QZAP - The Queer Zine Archive Project - Archiving Queer zines since 2003

Menstruaciones No Binarias: Your Body is Not Your Enemy, the Dominant Narrative is

December 4, 2024December 4, 2024QZAP

The zine Menstruaciones No Binarias, published in collaboration by Rebeldía Menstrual and Eróticas Fluidas, is a groundbreaking text that dismantles normative narratives about menstruation. This work redefines the experience of menstruating as a site of critical engagement, inclusivity, and autonomy.

Menstruaciones No Binarias front cover — (All photo credits: @eroticasfluidas and @rebeldiamenstrual on instagram)

With its visually striking design and theoretically rich content, this zine offers an alternative view to the biomedical and capitalist frameworks that often dominate the menstrual discourse.

The zine is originally in Spanish, so I went ahead and translated key quotes for this post. The English translations are included in the footnotes; in my translation practice I believe in adding the original text within the body of writing and the translation secondary rather than vice-versa to attempt to decenter Anglo-phone literary frameworks in comparative writing through the form of the text.

The authors of Menstruaciones No Binarias are Rebeldía Menstrual, represented by Nachi (she/they), a nonbinary lesbian and sexual health worker from Mexico, and Eróticas Fluidas, a self-managed project led by Andre, a transfeminist lesbian psychologist and advocate for survivors of violence from Chile. The creators describe their work as “una larga y sentida investigación”¹ that questions the implicit binarisms of health and illness, advocating instead for a paradigm that recognizes the diversity of menstruating bodies. As stated in the zine, “Desde ese lugar confluimos, ponemos nuestra energia para que esto se expanda y seguir dialogando con otras experiencias menstruantes. Confiamos en que otro mundo es posible a partir de las practicas de descubrimiento del cuerpo y con ello la rotura de mitos sobre la menstruación, considerando la singularidad de cada cuerpo.”² (pg. 2).

hands holding open Menstruaciones No Binarias Historically, menstruation has been shrouded in euphemisms and myths that reinforce heteronormative and cisnormative ideals. On page 5, the authors trace the linguistic roots of menstruation, noting its ties to cycles of the moon and seasonal rites: “Menstruación: de la palabra mens o ‘mes’, del indoeuropeo mehens o ‘luna’ y de la palabra r’tu o ‘estación, rito.’”³. These etymologies underline how menstruation has been spiritually and socially significant across cultures, yet systematically erased or sanitized in modern discourse.

One of the zine’s central interventions is to politicize menstrual pain. On page 6, the authors propose: “Proponemos comprender el dolor menstrual dentro de una realidad sociopolítica que no otorga oportunidades para habitar un contexto de cuidado y/o que nos permita el descanso.”⁴ This reframing shifts responsibility from the individual to societal systems that fail to accommodate the cyclical needs of menstruating bodies.

A recurring theme is the deconstruction of cisnormative assumptions about menstruation. On page 6, the authors challenge the idea that menstruation is inherently tied to womanhood, asking:

“¿Qué pasaría si abolimos la idea de que por menstruar nos vamos a convertir en ‘mujeres’? ¿En cuáles de esas ideas tenemos espacios otras identidades? ¿En cuáles de esos mitos tienen cabida las personas que desean hacer terapia hormonal con testosterona? ¿En cuáles de estas ideas tienen valor quienes deciden interrumpir sus menstruaciones por voluntad propia?”⁵

By foregrounding nonbinary and transgender perspectives, the zine opens a much-needed space for inclusive conversations.

hands holding open Menstruaciones No Binarias The work goes further to interrogate the medicalization and commodification of menstruation. While it critiques pharmaceutical and capitalist interventions, the zine acknowledges the necessity of these tools for some. This nuanced position allows for diverse approaches to managing menstruation, from herbal remedies to hormonal therapies, while respecting personal autonomy.

