On Zine Production Values 

If you’re in any zine space long enough, you will eventually end up drawn into a conversation about what is and isn’t a zine. Personally, I’m pretty firmly on team “the diversity of zines is something I love about them, and trying to draw firm boxes around concepts is not a great use of my one wild and precious life.” I think it’s cool that zines can be something you make with a sharpie and a single sheet of paper, or something with much higher production value.

It’s also really interesting to see what a high-production-value zine from decades past looks like: what the layout software of the era (or pre-compuer technologies) allowed for, and what the marks of sophistication and current style were.

Inciting Desire, from 1992, is one of those less-handmade-looking zines, probably laid out in Quark XPress, and with a lot of of-its-time highly condensed, hard-to-read fonts:

It’s on the higher-concept end of things too, opening with quotations from bell hooks and Judith Butler. A past QZAP post mentioned Inciting Desire in the context of distinguishing between porn and erotic, with Inciting Desire pretty firmly on the erotica end of the spectrum. I’m not trying to insult it or damn it with faint praise, either. There’s some pretty hot stuff in here!

In a call for submissions in this issue, they call for:

“submissions depicting people from the whole range of ethnicities, sizes, genders + ages; all practices you or someone might consider erotic; works explicit or cryptic; sensual, confessional or theoretical; political, hedonistic, or both; and feminist (you decide what that means). Peoples’ pleasures take many different forms; we want to show/describe/deconstruct/reconstruct/celebrate them. Send us your best, your baddest + your wettest”

“Tittie City Sandwich”, an excerpt from the novel Trashed, by Connie Mulqueen, is about a threesome in the bathroom of a dyke club where, “because there were so many girls packing the floor around them, they were close enough to cunt-fuck each other over the clothes so that it wasn’t obvious, though in that place they could’ve stripped and done it, and nobody would’ve cared.”

“Black Ravine”, by Wilton Woods, is a beautifully-written and troubling story about two boys, one prepubescent, one seemingly in his young teens, experimenting sexually in a forest. Inspiringly, there is even a piece of different-gender erotica, Ben Chesluk’s “Madrid”.

Aside from fiction, there’s also a moving memorial for Walter Blumoff, a radical faerie and photographer also known as Butterfly. As the zine notes, he died on April 26, 1991, and left over twenty thousand slides and negatives to the GLBT Historical Society.

Inciting Desire memorializes him as:

“an adoptee left in hospital isolation for two weeks after his birth while they “processed” his adoption papers; a Jew; a boy-lover; a computer geek. He survived cancer in his early twenties. He was hard of hearing, had bad breath, bad teeth, bad credit, depression and low self-esteem. He did therapy all his life to try to heal himself. Where he couldn’t solve his problems internally, he unleashed a stream of litigation upon the world as a way of getting even. He didn’t pay his taxes for the same reason.”

The zine presents a number of his photos from that collection, with commentary situating them lovingly in his life and work.

At the back, there’s a zine review section that includes some familiar titles like Anything that Moves, Cometbus (then at Issue #26, now at #59), Diseased Pariah News, Holy Titclamps, and Three Dollar Bill.

I haven’t been able to find out much else about Inciting Desire or its authors. We do know that Dennis Cooper once owned an issue of its first issue, which is held at NYU with the rest of his zine collection, which seems like a pretty solid badge of honour!

As someone who has made zines both with scissors and glue, and with up-to-date desktop publishing software, it’s cool to see how both of those techniques show marks of their era as the years pass. It makes me curious what will scream 2020s to the zine archivists of the future!

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.