First things first: Happy Queer History Month! History is built upon the reality we have all agreed upon to pass down. The stories that are decided to be honored and remembered. The markers of history and how we learn about it are integral to the fabric of communities and cultures. How we commune with the tangibility of our ancestors and have a stepping stone in our lineage. It is no surprise that a key element of suppression is a historical one, that is why this month is so important.
The version at archive.qzap.org is intended to be downloaded, printed and distributed.
As a young queer that grew up in spaces where non-heteronormativity didn’t exist, the idea of queer elders was a fantasy that I thought would be real once I came out the closet. Unfortunately, this wasn’t the case because of such history unmaking. Specially for queer poc. One has to go searching for history when it has been erased for you. Such a search and thirst to learn more about the history of you and your people, the truths that cement the foundation you stand on is an act of care for the legacies they made.
The creator was answered the same questions all young queer people have with such a thirst: where is our history? Where are our elders?
“When I confronted my few older queer friends, they smiled apologetically and remarked, “you don’t know these histories because a lot of people that could tell these stories were either murdered by homophobes or murdered by AIDS. The rest of us, the survivors, either don’t know our own histories or are petrified to have any sort of relationships with the younger generations, fearing the label predator and child molester.”
Remembering is an act of honoring and resistance. It is an act of learning and of loving yourself and your lineage. In all its splendid ugly and beauty. I have found that although such remembering does not come easy to history riddled with erasure, the effort that one has to learn to braid into the attempt almost makes it all the more sweet. All histories that are hidden have pressurized into a diamond in the mine of your lineage.
Queer to the Left… Queer Holocaust… Lesbian Avengers… QueerNation… QueerLiberation Army… White Night Riots… Pink Panthers… STAR… QueerFist.. Combahee River Collective… Stonewall… Gay Shame… George Jackson Brigade… Homocore… Gay Liberation Front… ACT UP… Compton Cafeteria Riot… Out of Control… Gay Activist Alliance…
If you don’t recognize one or some of these moments, this zine is for you.
Something that I deeply appreciate is the nonlinearity of the zine. Time itself is subjective and its affective realities in our minds are anything but one dimensional. When one remembers one doesn’t go through every second from the moment you are to the moment you were. Our lives and our ancestors are not neatly winded into a coil of cassette tape to rewind through. Rather time is in a perpetual vomiting and unwinding of such cassettes, our times being in constant undoing through doing. This zine reflects the act of remembering such radical moments. In such entanglements one’s memories form new connections.
To attempt chronology is to go through the structure that was the one that attempted the erasure of our history. Queering such chronology is necessary to the understanding that the future isn’t ahead of us. We cannot see the future but we can attempt to bear witness to the past to inform the cradle of our necks that nurture a possible futurity.
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I will not be going through the entire zine for a summary for you. I urge you to read the zine yourself, to envelope yourself in history making in such resistance work. The work that has allowed me to be semi-okay on campus with a shirt that says “I ❤ ️ Pussy”. How much queerness is synonymous to political resistance.
I do want to shout out our very own and its part to such history-making. Homocore! Zinesters! I call upon you to be history in your history:
Valeria is interning at QZAP this semester. She is in her senior year at University of Wisconsin-Madison studying Gender & Women’s Studies. She was born and raised in Valencia, Venezuela and now lives in Teejop land (Madison, WI).
In my personal experiences in queer “activist” spaces, I have often felt a dissonant feeling about the uncommitment for action. This “activism” with no action! The “activists” becoming more “actors” at a performance of progress rather than tangible change. In my objective mind and what I will always tell people first, the mentality I go into these activist spaces is something along the lines of…
… that all effort is worthwhile, all efforts towards progress should not be halted just because they are not radical enough. We need to eat to enact the revolution. We need to make sure we survive today to protest tomorrow. The effort of the improvement of current living conditions should never be considered obsolete. Mental and physical health is super important, take care of yourself above anything. How could we honor the martyrs all around the world if we do not continue doing anything we can? How can we say that all the effort up until now is worth nothing? Isn’t the most revolutionary thing to have radical hope and to enact it in any way possible?
Perhaps it is because of my young self in these times of grand disillusionment with the world, but in my heart and people that know me deeply know I want to scream and bite people’s heads off for the incompetence and inaction that occurs. The anger that lights my eardrums on fire for the way that people cannot see how it is a waste of time to put energy on discourse on trivial matters is when people’s lives are on the line! How selfish it is to put your own feelings and ideologies first above the group! What happened to coalition-building?! How selfish and elitist it is to feud and then refuse to work together on the common goal because of your conceptions and perspectives on how you understood the theory that you read (or didn’t read)! Why is everyone just sitting around and talking about how they can’t do anything? What do you mean you are so angry you do nothing? How are you not so angry and do something? How could we honor the martyrs all around the world if we do not continue doing anything we can?
I believe both of these things at the same time but it does make me feel dizzy when in discourse I am told they are opposition. In contrast, I see them in innate relation. Doing everything we can, rest and action, despite it all is radical hope. To be a revolutionary you must be so angry at the world for its current state and its capacity to be better. Being impatient because it can be better and it isn’t. Imagining always ends up with me being on the street. Being an activist is having the radical hope that the revolution isn’t raining down on a random day like the rapture but you are going to be part of it.
Consciously I am aware that rarely have none of us gone through a truly unique experience. However, considering how every mind is an island, sometimes we forget the sea. Our antecedents and shoulders in which we stand upon to look out into the sea. As I was scavenging a zine to write about I stumbled upon the fabulous and extremely validating manifesto zine for the Lesbian Avengers. A hilarious and extremely dykey call to action, impatience, and mobilization effort. What a comfort…
Founded in 1992, the Lesbian Avengers were a direct action group focused on lesbian visibility and survival. According to their telling of their history: “Too impatient for lobbying or letter-writing, these fire-eating secretaries, students, cab drivers, journalists, artists and teachers joined together to create fabulous street actions that inserted lesbians into public life, forced political change, and redefined dykes as the coolest, most ferocious, girls on the block.”
The Lesbian Avengers’ Civil Rights Organizing Project (LACROP) went further, taking a group of lesbians where they’d never been before — into the heart of heartland politics. LACROP transformed grassroots organizing by putting local activists front and center, pushing them to be fully out, and eschewing mainstream campaign tactics that relied on people remaining in the closet. In Maine, it organized door-to-door canvassing and led community forums where people came out publicly—including teachers and small business owners. Where mainstream efforts in Idaho tended to do one thing, LACROP did almost the opposite: putting local queer people at the front of, and in charge of, goal setting, public events such as speak-outs and kiss-ins, and door-to-door outings sharing personal stories. By empowering queer people to come out and to engage directly with their communities, LACROP defeated an homophobic initiative in rural Idaho and laid long-term infrastructure for social change.
“Media was often key…The Lesbian Avengers shaped their actions for visual impact, and had media committees dedicated to outreach and ‘propaganda.’”