One of the zine’s most compelling questions appears on page 35: “¿Como agenciarse colectivamente para vivir menstruaciones dignas?”⁶. The authors emphasize the importance of collective care and self-determination in health practices. This micropolitical approach reframes menstruation as not only a personal experience but a communal and political act.

hands holding open Menstruaciones No Binarias The authors provide a rich theoretical lens through which to view menstruation, connecting it to broader discourses of embodiment, autonomy, and resistance. On page 17, they explore how hormones are part of the “redes de conexion”⁷ that shape our bodies, highlighting how hormonal processes defy simplistic categorization: “Nuestros vasos sanguínos serían algo así como redes de conexión por donde fluyen las hormonas, que al llegar a diversos lugares pueden generar diversas TRANSFORMACIONES.”⁸ This view aligns with feminist and queer theories that prioritize fluidity over fixity.

On page 24, the creators assert, “Cada experiencia es un mundo para cada cuerpo, existen tantas formas de vivir estos ciclos, hay tantas experiencias menstruales como cuerpos y personal mesntruantes en el mundo.”⁹ This statement underscores the zine’s central philosophy: the individuality and diversity of menstruation defy monolithic narratives. Building from this premise, the text challenges the homogenizing tendencies of both medical and cultural discourses, advocating for the acknowledgment of menstruation as a deeply personal yet communal experience. The authors emphasize that no single framework can encompass all menstrual realities, from those shaped by hormone therapies to cultural rituals and individual preferences. This lens aligns with a broader transfeminist critique of binary and reductionist categorizations, inviting a reimagining of menstrual health that is as multifaceted as the bodies and identities that experience it.

hands holding open Menstruaciones No Binarias My favorite section starts on page 27 titled “El registro menstrual en mis propios términos”.¹⁰ The authors introduce a framework they term the “micropolitica menstrual”¹¹ emphasizing self-managed sexual health through practices that empower and demystify menstruation. As they note, “Estos ejercicios son parte de una posible micropolitica menstrual orientada a la autogestión de la salud sexual.”(pg. 28)¹² . This approach challenges biomedical and capitalist norms, instead advocating for autonomy and collective care. The micropolitic encourages individuals to track their cycles through diverse means—whether using lunar diagrams, digital apps, or traditional methods—aiming to deepen personal understanding and reclaim agency over one’s body. By prioritizing such personalized practices, the zine fosters an intimate resistance against systems that historically pathologize or control menstruating bodies, envisioning menstrual self-knowledge as a radical, empowering act.

The zine also addresses the experiences of trans and nonbinary individuals who undergo hormonal therapies, noting that the effects of such treatments vary widely. This attention to diverse experiences emphasizes the individuality of menstrual cycles and the necessity of rejecting one-size-fits-all solutions.

Menstruaciones No Binarias back cover Menstruaciones No Binarias is not just a zine; it is a manifesto for a new politics of menstruation. It invites readers to reimagine their relationships with their bodies and to question societal norms that marginalize and pathologize menstruation. By centering voices that have been historically excluded from menstrual discourse, it charts a path toward greater inclusivity and understanding.

The questions it raises—about care, autonomy, and the intersections of identity and biology—are as urgent as they are transformative. In the spirit of the zine’s call for collective action, this work reminds us that another world is indeed possible, one where all bodies are honored in their singularity and complexity.

