a lot of comfort from neighbors who assumed that my grief and hardship was a result of that rather than the daily violence and fear in my home. Seemingly similarly to you, when I told people about how I was routinely beaten and that's why I was so defiant, they would make excuses for the situation. I think it was too ugly or uncomfortable for most people to really want to think about my disabled dad and I getting beaten when he couldn't even defend himself. So I dealt with it like most people do, by getting drunk every day. But by the time I was eighteen or so and began hanging out at the DIY punk venue Speak in Tongues, I can't think of another way to say it other than the format of open air expression there was really liberating for me in slowly exorcising my demons. Punk had been more ethereal for me before that. I had certainly been picked on in high school for reading Maximum Rocknroll and it was neat to see all of the global goings-ons but it wasn't real for me until I was physically in the thick of it several times per week. In my later teens, zines continued that trajectory of getting in touch with my feelings and what had happened to me by meeting others who did openly talk about it and that was cathartic obviously, but not nearly as much as being able to write out and express what had happened to me. Eventually I wasn't angry or afraid at all anymore. I didn't realize that was possible.

(David): One thing that has puzzled me over the years is the divorce of fanzine and zine culture: in the 1980s, I felt the underground print community, from Flipside to World War 3 Illustrated, felt like a crossover grouping. But when I tabled at the 2008 Portland Zine Symposium, I felt like the zine world—more illustration-based, personal, and narrative—and the fanzine—more reportorial, music-based, and conventional—had separated. When you tabled at Propagandhi gigs, did this seem to be the case as well, given your 1% analysis?

(Joe): I may be partly to blame for this so I apologize. When we founded the Zine Symposium and also while seriously getting Microcosm off the ground in 2001, there was a certain sense that the music scene was well-documented and there were outlets and avenues for those fanzines, like record stores and punk shows. We cultivated the scene more around personal and individual expression about experiences and artistic takes on important historical moments. In many ways, I think that all of the founders and organizers were the ones who felt left out of the music scene as it was too macho and didn't often speak to our experience or current trajectory or interests. Ironically, Eleanor Whitney and I both had played in numerous bands but still felt this way, to some degree. Nicole Georges went on to perform as an even more serious musician than any of the rest of us, but I believe that she did it on her own terms, as she does everything. And she did fully document those moments in her zine, Invincible Summer, but it was more of a lifting the curtain than documenting the scene.

For better or worse, we were reacting against a legacy that wasn't interesting to us any more. I don't really know anything about contemporary punk or any kind of music. I own all of my records from the 80s and 90s and spin them when I'm making dinner, but that is a fully compartmentalized world from my zine making. By the time I was touring with Propagandhi in 2007-2009, most of the reading material that Microcosm and the band provided was about global politics. I don't think there was a single music fanzine unless a kid brought their own to a show. Right now I'm staying with Richard the Roadie who started this legacy by bringing AK Press books on tour with bands like Avail and Rancid in the early 90s. And by 2007, I think a lot of kids trusted their reading to Propagandhi even if they didn't have a stance on nonviolence or oil pipelines or Native American rights. I also have to cite Aaron Cometbus as majorly paving the way for making punk kids more literate and interested in subjects other than music.

(David): You mention Aaron Cometbus, who created a hybrid music/art/narrative zine, as paving a way towards punk literacy, but you also take some credit for creating a schism of sorts between the music and art portions of the zine scene, simply by way of symposium structures, etc. For me, as someone in his 40s who still plays in three bands, I am a bit stunned that modern punk, or any modern music, does not play much of a part in your life. You call it a kind of compartmentalization, but might not others see it as abandonment?

(Joe): Punk continues to play a huge part in my life today. But you seem to be defining punk solely as music, which is kind of my whole thing: Punk has always been much more than just music. The music is a very small part of it to me.

(David): Speaking of AK Press, as well as PM Press, who also seem to follow similar models as Microcosm -- keep operations close to the ground, table at gigs and rallies, feature titles that are underground and political -- how would you distinguish yourself from them to a general audience? Perhaps your longstanding dedication to DIY manuals and books for bicycle advocacy, less emphasis on sectarian politics?

