On Zine Production Values 

Inciting Desire #2: The Safe Gender Issue. "Crying out in pleasure and pain not caring who or what hears"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:

When I daydreaming of sex. Lately I've taken up with my hand, his body to watch my hand. I work full his limp cock. With my favorite big adrenaline rush into his shorts. This is the vagina & the elastic leg-hole of a novice, he circles my game. He gives all hand on her crotch, his tongue circling her nodding off. Sam does not seem pleased with the thrill of tongue. But it's just straight up and brazenly do the same, slurping with the rocking rhythm on the living room floor. Inside my body, my face becomes passive. Throwing caution to the wind, I unbuckle my tongue from his head. Slowly I rock my face of me, putting one come-slippery hand down to the feel of lips on my long thick stream. His jaw open wide sucking back up to my face. Green eyes that shine tension. Sam is down to her fussy easing in & out of awareness I begin again Quickly (well, quickly for people who are always covered with pink] under the light my hard cock rubs over her handful breasts. Black lacy bra over the purple-rimmed head, working the shaft with forefinger around the base at once into his mouth. I bend juices of his cock, which is her that evening. How Chris crosses the way in with a slow jerk. I move the focus of my sucking and cool between my ass. In other words, suburban, surprisingly cute nipples. She seems to abandon this & shine with intelligence even when he's me. He looks me in the eye while doing. Despite her jealousy of me. Sensing what's about to come: her. So she springs up. pulling Chris' lips. It looks like

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”

Safe Gender editorial, from Inciting Desire #2“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 Photographs of Butterfly, from Inciting Desire #2The 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.

Someone please tell me how to feel about sexual liberation

Zine of the Gay

LESBIAN & GAY FREEDOM MOVEMENTIllustration of a woman having sex with a dolphin LGFM SUPPORTS DOLPHINS WHO WANT TO HAVE SEX WITH HUMANS LGFM, BM BOX 207, LONDON, WCIN 3XX. 40p
LGFM newsletter, issue #5

This week, I’m looking at four issues of the newsletter for the UK group “Lesbian And Gay Freedom Movement”, which is unfortunately very difficult to find more information on due to their pretty generic name. The content of the newsletters, however, is… definitely not generic!

QZAP holds four issues of the Lesbian And Gay Freedom Movement newsletter: #5 (Summer 1991), #6 (Summer 1992), #8 (Winter 1993), and #10 (Spring 1995). The newsletters came to QZAP via the Emma Centre, a Minneapolis infoshop that I wrote more about last week.

LGFM described themselves as “a movement to bring anarchist ideas and ideals to lesbians, gays and bisexuals, and to make sexuality and the overthrow of patriarchy major campaigning issues for all anarchists.”

The newsletter fought the respectability politics that had crept into lesbian and gay movements, criticizing a focus on legal rights rather than liberation.

In the early 90s, when these zines came out, the age of consent in England was 16 for heterosexual sex, and 21 for homosexual sex. The age of consent for gay sex was lowered to 18 in 1994, between issues #8 and #10 of this newsletter. The age of consent was only equalized across all combinations of genders in 2000. These newsletters reflect a time when debate was raging in the UK more broadly, and also within queer communities, about the role of the state in sexual ethics. As these newsletters show, queer sexual mores were a wide-open question, and some of the positions staked were pretty far outside of the current mainstream.

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HOW YOU CAN HELP END OPPRESSION OF FAT DYKES1) Stop assuming that being fat is a matter of choice for most fat wonyn. 2) Stop assuming I should lose weight one of the oppressive assumptions that thin womyn make is that all fat womyn want to lose weight. - 3) Stop assuming or believing that I'm killing myself by being fat uppression kills! 4) I have lots of feelings when I eat. So do thin people. Don't attribute pain, despair, low self-esteem, or other mental symptons to we just because I'm fat. 5) Don't always assume that fat people are jolly and funny. 6) Don't ignore fat people. Fat people are easily ignored because we often try hard to be inconspicuous. 7) Don't point to the exceptional weight loser. Weight loss is statistically atypical. 8) Don't expect Fat Liberation to become a major political movement before YOU start to change. 9) Remember, 1 am me. I am not your dictatorial fat father, I am not your nurturing Aunt Clara, I am not your seductive fat mother. 10)Get rid of your terror of being fat. Get rid of your fear of fat people. It is hurting all of us. II)Don't leave it to Eat dykes/womyn to do all your consciousness raising for you. 12) Don't treat fat people like we're uncool. Just because we are not allowed to wear the latest styles doesn't mean we don't know what's going on. 13) Let yourself be attracted to a fat dyke/womyn. It's not an accident if you've 'never' been attracted to a fat lesbian. 14) ilave sex fantasies about fat womyn/lesbians without turning us into earth mothers and comforters. 15) Whenever you fantasise, draw or otherwise image lasbians/womyn, see us as we really are. all shapes and sizes and colours. It is the responsibility of artists and graphics womyn, etc to show fat images in a positive way. 16)Invite us to go swimming or to the sports club. Take our pictures when you have your camera out (unless we ask you not to). Don't put your sheme of fat upon us. 17) Don't drink diet pop or in any other way support the diet industry. The patriarchy makes huge amounts of money though the diet industry by playing on womyn's fears of being fat of getting fatter. 18) Remember that fat oppression is a fat person's problem too. We are all taught to be afraid of being fat, or fatter. 19) Remember what Vivian Mayer says: "Fat is not a feminist issue, Fat LIBERATION is!!". 20)Stop dieting yourself! In summary, support me as a fat dyke by:...understanding my oppression...exposing fatophobia where you see and hear it (eg don't let your agency or organisation post netices about diets or groups that assume we need to lose weight)...letting and helping me love my body FAT without any overt or covert assumptions of having to lose it. Encourage fat lesbians and womyn you know to...stop dieting...join a support group or talk with other fat dykes about being fat...come out of our closets...build pride and rid ourselves of our self-hatred. HELP US THROW OUR WEIGHT AROUND! (10)
“HOW YOU CAN HELP END OPPRESSION OF FAT DYKES”, from LGFM #5