In the zine we have archived, the manifesto shows us this in the dykiest way possible. Bright pink and in all caps, I am truly being showered in lesbian rage. Calling out all lesbians from all corners and crevices they may be hiding in…
“IT’S TIME TO GET OUT OF THE BEDS, OUT OF THE BARS AND INTO THE STREETS TIME TO SEIZE THE POWER OF DYKE LOVE, DYKE VISION, DYKE ANGER DYKE INTELLIGENCE, DYKE STRATEGY. TIME TO ORGANIZE AND IGNITE. TIME TO GET TOGETHER AND FIGHT WE’RE INVISIBLE AND IT’S NOT SAFE- NOT AT HOME, ON THE JOB, IN THE STREETS OR IN THE COURTS WHERE ARE OUR LESBIAN LEADERS?”
The first page of this zine is a punch in the face but you like it. A punch that tells you to get your lesbo s*** together while having a good laugh. Truly enveloping yourself into the evil dyke archetype that gets matters mobile. There is an ever present sense of that impatience and exasperated feeling that any person, including myself, is overcome with one point or another that fuels a certain kind of anger:
“WE’RE NOT WAITING FOR THE RAPTURE. WE ARE THE APOCALYPSE. WE’LL BE YOUR DREAM AND THEIR NIGHTMARE.”
The Lesbian Avengers queer political language and “propaganda.” Using catchy short sentences of action and purpose such as the ones we have been too heavily familiarized with in campaign cycles. This time around in the most queer way possible of such language: instead of performative words to gain votes, its real promises. Instead of comforting and digestible slogans, we have “predatory” lesbianistic and often sexual threats to enact fear and recruit!
On the following page of the zine we are introduced more formally to the main aims and goals of the Lesbian Avengers: Who are the Lesbian Avengers? What is direct action? And why no abstract theoretical discussion?
They define direct action as “a public intervention ranging in creative form from marches to street theater to speak outs to cathartic spray painting of anti-hate slogans.”
Such creative interventions are what should be at the core of mobilization efforts to make the public uncomfortable, aware, and inconvenienced. Reminding that lesbians are here.
In the section on abstract theoretical discussion they ask “How many of us have sat in meetings arguing political theory to the point of mental and physical exhaustion, to the point where we run screaming to the nearest dance floor for release from the frustration?!” ME! ME! ME!
I will not make the case against abstract theoretical discussion, if anything I am all for it. I want to surround my life with abstractism, art, and theory. In the overdetermination of understanding and defining, we have lost the sauce. What the western mindset has failed to realize is that abstractism and theory is not the thing itself but the action of forming meaning and nomenclature for aspects of experience, humanity, and existence, that are based in reality. Simply that our language doesn’t not have tangible tools to describe such elements. What we are describing is very real and the action that must be connected to it must be very real as well. One drives the other and vice versa. Theory and abstractism exist because of reality. Discussions around theory that don’t leave you stimulated and itchy with the capacity and fuel to do something… going out to the street, creating something, forming a connection… babe. Discussions on political theory that lead to inaction because of political polarity… isn’t that the antithesis of why we are here? You forgot to touch the grass that you have been reading so much about! It’s right there!
Their communiqué-style newsletters gave activism the duality of action and being cool. “Look how much we’re getting done, and how much fun we’re having while we do it.” Using camp design, being loud and threatening about their lesbian activism, and putting their money where their mouth is, the Lesbian Avengers reminded me of my frustrations are not alone and to drown in my anger so it turns into passive resentment. There is always the fuel for it… like vandalism to a Navy billboard:
Valeria is interning at QZAP this semester. She is in her senior year at University of Wisconsin-Madison studying Gender & Women’s Studies. She was born and raised in Valencia, Venezuela and now lives in Teejop land (Madison, WI).
As I mentioned in the previous post, Queer City distinguished itself from other queer zines and cultural efforts of its time in having two co-authors of different genders, attempting to bridge the gap between the city’s dyke and fag scenes as well as to the document queer, trans, leather, and/or SM scenes that existed outside of or in more complex relationship to those boundaries.
In her sections of the zine, Rachel writes about good spots for women amidst the male-centric world of the Castro (“And if you’re feeling particularly raunchy, consider getting your labia pierced. After all, if Susie Bright could do it, so can you!”), “the truth about girl bars” (“When the dance floor is too packed, slam dance everyone out of your way or create your own dance floor somewhere else”), and the city’s top attractions for out-of-town lesbian visitors (“And you must take your bod to Osento, our women’s bath house, where you can join women of all sizes and colors sitting around the hottub or in the saunas. Rather than any bar, Osento, whose business is spread primarily through word of mouth, is the true heart of San Francisco’s women’s community.”)
Rachel kindly provided the following recollections by email:
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Life in the early 1990’s was about living in the moment. There were few distractions: no internet, no cell phones. We lived intently every day, in part because we were young and passionate and queer and in love with it all and each other, and also in part because so many of us were dying. We only had each other, and we lived for each day we had alive. It was the most incredible time of my life. I worked in the epicenter of it all, A Different Light Bookstore in San Francisco. Part bookstore, part community center, part waystation for disenfranchised queers. We were the pulse, and I reveled in it.
“New In Town? Read This,” from Queer City
“10 Things That Are The Same Anywhere You Go In Queer Nation,” from Queer City
Queer City was born from our restless quest for meaning, for love, for leaving our mark, and to say: we were here, we do actually feel blessed to live here, and maybe you can get here too. We also liked the union of young dykes and gay men- a newer concept in 1990. We wanted to represent unity as young queer people. Making the zine was fun. It was all done by hand, low tech, then photocopied down the street at Copy Central. I think I assembled it by hand too. Then we sold it in the bookstore, and it was very popular. No doubt it traveled around the world. We made a limited run of T shirts too, which sold out. I think I’ve still got one around somewhere!
I wasn’t really influenced by other zines, I think we just had our own vision and went for it, but other classic zines I loved at the time included Hothead Paisan. I even ended up getting a tattoo from Diane DiMassa to celebrate turning 30, then flew to London afterwards. Ah, youth!
Lee P, interning at QZAP in summer 2024, is a long-time zine maker whose current project is Sheer Spite Press, a small press and zine distro. Originally from unceded Algonquin land, Lee calls Tiohtià:ke // Mooniyang // Montreal home. Lee is also a member of the organizing collective for Dick’s Lending Library, a community-run, local library of books by trans, non-binary, and Two-Spirit authors.
“Queer City is a dream. Queer City is when you were 10 or 12 or 18 or 24 and you thought that you were the only freak in the entire world like yourself and that you were trapped forever. You wanted to die rather than lie, wanted to flee and be free. Then you moved away or ran away or hitched and when you told them you were in SF they went ‘Oh, I see,’ as if everything made sense, and though you wanted to say more it evaporated in the face of that tone in their voice. You wanted to say more but you weren’t read to burn bridges, or anything else. Yet.
Here you are. We’ll tell you where you can go, how to get there, but the rest is up to you. Have fun, be safe, watch our for your brothers and sisters. Welcome to Queer City.”
Queer City is a charming, bitchy, opinionated guide to the San Francisco of 1991: where to eat, how and where to cruise, which nights to go to which clubs, and the kind of gossipy, hand-on-your shoulder kind of advice that makes you feel like you have a cool older friend showing you around. (“if you think noone is watching you make out with that girl at Club Q, you’re wrong, but do it anyway”)
It’s a version of San Francisco that I never had the pleasure of seeing, having only visited the city for the first time in 2015, but one that looms large in my mental landscape since I’ve read about it many times across the work of many writers.