(Joe): In terms of spirit and editorial ideology I can see how all three look similar from the outside. We are all mission-based publishers rather than profit-oriented. I think the biggest differences are in development. The prices of Microcosm books, on average, are half or less of AK or PM and we manage 75% of our sales in-house while, to my understanding, they both develop for and rely upon their book trade distributors for the majority of their book sales. The result is that their books "fit in" better in the bookstores while we focus most of our effort on "the ground game," organizing our own author package tours and finding the excited readers for each book rather than relying solely on author or distributor. While we might all be interested in publishing the same book, Microcosm would do it very differently: smaller trim size, lower price, less conventional cover, and humorous subtitle. Our author royalties are also double the industry standard and we sell books to the authors at cost, taking more inspiration from Lookout Records than book publishers in our model. Granted, in 20 years we've lost zero books to either PM or AK but we have won several books that have submitted to all three and all of the books we've lost have been to Soft Skull when their pockets got deep. I respect the models of AK and PM but they are deeply different models, mostly because they follow convention quite a bit more.

(David): Throughout the memoir, your well-intended criticism of progressive, left-leaning, or DIY culture gets a bit more heated and pointed, whether it's the "echo chamber" effect they seem to embody, or their tendency, perhaps, to rely on emotional responses rather than reasoned analysis. In some ways, this reminds me of Paul Krugman's dissection of Bernie Sanders' economic platform, whose fuzzy math may not be much better than Republicans, though his ideals are. Do you feel like a bit of a heretic, even now?

(Joe): I have felt like my views have been at odds with my community's for my whole life so I'm quite comfortable challenging—and hopefully gradually reshaping—the views of the scene to be a better environment for every weirdo who wants to be a part of it. I stand behind my critiques and had many years to consider them and why things rubbed me wrong. I think an emotional response is appropriate and should be met with an empathic response but I think that people in the punk community have a harder time understanding the difference between that and attacking someone else, without really knowing what they want from that person. It doesn't do any good to pour salt into the wound if the only result is getting worked up without a hopeful chance at resolution, or even knowing what that would look like. It is with the same love that the scene was my only real family for most of my life that I raise these criticisms. Krugman's analyses of Sanders were disproven, to my understanding, so let's hope the comparison doesn't stick and I'm remembered instead as the loyal opposition, better arming the choir.

(David): You became mired in the gentrification politics of Portland a few times as the city shifted from a hip outlier of sorts to Portlandia, the stuff of legend—though San Francisco likely has now stolen the conversation and news. Do you think Microcosm could develop and thrive if you moved there today, right out of the Midwest, with your communal living and DIY spirit?

(Joe): At my reading event for Good Trouble at Powell's, someone asked me how Microcosm would be different if it never left Cleveland and I think about that a lot. Portland genuinely shaped Microcosm for the better, but the city is not what it once was. The once glorious DIY clubs Spurcraft and 17 Nautical Miles are now a trophy store and a bar.

Portland now has the most population growth per capita and worst rent hikes in the U.S. We have virtually no tenant protections so people are routinely served 30 day notice that their is rent is increasing by 50-300%. It's such an epidemic that it's legal to camp anywhere in city limits and it will be the issue that determines the next mayoral election, as there are still no jobs. I see what our youngest staffers have to go through to make it work in Portland these days and I respect their determination and hard work. I no longer have eleven roommates or cheap rent but I am inspired and motivated by different environmental factors around me now. I'm not the kind of person who longs for the past, but I don't think that the Portland of today would have created the same Microcosm anyway. At the same time, there's also many reasons that I'm still there, though they are more personal, like it's the only place that I've ever felt like home and it's where the people who love me the most are. Will that last? I don't know.

(David): But many people might wonder, if Portland and San Francisco, once considered the most liberal bastions in the country, cannot effectively counter hyper-gentrification or democratize their housing market, what hope do others have? What lessons have you learned from Portland that might help others, right now, who are about to face similar situations in the near future? Immediate tenant organizing?