In Issue #8 of the newsletter, LGFM listed the groups they supported as:

  • “Oppressed sexualities including transexuals, girl/girl & boy/boy lovers, girl/woman & boy/man lovers, transvestites, S&Mers…
  • Children in their fight for liberation and freedom to choose their own sexuality.
  • Lesbians, gays, and bisexuals in prison, ‘care’, and psychiatric institutions.
  • Isolated and lonely lesbians, gays and bisexuals, and those just ‘coming out’.”

In Issue #5, this list also includes “people with mental and physical disabilities, also those who are non-monogamous, like cottaging [cruising] or picking people up in public places, […] those of us who enjoy sex toys and pornography […] and sex with animals.” Issue #10 also includes fat people and “those who don’t define or identify themselves as anything” in the list of those whose sexual liberation they seek.

This makes me very very very very very uncomfortable! It is pretty intense to see some of your most deeply-held views (police abolition, bodily autonomy for sex between consenting adults, including people with disabilities, and including sex that includes power exchange) being placed alongside and in equivalence with… other stuff.

FUZZY BOXES!QUEER, DICK SUCKING, ARSE FUCKING, PISS LOVING, TONGUE KISSING, NIPPLE CHEWING, CUDDLE SNUGGLING SLUT. THE LIBERATION AND ENJOYMENT OF SEX AND SEXUALITY IS A PERSONAL STRUGGLE OF EACH PERSON. THE UPBRINGING AND SUPPRESSION OF OUR CHILDHOOD SEXUALITY CAN TAKE YEARS TO OVERCOME ALONG WITH THE SUFFOCATING DEFINITIONS AND BOXES WHICH WE ARE OBLIGED TO PICK UP IN TEEN AND LATER YEARS FROM SOCIETY. THOUGH HOW DO YOU EXPLAIN THE MERGING AND FUZZING OF THE EDGES OF THESE BOXES WE'RE PLACED IN? ARE DEFINITIONS JUST ANOTHER FORM OF OPPRESSION SET TO CONTROL US AND STOP US FROM RELEASING OUR TRUE POTENTIAL AND TRUE CAPACITY TO LOVE AND ENJOY OURSELVES? HOW DO YOU EXPLAIN THE FACT THAT I'M QUEER, ENJOY ALL KINDS OF SEX WITH ALL KINDS OF MEN, FALL IN LOVE WITH GUYS, HAVE AND WANT RELATIONSHIPS WITH GUYS, BUT EVERY NOW AND THEN WANT TO PUCK WITH A WOMAN. I'VE ENJOYED THE FEELING OF SLIPPING INTO A SOFT WARM VAGINA UNTIL I CUM. YET CONSIDER MYSELF QUEER AND COULD NEVER GO BEYOND FRIENDSHIP WITH A WOMAN.
From LGFM #8

Let’s look more closely at what’s in these newsletters:

Issue #5 takes up the cause of Ben Wilson, who was incarcerated for “having sex with boyfriends under 16”, sentenced to life in prison, and chemically castrated with estrogen. There’s also a letter from “an inmate in [the] New York State Prison System who has run afoul of the age of consent”, defending “consensual intergenerational sexual relationship[s]”.

Issue #6 shares several stories of people prosecuted for sex with animals, arguing that it’s inconsistent for factory farming to be permitted and bestiality not. There’s also an interesting essay where a writer talks about their experiences coming into BDSM as someone who had never been able to orgasm before having experiences as a bondage bottom. It also argues that gays and lesbians should, instead of fighting for inclusion in institutions like police and the military, instead look towards their abolition.

