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:
∇Δ∇Δ∇Δ
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.
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