In Cleveland’s Post-Covid DIY Revival, Queer Black Drag in Midtown and Hardcore in Taco Bell Parking Lots

It’s two in the afternoon outside a warehouse in the quiet center of Midtown, and Onya Nurve, a drag queen dressed in colorful kente cloth and white boots, needs a working microphone.

It’s Juneteenth, and a particularly sunny day. As a train car roared over the bridge shadowing the trucking port where queens ready their afros or wigs, Onya Nurve asked a scattered crowd of 50, now with that working mic, “Are y’all ready to hear some lovely chocolate performers?”

In the building itself, sitting at a bar decorated with Hindu tapestries and a West Coast mural, is DeNavya Tolbert, the organizer of the event and the head of BLK Punx Press, a DIY performance space. This Juneteenth, the third BLK Punx’s celebrated since opening in 2019, marked a sort of symbolic point for Tolbert and her post-industrial warehouse venue off Perkins Avenue: a sea change in Cleveland DIY in an arts world still seeking normalcy post-pandemic.

The reasoning lies in Tolbert’s guiding ethos: to create an inclusive-but-niche, bare-bones arts haven for, and by, Black queer musicians and their fans.

“A lot of Black queer folks, they see that they have to choose who they want to be when they go somewhere. They’re like, ‘Okay, am I going to be Black or I’m going to be queer?” Tolbert, 30, said. “In this space, it’s different. A lot of people don’t have those opportunities to be both of those.”

Three years of the pandemic brought an almost ironic roadblock to the global DIY community: You had to stay home, but you couldn’t amass a crowd, especially one yearning shoulder-to-shoulder communion. While several local houses took things virtual, like Stream Space and McFarland Manor, the remainder of Cleveland’s scene endured a long pause from all it wanted to do: experience live music together.

But, in DIY’s reentrance in the past year or so, something peculiar has happened. Long dominated by a somewhat homogenous crowd of ambitious white males, DIY resurfaced with more diverse forms and identities. Newcomers, like Tolbert, came ready to promote a space for the marginalized. Some venues honed their reach on Instagram, while others ensured their neighbors had their cell phone numbers. (To preempt calls to the police.) Blighted Downtown bridges and the parking lots of Taco Bells and adult stores became more enlivening stages than the typical unfinished basement.

“Since Covid, I guess we’ve been more organized,” Quinn, 28, the founder of The Birdhouse on Quail St. in Lakewood, said standing in his basement at a recent Saturday show. Upstairs, his girlfriend Allie collected ten-dollar bills for the show’s cover and sold T-shirts emblazoned with their house mascot, Kitty. “We don’t book as many bands in a line-up. We usually end at 11. People just don’t have the attention span anymore.”

Some of the trends witnessed locally reflect those happening on a national, if not global, level. In Northampton, Mass., bands now play the front lawns of public libraries. In Denver, queer punks protest Nazi sympathizers—and the Denver scene’s capitalistic “Pay to Play” model—in homes lathered with Pride flags and Black Lives Matter stickers. And in Savannah, Georgia, house shows are now headlined, or completely run, by tranicore bands.

“We’re all aware of more genres of music, more genres of art, more genres of literature,” Jim Ruland, an author of six books on underground music and a DIY expert living in San Diego, told Scene. “And with the Internet and social media, people can specialize like never before—which is awesome, so that the people who are into it can find it. But if you’re not looking for it, you may not find out about it.”

But new trends don’t negate old necessities. Either due to lack of liquor licenses, or fears of landlord shutdowns, many venue owners still evade publicity or only release addresses to RSVP’d attendees.  After all, DIY’s inclusivity often attracts underage crowds, which could spell all sorts of legal quagmires.

This strange paradox—being relaxed and open and being legally vigilant—worried Tolbert as she prepared to host BLK Punx’s first string of shows. (One of them an “Anti-Valentine’s” all-girls concert.) She had heard a woman overdosed at a show a block over on East 40th and St. Clair, and wanted bases to be covered. She read all there was to read about California’s Ghost Ship tragedy, the fire at the Oakland warehouse spot that killed 36 people.

“I don’t want to be on trial for murdering people, because essentially the people who own that space all went down for that,” she said, referring to Ghost Ship. “And I was like, first of all, I’m not going to put myself in that position.” It’s also why BLK Punx hires armed security, Tolbert said.

In late August, four bands played the north end of a blighted bridge in front of the Downtown skyline. Hardcore and punk groups Daunting Nightmare and Fugitive Level played off generator power to roughly 150 people in their twenties and thirties, as a Guardians game roared in the distance.