“a felt and extensive investigation”↩
“We converge from this place, we put our energy so that this expands and continues a dialogue
with other menstruating experiences. We trust that another world is possible from the practices of
the discovery of the body and with it, a rupture of the myths about menstruation, considering the
singularity of each body.”↩
“Menstruation: of the word mens o ‘mes’, from the Indoeuropean mehens or ‘moon’ and the work ‘r’ito’ or ‘station, ritual.”↩
We propose a comprehension of menstrual pain inside a sociopolitical reality that does not grant opportunities to inhabit a context of care and/or that permits us rest.”↩
“What would happen if we abolished the idea that if we menstruate we will convert ourselves into ‘women’? In which of these ideas do we have space for other identities? In which of those myths is there capacity for the people who wish to have hormone therapy with testosterone? In which of these ideas is there value for the people who decide to interrupt their menstruation out of their own volition?”↩
“How do we create a collective agency to live our menstruations with dignity?”↩
“…networks of connection”↩
“Our blood vessels would be something like networks of connection where hormones flow, that once it arrives in diverse locations it can generate diverse TRANSFORMATIONS.”↩
“Every experience is a world for each body, there exist so many forms of living these cycles, there are as many menstrual experiences as there are bodies and personal menstruatees in the world.”↩
““The menstrual record in my own terms”↩
“menstrual micropolitic”↩
“These exercises are part of the possible menstrual micropolitic oriented towards autogestation about sexual health.”↩

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).

World AIDS Day – 2024

December 1, 2024December 1, 2024QZAP

On this World AIDS Day I’m thinking about my deceased friends and the power of paper and toner. If there was a number one reason I started making zines in 1992 it was because I got involved with Milwaukee’s chapter of ACT UP. As a bebe queer activist who wanted to teach my peers about better sexual (and overall) health, one of the best ways to communicate in that pre-internet era was through print.

So we did. We made zines and handed out rubbers and flyers with instructions on how to put them on. We talked about sex, and we danced, and we shouted and we put up stickers and wheat pasted and danced more. And we zapped politicians, and pharmaceutical companies, and died in the streets and locked down in offices… and we danced. And some of us got older, and learned more about harm reduction, and intersectionality, and our queer history, and are able still to dance (sometimes, and maybe in different ways, and still…) And some of us didn’t.

Flyer from the 1992 RNC that says “150,000 Dead from AIDS. Stop This Monster” with picture of president George H.W. Bush. On any given day I mostly don’t care what my boss, or my family of origin and mishpucha, or a bunch of random fundie assholes think about me and what we’re doing here. But I do wonder what these ghosts would say. Would they be proud of us? These queer older siblings who would see that both science and society have come so far, and yet we’re battling the same bigotry – the homo- and trans- and bi-phobia, the same racism and poverty and classism that has allowed this dumb fucking syndrome to fester and spread for 40+ years. Would they be proud of who WE are, this collective of folks who want to preserve this history of print and all of the people whose stories and lives are spilled out among the pages because they taught us that we and our love and our bodies and our pleasure is worth fighting for?

I would like to believe so, but some days I really just don’t know.

xoMilo

Rebel Fux #7: (Post) Election Haze

November 8, 2024November 8, 2024QZAP

In the words of Kate Huh in the issue I want to highlight, in Rebel Fux #7: “Well, I guess this is the election issue.” I am writing this pre-results but by the time this is up we will know who the next president of Amerikkka is. This is a highly political post, but in honor of the Queer Zine Archive Project’s sheer existence, the personal is political. I am sure that many of us, including myself, are going through sociopolitical stress in response to the moment or more persistently in response to how this moment reflects the entirety of many of our lives. Pasts, presents, and possible futures. The cynicism and pessimism that rightfully occurs during these times should not be diminished. There is no space for celebration in the imperial core but we make do. I am not trying to tell anyone who to vote for, or whether to vote or not to vote. Alongside this issue of Rebel Fux, it paints the atmosphere of catastrophe and poison that we all feel as of right now.

In this issue, like the rest of the series, mixed media from a plethora of different sources form a kaleidoscope of eerie collages depicting the affective realities of an election cycle. Photos by Jacob Riis, a “muck-raking” journalist, and social documentary photographer; photos from the Brown Brothers. Words from Thorstein Bunde Veblen, an economist and sociologist who, during his lifetime, emerged as a well-known critic of capitalism. As well as words from the at-the-time voters’ guide and a “weird gay survey.” I picture the creator of this zine either finding these sources, piecing together what inspires this topic, or whether the pieces emerged first and then the connection between them all made itself evident in the set and setting of election season.