I was surprised and delighted to get to the final page of the zine and see the name of one of those authors who had made the San Francisco of that era come alive for me. Alexander Chee’s 2018 essay collection How To Write an Autobiographical Novel includes recollections of organizing with ACT UP and Queer Nation, of Hallowe’en in the Castro, and of running from police who wore latex gloves as they beat gay protestors with batons.
Along with Rachel Pepper, who I’ll be interviewing next week, he was one of the zine’s two coauthors: Queer City aimed to bridge the gap between the city’s dyke and fag scenes, as well as to document queer, trans, leather, and/or SM scenes that existed outside of or in more complex relationship to those boundaries.
When I sent a message through Alexander Chee’s website contact form to ask him about the zine, he replied immediately. We spoke on Zoom, and I had the pleasure of reintroducing him to Queer City, which surprised him in being both “cuter than I remembered” and, at $4.50 in 1991 money, which is over $10 now, costlier. (“I’m a little shocked to see the price tag, to be honest. Fucking expensive zine.”) The following is a version of our conversation that has been edited for clarity and length.
Lee: So you mentioned that you were working at A Different Light Books and lots of folks you knew were making zines, and that was how Queer City came about.
Alexander: Yeah. I don’t know if people know this about independent bookstores, but they function as, or functioned back then as, or maybe our bookstore specifically functioned as, a kind of community center, an information booth.
A Different Light had the first shelf of books, for example, devoted specifically to information for people living with HIV and AIDS, and people would call all the time for various information-related questions.
All of this was before the internet of course. And we were also selling city guides by these very corporate gay places. We would look at them and think, “Not in a million years. I wouldn’t go to any of these places.” And people were moving to the area all the time, basically to be queer and to explore their sense of identity and sexuality, and their desire for adventure. So it was a desire to respond to that as well.
I think it’s important for everybody to try making a zine at least once if they want to be a writer, partly because you get over this sense of waiting for permission to communicate your message.
Lee: What were some of the other zines that you people in your life were making or that you were reading or aware of at that time?
Alexander: My friend Choire Sicha and I would sometimes make zines just to communicate with each other. I mean, we talked a lot too. But I seem to remember he made me a birthday zine once.
Our friend D-L Alvarez, the artist, had a really cute and sexy zine called Brains that I liked. I think the tagline was like, “for guys who wear glasses who like guys who wear glasses” or something. It was basically for nerdy queers.
Andrea Lawlor and I go way back to Iowa City in 1992, I’m trying to remember when their Judith Butler zine came out, if it was before or after I met them.
We both wanted [Queer City] to [help] people have a sense of what was going on outside of their respective gender and sexual orientational preferences.
Lee: I was wondering about that. It seemed like there was a strong point being put on having editors of different genders. Was the scene pretty balkanized by gender at that time?
From Queer City zine
Alexander: I mean, I remember doing a go-go act at a lesbian sex club, which was one of the weirder gigs that I’ve ever had. I did it with a friend who I won’t name here. I don’t know what they want people to know that they were there.
But yeah, I think the activism was bringing us all together. I had come out there with a bunch of friends, predominantly a lesbian crowd. There’s a picture of me in college that’s like me and 10 women friends that I like to call “Alex and the Lesbians”. And they were the people who were around me as I moved out to San Francisco.
At Wesleyan, we were a very mixed group, partly because we had to be. It was a small school, so we didn’t have the luxury of the kinds of balkanization that were happening in the scene that we arrived in. So we were sort of like, “why is it so weird?”
I understand gender exclusive spaces in certain ways, certainly everyone is tired of us having people descending on a gay bar for a hen party.
Another part of this that I think is not visible, is that Warren, who’s listed here [in Queer City], was a housemate of ours. It’s basically our apartment. We had an apartment above the It’s Tops Diner, directly across from the sex club 1808 Market, which I think has since closed. It was so cheap. We each had two rooms. So Queer City is very much a product of our household, as well as A Different Light Books.
Lee: Was this the only zine that you made that was for public consumption, rather than as a friend thing?
Alexander: Yeah, I think so. I was a part of a few different zines at the time, a few different cultural efforts.
There was something called Boy With Arms Akimbo. It was a queer art activism group. A lot of the people I knew at the time were exploring different ways of thinking about media and how we were going to communicate with each other, and how we were going to organize community and organize politically.
Lee: I was thinking about how you’ve written about feeling very ambivalent about doing an MFA as someone who was coming out of the more DIY, punk-y, activist-y background. I was curious how zines fit into that for you, in the different ways you’ve engaged with writing and putting writing into the world over time.
Alexander: I think it’s important for everybody to try making a zine at least once if they want to be a writer, partly because you get over this sense of waiting for permission to communicate your message.
I’m thinking of Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah who has a great story about zines. He and his friends made [a zine] shortly after Trayvon’s death. He was so sure that it was going to change everything. And then of course, it didn’t really. But I think when I think back to his story, what I would add [is that] it changed him. I think it was a big part of him becoming the writer that he is.
Lee: I felt so grateful that zines have been the way that I came into the world of making things, and that the perspective of people who are waiting for institutional permission to make something is really alien to me.
Alexander: Yeah, I think that’s right. I think the liberatory sense of it is something that stays with you, whatever else you end up doing.
Lee: Yeah, absolutely. It can be applied to so many things in life: that you can just do if you give yourself permission to.
Alexander: Right. And I’m not surprised at all that, for example, Choire has gone on to have the career that he does, given the way that he was applying himself to making zines.
Lee: San Francisco at the end of the eighties and the beginning of the nineties sounds like it was such a particular and pivotal time and place. What are some things that stand out to you about that time, or that people might not understand who weren’t there?
Alexander: I guess it felt apocalyptic. It turns out that was premature. I mean, it was apocalyptic in a way. A prelude.
I wrote about this era recently for my newsletter, about how to orient yourself in relationship to writing and publishing, whether or not you get an MFA. It’s something my students ask me about a lot.
Part of what I was trying to say is, if you don’t have a scene where you are, here are some ways you can think about making them. If there’s no reading series where you live, what if you tried to create one? A writer’s group: what if you tried to create that?
And I think that [in the time Queer City came out] there was a sort of DIY, activist, “if you thought of it, you gave yourself a job” approach to culture, and I feel like a lot of people are very much waiting for somebody else to do it, and wondering, and almost angry, about why no one [is doing it], when actually that’s the clearest sign that they should do it. So that’s what I was trying to get people to get past.
I think back to all these experiences that I was having back then, and how often they were the first of their kind. Working on the first OutWrite conference, which was the first national American LGBT literary conference. Working on the startup of Out magazine, when I moved to New York in 1991, which was the first magazine of its kind.
I felt, “Well, of course, this is what we have to do because it’s needed.” I wasn’t getting too caught up in like, “how cool that it’s historic” until later, maybe decades later. Because at the time, it was like, well, we’re trying this and it might not work out.
Because of this, I had this very, very gay resume, at a time when a lot of people would not, but if I didn’t have it, I looked like I hadn’t done anything. I hadn’t published anywhere. I hadn’t worked anywhere. Literally, all of my experience was gay. So in a way, I had to make it work. I had to be a part of it because I didn’t have anywhere else to go.
I remember in 2004, 2005, a former student who had gotten a job at a major men’s magazine in New York was at an editorial meeting where my name came up, well, he looks a little too gay for us. He was really surprised to hear the editors talk about me that way. And I was like, oh, OK. I had imagined that they talk about me that way, and that is how they talk about me.