Embedded in the bridge crowd, one smiles at the originality of the space, or muses on what a space is primarily: This is a bridge; it’s also not a bridge, but a host for punk music. It’s an attempt, one realizes, at reclaiming ownership, ownership over parts and pieces and grass and concrete run by the powers, you might say, that prefer capital over art.

“After Covid, the mosh pits just seemed better,” a man in his thirties calling himself Furface said, wearing a triangular beard and cowboy hat. “We haven’t been shut down, yet—not that I know of.” His hand comes up for emphasis. “Actually, fuck that. We do what we want.”

Near the second hour of the show, a security guard working for Bedrock drives up to tell the show organizer, a 35-year-old living in Lakewood, that what they’re doing is on private property. It’s illegal, pretty much. “In the future, we’ll call CPD,” the security guard warned before he walked away.

“They come here and will park under the bridge, and whatever,” the 35-year-old told Scene as the guard retreated to his truck. “But they’ve never done anything.” He nodded to a series of people lounging on rusted arches. “They just don’t want people clinging to the top of the bridge.”

He took the microphone. “Fuckin’ thanks for coming out to this, we appreciate it,” he said, as people in the crowd wooed back. “But we’re sad to say this’ll be the last show here. We were just told they’re tearing down this bridge next year.”

Such is the DIY life, with house managers growing up and moving out, properties being sold off for future leasing to tenants who won’t host late-night shows, and locations almost always enjoying a short shelf-life. It’s a transiency and impermanence both rued and revered, in terms of physical spots. (See: Speak in Tongues.) These are moments impossible to recreate. You had to be there.

A few weeks later, in early November, the heads of the Slime House, a sort of esoteric DIY space off West 101st St., hosted a four-band hardcore show in the parking lot of the AdultMart on Berea Rd.

The Slime guys had veered off the beaten path before. In July, they invited a hundred-plus people over Instagram to a hardcore show in a nearby Taco Bell parking lot, video of which, in its aftermath, quickly dominated social media in Cleveland. The whole experience—save for a few disgruntled cooks—opened up a new high for the Slime guys: host shows outside of their tiny basement with its random rug “stage.”

“AdultMart told us, ‘No property damage, or we’ll have a problem,’” tenant Brendan Sonnenberg, 22, told Scene, as Abraded’s singer Hellghillies shouted into the microphone nearby. “I mean, at Taco Bell, there were managers out of uniform freaking out. But here, they were cooler. As long as we didn’t fuck things up.”

“Are you ready for Drug Abuse?” Hellghillies asked the crowd. The crowd returned: “Drug Abuse! Drug Abuse! Drug Abuse!” As Drug Abuse went into their set, a mosh circle quickly formed below the AdultMart sign, as teenagers inside the pit began two-stepping or floor punching. Two kids climbed the rooftop and proceeded to leap off shoulder-first into the crowd.

Nearby, a 32-year-old in all black was asked if DIY metal was better outside, at this avant garde stage, than it was in Sonnenberg’s basement. “No,” he told Scene, grinning, “because I’m usually drunk at Slime.”

What is the ultimate telos of today’s DIY? Many talked to for this article, whether in kitchens or in parking lots, either felt a political ethos behind today’s venues was vital, or felt it was an intrusion on the bareness of underground music. Some even felt any mention of the political signified, god forbid, gatekeeping.

It’s the former why, ironic as it sounds, Tolbert shut down BLK Punx in September.

New tenants at the Perkins Building, émigrés from the defunct ArtCraft Building, she said, had started complaining to her landlord after the Juneteenth show about trivial matters: garbage left over, the “noise.” Tolbert whiffed tension at odds with her politics. By August, her and management were at loggerheads. “Were we pushed out?” Tolbert said. “Yes, 100 percent. Absolutely.”

At least for now. Tolbert is busy, juggling a day job in sales and her life as a working DJ. The whole reality of running a proper venue again, of contracting bands, of keeping good accounting, of making some money, seems daunting. It’s all why, she learned, DIY operators opt to stay under the radar.

“It’s not that, ‘Oh, my space will get raided,’ or anything like that,” Tolbert said. “It’s more so, ‘Damn, it’s actually hard to run a business.'”

So, for the time being, Tolbert is experiencing the scene as a bystander. At a recent show in October, a punk event hosted somewhat near to where BLK Punx used to run, Tolbert looked around and saw something encouraging.

“Seventy percent of people moshing were Black and queer women,” she said.

When asked the house’s address, or what it’s called, Tolbert gently deflected. “I don’t know if I could release the name,” she said. “I mean, it was just someone’s basement.”

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This article appears in Nov 8-21, 2023.