“don’t vote for assholes cause’ assholes hurt people!”

Under these political conditions that everyday person is cut up into individual pieces, reduced to nothingness but a number and statistic. Diminished to a singular action but an action that might feel as if the entire nation, but in the case of the American Imperial Core, the entire world’s weight is upon the choice of your ballot. We still live under the guise of democracy, so these actions do mean something, but remember you are more than that something. Being poisoned by the reduction valve of this action, making all you are what the government proclaims you are, what the government and dominant ideology allow you to imagine yourself and your community to be is a death sentence. A slow but slithering tumor that grows through the entirety of your roots and it is infectious ways.

On page 2…

“The principal manifestation of

poisoning is central nervous

system depression.

Blurred or double vision, approaching stupo-”

A person photographed by what I assume is Jacob Riis, injecting themselves. The dominant ideology might provide the tools, the substances, and the environments in which we exist for these poisons to thrive, but we are also the ones that place the injection into ourselves. The mental rejection is a tough action against an ever-present powerful tide of the landscape. To stay true to yourself and what you believe in with so much noise, silence has a purpose and that is to listen to the hum of your drum. Remember to honor it despite all the poisonous noise.

Present law obstructs the principles behind any and all human effort and human enjoyment of life and well-being on the whole.

Again, Rebel Fux uses Junji-Ito-esque two-pager spiralizations into horror scenes, but in comparison, this horror is our realities. Violent streets while the angel that watches is omnipresent and being carried by a foreign in emotion but local in its owner: the manifest destiny angel. Painted in “pure femininity” and bringer of the front lines to the expansion of empire, the fate of conquest.

“This ballot proposal is a dose that produces anesthesia” as said on page 10. The ballot is one of the variety of substances used for self-injection produced, serviced, and distributed by the market of the imperial core to its own citizens. This time, as told by Rebel Fux, is an anesthetic. We often connect the anesthetic to the removal and domestication of feeling, but we must also witness the effect of the anesthetic upon movement and action. A form of desensitizing bliss that does not actually provide much-needed rest but is just a muffler and distraction to a possible imagining of what could be done outside, in spite, regardless of, or more than what the ballot offers us. In the injection of the anesthetic, the submitting and entrance of the ballot into its box, we are enticed and given the chance to lay in the imperial bliss of mediocrity. Allow yourself to bear witness within your mind, yourself, your community, and the world, for more.

It is valid and right to mourn and grieve, but the next day utilize said emotions to sensitize your actions. Later on in the zine, this powerful page proclaims “The emphasis is kept on weapons…” Although this zine was created more than 2 decades ago, it still rings true. “…by a passionate common sense,” the landscape that we live in is not and was not created out of failure to its origins and logistical purposes. The “common sense,” the logic built into the system is working perfectly fine, actually working extremely perfectly. The way that it fails multiple groups within its borders and outside of them, is the method of the system. The common sense is very much alive and passionate as we witnessed last night. The structure of the system and its legalities was built to function in this way. All nations, like the human body, run through lifespans and cycles not unique to the present patterns we are experiencing. Although something might feel unique it does not mean it is, and this is not a failure, this feeling is the common sense that has been built into the minds of the everyday American citizen. The “blurred or double vision” trusts the dominant structure. As if its omnipresence that dishonors the divine, is a warm blanket protecting us. In reality, as a frog in a boiling pot, we are being cooked and blissfully staying in vertigo of the water. This cognitive dissonance is essential to the blurring of vision, to leave all of us dizzy to each other, to solidarity.

We are not bound to what has been imposed upon us, just cemented in birth to the reduction valve of this country. Our instinct, although common sense would like us to believe, isn’t isolation and individualism. Discover ways to imagine and do more outside of the mediocre injection of the ballot. Remember and return to what matters.