Lee: Not even subtext, huh? Just right out there.
Alexander: Right there.
Lee P, interning at QZAP in summer 2024, is a long-time zine maker whose current project is Sheer Spite Press, a small press and zine distro. Originally from unceded Algonquin land, Lee calls Tiohtià:ke // Mooniyang // Montreal home. Lee is also a member of the organizing collective for Dick’s Lending Library, a community-run, local library of books by trans, non-binary, and Two-Spirit authors.
I had the pleasure this summer of spending six weeks in Milwaukee as a QZAP intern. I got to help out with tasks like cataloging, peruse and research in their filing cabinets, get served a lot of lovely meals, and make some zines with Chris and Milo’s support.
QZAP interns are asked to make two zines: the first must be a zine that teaches someone something, on the principle that everyone has something they can teach others. Past interns have made instructional zines about screenprinting, making lemonade, doing dishes, and, my personal favourite, “how to bra-train your sugar glider.” Preoccupied by the current intensification of genocide in Palestine, and the ongoing task of keeping going in a world whose awfulness is even more than usually top of mind, I wrote my how-to zine on How to Find the Beauty Amidst All The Horrors.
The second internship zine is more free-form, from the principle that, as Milo puts it, “there’s not a ‘correct’ or wrong way to make zines, and we want folks who are newer to the medium and community to be inspired by all the shapes and sizes and possibilities that the collection entails,” but it’s supposed to be 20-40 pages. I completely overachieved and ended up with a 60-page beast: Making Friends With Zines.
Making Friends With Zinesis tribute to all the ways people can find each other and make and sustain connections through zines: trading through the mail, at zine fairs, by running a zine distro, on Discord, through zine libraries and zine librarianship, and… by running a zine archive!
I talked to a lot of wonderful people for this zine, including some who I reached via QZAP sharing my call for submissions: Cindy Crabb, Amber Dearest, Jenna Freedman, Keet Geniza, Julia Gfrörer, Kelly McElroy, and my sibling, Clare, and also received contributions from LB, Ocean, Sage Pantony, Nat Pyper, Jen Twigg, Soph Warrick, Andi Vicente, and Alanna Why. I commissioned the beautiful cover art from my friend Veronika Dawydow.
And of course, I also talked to my internship hosts, QZAP’s own Chris and Milo! I wanted to share the version of my interview with them that appears in the zine, which was excerpted from a much longer and very fun conversation about their lives in zines.
One of my favourite things about this interview is how it captures the happenstanceness of building a life centred around zines. None of us expected when we made our first zine that it would end up being the way that we connected with many of our closest and most beloved people, as well as a wide constellation of acquaintances and peers and fellow-travelers. It’s such a funny, niche thing!
What has making friends through zines looked like for you?
Milo: At this point, 30 years in, zines are such an integral part of my life, and my deepest friendships are with other folks who make zines or doing zine librarianship.
Certainly I have found numerous lovers, people to this day who are a part of my heart: even if we’re not in bed together anymore, we have learned so much about how to build communities that we want to live in.
We host folks here at QZAP, obviously, whether it’s through our residencies or through friendships or, “hey, people are coming through for a zine fest, sure, you can crash in our space,” kind of thing. And I feel like maybe it’s not different from other subcultures, especially ones that coalesce around fandom, but I don’t know for sure because they’re not subcultures that I’m actively a participant in.
We’re getting together. We’re bonding. We’re making more community. In some cases, we’re making offspring who are now moving through the world and discovering that maybe they’re queer also, and also maybe they’re drawing, and they’re making zines also.
Could you say more about figuring out how to build the kind of community that you want to see in the world through zines?
Milo: I think that a lot of the ideas that we see shared in print in this smaller format, this less public format, this personal, handmade way, a lot of where that is coming from tends to be what I think of as more leftist on a political spectrum.
An emphasis on doing it yourself, but also going together, building things together, skillsharing, doing education for the greater good. And I feel like those are ideas we’ve gotten through zines. When you meet somebody who wrote about that, you start to have a connection.
And working with a collection like QZAP’s, which is so queer. It’s explicitly queer. It’s intentionally queer. But then getting ideas about polyamory, getting ideas about alternative families, how to build those ideas for real maker stuff that doesn’t have to be explicitly queer, but tends to show up more often in queer communities.
And all of those are building blocks to a world that we would like to see more of. So I mean, it sounds fucking cheesy, but in some ways it’s modeling good behavior. If you want the world to be a way, then you need to be that way yourself, and do the labor of it. It’s one thing to say, oh, I wish it were like this. And then [another to,] in ways big and ways small, actually work towards that.
When did the internship start being part of the archive?
Chris: That’s actually a great story. That wasn’t even a thought for us. And we got an inquiry from a woman named Drea, who was a student at Carroll College, and asked if we offered internships. And Milo and I had a conversation, kind of like, “Internship??? I hadn’t thought of that, but what would that look like and what would we have somebody do?”
That’s how I came into helping develop, along with Milo, the internship program. We’ll work with your department. We can do for-credit. We can do not-for-credit. So that is what Drea kind of stumbled into. We had her come and interview with us, and she was delightful and we all just clicked. And she spent a whole semester [here] and then stayed on through the summer.
What’s it like having people come in and visit the archive and do internships?
Chris: It’s great. The most important reason is seeing the archive through the experiences and the eyes of other people, because we have been in it and doing it for 20 years. And [making zines] for a decade before that. So we have one perspective, or two perspectives that intertwine.
And folks that come to us through internships really come from very different places, different socioeconomic backgrounds, racial backgrounds. So we get to also have people’s lived experiences inform what they’re doing here at the archive.
What kinds of things bring people here?
Chris: I think part of it is the phenomenon of seeing yourself. I think part of what drives people to come here is their connection to queerness, and how they see that representation in the materials here in the archive. And also for some folks, it is maybe even seeing themselves quite literally. And then other times, it’s interest-based. So folks are, I think, coming to us more because they know what queer culture is now, and they want to see what zines captured of all of that time before, and how it informs us.
How has running the archive changed your relationship with zine communities and the types of friendships and interactions that you have?
Chris: For myself, it’s weird. It’s professionalism. I’m clearly not a professional, but Milo and I have become sort of de facto experts, or professionals, or librarians, and…
Milo: Spokesmuppets.
Chris: My interest was always about making connections or finding interesting music or stories to read, and I never thought about the side of it where Milo and I often are asked to come and be keynote speakers or teach in a class or guest lecture. I also recently branched out into my first experience in academic writing, because I didn’t go to grad school. I’ve actually kind of punk-rocked into it by doing real-world experience, and without going into debt.
And I joke about this all the time. If I’d known that the [first] zine that I made back in the day was going to lead me to where I’m at, I would’ve done a better job!
Milo: There are some folks in the zine community who I interact with on a zine fest level. We might see each other at the same fest. We say hi. Sometimes I’ll pick up their work. Sometimes they’ll pick up mine, and it’s lovely.
And then I have this whole other level of friendships with folks who are at this point more than just zine makers, they’re also zine scholars, they’re also librarians or academics. We’ve met because of the labour that we put in personally and also the love that we put in. It’s not just a vocation, it’s an avocation, right? And so for those folks, I feel this super, super intense connection.
