In the October 1992 issue of Artforum, Lawrence Chua dived into the DIY publishing maelstrom of “Queercore,” a hybrid of both LGBTQIA+ and hard-core punk aesthetics that provided an alternative to mainstream gay glossies, such as Out and Genre. “Queercore’s Xerox-ed broadsides . . . make marginality their starting point, empowering voices excluded from the slicker journals. Yet separatism in queercore’s pages is less a goal than a strategy to undermine the very notions of ‘inside’ and ‘out,’” Chua observes. Vaginal Davis, he argues, “epitomizes Queercore’s gleefully provocative diversity.”
 
Davis spoke with fashion designer Rick Owens on the occasion of “Magnificent Product,” an overview of the artist’s decades-long career at Stockholm’s Moderna Museet that opened on May 17. Artforum senior editor Alex Jovanovich introduced their conversation—and wrote a piece about Vanessa Conte’s BDSM zines—in the magazine’s current issue, providing two reasons to revisit Chua’s 1992 essay. —The editors