It’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.
We’re starting off 2018 with the release of the third issue of From The Punked Out Files of the Queer Zine Archive Project. This issue combines the research of two summers of zinester-scholar-artist-librarians-in-residence at QAZP. It’s 56 pages of writing, thinking and analysis about queer sex zines, queer diy comics, POC zines, zine events, solar eclipses, road trips and frozen custard.
Pamphlet stitch is an old technology, and is one of the simplest non-adhesive bindings. It doesn’t require special tools (though I’ll recommend some below), and can be done as a solo project or in a team, with each person taking a step to divide the labor. I see bookbinding as a deeply feminist praxis. In early America, binderies were one of the few places outside the home where it was “respectable” for single women to find work. These jobs were also pathways to literacy for these young women, enabling them to learn to read and do sums, as well as providing for themselves and often their families. Reviving and reclaiming the book arts, then, is a feminist act. Queering the book arts extends this logic, and provides a new space for expression with this old tech.
It’s easy to get discouraged. Easy, and understandable. At times like these, it can be helpful to look back and see how others handled times of crisis. YELL is unfortunately, at the moment, defunct. However, its achievements (as listed near the beginning of YELL #1) are nothing short of inspiring. From handing out condoms and safer sex literature to over 45,000 NYC students, to enacting change in NYC public education policy, to representing youth interests at the international conference on AIDS, it’s clear the body of this organization was just as energetic as its publication.
We’ve been struggling for the past couple of days to come up with something to say about the election. It’s super hard not to be swallowed by a feeling of absolute doom and horror for things to come. We’re threatened. ALL our communities are being threatened. We’re unsure what the next 6 months will bring for us all.