And some of them are folks that we share struggles with, very intense personal struggles. And I feel like my experience with zines has led me to this group of folks that I feel so charmed and blessed to be in community with.
I don’t know that I would’ve expected that from my 18-year-old self when I first started making zines. It was something silly and fun to do, but looking at this long chronology of essentially 32 years, in a lot of cases we’ve all become adults together in a way that is unexpected, I think.
And for me, I think it’s partially unexpected because being queer in the early nineties, it wasn’t totally a death sentence, but it also certainly wasn’t NOT, with the AIDS crisis.
I think we’ve been very blessed with how the amazing folks that we get to meet and welcome into our home, the amount of learning that we get to do, the discussions that we get to have about a world that we would like to live in as queer folks.
Chris: I think for me, there’s so much more that I’ve been able to achieve in life because I have this amazing love and support from makers in general.
It achieved the purpose that I set out to do 30 years ago, which is to make connections and meet people and find amazing things. I would not have contemplated that some shitty cut-and-paste thing that I put together [would be my] in. How fucking amazing is that you can throw something together and it gives you an in to this amazing community.
And [it could have just] been a thing I did back in the nineties or whatever, but it was always there. And it meant so much to me that, even in those few years where I wasn’t really making zines, I was still in the culture traveling and building off of those connections. 💜
Making Friends with Zines is on sale now in print and digital formats.
Lee P, interning at QZAP in summer 2024, is a long-time zine maker whose current project is Sheer Spite Press, a small press and zine distro. Originally from unceded Algonquin land, Lee calls Tiohtià:ke // Mooniyang // Montreal home. Lee is also a member of the organizing collective for Dick’s Lending Library, a community-run, local library of books by trans, non-binary, and Two-Spirit authors.
If you’re in any zine space long enough, you will eventually end up drawn into a conversation about what is and isn’t a zine. Personally, I’m pretty firmly on team “the diversity of zines is something I love about them, and trying to draw firm boxes around concepts is not a great use of my one wild and precious life.” I think it’s cool that zines can be something you make with a sharpie and a single sheet of paper, or something with much higher production value.
It’s also really interesting to see what a high-production-value zine from decades past looks like: what the layout software of the era (or pre-compuer technologies) allowed for, and what the marks of sophistication and current style were.
Inciting Desire, from 1992, is one of those less-handmade-looking zines, probably laid out in Quark XPress, and with a lot of of-its-time highly condensed, hard-to-read fonts:
It’s on the higher-concept end of things too, opening with quotations from bell hooks and Judith Butler. A past QZAP post mentioned Inciting Desire in the context of distinguishing between porn and erotic, with Inciting Desire pretty firmly on the erotica end of the spectrum. I’m not trying to insult it or damn it with faint praise, either. There’s some pretty hot stuff in here!
In a call for submissions in this issue, they call for:
“submissions depicting people from the whole range of ethnicities, sizes, genders + ages; all practices you or someone might consider erotic; works explicit or cryptic; sensual, confessional or theoretical; political, hedonistic, or both; and feminist (you decide what that means). Peoples’ pleasures take many different forms; we want to show/describe/deconstruct/reconstruct/celebrate them. Send us your best, your baddest + your wettest”
“Tittie City Sandwich”, an excerpt from the novel Trashed, by Connie Mulqueen, is about a threesome in the bathroom of a dyke club where, “because there were so many girls packing the floor around them, they were close enough to cunt-fuck each other over the clothes so that it wasn’t obvious, though in that place they could’ve stripped and done it, and nobody would’ve cared.”
“Black Ravine”, by Wilton Woods, is a beautifully-written and troubling story about two boys, one prepubescent, one seemingly in his young teens, experimenting sexually in a forest. Inspiringly, there is even a piece of different-gender erotica, Ben Chesluk’s “Madrid”.
Aside from fiction, there’s also a moving memorial for Walter Blumoff, a radical faerie and photographer also known as Butterfly. As the zine notes, he died on April 26, 1991, and left over twenty thousand slides and negatives to the GLBT Historical Society.
Inciting Desire memorializes him as:
“an adoptee left in hospital isolation for two weeks after his birth while they “processed” his adoption papers; a Jew; a boy-lover; a computer geek. He survived cancer in his early twenties. He was hard of hearing, had bad breath, bad teeth, bad credit, depression and low self-esteem. He did therapy all his life to try to heal himself. Where he couldn’t solve his problems internally, he unleashed a stream of litigation upon the world as a way of getting even. He didn’t pay his taxes for the same reason.”
The zine presents a number of his photos from that collection, with commentary situating them lovingly in his life and work.
I haven’t been able to find out much else about Inciting Desire or its authors. We do know that Dennis Cooper once owned an issue of its first issue, which is held at NYU with the rest of his zine collection, which seems like a pretty solid badge of honour!
As someone who has made zines both with scissors and glue, and with up-to-date desktop publishing software, it’s cool to see how both of those techniques show marks of their era as the years pass. It makes me curious what will scream 2020s to the zine archivists of the future!
Lee P, interning at QZAP in summer 2024, is a long-time zine maker whose current project is Sheer Spite Press, a small press and zine distro. Originally from unceded Algonquin land, Lee calls Tiohtià:ke // Mooniyang // Montreal home. Lee is also a member of the organizing collective for Dick’s Lending Library, a community-run, local library of books by trans, non-binary, and Two-Spirit authors.
This week, I’m looking at four issues of the newsletter for the UK group “Lesbian And Gay Freedom Movement”, which is unfortunately very difficult to find more information on due to their pretty generic name. The content of the newsletters, however, is… definitely not generic!
LGFM described themselves as “a movement to bring anarchist ideas and ideals to lesbians, gays and bisexuals, and to make sexuality and the overthrow of patriarchy major campaigning issues for all anarchists.”
The newsletter fought the respectability politics that had crept into lesbian and gay movements, criticizing a focus on legal rights rather than liberation.
In the early 90s, when these zines came out, the age of consent in England was 16 for heterosexual sex, and 21 for homosexual sex. The age of consent for gay sex was lowered to 18 in 1994, between issues #8 and #10 of this newsletter. The age of consent was only equalized across all combinations of genders in 2000. These newsletters reflect a time when debate was raging in the UK more broadly, and also within queer communities, about the role of the state in sexual ethics. As these newsletters show, queer sexual mores were a wide-open question, and some of the positions staked were pretty far outside of the current mainstream.
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“HOW YOU CAN HELP END OPPRESSION OF FAT DYKES”, from LGFM #5
In Issue #8 of the newsletter, LGFM listed the groups they supported as:
Children in their fight for liberation and freedom to choose their own sexuality.
Lesbians, gays, and bisexuals in prison, ‘care’, and psychiatric institutions.
Isolated and lonely lesbians, gays and bisexuals, and those just ‘coming out’.”
In Issue #5, this list also includes “people with mental and physical disabilities, also those who are non-monogamous, like cottaging [cruising] or picking people up in public places, […] those of us who enjoy sex toys and pornography […] and sex with animals.” Issue #10 also includes fat people and “those who don’t define or identify themselves as anything” in the list of those whose sexual liberation they seek.
This makes me very very very very very uncomfortable! It is pretty intense to see some of your most deeply-held views (police abolition, bodily autonomy for sex between consenting adults, including people with disabilities, and including sex that includes power exchange) being placed alongside and in equivalence with… other stuff.
