Category: Blog

Aborting Mission Should Be Your Volition

Rock for Choice ad from the back cover of Teen Fag #2, 1993Even before the COVID-19 pandemic began we were thinking about trying to write a thing about zines that talk abut using herbs and DIY abortion. Then came the pandemic, and in the U.S., the confirmation of another anti-abortion supreme court justice, who, it’s speculated, will work to overturn the 1973 Roe vs. Wade decision that legalized pregnancy termination.

We kind of hate that we have to write this at all, but the ongoing attacks on reproductive freedom and healthcare across the world make this necessary. Everybody should have access to the healthcare they need, full stop. This means being able to make informed choices about reproductive options including different methods of contraception, pregnancy and childbirth, and the ability to end a pregnancy as desired.

A couple of notes:

  1. The following links were not digitized by us at QZAP. Abortion and reproductive healthcare are absolutely queer and trans issues, but these zines are maybe outside of our collection policy scope. As such, they are not necessarily up to our standards for digitization, nor can we assure that the original creators permissions were sought before these were put online.
  2. These zines are intended to be informational and not “how-to” manuals. If you need to get an abortion or know someone who might, try contacting Planned Parenthood (in the U.S.) or The International Campaign for Women’s Right to Safe Abortion (global)
  3. A lot of the research for this (short) list came from Jenna Freedman’s article Unreproductive: Zines on Herbal Abortion and Menstrual Extraction at Zinelibraries.info, which is focused library holdings, and the Let’s Talk About DIY Sexuality Zines handout (PDF) by Emily Bee that was prepared for the 2015 Milwaukee Zine Fest.

The Zines

It’s on Liebigstraße 34

liebig34 berlinWow! It’s been almost a year since we’ve posted anything to the blog. And what a fucking year. As we’re still in the midst of a global pandemic, we’re not doing a whole lot these days. At least, not in person. Luckily, online events are a thing right now, and we’re super happy to participate in them.

Coming up next week, we’re co-sponsoring a film screening at the Northwest Film Forum of It’s on Liebigstraße 34.  The screening will include 3 films about the (in)famous feminist-queer squat Liebigstraße 34 in Berlin, Germany and how it was forcibly closed last autumn.

The screening is sliding scale from $0–$25 and will include a Q/A with the film-makers. The links above and below have info on how to get tickets.

It’s on Liebigstraße 34
Feb. 13 at 10am PST / 7pm CET
Northwest Film Forum (online)

Incidentially, we were asked to co-sponsor this by our long-time friend Elliat, who made the amazing doc Travel Queeries, which you can see here.

Queer Love Stories

QLS GRN blgIt seems like a lifetime ago, but it has really only been about two months since we partnered with our friends at the Milwaukee Zine Fest and The Milwaukee Rep to produce a zine from their Queer Love Stories event.  Just as things were ramping up here with the COVID-19 preperations and prior to the Safer At Home orders, we got copies of the community made QLS zine from our local.  That was three weeks ago (it’s 13 April, 2020, a Monday, as we post this.) Since the production of this was funded through the partnership and our initial intent was to make them available during the Milwaukee Zine Fest, we thought we’d do that minus the fest.

If you would like a copy, all you have to do is send us 3 First Class U.S. stamps.

Queer Love Stories c/o QZAP
2935 N. Fratney Street
Milwaukee, WI 53212

Please be sure to include your name and address.

If you are not in the U.S. and would like a copy, please contact us.

Please take care of each other.

Love,

QZAP

In The Maw of the Great White Rabbit

Panel from Howard Cruise's aclaimed graphic novel Stuck Rubber BabyWe honor the legacy of gay comics artist Howard Cruse, who died on November 26, 2019, and share our condolences with his husband, daughter, and chosen family. 

Howard’s work began during a time of tremendous social change in the US in the early 1970s, when he utilized the energy of the underground comix movement to create gay characters and stories with love, laughter, and poignant drama. He was an early editor of Gay Comix, and his breakout work, Stuck Rubber Baby, explored queerness and racial justice through a Southern lens. Perhaps his most well known character, Wendel, represented a bit of Howard himself, with optimistic, simple charms.

Most importantly, Howard worked at a time where he established the frameworks of gay comic storytelling himself, truly a pioneer where few visual artists were creating work by, for, and about queer people. To meet him in person, you would encounter a gentle soul, a very kind and thoughtful human being, in some ways an ‘anti-celebrity’ of sorts. He was candid about how drug use sparked his creativity, and he told human stories in ways that made them universally relatable.

Thank you, Howard, for the path you created, the artists that you inspired to create their own queer work, and for leaving the world with a rich legacy of queer visual stories. Your memory is a blessing.

