Mobile, partially formless, homeless subculture that can be found in any major city across the West Coast, along the Gulf Coast as far as east as New Orleans, and increasingly in the cities of the Eastern Seaboard as well.
A sort of modern update of the hobo culture of the 30s, with more drug use, body piercings and tattoos, and heavy, heavy anarchist politics, usually in the vein of Bakunin or Hakim Bey. Many of the "black-clad anarchists" who fascinated the media by smashing McDonald's windows during the Seattle WTO protests were gutterpunks.
They usually sleep on the streets, panhandle and congregate in the hip student districts (where they may be difficult to differentiate from particularly punk students), and supplement their income through a certain level of involvement in the local drug trade.
Needless to say, there's no official membership list or monthly newsletter, but there's a surprising level of communication and coordination between members of the gutterpunk community, even in different cities. There are even a few semi-official symbols of gutterpunkdom, the tried-and-true "circle A" anarchist symbol and the eight-sided chaos arrow.
Most gutterpunks are known within their community by a descriptive nom de guerre rather than their legal names, for the simple reason that many of them are on the run from the law.