From LGFM #8
Let’s look more closely at what’s in these newsletters:
Issue #5 takes up the cause of Ben Wilson, who was incarcerated for “having sex with boyfriends under 16”, sentenced to life in prison, and chemically castrated with estrogen. There’s also a letter from “an inmate in [the] New York State Prison System who has run afoul of the age of consent”, defending “consensual intergenerational sexual relationship[s]”.
Issue #6 shares several stories of people prosecuted for sex with animals, arguing that it’s inconsistent for factory farming to be permitted and bestiality not. There’s also an interesting essay where a writer talks about their experiences coming into BDSM as someone who had never been able to orgasm before having experiences as a bondage bottom. It also argues that gays and lesbians should, instead of fighting for inclusion in institutions like police and the military, instead look towards their abolition.
Issue #8 focuses on SM, including a report from an SM pride march in London, but also includes an essay by a queer teenager opposing age of consent laws, arguing that “abuse can’t be stopped by the law, neither can protection be given; but control, guilt, and fear can and will occur.”
From issue #6
From issue #10
In Issue #10, there’s an article about the role of anarchist women in the Spanish Civil War, a report on the raid on a London fetish club, Whiplash, from someone who was present, remarks on Irish liberation, and a report from a squat in Ljubljana. This issue also reports critically on the age of consent for sex between men in the UK being lowered from 21 to 18, and on the decriminalization of sex in the military, arguing that there should be no legal age of consent, and no military. There’s also a cool story encouraging people not to let ableism inform their assumptions around who has sex, and with whom:
“I was at a feminist event with a woman and she was with someone in a wheelchair who couldn’t speak (except after orgasm) and couldn’t lift their arms. Communication was by use of a board with printed letters and words on it which was pointed to with tongue or nose.
Two feminists I knew who were giving the lecture at the event came up to us. I introduced them to my friend and the person with disabilities. The feminists ignored the wheelchair user and addressed my friend. They asked if she was the facilitator for the day for the user. She replied, “No! This is my lover”.
The feminists had immediately assumed that an ‘attractive’ woman with a physically challenged person must be a carer – not a friend or lover. I think we have a long way to go….before the disabled are thought of as equal and as sexual people.”
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In a choice between a politics of liberation and of respectability, I would align myself strongly with liberation. I do not believe the world is made safer by policing and incarceration, including with regards to situations where someone harms another person in a way that involves sex.
From LGFM #5
As someone who reads and talks and thinks a lot about queer history, this is not my first time running into these questions. Patrick Califia’s essay collection Public Sex is a fascinating collection of essays on sex, BDSM, leather culture, and censorship, from a writer who was at the centre of the 1970s-80s “lesbian sex wars”. Califia comes out swinging in favour of porn, weird sex, free expression, bi and trans inclusion, and an expansive big tent of queerness that refuses to exclude people based on the transgressiveness of their sexual interests, including sexual relationships between adults and minors. It’s a book I really recommend, both as a historical document and as a source of insight into the ongoing conflict between purity culture and freakiness that are still dividing queers to this day.
I feel like I’ve been ending each of these posts by saying, “Well, one thing I can say for certain is that I am grateful for archives.” But it’s always true. I’m not really sure what compels me to seek out the material in QZAP’s archive that most challenges me, but I really can’t seem to help it. I am sure they have many delightful light-hearted zines of which I agree with every word. But the ones that most draw me in are the ones that also most trouble me.
From LGFM #8
And one thing I am sure of in the case of every one of these zines, is that I am glad it’s archived. I want these materials to be available for people to struggle with. I don’t want archives to only be a home for work that I and nobody else object to. I want us to stay with the thorniest topics and the messiest and most troubling parts of our shared history.
Lee P, interning at QZAP in summer 2024, is a long-time zine maker whose current project is Sheer Spite Press, a small press and zine distro. Originally from unceded Algonquin land, Lee calls Tiohtià:ke // Mooniyang // Montreal home. Lee is also a member of the organizing collective for Dick’s Lending Library, a community-run, local library of books by trans, non-binary, and Two-Spirit authors.
Like me, QT zine traveled to QZAP from Montreal, which immediately piqued my interest. Its path there was a little more circuitous than mine, though. It’s part of QZAP’s Emma Centre collection, which collects queer zines that previously lived at the Emma Centre in Minneapolis:
“The Emma Center opened in 1992 thanks to activists who were involved in the Twin Cities Anarchist Federation (an umbrella group) and some folks involved in the Powderhorn Food Co-op. Before closing shop in 1995, Emma Center acted as a center for anarchist activities, sold books and magazines, supplied free clothes, food and weekend child care, and hosted Women’s and Queer Space nights and frequent punk shows.” (source)
QZAP holds two issues of QT, #1 and #4, attributed to the QT Kollective, who were apparently very busy, since #1 is from 1991, and #4 is from 1992. The title is variously indicated as standing for “Queer Tapette” (fag, en français), “Queer Terrorist”, “Cutie”, “On the QT”, or “Queen’s Tit”. It’s made with a kitschy collage aesthetic, campily reclaiming homophobic news clippings.
The highlight of Issue 1 is two stories whose relationship to real events and people are unknown, both told in a dry, satirical, tongue-in-cheek way. “The Faggot Who Thought She Was A Lesbian” is the one that caught my eye as I was flipping through this zine to see if I wanted to write about it.
From QT #1
The story is about “Alex,” who tries to fit in with a crowd of a-gays who “talked about the art auction raising money for homeless children in Suweto [sic] and how politically correct they were to go to these things, even if they never bought anything because they spent it all on porn pix of white men.”
Unable to stomach that, “Alex took to wearing black, covering her eyes with thick coats of eyeliner and mascara, listening to Skinny Puppy and Nine Inch Nails, and creating an aura of doom about her personage… Alex ceased caring about whether or not she was a homosexual – she knew as long as she was draped in seven layers of black, no man would touch her cock anyway…”
Eventually, via happening across “Women Screaming”, a radio show from “the middle of Ohio”, Alex encounters a political definition of a lesbian as “someone whose primary emotional and political commitment was to other women”, and finally finds an identity that works for her. I always love to see the fag to dyke and dyke to fag pipelines in action! 💜
The second story is about “Dickie”, a fag who gets chased through an alley by a group of armed skinheads, rescued by a punk named Louis, who then fucks him against a tree in a park (it’s incredibly hot).
The highlight of issue #4 for me was its fag hag manifesto, which ends in a call for a “fag hag separatist movement, where we sleep with each other and groovy bisexuals. Fag hags and bi’s – the newest, hippest, funnest coalition ever to emerge! Deal with it!!!”.
From QT #1
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There is, for lack of a better word, an edginess to this that I find so fun. I think there should be an infinite variety of queer media for people of all interests, dispositions, and personalities, but I personally have a soft spot for work that’s kind of mean and gross and horny and troubling, that confronts me more than telling me I am valid. 1990s queer art is a real treasure trove of this! And some of it has aged horribly, but for me, QT, along with work like the AIDS zines I wrote about in my previous post, preserves a rage that I find deeply bracing in its lack of softness and apologies and hedging. It’s not how I write, or how I live, and I might not even get along with the people who wrote those zines, but it’s the work that I’m most drawn to.
