Tom McEnaney Featured in Berkeley News for New Book on Punk’s Radical Legacy

BCNM Director Tom McEnaney has co-authored a new book tracing the expansive and often overlooked histories of punk culture.

Published this month by Cornell University Press, We’re Having Much More Fun, co-authored with Cornell professor Judith A. Peraino, draws from Cornell’s punk archives to explore punk not simply as a musical genre, but as a broader social and political practice. The book features more than 400 archival objects, including zines, flyers, photographs, business cards, and other ephemera, alongside essays and interviews that foreground the influence of women, queer communities, and people of color on punk’s development.

For Tom, the project also carries a distinctly local significance. Having grown up in the Bay Area, he helped bring East Bay punk materials into the Cornell archive, including work connected to longtime Berkeley zinester Aaron Cometbus. The book includes a section dedicated to Bay Area punk, featuring materials from local spaces such as 924 Gilman Street, the Berkeley Aquatic Center, People’s Park, and Sproul Plaza.

In interviews about the book, Tom emphasizes the East Bay’s importance in shaping punk’s political identity. Rather than presenting punk as a short-lived movement of the 1970s and 1980s, We’re Having Much More Fun positions it as an enduring force rooted in collective action, anti-authoritarian politics, and community-building. The book also highlights the East Bay’s role in sustaining punk through DIY publishing, benefit events, mutual aid, and all-ages spaces.

McEnaney and Peraino will also appear at upcoming public events celebrating the book’s release, including a talk at Moe’s Books on March 30 at 6:00 PM and at City Lights Books on March 31 at 7:00 PM.

Read the original Berkeley News story online.