(Joe): I think "liberal bastions" is exactly the problem. In Portland, the liberals are often involved in the most passive racism of any citizen. Residents had absolutely no problem uprooting people of color from their historic neighborhoods when our population first boomed in the 21st century but once middle-class white people were being priced out of the same city in turn, they were legitimately outrage but couldn't seem to see the connection. I was featured on the front cover of our daily paper The Oregonian talking about this in 2007 and people literally laughed about the situation, saying that I was overstating the problem. No one would be laughing now when you rent a shed for $1,500/mo or spend $2,500/mo for an apartment. Of course the problem is that it’s far too late to offset or push back on the development or even slow it down. Naturally, my advice would be to keep an ear to the plight of people who don't look like you and stand up for them when they are suffering from gentrification to build a movement that can take care of each other. Listen to people's concerns who are more marginalized than yourself because while you might not have the same concerns you will likely have the same issues before too long. If we had done that we could have stopped it. People's refusal was really soul-crushing for me.

(David): In some way, even better than larger publishers, you have mastered the economics of scale—not simply through the trial and error of being a collective, or of being a DIY maverick, or by reading a million How-To books, but by understanding your audience. Yet, we have both seen the near death of print—the collapse of distros, the collapse of global outlets like Tower Records—and the rise of the Internet. What is the future of print? I know Amazon is planning brick and mortar bookstores, so is rejuvenation likely?

(Joe): I often tell the story of The Bell Curve which "hacked" its way into the New York Times bestseller list through advancing the appropriate number of copies through sales channels that "count" and putting the authors on every key daytime talk show that triggers stores to heavily stock a book. Inevitably the books were shipped and many were returned unsold because the book was developed for the industry, not for the reader. And it was racist. I feel like the entire industry learned the wrong lesson from this and now operates this way, trying to leverage books onto a list instead of for the people that love them deeply

My strategy has always been to ignore things like Tower or Amazon or even trade distributors and create a parallel system to reach readers. Since day one and still true today, I consider each challenging narrative that Microcosm would like to tell next and then assess if taking that risk could seriously jeopardize us. If it won't, we do it even if there isn't much of a potential financial payoff. Because we're building the world that we want to see while most of the publishing industry is making one risky investment after another and wondering why they aren't paying off. The death of print is nothing but a media buzz phrase. 2015 was Microcosm's best sales years ever. It was also a record year for books in general with sales up $50M—and a record year even for indie book stores. But now post-recession technology floods the market with 4,000 new books every day.

Most of them are not developed titles, meaning that if you look at the books you can't tell what the benefits are that the books offer by looking at them for five seconds. It's just more static and noise for an already overwhelmed reader to parse. The recession taught us that people will treat books as a luxury item as they are forced to spend more and more hours of their day working. It also taught us that millennials read much more than previous generations and certainly more than we give them credit for. There are just too many books for any person who already has job to make sense of so each one sells fewer copies. After 20 years, I recently read a book about how publishing math and risks are supposed to work and I learned that I had accidentally hacked the system. My method wasn't better or worse; it was different and I think that's why we've been able to grow and evolve while most mid-sized houses are bankrupting or getting bought by majors. It's a very good time to be a small publisher because for the first time in Microcosm's history, we can do exactly what we want to do without having someone compete with us for a title and only about 1% of our titles have flopped because of mistakes that are now obvious. I think the future of print will be achieved through solid development directed at readers and fans rather than what I see most publishers doing, which is still developing for buyers of major retailers. Putting books into envelopes is the future of print for any small publisher that wants to stay in the game.

(David): I understand you don't necessarily miss the Tower Records stores, since the Internet creates a global exchange without the need for intermediaries, but I do recall seeing, with a profound sense of loss, the inventory list and money owed from my defunct distributor Desert Moon, which carried hundreds of titles, many of whom no longer exist. Yes, book sales are up, but music magazines have diminished. Do you have any suggestions for coping with the new world of publishing, or for those keen to create a new fanzine/magazine, in the age when books, or even mags, might be considered luxury, as you suggest?