Ephemeral Matters – QZAP at the Nasjonalmuseet

October 30, 2024October 30, 2024QZAP

A selection of zines that are part of the exhibit Ephemeral Matters: Into the Fashion Archive We’re super excited to finally announce that we’re participating in an exhibition at the National Museum (Nasjonalmuseet) in Oslo, Norway. Ephemeral Matters – Into the Fashion Archive has been 18 months in the making, but it’s finally here. The long and short of it is that we’ve been collaborating with curator Marco Pecorari and other folks at the museum to be one of five archival collections that maintain materials connected to “the fashion industry.” OR, in our case, may stand in opposition to or interact critically with said industry.

At the beginning of 2024 we worked with Marco to choose items from the QZAP collections to send to display at the museum, focusing on themes of:

role of garments
vestimentary practices and DIY
Community and Subcultures through modelling/garments
the body transformation
zines that mock, play, refer to fashion magazines/fashion languages
nature of zine and zine archives
and t-shirts and other wearable ephemera

Photo of one of the exhibition drawers that shows Fatty Fatty 2x4 and Fat Girl #6

As a result, in March of this year we sent over 100 items, including lots of zines including copies of Sexy Magazine (1992), Dr Smith (1984), Blue Floral Gusset (2010), and Fat Girl (1996.) Also included were a selection of queer, punk, zine and library related buttons (badges), DIY printed punk patches, and a selection of similarly themed t-shirts. In turn, they sent their videographer Nicholas to us in Milwaukee. We spent a day in the QZAP archive space shooting a video interview, showing off a lot of our collections and listening to Pink Stëël.

After a summer of exchanged emails and tons of work on part of the museum, the exhibit finally opened on 18 October, 2024 and runs through 23 March, 2025. If you’re not able to make it to Oslo while the exhibit is up, the catalog is available through the Nasjonalmuseet web store for 399 NOK (~$36.50) plus shipping.

We want to shout out huge thank yous to Marco, Hanne, Nicholas, Stine, Maria, Hope and the rest of the museum staff, and also all of the other collectors, designers and archivists who have loaned their ephemeral materials to make the exhibit happen.

A selection of screen-printed punk patches.

Rebel Fux #4: Where Creations End Their Creators

October 24, 2024October 24, 2024QZAP

Rebel Fux is a series of mini-zines with a fragmented metaphysical soul. Created by Kate Huh, you can listen to their voice through the orchestration of images and words they unify for us. Each edition of Rebel Fux consists of a different theme and lies in a different node of abstraction depending on the chosen topic. Rebel Fux is a perfect name for the series as it encompasses the rebellion of the spirit through the way we perceive the world in our subjectivities. We f*ck what has been given and shown to us by f*cking the rebellious spirit itself. In disintegrating images of the topic through poetic collages, we feel the aftermath of the spirit’s intercourse as it passes through us.

I will be focusing on Rebel Fux #4 for this post, on the violent creation of nature and the nature of violent creation. Some of the editions in the archive combine figures of the fragmentation and unification Kate uses. This time the words of Mary Shelley and J. Robert Oppenheimer danced about the page of Lynd Ward’s eerie woodcuts. The connection between the modern Prometheus myth and the creation of a weapon of death is the overarching thread here. A deep sense of questioning the ethics of the creator’s intention, actions, and results of what their hands were involved in conducting. Either way, we immediately know the feelings of the creator of this zine about these questions, light-heartedly on the first page as 1931 Frankenstein’s Monster presents Kate’s formidable voice:

“In this issue it becomes clear; if you fux with Nature, Nature fux with you…”

Nature is capitalized and fortified in a conscious way which I highly appreciate. An autonomous spirit of choice and marker of vengeance for any disrespectful alchemist efforts that do not withhold and honor the balance of our elements. Grounded by reality, this could not feel more poignant and demanding than today as according to new research, the vast majority (over 99%) of the 281,000 metric tonnes of CO2 emissions estimated to have been generated in the first 60 days of Israel’s genocide on Palestine were greater than the annual carbon footprint of more than 20 of the world’s most climate-vulnerable nations. In clear connections to our presents, pasts, and unfortunate futures, in Rebel Fux, we see the becoming and unbecoming of creator and creature as demise descends for the mortal price of fuxxing with Nature.

