Hell Yeah!!! Hell Yeah for weekends, Hell Yeah for zines, and double Hell Yeah for consent-based porn zines!!!! The creator calls it porn. Maybe it’s more erotica? There’s some gender fucking. There’s some masturbation. There’s some hand-holding. Either way, this Hell Yeah makes for some delightful reading with ones hands on ones sexy bits on this warm afternoon.
H is for Hackers with
Hi friends and fans,
We're reaching out to ask for help because we're growing in ways that exceed our current expertise. We are seeking an extraordinary person to join our collective zine archiving project as a volunteer codemonkey/hacker/webdork programmer to help us fix and maintain our website at archive.qzap.org.
The Queer Zine Archive Project (QZAP) is a labor of love, freely organized as a collective of volunteers in its eleventh year of existence. As unpaid staff ourselves who are recognized by peers and our audiences for our vital queer zine preservation efforts, we know it is important to acknowledge and value all the work that goes into making QZAP an innovative leader in digital and community archives, especially on the tech side. We currently do not have a collective member with the skills to grow our website to meet the demands from our users. Maybe you have the skills, or you know someone who does, who has the time to make a commitment to help us in the months and years to come?
Here are the skills we're looking for:
Additionally important:
We have a short list of projects that need attention and are beyond our ken at this time including making our CA instance mobile friendly, fixing the clicky-ness of our metadata, adding SOLR indexing and search to our CA instance, and more.
This is an unpaid volunteer position with potential to gain world-wide recognition in providing a unique service in the field of digital archiving and zine cataloging. If you or someone you know are able to assist us, please get in touch.
Many Thanks,
The QZAP Crew
Every once in a while we feel the need to shake off our regular lives and move in different circles. Sometimes it's challenging to even contemplate how to do it, though. When that's the case, finding a guide can be very helpful. Several years ago just such a guide was sent to us, and and we here at QZAP find it invaluable. So it is with great pleasure that we present The SPPSSM Guide To Proper Saphic Styling by Beatrice Llewllyn and Phyllis Troubridge. Mses. Llewllyn and Troubridge are founding members of SPPSSM, the Society for the Preservation and Promotion of Sapphic Social Mores. Their sound advice has graced many a Femme Show performance, and has been an enhancement to the lives of numerous saphists over the years.
One of the ways of making harm reduction work better is to make sure that it's culturally appropriate. A great example of this can be seen in AquaNet Zine, by AQUA. It's explicitly by and for Asian and Pacific Islander (A/PI) youth, though some of the letters and other material will resonate across cultures. It's also delightfully 1997 in terms of asthetics and content.
In light of the kerfuffle surrounding Amnesty International's draft policy on sex worker's human rights we thought we'd highlight a zine by actual sex workers talking about their expieriences. While we have several zines in the archive talking about sex work, Whorecore is certainly one of our faves. It's unapologetic and intersectional in the way that it discusses the issues faced by the folks who made it.
Today's #QZOTD is Sassyfrass Circus #3. In some ways it's a diary comic, but it's also way more than that. She talks about a trip to Egypt and Israel, writes a brief history of Wimmin's Comix, and generally is an illustrative badass. J.Bee is currently the zinester in residence at QZAP.
Today's QZOTD is a diary zine called Montgomery Clift Was Queer. In it Charlie chronicles some time spent in NYC in 1994, including dumpster diving, musings about Jack Smith, and forrays into record shops to buy jazz records. It's cinematic and staccato in it's rhythm, and a joy to read.
Tomorrow is International Zine Library Day!!! It's one of those made-up but totally special holidays created to celebrate zine in libraries and archives, and also the librarians who work with all this amazing material. You can help us celebrate in a couple of ways:
GMS Headbanger first came to QZAP a few years ago. In a collection filled with odd and fascinating things, this grabbed our attention in a big way because heavy metal and folks who love it are not usually associated with queer lives (with some noteable acceptions.) Headbanger is the newsletter of the Chicago Gay Metal Society. Since we've added this to the collection we've been actively seeking other issues and information about GMS. So far we've come across a flyer, but not a lot more is known to us. If you have info or other issues of Headbanger please get in touch!
We had mentioned in passing that flyers made up part of out collection of ephemera. To be more accurate, from the founding of QZAP we've had a single-page flyer collection that we view as being zine-like but not zines. In some cases we've got a whole collection of SPFs from a single artist or collective. Such is the case with Queer Action Figures #3. This is the third installment of demanding, in-your-face zinestyle graphics that QAF put out in the mid-1990s. They're fun, funny, and in many ways have timeless messages of queer liberation for all of us.
In among all the zines we've got an odd collection of ephemera at QZAP. Mostly this consists of queer punk patches, flyers for events, a handful of CDs, and then there's the Pansy Division trading cards. Originally these were included in the LP version of their 1996 album Wish I'd Taken Pictures. Since PD just played a show at NYC Pride and got a sweet writeup in Pitchfork it seemed like a good time to show these off again.