(Joe): The Tower Records stores held a distinct advantage—it was a really key way to get zines and books to suburban kids who needed them most. We waffled quite a bit about selling to them when they came to us but ultimately thinking about the isolated kids who needed them was what sold me on it. So it's not that I don't miss the stores—in some ways, I do. But my point is that you cannot rely on places like Tower or Desert Moon. They aren't our friends and their goals were never our goals. They aren't the kind of place that we could ask to do any favors. I think Tower owed us $800 or something in the end and while they had the money to pay their bills, the bankruptcy lawyers fought over the money until it was gone instead. I built Microcosm to never rely on any one source of sales or income so we wouldn't tank when one place or another went under. And I think zines like Razorcake are built the same way, by having a loyal audience in a dedicated community that pays the bills through getting lots of small checks from lots of places. Refusing to put zines in envelopes is the biggest mistake that I've seen publisher after publisher make and outsourcing those jobs to fulfillment companies and relying on distributor and ad revenue is what swallowed Punk Planet too. A friend of mine from high school did their mail order for years and I talked to the publishers at the end and asked them why they didn't continue doing it out of their office. The answer boiled down to "We don't want to do that kind of work." But I think that kind of work is the difference between sustainable and not, and most dangerously it's when you lose touch with your roots over some illusion of becoming white collar.

(David): Your argument is that titles are flooding the market, a deluge, a gray-out, of sorts. Yet, I heard this exact same perspective from people like Ian MacKaye of Dischord in the 1990s/early 2000s, when pressing 7"s and CDs, basic documentation of music, became cheap and ubiquitous. Yet, that is WHY Microcosm could be started -- the mass democratization of print. Are you arguing that less books should be printed, less voices heard?

(Joe): I think that intentions matter most. I think that of the 4,000 new books being published each day, I think that the vast majority are done not to document or preserve culture but as attempts at commercialism or vanity—in the hopes of "being discovered," pride in the accomplishment of writing, or simply because so many people see writing a book as a lifelong goal—even when they don't necessarily have anything to say. Most of our publishing peers are commercial and struggling. Most authors that I meet are writing in the hopes of it replacing their job at any cost. You would be shocked how many writers are quite willing to write romance or mysteries because even when they have no interest in them, they know that these genres are what sell. So, to answer your question, no, if a voice has nothing new to add to a conversation I don' t think it should be heard because it drowns out substantial voices. Like any considerate person, I think figuring out what a person has to say is much more important than being heard. But as I said, if proper development was done on every book—looking at what's already out there and differentiating from it to offer something new and interesting—I don't think there is a limit to how many books should be published or would be well-received. My opinion is that fewer inscrutable books should be published that no one can quite figure out what they are or who they are for. You need to be able to know how the book is unique and what benefits it offers by looking at the cover.

(David): Your diagnosis of Asberger's Syndrome seem to illicit varied responses even from the people closest to you—you seemed mild in comparison to others, or simply just another phallocentric male with routine behavior akin to everyday power struggles. Why, in a community that supposedly relishes social justice, fairness, and equality, did people have such a difficult time? Broadly speaking, has the DIY/punk community done a poor job of addressing disabilities?

Trying to recall standout Aspie incidents for the book was difficult because before my diagnosis, behavior that would stand out to others was totally natural to me. Often when I get the reaction "You don't act like so and so that I know who has Asperger's" I tell them about the time that I was fifteen before Catholic confirmation and as part of what I know understand was a bonding and socializing game, we were all supposed to share something about ourselves as went around the circle. My first turn I monotoned, "I like cake." On my second turn, I said, "My favorite color is orange." By the third time around when I said that, "My name is Joe," the counselor interrupted to say, "This exercise is more rewarding if you try a little harder, share, and don't act like a brat." This totally floored me as I wasn't meaning to be uncooperative and was completely following the rules as they were explained to me. I felt like an asshole but showed no emotion outwardly. I didn't know what appropriate sharing was until I was diagnosed at 32. I had hidden or created workarounds for many of the ticks and tells that I had exhibited. It did not mean that I had resolved the symptoms and problems. I have very dull mirror neurons, the receptors in the brain that cue a response to subtle and emotional communications that others expressed to me. Sometimes this was meaningless or harmless, but sometimes I could really hurt people's feelings and could come across as quite callous. Years later my ex-wife came to see my behavior as "emotional abuse" and while I believe that her pain was real, I was doing the best that I could with the tools that I had. For me the most hindering part of the disability was not being able to read people's expressions or nonverbal communications and hurting their feelings as a result. I've done years of work in cognitive behavioral therapy to learn how to pantomime and intellectually mimic what most babies are born knowing: how to read emotions and respond appropriately.