Quotes from Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein spiral into the ultimate point of magnetization and explosion, such as the atom bomb itself, into his creator’s words. J. Robert Oppenheimer, the father of the atom bomb, is a Prometheus-Frankenstein figure and we see in his creation and words how so.

shed countless tears; happy beyond hope thus inexorable fate be satisfied, and if the destructio pause before the peace Again shall you raise the funeral wail, I received their cold answers, It is the kind of schizophrenia we physicists have been living with for several years now unfeeling reasoning died s on my lips. The fuxxed creator’s journey vacuums alongside Lynd Ward’s woodcut prints. In an extreme black point contrast, the direct lines set a scene for the poetics. Ward illustrated a 1934 edition of Frankenstein, published in New York by Harrison Smith and Robert Haas. These are outstanding, not only for excellence and power of design but especially for insights into a disturbing and powerfully poetic solely in the visual plane. Makes me wonder about the process of these woodcuts, and the type of creation into nature’s skin, the wood of a tree. Which then this zine integrates back the words of Mary Shelley into the visuals for the nexus point of bearing witness to the birth of a creation that you know in prophetic unfolding will mass into death and destruction.

Cover of the 1934 edition of Frankenstein by Mary Shelley, Illustrated by Lynd Ward and Justine in Prison in “Frankenstein” by Lynd Ward — Justine in Prison in “Frankenstein” by Lynd Ward

The integration of such distinct acts of creation insights wonder into the possibilities of the animativity of the creation itself. Frankenstein’s monster while considered an abomination, was only through tragic self-undoing, was there actual violence in response. Oppenheimer’s atom bomb has no consciousness, in its inanimacy, the consciousness is of its creator and user. So therefore the consequences and material actions that come from such creations come from the intentionality and unintentionality of their creators.

“I shall not be merely weaving a series of supernatural terrors.

The great discoveries of modern science have been put to horrible use.

Remember, thou hast made me more powerful than myself

your anguish,

is dear to me,

a single bomb.”

Oppenheimer’s pure curiosity is creation with the matters and physics held carelessly on the other side of its coin. As we create, the spaces left out in our creation are still real and will be held captive and used by successors. Oppenheimer was a seeker of creation, not death. Frankenstein was a seeker of transmutation, not monstrosity. Prometheus was a seeker and holder of intelligence not the horrors of mankind. Nevertheless, their hands lead to such events. They did not think of it. And in the divine humbling that the balance of nature does to all of us: what they did not pay attention to, what was left uncalculated, calculated itself into a haunting in the shadows. To be the effect of the cause they created. As for me, I am not sure I blame the creator for the destruction creations caused and keep on causing, but I sure do blame their lack of care. Being lost in the fullness of the thirst, a wonder of wonder is intoxicating, but remembering where you stand is integral. The earth that gives you the materials off her back for the projects. The atoms, the organs, the fire.

When I saw that ball of fire, two passages in the Bhagavad-Gita came to my mind. One was: And the other: "The radiance of a thousand suns which suddenly illuminate the beavens all in one moment-thus the splendor of the Lord." "And I am Death, who taketh all, who shatters worlds.

The climax of the zine is Oppenheimer’s words bearing witness to the destruction of his own creation. The mass blinding event of witnessing shot him towards the future of the scale of what he had done. These pages in full depiction of this moment as it shows us Frankestein’s monster, Lynd Ward’s woodcut, and an indistinct man in pain, is reminiscent of Junji Ito’s methods of somber horror. In his manga, he circulates the reader with images of dizziness into a trap of a double panel of your own turning. The spiralization into the concise moment of inescapability for what you have been led into, and this moment… for the creator of pain: they lead themselves and everyone down such a spiral.

