I made it to Milwaukee! I’ve been here for a month now which is crazy to think about. In such a short amount of time I have situated myself quite well here. I have a job, I’ve made friends, and I’m slowly learning about the hardcore scene. I feel a sense of urgency having dropped myself into a completely unfamiliar place. I need to experience life in the city because there’s opportunities for connections I didn’t have before. Growing up on Long Island, there aren’t many places to meet people. There’s school, work, and that’s about it. You take the friends you can get.
When I meet someone in Milwaukee, and I think they’d be interested, I hand them my zine. It’s an object that exemplifies my work as an art curator, but also a sense for the kind of person I am through the things I make. My zine’s called GenderFuck, a submission-based anthology of trans art and writing. The idea my co-editor and I always had was to find and communicate with other trans people, and we have achieved that, but the audience we’ve accumulated is at a distance from us. Most people know of us through the internet, or from going to school with us. I’ve met people through the zine, but being in Milwaukee has challenged the way I think of zines to introduce yourself to people. The question now is how do we communicate with our audience through the zine itself?
In the 90’s this guy named Judge started a zine called Oi Boy. It’s quite similar in style to GenderFuck: an anthology of art and writing with a central topic. Oi Boy is about removing masculinity from its societal pedestal by critiquing toxic men and telling stories where men aren’t sex-crazed misogynists, but loving friends, caring boyfriends, and disgruntled townies who hate jocks. But there’s a central difference to Oi Boy; they have a letter-to-the-editors section.
The Oi Boy “Male Box” features letters from readers requesting copies of the zine or responding to stories from previous issues. What stuck out to me was how casual and conversational some of these letters were. The first one opens, “RE: that particular article you caught me reading earlier today…” I was kind of shocked to see that the people writing letters to them were not a faceless readership, but people the editors know/have met before or interacted with. I remember when I was a kid listening to the Delila radio show: a call-in romance advice segment. You’d get a sense for the callers from the story they told, but you knew this was the first and last time Delila would talk to these people. Delila is the voice, the personality, whereas the callers are faceless contributors. Oi Boy, on the other hand, feels like a community.
One of the stories is called “Excerpts from Acid,” by Phobrek Hei (not sure if there is a longer piece called “Acid,” I’ll have to look into that). It follows three friends, Raphi, Sasha, and the narrator, dropping acid then going to a corporate park to look at a sculpture Sasha’s brothers friend made. The sculpture is a penis. It’s got some scratches on the metal, and the base is meant to be shower tiles, but other than that, it’s just a penis. Raphi is whatever about the sculpture, and Sasha rambles on about art history shit, but the narrator has a bit of a crisis from it. He rejects the sculptures’ projection of masculinity. Not in the, “this is art sucks” way, but more in the, “this makes me question if I even like being a man,” kind of way.
The narrator remembers this party he went to. “My body from the neck down had been so classically feminine that night, yet it seemed somewhat cheap, unreal: sadly imitative. At that point, I was startled to find Sasha telling me the exact same thing I thought without the judgment: that I had been a woman from the neck down all night.” Sasha is the kind of straight friend you wish to have when coming out as trans; the kind of guy who may not fully understand what you’re doing, but who loves and cares about you, nonetheless.
I’ve co-edited my zine, GenderFuck, for over a year, but we’ve been operating almost in isolation from other zinsters. I’ve worked with people who made or would go on to make zines, but zinemaking as a community is still very new to me. GenderFuck is first and foremost about distributing other queer people’s art, but the community building has happened largely outside the zine, through punk shows we’d put on in support of each new issue (mind you these shows were at my college so the audience was limited to students). Oi Boy is also a zine collecting peoples art, but they interact with their community directly through the zine, and the community contributes to it, through the “male box.”
Oi Boy has inspired me to put in a call for letters in the fourth issue of GenderFuck. We know that we have an audience through our Instagram and the little comments people write when they submit to us, but I want to interact with them more. I want what Oi Boy has, a web of people talking to each other through the zine. That’s what we started GenderFuck to do but I’m not sure we’ve achieved that yet. The shows have been fulfilling that desire, in how we’ve facilitated an event for people to hang out and talk to each other. Now we just need to integrate that into the zine itself.
June Horbach is the co-editor of the zine GenderFuck. She is interning at QZAP before her last year of undergrad. She hails from Long Island, hates malls, but loves the Southern State Parkway.