I think that understanding the highly nuanced complexity of how disabilities require special needs and are not simply a person choosing to be difficult does not mesh well into a didactic punk scene where things are right or wrong, good or evil. Intersectional politics are simplified into black and white halftones when the real world is quite gray and many kinds of privilege are not willing to be discussed yet. Strangers purport to know more about my life and motives than I do. Maximum Rocknroll, who has spent millions of pages printing letters arguing back and forth about who is and is not a Nazi has refused to run our ads or reviews or even engage with me about the situation. I don't think that anyone could reasonably disagree with me that DIY punk scene has done a horrendous job of understanding and addressing disabilities, just as it has historically with gender, race, and sexuality.

Even after I was diagnosed, I could not tell you how many people still did not want to acknowledge that my Asperger's has tremendous bearing on my behavior and is the cause of failure in navigating so many emotional and complicated situations throughout my life. And that's what was really heartbreaking: The DIY punk scene was the only family that I've ever known and for them to have such an obvious and painful failing that has clearly affected so many people in situations like mine is heartbreaking.

Connecting it all together, I recently was interviewed by another Aspie businessman who expressed that he wasn't concerned if he offended someone by what he said or rubbed them the wrong way. And I feel like that's the difference in me because of my punk upbringing: While I lacked the ability for most of my life, I want to create a caring and empathetic world for everybody where we hear each other's concerns and act responsibly. I think it's important and groundbreaking for men to talk about their feelings.

(David): You say, “The DIY punk scene has done a horrendous job of understanding and addressing disabilities, just as it has historically with gender, race, and sexuality." I agree wholeheartedly with the first, and that's why I penned a whole chapter on the links between deaf culture and punks in my new book, but are you suggesting that Punk Planet, Slug and Lettuce, HeartattaCk, and Maximum RocknRoll didn't explore gender, race, and sexuality? I recall sometime whole issues dedicated to the topics, like a Maximum RocknRoll "Queer" issue etc.

(Joe): Exactly. The fact that Punk Planet, Slug & Lettuce, HeartattaCk, and Maximum Rocknroll all have explored race, gender, and sexuality so thoroughly are the biggest indicators that punk is racist, sexist, and homophobic at large. Why else would a theme issue every few years on a topic like this be interesting or necessary in the first place? Of course, it bears repeating that it's only the outlier punk zines that focus on ableism. Does the existence of these zines disprove that the ableist discrimination in punk is real? Of course not. It just shows how much further subcultural understanding of the issues has to come and offers some guides of how to do so.

(David): Whether in terms of operating Microcosm, or in terms of grappling with the DIY community about conflict resolution regarding you supposedly causing "unsafe space," means you apply knowledge culled from experience, logic, history, and deep reading, rather than a DIY member relying on pure emotion and sensibilities reinforced in an "echo chamber" -- a DIY member who easily falls prey to ideas like: “Microcosm is not really a collective, and Joe is a rampant emotional abuser of women.”

(Joe): I think that what changed in the millennium is that punk identity politics established a new rule: people put up black and white rules that assume that remove fact-checking from an equation. I've deeply hurt people's feelings through my actions. But it wasn't because of my intentions that that happened and more often than not, I left those encounters deeply hurt as well. I was difficult and frustrating to communicate with because of undiagnosed Asperger's, not because I was intending to manipulate or exploit people. I learned from those mistakes, changed my behavior, and tried to resolve those conflicts. I cooperated with what was asked of me but in hindsight there isn't mechanism for resolution, just feeling good in the moment; winning the battle to lose the war. But the scene isn't equipped to understand that. Intersectional politics have been a huge struggle for many social movements so it's not a huge surprise. But it really hurts to think of how many other people this must have happened to through the last thirty years and how asking questions and fact checking vague accusations results in more bullying. Often times when I bump into strangers they know stories of me and attack or bully me as a result. When I point out this is bullying and abusive behavior, they make fun of me.

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