Throughout this post, I have been using the word “creator” instead of “scientist” even though throughout the zine it focuses on scientists and their creation fuxxing with nature. However, I think any form of creation can fall victim and perpetrator to this violence, in different forms. Technologies and their consumer, politics in societal structures, art in culture, and more. Not all creation is of this sort. When we go outside of the bounds of the bounty that nature gives us. When we do not honor the flow of intuitive creation in balance with our place within it.

But am I not alone, miserably alone? if You, my creator, abhor me

In the end, Rebel Fux gives the voice back to the creation. A being or unbeing that is condemned, because of the carelessness and oversight of their poisonous curious creator, to the undoing of the ethics of their future and present users. The dysautonomia of their free will results in this inescapability.

As humanity seems to be in a dizzying repetitive violence of history, genocide on top of genocides, are we not Frankestein’s monster? Have we been removed from our autonomy because of the conditions of our creation? When the alchemist that melded our clay into our human bodies and granted us life, did they too exclaim “And I am Death, who taketh all, who shatters worlds…”?

Queer History Making / Making Queer History

October 9, 2024October 9, 2024QZAP

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.

Out of the Closets and Into the Libraries by the Bang-A-Rang Collective is a zine of radical queer moments navigating us through history…

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.

▲▼▲▼▲

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:

The Lesbian Avengers: Have We Always Had the Same Issues?

September 25, 2024September 25, 2024QZAP

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?

Welcome Avenger 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:

Queer City, Pt 2: Rachel Pepper – “Life in the early 1990’s was about living in the moment”

September 15, 2024September 15, 2024Lee

QUEER CITY. EDITORS RACHEL 3 The female editor of QUEER CITY is Rachel Pepper. By day she's a high-powered book clerk at A Different Light, San Francisco's queer bookstore, by night she splits a dual personna of club-girl extraordinaire and house bound recluse. She writes a bi-weekly column for the Bay Area Reporter called "The Outer Limit," is a San Francisco correspondant for OUTWEEK mag, and loves to undertake time consuming, low profit projects like this one. Check out her first solo 'zine effort, CUNT, a hot hip dyke publication she knocked out in three days of frenzied creative hysteria. Rachel's a self-described "ACI UP Type" who participates in activist politics, dyes her hair blonde, is pondering getting a tattoo, and is a strong-willed Taurean. You can sometimes find her on the stage of Club 0 dancing nasty and cruising the scene with her friend Daula, or soaking in Osento's hot tub with her master gal Deborah. Se loves cute women in black leather jackets who are bold enough to approach her in bars and ask for her phone number. Snap to it, girls. TOP PHOTO BY ELIZABETH MANGELSDORF BOTTOM PHOTO ALEX — From Queer City

After I spoke with Alexander Chee about Queer City, he connected me with his coauthor, Rachel Pepper.

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.

10 THINGS THAT ARE THE SAME ANYWHERE YOU GO IN THE QUEER NATION 1) In any club you go to for the first time, if you have not already slept with one person there, someone you know has. 2) It is no longer possible to tell if someone has politics or if they just wear the T shirt." 3) The dykes are looking like fags, the fags are looking like dykes, and the bisexuals are looking to be here for awhile. 4) Unity is not about assimilating. 5) Everywhere you go, they'll be playing "Groove is in the Heart." 6) No one can really afford fashion games anymore and if they can... 7) there is always someone fiercer, faster hotter and rougher so get over it. 8) In the age of safe sex, no one is a cheap date. 9) At the end of the day/last call/closing and evaluation, everyone is single. 10) The times are too bad for us to be bad to each other.