“Punk as Fuck”, from QT #4
A friend who’s a couple years older than me in chronological age, but more importantly, came out as trans in the early 2000s, over a decade earlier than I did, was talking recently about the enormous capacity that queer people of their microgeneration have for brushing things off without taking offense, and their dismissiveness about their own experiences of violence (“Nothing that bad even happened to me, sure, I got gaybashed every once in a while…”).
I have been thinking about this a lot! I think it lies near the heart of the infighting around books like Sarah Schulman’s Conflict Is Not Abuse, and in a lot of failures of communication and understanding amongst queer people of different ages and generations. There are a lot of ways of metabolizing pain. I think it can be very beautiful to choose softness and gentleness, but I want people who do so not to write off bitterness and rage, confrontation, and the power of laughing off immense violence and danger with dark, dark jokes.
I wouldn’t have based my whole darn life around zines if they hadn’t turned out to be such a weirdly good way of connecting with people, and of finding people who are moving through similar experiences. Spending time in the QZAP archive, I’ve found a lot of writing that mirrors my own experiences, but they are reflected back to me differently in each instance. They reflect contexts different from my own, make different assumptions, imagine different readers, and map the edges of acceptability in different locations than I might be accustomed to. They expand my sense not just of the breadth not just of queer experiences, but of ways I can make sense of my own queer life.
Lee P, interning at QZAP in summer 2024, is a long-time zine maker whose current project is Sheer Spite Press, a small press and zine distro. Originally from unceded Algonquin land, Lee calls Tiohtià:ke // Mooniyang // Montreal home. Lee is also a member of the organizing collective for Dick’s Lending Library, a community-run, local library of books by trans, non-binary, and Two-Spirit authors.
The cover of Infected Faggot Perspectives #12, dated to December 1992/January 1993, and priced at “$3.00 or free to the infected”, confronts the reader with a caricature, signed to Rick Cole, of an emaciated figure in a hospital bed, strangled by IV lines, stuck full of needles, and dripping sweat. The zine’s tagline, which seems to have appeared on every issue, was:
“Dedicated to Keeping the Realities of Faggots Living with AIDS & HIV Disease IN YOUR FACE Until the Plague is Over!!!”
The zine dates from a time when AIDS was high in the U.S. public consciousness, following, for example, shortly after the death of Freddy Mercury, but a few years before the availability of the combination therapies that began to make HIV/AIDS more survivable for many of those able to access them.
I am about a generation younger than the generation of (Western, white, not necessarily street-involved, because we know now that the virus had been killing people for decades before it became known here) people most affected by AIDS. I was spared those traumas but grew up with a huge absence where my elders should have been. As far as I remember, I first learned about HIV/AIDS through saccharine, pitying, heterosexual representations like Philadelphia.
From Infected Faggot Perspectives #12
The records that people who were actually living with AIDS left, as they fought for their friends’ lives are deeply precious to me. A crucial component of this cultural legacy is a dark, dark, dark gallows humour, suffused with rage at the abandonment of PWAs on both individual and cultural levels, the physical messiness of living and dying with AIDS, and the social messiness of organizing amidst mass sickness, death, and grief.
Directed outwards at a wider audience, AIDS gallows humour, alongside actions like the political funerals of ACT UP, aimed to force those not yet affected by the virus to confront the reality that people were dying young in excruciating pain, and nursing, burying, and mourning entire social circles in the face of public indifference and hostility.
Directed inwards at fellow community members also grappling with AIDS, dark humour offered a pressure release from those same realities. It’s not actually possible to live full-time as a tragic, saintly victim, sometimes you’ve got to laugh.
IFP offers arch advice like, “let’s face [it,] an AIDS Queen isn’t Glamorous until she is way below 100 [t-cells]… sorry, girls, maybe next year… keep trying.” Its articles share useful resources, like “Around the World in AIDSy Days”, which gives travel advice for PWAs, including resources for DIY healthcare, and considerations of border restrictions for poz people, but also opens,
“Hey girlfriend… wanna take one last trip to a tropical paradise before kicking the bucket but you’re afraid ‘cause you’ve heard there’s a 50% or better chance you’ll get something other than fucked during your visit & then what would you do?”
Other articles vent anger at fairweather friends of PWAs, and the unique social dynamics of the AIDS crisis:
“People with AIDS are often abandoned… but the deathbed is well attended and there is plenty of loud crying at the memorial – Nice new outfit there.”
At times, the zine’s tone is more straightforwardly sincere, as with its long obituary for Cliff Diller, who was among the founders of the West Hollywood SM party Club Fuck!. IFP’s memorial for him includes beautifully specific and evocative moments like:
“A celebration of Cliff’s life took place in L.A. on Sunday Oct. 25, the highlight of which was a performance and ritual by Aztec fire dancers. Over 100 friends gathered, most wore green, ate lasagna, ceasar [sic] salad, and pulled together. Instead of feeling, I am over this, I left feeling that, yes, I can do this one more time.”
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Diseased Pariah News #1 (reprint)
One of the most famous examples of dark AIDS humour is Diseased Pariah News, an influential AIDS zine published from 1990 to 1999. All eleven issues of it are available to read online at the Internet Archive, and it is well worth your time. It offered a similar combination of resource-sharing, irreverence, and political rage, with the first issue declaring its mission to “provide a forum for infected people to share their thoughts, feelings, art, writing, and brownie recipes in an atmosphere free of teddy bears, magic rocks, and seronegative guilt.”
According to an academic article on “Counterpublicity and Corporeality in HIV/AIDS Zines,” Infected Faggot Perspectives ultimately ran to 14 known issues. There is at least one issue held in Duke University’s Bingham Center zine collection. There is a copy of issue 6 in the Columbia University Libraries and of issue 8 (April 1992) at the ONE Archives at the USC Libraries. Traces of it are also scatteredonline.
The writing in IFP is mostly under pseudonyms like La Vieja Sidosa, Pansy Ass Faggot, and Trixie Trash, but the zine appears to have been the work of W. Wayne Karr, who died in 1995 and was remembered for his advocacy around access to AIDS drugs, and Cory Roberts-Auli, who died in 1996, after writing a final essay about facing his death, which was published with a preface remembering him for the depths of his solidarity with the often-neglected population of women living with AIDS.
He wrote,
“When I think of what is ahead of me, I feel almost a sense of relief. I know I am capable of letting go and I look forward with a sense of adventure to what lies ahead. If all of you hearing or reading this could step outside of your own emotions for a moment and be happy for me and for my freedom, you would see just how ready I am for this to be over. I’ve been carrying this disease around for many years and I am elated to be free of it. Of course, I have little to no information about what lies ahead, after all, I have never died before. Still, I can’t help being excited and scared at the same time.”
Mia Mingus, the writer and activist in disability justice and transformative justice, writes a blog titled Leaving Evidence, with the description,
“We must leave evidence. Evidence that we were here, that we existed, that we survived and loved and ached. Evidence of the wholeness we never felt and the immense sense of fullness we gave to each other. Evidence of who we were, who we thought we were, who we never should have been. Evidence for each other that there are other ways to live–past survival; past isolation.”