By Any Means Necessary

P-Form #23 coverIn 1992, the drag queen Joan Jett Blakk ran for presidential office with backing from Queer Nation. Using the slogan “Lick Bush in ‘92,” Blakk’s campaign brought national attention to issues impacting queer communities, particularly the AIDS epidemic that the federal government was completely ignoring1. In the midst of the campaign, Terence Smith, the activist who performs as Blakk, penned an article for the performance art zine P-Form. Smith writes that drag carries a politics of “invulnerability,” providing a means of protection for Smith on both the stage and the streets. “No one can ‘harm’ me in drag,” writes Smith, “Because part of me is hidden underneath a Maybelline shell.” The article is a beautiful illustration of drag as a queer political force—a form of gender-fuckery that according to Smith “stomps out” the signifiers of masculinity and femininity.

Smith’s article is one of many articles on drag performance in this special issue of P-Form. The Randolph Street Gallery ran the zine from 1986 to 1999 and covered the performance art scene in Chicago. (Note: Blakk also ran for mayor of Chicago in 1991.) P-Form regularly highlights the work of queer and feminist artists. In the case of this issue, the majority of the articles are written by the artists themselves, who describe their performance practice as well as the difficulty of surviving and sustaining life as a queer performer.

JJBPIn an article entitled “Every Breathing Moment,” Michael Palmer describes the institutional violence enacted against trans bodies. Palmer writes about endless visits to doctors who challenged his identity as a trans man and refused to provide top surgery. He writes that “listening” to doctors or family would have meant turning toward death. Palmer describes breathing as a radical act—an assertion of life in institutional spaces that negate trans lives.

P-Form also provides reviews of other artistic forms, including painting cinema. In accordance with the drag performance theme, this 1991 issue includes a brief review of Jennie Livingston’s documentary Paris is Burning, which had been released the previous year. The review reads like a collage of interviews and pull-quotes, featuring press statements made by Livingston as well as iconic lines from drag performers such as Dorian Corey and Venus Extravaganza. “The balls used to be about what you could create,” says Corey, “Now they’re about what you could acquire.” Corey notes that theft was not uncommon among the economically struggling performers on the ball circuit. The statement is a strong illustration of how the Harlem ball circuit served as a space of queer of color fabulosity that also gestured toward the precarity of queer life. Performance is a means of sustaining queer life, and it depends on radical forms of resistance to institutional oppression.

1 Goodman, Elyssa. “The Drag Queen Who Ran For President in 1992.” Them, 20 Apr. 2018, https://www.them.us/story/joan-jett-blakk-drag-queen-president. Accessed 13 June 2019.

Jacob Carter graduated from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee in 2019 with a master’s degree in English. He is interested in queer cinema and performance art and plans to apply for a PhD in performance studies later this year. He has previously presented his research at the annual conference of the Society for Cinema and Media Studies and the Midwest Interdisciplinary Graduate Conference.

Queer Space Communism 2019

qsc

As we enter into “Pride Month” here’s our annual reminder that corporate rainbow capitalism won’t save us, but queer space communism just might.  To that end, here are 10 things that you can do to help foster rad queer communities into the future:

  1. Skip the rainbow tat from big box stores and chains and support indy queer artists and producers.
  2. Have lesbian potlucks on the regular, and invite non-lesbian queers too.  But tell the TERFs and SWERFs to fuck right the fuck off, and give them no space at the table.
  3. Start edible garden collectives.  Growing veggies and fruits can be intimidating, but, like visiting a bath house for the first time, if you do it with buddies it’s more fun.
  4. Create spaces and events without “allies” and straight folks.  We don’t have to always invite or accommodate them, and we NEVER need their approval or to be “respectable.”
  5. Talk and write about queer sex.  Be explicit.  Discuss pleasure, and desire, and health.  Especially with younger folks and older folks.  Don’t make assumptions about who or how.
  6. Throw queer dance parties!  Also throw queer dance parties with a variety of muisical genres and themes and at different times of day and night.  Make space for the metalheads and disco divas and hip-hop homos and everyone else.
  7. Preserve our hestories through story telling, oral hestory recording, artifact collecting, and letter writing.  Help commit our lives to physical objects so that there is a fossil record.
  8. Teach and learn both hard and soft skills.  Host or attend workshops on bike repair, cooking, community first aid, budgeting and personal finance, sewing, arts/music/writing and so on.
  9. Make queer digital media and host or platform it yourselves.  Become unchained from YouTube, Facebook, Blogger and iTunes.  Work together to skillshare technical knowledge, including recording, editing, sound and visual production skills, but also how to build webservers and host different types of content on your own.
  10. Make and read queer zines.

Looking for Love in All The South Places

OMJIt’s probably an incurable disease of the soul that I flew all the way out to Wisconsin from Florida only to spend hours looking through the QZAP archive for the place I’d just left. Pouring over Queer Zine Explosion, Larry-Bob’s painstakingly detailed queer answer to factsheet 5, I noted anything I saw with an address south of Delaware and east of Oklahoma, more or less, with particular attention to the seaboard states which make up the South I’ve always lived in. As one of the members of Gainesville’s Civic Media Center zine collective, I work with the Travis Fristoe zine library, documenting and preserving the personal, punk, political, art which came to the CMC from around the country but especially Gainesville, Florida and the south. Though the Fristoe collection contains work by queer creators, it was not an explicit collection mandate at the collection’s inception, so I was excited to see what Southern zines QZAP was home to, and what queer Southern zines made their way to national circulation.