“10 Things That Are The Same Anywhere You Go In Queer Nation,” from Queer City

NEW IN TOWN? read this *) The haight-ashbury clinic provides free general healthcare and referrals 2) If you get your clothes ripped off or if you're having a fashion emergency, go to Clothes Contact on Valencia street at 16th, where they have fabulous used fashions at $7 a pound 3) On saturdays and sundays people have yard sales where they sell great stuff, and they have no idea what it's worth 4) Special club events, demonstrations, and assorted extremist specialty events leave flyers and posters in the following spots: a different light cafe flore cafe macondo cafe picaro rolo citizen 5) The women's building on 18th street is a great place to hook up with like-minded politicos and way-cool women. ACT UP/SF and Queer Nation/SP both meet there and there is a bulletin board as well. 6) There is no gay/lesbian center here yet. 7) Wear a whistle. If you hear one blown on the street it means someone is getting bashed. If you are getting bashed, blow it and run. 8) All in-city public transportation is 85 cents exact change. A bus transfer is good two more times in the next two hours. A mun transfer is good once in the next two hours. 9) Muni maps are $1.61 including tax and are available at most drugstores, bookstores, and the ticket booths for the underground. 10) If someone calls you girl, it is because you're family. So be gentle.

“New In Town? Read This,” 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, Pt 1: Alexander Chee on the DIY spirit of early-90s San Francisco

September 7, 2024September 8, 2024Lee

“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.

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Former location of A Different Light San Francisco, which closed in 2011. Photo from Wikimedia Commons user InSapphoWeTrust.

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?

Issue #5 of Diseased Pariah News, via the Internet Archive

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.

Diseased Pariah News. Hothead Paisan was amazing and hilarious.

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?

QUEER ISListening to Sinead O'Connor, Girls in the Nose, Fifth Column, Revolting Cocks, but probably not gay men's choral tapes or super zappy women's music. Except "Turning it Over" on rainy Sunday afternoons. the BOX Club Uranus Knowing queer cinema isn't Longtime Companion but is Barbara Hammer, Bruce LaBruce & GB Jones, and Azian Murudin. Being present but not necessarily admitted. Getting off on the work of Pat Califia, no matter if you're male or female. Queer means never having to apologize for your opinions when you've offended someone--especially when you've purposefully tried to. Putting a Rubberman poster up in your bathroom and a Jessica Tanzer print up over your bed. If you're a woman you find gay male porn films more stimulating than lesbian-produced ones, and that if you're a gay man, you sneak into your dyke pal's room to look at her Ca Our Backs. Men and women both wearing day glo stickers, labryses, and cockrings. Piercings and tattoos Considering Interview, Homocore and MS. all integral parts of your regular reading. Knowing who Holly Hughes, Karen Finley, and Tim Miller were before their NEA grants were denied. Queer is a melding of lifestyle and identity. Cocteau Twins This Mortal Coil Dead Can Dance Going into Queer Nation with your male roomie and knowing that he will be greeted more warmly by the lesbians, and you by the gay men. nice & queer LIBERATION NOT ASSIMILATION POSITIVELY QUEER — 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?

Boy With Arms Akimbo poster, via University of Rochester AIDS Education Collection

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.

"OutWrite - a literary force of the '90s" judged Lambda Book Report. "Literally overwhelming" reported the Seattle Gay News about OutWrite90. "An event that symbolizes the excellence of gay and lesbian literature" proclaimed The Advocate on OutWrite91. OutWrite90 and 91 were the largest gatherings of lesbian and gay writers in history. You are cordially invited to the event that will surpass both. Out Write 92號 The 3rd National Lesbian & Gay Writers Conference — OutWrite ’92 promo materials, via Northeastern University

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.

QZAP Internship Zine: Making Friends With Zines

August 30, 2024August 30, 2024Lee

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.

It’s the third zine I’ve written that is entirely about friendship (the first two being PALS: The Radical Possibilities of Friendship and Five Friendship Fantasies), and I’m also working on a forthcoming book that’ll also be about friendship.

Making Friends With Zines is 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.

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