Zines like Infected Faggot Perspectives, Diseased Pariah News, and AIDS Kills Fags Dead, left evidence of their creators’ immense creativity, brilliance, and a mordant, furious, catty, grief-laden, exquisitely faggy sense of humour. I’m grateful to have these zines available to me, and to count those who made them as my elders and ancestors.
Lee P, interning at QZAP in summer 2024, is a long-time zine maker whose current project is Sheer Spite Press, a small press and zine distro. Originally from unceded Algonquin land, Lee calls Tiohtià:ke // Mooniyang // Montreal home. Lee is also a member of the organizing collective for Dick’s Lending Library, a community-run, local library of books by trans, non-binary, and Two-Spirit authors.
A few days after I decided to make this week’s blog post about Queeruption, I sent up a distress flare to QZAP: I wasn’t sure how to write about it in any kind of concise way.
Queeruption is a queer anarchist festival that’s had 12 editions in 12 locations between 1998 and 2017. QZAP holds materials on 5 of these: Queeruptions 3 (2001 in San Francisco), 4 (2002, in London), 8 (2005, in Barcelona), 9 (2006, in Tel-Aviv), and 10 (2007 on Coast Salish territory, Vancouver).
Here’s what Milo of QZAP said when I asked them for their help in thinking through how to write about Queeruption:
“Thinking about Queeruption, and the abundance of materials that came out of it, either officially or unofficially, and the number of folks who have been involved can be a little overwhelming.
One of the ways that I think of it is that it was (and this is my perception and experiences) intended to be a radical queer temporary autonomous space. Because it happened in multiple locations, and was leaderless, for the most part, each instance was a reflection of the needs, desires and situations of the folks who organized and hosted, while also trying to take into account the needs of all of the participants, as well.
All that to say, that’s why each one is different and might be hard to capture the zeitgeist in a single post. Also something something about liminality and the intentional places on the margins that we create and then collapse.”
Each edition of Queeruption grapples with its location in a particular way. In the case of Barcelona, this focuses on the politics of gentrification and squatting. For the event held on Coast Salish land, the event materials have a stronger emphasis on the historic and ongoing colonization of that land, and how to support Indigenous resistance. The fraught and contested relationship between Queeruption and its location is most evident in the materials for Q9, held in Tel-Aviv in 2006.
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When in doubt, it’s good to start by situating yourself. I’m writing this on the traditional territories of the Potawatomi, Ho-Chunk and Menominee peoples, in so-called Milwaukee, Wisconsin, USA. I live and hold citizenship on the other side of the border in Canada. I’m a white person with a Canadian passport, which makes it pretty easy for me to cross the border and come here. It’s probably easier for me to get to Tel-Aviv than it is for a Palestinian in Gaza to get there.
The Queeruption materials all make clear that the organizers and participants try, in various ways, and probably with varying degrees of success, to be in good relationship with the locations the events are held. As politically engaged people, they show a clear desire to add something to their communities via Queeruption that would last beyond the duration of the event. In Barcelona, the organizers squatted a previously unoccupied factory for the event. It had formerly produced synthetic leather, and attendees were invited to use the leftover materials to make jewelry, BDSM gear, or sex toy harnesses. The space was turned over for other use after the event, and best as I can tell, it still seems to house artist studios today. It’s extremely cool!
I don’t expect a queer anarchist party to solve all the problems of the world or the country or the city it takes place in. But part of reading about these events is inevitably picturing myself there. Would I have fun? Would I feel comfortable? If I felt uncomfortable, would it be in a productive way or just a shitty way? And what about my friends? Would they be able to get through the border? Would they be able to get through the door?
I generally feel like the answer is to organize more things, and fight to make more space at the current things, not that we shouldn’t organize anything if it’s not going to be perfect and magically exempt from all of the violence of the world that surrounds us. And also, to always remain curious and critical, to look at who’s in the room and consider who isn’t.
The Queeruption materials are cool because they show a community in the process of figuring out its collective values and how to align an event to them on the fly. Everything is provisional and up for debate. The way the Queeruption zines and materials present snapshots of this work is remarkable and precious.
The festival zine for Queeruption Barcelona reminds participants that to make the event successful, they needed to take part in “DJing, performing, dressing up, dancing, flirting, fucking, talking, laughing, and meeting new people… Wash your own dish, clean a toilet once this week, chop a carrot!! CONTRIBUTE!!! DON’T JUST CONSUME!!!”
To build the world we want to live in, we’re gonna need to chop a lot of carrots and have a lot of hard, messy community conversations. Consensus-based decision-making is pretty mind-boggling if you’re not used to it! It can be really seductive to want someone else to do all the work, and just be able to show up to a fully-realized event. But learning how to work together and talk it out and compromise, how to build in a way that’s really different from capitalist ways of gathering, how to sometimes take space in illegal or unauthorized ways.
Documenting this work gives us something to build on, and shows us some things that are possible but that we may not have considered. And archiving this documentation means that the work and conversations can spread far beyond the time and space of one event.
Lee P, interning at QZAP in summer 2024, is a long-time zine maker whose current project is Sheer Spite Press, a small press and zine distro. Originally from unceded Algonquin land, Lee calls Tiohtià:ke // Mooniyang // Montreal home. Lee is also a member of the organizing collective for Dick’s Lending Library, a community-run, local library of books by trans, non-binary, and Two-Spirit authors.
First things first: Happy Queer History Month! History is built upon the reality we have all agreed upon to pass down. The stories that are decided to be honored and remembered. The markers of history and how we learn about it are integral to the fabric of communities and cultures. How we commune with the tangibility of our ancestors and have a stepping stone in our lineage. It is no surprise that a key element of suppression is a historical one, that is why this month is so important.
They define direct action as “a public intervention ranging in creative form from marches to street theater to speak outs to cathartic spray painting of anti-hate slogans.”
In the section on abstract theoretical discussion they ask “How many of us have sat in meetings arguing political theory to the point of mental and physical exhaustion, to the point where we run screaming to the nearest dance floor for release from the frustration?!” ME! ME! ME!
![When I daydreaming of sex. Lately I've taken up with my hand, his body to watch my hand. I work full his limp cock. With my favorite big adrenaline rush into his shorts. This is the vagina & the elastic leg-hole of a novice, he circles my game. He gives all hand on her crotch, his tongue circling her nodding off. Sam does not seem pleased with the thrill of tongue. But it's just straight up and brazenly do the same, slurping with the rocking rhythm on the living room floor. Inside my body, my face becomes passive. Throwing caution to the wind, I unbuckle my tongue from his head. Slowly I rock my face of me, putting one come-slippery hand down to the feel of lips on my long thick stream. His jaw open wide sucking back up to my face. Green eyes that shine tension. Sam is down to her fussy easing in & out of awareness I begin again Quickly (well, quickly for people who are always covered with pink] under the light my hard cock rubs over her handful breasts. Black lacy bra over the purple-rimmed head, working the shaft with forefinger around the base at once into his mouth. I bend juices of his cock, which is her that evening. How Chris crosses the way in with a slow jerk. I move the focus of my sucking and cool between my ass. In other words, suburban, surprisingly cute nipples. She seems to abandon this & shine with intelligence even when he's me. He looks me in the eye while doing. Despite her jealousy of me. Sensing what's about to come: her. So she springs up. pulling Chris' lips. It looks like](https://i0.wp.com/gittings.qzap.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/Screenshot-2024-08-09-124319.png?ssl=1)
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