This is a quick little post to note that last week we were the recipient of a $500 grant from the San Francisco-based Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence. The Sisters are an amazing organization that works tirelessly for the queer community, not just in the Bay Area, but around the world. They use humor and glamor to provide services, financial aid, spiritual guidance and tons of joy to raise marginalized voices and fight bigotry. So this is us saying loudly and proudly THANK YOU to the best nuns ever! Also, we want to publicly say thank you to Devin, who worked incredibly hard with us for the past four months to research grants and opportunities for fundraising for us. For a whole host of reasons QZAP is NOT a designated 501(c)x tax-exempt organization, and that sometimes makes fundraising challenging.
As for this grant, the money will eventually be going toward new filing cabinets in our physical archive space. For the past 18 months we’ve been wrestling with the fact that we’ve literally run out of space to store all of the queer zines we’ve collected or that have been generously donated to us. It seems silly, but our collection, which began with about 350 zines in 2003, has grown to over 4,000 as we just passed our 22nd anniversary. It’s a good problem to have, to be sure, but still a problem nonetheless. Our ultimate goal is to replace a bank of 5 2-drawer vertical files with a bank of 5 4-drawer or 5-drawer ones. This will allow us to better organize our general collection, provide space for growth, and make accessing the zines easier. While $500 doesn’t seem like a lot, for this project it covers about 1/3 of the total projected costs, which ain’t nothing, and we’re very thankful that The Sisters saw fit to kickstart the financial side of the project.
As always, if you want to support us financially, you can make a donation or purchase some zines, buttons, stickers or a t-shirt through our swag shop. If you can’t support us with funds, please check our wishist for in-kind material that we’re looking for, like hanging file folders, a map file, and paper or toner to make more zines.
Here at QZAP, regardless of the serostatus of the folks in our collective, AIDS and HIV/AIDS education and activism is coded into the DNA of the archive. I started making zines in the early 1990s because of my work with my local ACT UP chapter. 18 year-old me wanted to share safer sex info with folks my own age, and one of the ways to do that was to include that information about how to put on condoms, how to use latex dams, and where to go for sexual health services even if you were a minor in the zines that we made. 
When I think about my own work, I draw a direct line from 1960s pop art to the work of Keith Haring and then to Gran Fury and the Silence=Death collective. Douglas Crimp’s amazing book 
We can see these visuals, and the culture of HIV/AIDS activism showing up as a through-line in the work of many zinesters of the era. In 2022 we talked a little about 