A look at last year’s QueerCore Fest.
Photo credit: Aaron Stoquert, Put Over Photo
EASTHAMPTON — For the third straight year, QueerCore Fest returns for what organizers say is its most vibrant celebration of queer, trans, gender-diverse and femme voices, as well as artists of diverse ethnic and racial heritage.
The two-day festival unites music, art and activism for two days of collective empowerment, joy and resistance under the credo “Loud music for collective liberation,” organizers said.
With the community ethos of a do-it-yourself basement punk show, QueerCore Fest will once again feature a lineup of 13 multiracial, queer, trans, gender-diverse and femme-fronted punk and hardcore bands from across the country on Friday, Sept. 18, and Saturday, Sept. 19, at CitySpace in Easthampton.
QueerCore Collaborative will present the event in partnership with UMass Students for Alternative Music, Mount Holyoke College ALT, and Smith Music Collective. It will also feature a maker’s market in partnership with Yet Another Queer Pop-up Market and tabling by local community resources. Doors will open at 6 p.m. on Friday with the show beginning at 7 p.m. On Saturday, doors will open at 3 p.m. for a 4 p.m. show. For tickets and to view the full music lineup for the two-day festival, visit events.humanitix.com/queercore-fest-2026.
The QueerCore Collaborative co-created the festival for the 2SLGBTQIA+. Organizer Ben Delozier told Reminder Publishing that, as someone who grew up in a “rural and sheltered environment,” they saw firsthand how punk music and its spaces could aid personal expression and unite those looking for community.
“This music for me — punk, hardcore, emo, heavier music — when I first encountered it, it was going to live shows at these tiny little DIY venues at the city closest to me, and punk music was like this doorway into a much bigger world for me,” Delozier explained. “I felt like going to those shows, the people that showed up there, I was just like, ‘wow the world is so much bigger than I knew or that I thought’ and just the expansiveness of being human, all the different ways of being human, I felt like going to those shows showed me a bunch of kinds of people I hadn’t met before in that space.”
The passion for music stayed with Delozier into adulthood. In recent years, they played in some punk bands and was exposed to UMass SALT, a student-run DIY group at the University of Massachusetts Amherst that has hosted live music since 2014 and is a partner of QueerCore Fest. After experiencing the community that would attend these shows, it was clear to Delozier that they wanted to create another space offering these same types of DIY shows.
“It wasn’t lost on me that when I looked around the room [while performing through UMass SALT], I saw a bunch of queer kids and kind of just the misfits and the people that probably didn’t feel like there were other spaces that night that were for them, but this was a space that was,” said Delozier. “I think that was a pretty magical moment for me to just remember what I felt when I was a kid and being like I want to be more a part of creating these spaces again, not just as a band member but as an organizer.”
A look at last year’s QueerCore Fest.
Photo credit: Aaron Stoquert, Put Over Photo
QueerCore Fest was conceived in 2024 with what Delozier said is the fundamental belief that being able to see yourself in the other people that are surrounding you is an essential part of being human. They added that it has been refreshing to see people attend the festival and feel belonging through having a space in a world where too often the message to queer, trans, multiracial and immigrant folks is that they do not belong.
“Our response to that is people in power do not get to dictate who the world is for and who it’s not for. They don’t get to dictate whose space is for and who they’re not for, and so for us the response to that is our role as fellow human beings of the world to rally around each other and be the reminder to each other that actually this world is for you, and we do that by DIYing into existence the spaces that feel like those kinds of reminders. That’s what QueerCore Fest is,” Delozier added.
This year’s lineup features local and regional bands that intersect with queer and multiracial identities. Delozier said that the hope is that attendees can connect with these bands and follow their artistic path after seeing them at QueerCore Fest.
“Our hope is to connect people to bands locally and regionally that they can follow so that they can get plugged into other spaces that are going to feel really nourishing on their hearts beyond just the events that we’re doing,” Delozier said.
Delozier said they are “lucky and very humbled” to see how the event has grown and to have received feedback from the diverse community that has grown through the event about how much offering an event and space like this as an annual celebration of collectivism has meant to them.
In solidarity with marginalized communities worldwide, QueerCore Fest is once again serving as a benefit show and raising funds for the Palestine Children’s Relief Fund, a non-political humanitarian organization providing essential care to children and families in Gaza and beyond. Delozier said the decision to support the PCRF reflects the event’s themes of collective liberation.
Delozier credited local community partners for their support in putting together the event, including the Mass Cultural Council, the Easthampton Cultural Council, CitySpace, Yet Another Queer Pop-up Market, Bombyx Center for the Arts, UMass SALT, Mount Holyoke College ALT, Smith College Music Collective, Daily Operation, Vegan Pizza Land, Hope and Olive and Silver Screen Designs.
“It’s been amazing to collaborate with those groups and use them as an ecosystem of extended community that we can take our participants and direct them towards,” Delozier added. “We want this to be bigger than a one-off event, and we also really want to leverage that we have amazing humans doing all kinds of organizing work already in our area and how we can connect them to that.”
A look at last year’s QueerCore Fest.
Photo credit: Aaron Stoquert, Put Over Photo
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