My favorite Southern zine I found at QZAP was One Mint Julep, the solo zine by Hugh McElroy, who made up one-half of Picklejar, a queer, Southern, kid liberation zine by high school friends in Washington, D.C. When his collaborator went up North for college, Hugh stayed in D.C., and he continued to write about what queerness and Southernness meant to him. Hugh fiercly articulates what many queer Southerners know- that the South is too often dismissed for its supposed backwardsness, despite the often radical community and coalition building work done here. Hugh is frustrated with his peers in D.C. who hide or change their accents and refuse to claim a Southern identity, and that frustration comes through in OMJ’s various meditations on community, dating, home, and family in D.C.

The all-but-last page of One Mint Julep is one of those pages where you have to show somebody, because it hits you exactly where you live. Hugh has drawn, in scratchy pen, maybe ballpoint, a bird-headed, winged creature on tall, leaf-capped, vine-like legs, rising up from the gabled roof an old plank house, surrounded by bats, moon (sun?) behind it like a knock-off halo, fighting a tiny winged creature. Slices of typed text across the page, layering it with this beautiful, joking, angry, little poem about being from the South, some of which goes “i live in a swamp/ kudzu ate my car last night…. I sip sweet mint julep/ to keep me cool and to/ fire me up” and breaking finally into a half-paragraph of exploding frustration saying exactly what i want to say: the North isn’t any better, and we’ve got to stay here and fight, because the South is ours. I took a picture and sent it to my friend, a sweet queer Florida boy who once, when I said I grew up in the south, gave me a Look of withering dismissal and said “you’re from North Carolina.” He loved it, too.

Fi Taylor was a 2018 QZAP Scholar-in-Residence.  They are currently working as a union organizer and community librarian at the Civic Media Center in Gainesville, FL.

Queer Terrorist / Queer Tapette #4

QueerTerrorist4Queer Terrorist/Queer Tapette #4 is a bisexual punk manifesto that calls BS on the biphobia rampant in lesbian and gay communities. Created in Montréal, Quebec in 1993, Queer Tapette writes queerness into mainstream pop culture while simultaneously critiquing lesbian and gay culture for their sexual exclusivity. The zine opens with a short story that slams the fake radical politics of mainstream lesbians, alluding to how the sense of conformity found in lesbian spaces mirrors that of dominant heteronormative society. Drawing on references to 1990s lesbian popular culture, the story ends on a humorous note that immediately hooks the reader: [they are] “going to bed listening to Melissa Ethridge and masturbating to an image of a snotty franco girl”. This combination of humor and scathing political criticism is present throughout the zine, a tone that both informs and entertains the reader as they immersed in the world of Queer Tapette.

When the reader flips to the next page, they are met with massive text that reads FAG HAGS FIGHT BACK!!!. What follows is a three page collage-style spread that explores the many reasons why the zinester is “fed up with the treatment [they] receive in gay male, lesbian, and straight societies”. Continuing with the tone established in the first few pages of the zine, this section is particularly aggressive in its rightful accusations of biphobia from both the straight and lesbian/gay communities. Invoking a coalitional politics, the zinester calls for alliances between bisexual people and ‘fag hags’, arguing that these two identities were the “newest, hippest funnest coalition ever to emerge”. This article addresses the fact that bisexuality is itself a marginalized identity within the more broader group of ‘sexual minorities’, and as such requires unique and special attention be payed to the needs and desires of bisexual people.

Next up, McTheif the Crime Cat makes an appearance to give advice on how to ethically shoplift. The anti-capitalist comic serves as both a recruitment tool and a how-to guide for potential shoplifters, succinctly explaining why shoplifting only harms big business and capitalists and NOT other poor queers. Plenty of yummy bisexual smut is sprinkled throughout the remainder of the zine, squished in between several pages of a super-queer, super sexy 90210 collage/comic, a passionate criticism of gay and lesbian organizations who only advocate for the ‘civil rights’ of their own kind, and several comics and newspaper clippings celebrating the many badass and sexy drag queens that are left behind by exclusionary lesbian and gay politics.

Anti-gay military policy is the subject of one of the last entries in issue #4 of Queer Tapette, closing out the zine much as it began – with an explicitly political message aimed at lesbian and gay activists:

“Stop whining to me about how you want let into the military, you clone faggots and dead-head lesbians. What are you fighting for – the right to police nationalist borders of Amerikkka, the right to be ‘openly gay’ as you kill other people, the right to effect genocide across the world?”

The radical politics of Queer Tapette rejects the homonormativity perpetuated and desired by mainstream lesbians and gays, and refuses to conform to their liberal agenda of maintaining capitalist and militarized North American culture. This political message is enhanced and diversified by the dark humor and overtly sexual comics and short stories that characterize Queer Tapette as a punk bisexual manifesto.

Sarah Cooke is a current intern at QZAP.  They are a grad student at the University of Wisconsin – Milwaukee in library science and women’s and gender studies. Sarah can usually be found covering the world in stickers and glitter with their accomplice, Matilda the cat.

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