Issue #8 focuses on SM, including a report from an SM pride march in London, but also includes an essay by a queer teenager opposing age of consent laws, arguing that “abuse can’t be stopped by the law, neither can protection be given; but control, guilt, and fear can and will occur.”

In Issue #10, there’s an article about the role of anarchist women in the Spanish Civil War, a report on the raid on a London fetish club, Whiplash, from someone who was present, remarks on Irish liberation, and a report from a squat in Ljubljana. This issue also reports critically on the age of consent for sex between men in the UK being lowered from 21 to 18, and on the decriminalization of sex in the military, arguing that there should be no legal age of consent, and no military. There’s also a cool story encouraging people not to let ableism inform their assumptions around who has sex, and with whom:

“I was at a feminist event with a woman and she was with someone in a wheelchair who couldn’t speak (except after orgasm) and couldn’t lift their arms. Communication was by use of a board with printed letters and words on it which was pointed to with tongue or nose.

Two feminists I knew who were giving the lecture at the event came up to us. I introduced them to my friend and the person with disabilities. The feminists ignored the wheelchair user and addressed my friend. They asked if she was the facilitator for the day for the user. She replied, “No! This is my lover”.

The feminists had immediately assumed that an ‘attractive’ woman with a physically challenged person must be a carer – not a friend or lover. I think we have a long way to go….before the disabled are thought of as equal and as sexual people.”

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In a choice between a politics of liberation and of respectability, I would align myself strongly with liberation. I do not believe the world is made safer by policing and incarceration, including with regards to situations where someone harms another person in a way that involves sex.

Illustration of three horses, with text reading "Freedom is not a COMMODITY""Liberation is not a sports bra" "Resistance is not a grapefruit diet"
From LGFM #5

As someone who reads and talks and thinks a lot about queer history, this is not my first time running into these questions. Patrick Califia’s essay collection Public Sex is a fascinating collection of essays on sex, BDSM, leather culture, and censorship, from a writer who was at the centre of the 1970s-80s “lesbian sex wars”. Califia comes out swinging in favour of porn, weird sex, free expression, bi and trans inclusion, and an expansive big tent of queerness that refuses to exclude people based on the transgressiveness of their sexual interests, including sexual relationships between adults and minors. It’s a book I really recommend, both as a historical document and as a source of insight into the ongoing conflict between purity culture and freakiness that are still dividing queers to this day.

I feel like I’ve been ending each of these posts by saying, “Well, one thing I can say for certain is that I am grateful for archives.” But it’s always true. I’m not really sure what compels me to seek out the material in QZAP’s archive that most challenges me, but I really can’t seem to help it. I am sure they have many delightful light-hearted zines of which I agree with every word. But the ones that most draw me in are the ones that also most trouble me.

A comic book illustration of two people talking, with the captions replaced by:"My pleasure is nameless: those all too rare moments when I act for myself afford no handholds for the constraints of power!" and the other person replying, "But do we have pleasure sufficiently powerful to act) as a practical weapon?" In the background, a third person looks on sadly, thinking, "Everyone's a revolutionary sexual dissident- except me."
From LGFM #8

And one thing I am sure of in the case of every one of these zines, is that I am glad it’s archived. I want these materials to be available for people to struggle with. I don’t want archives to only be a home for work that I and nobody else object to. I want us to stay with the thorniest topics and the messiest and most troubling parts of our shared history.

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.

“Women Screaming”: QT & queer edginess

Zine of the Gay

A black and white photocopy of the cover of QT zine #1, with a photo of a person in glasses and a leather jacket pointing to a sign that says "Cruise Me Not Missiles". Cut and paste text says "Homosexuality is one of the gravest threats to society in the last 2 decades of the twentieth century." There is a big pink stamp that says "EMMA COPY" in the top left.
Cover of QT #1

Like me, QT zine traveled to QZAP from Montreal, which immediately piqued my interest. Its path there was a little more circuitous than mine, though. It’s part of QZAP’s Emma Centre collection, which collects queer zines that previously lived at the Emma Centre in Minneapolis:

“The Emma Center opened in 1992 thanks to activists who were involved in the Twin Cities Anarchist Federation (an umbrella group) and some folks involved in the Powderhorn Food Co-op. Before closing shop in 1995, Emma Center acted as a center for anarchist activities, sold books and magazines, supplied free clothes, food and weekend child care, and hosted Women’s and Queer Space nights and frequent punk shows.” (source)

QZAP holds two issues of QT, #1 and #4, attributed to the QT Kollective, who were apparently very busy, since #1 is from 1991, and #4 is from 1992. The title is variously indicated as standing for “Queer Tapette” (fag, en français), “Queer Terrorist”, “Cutie”, “On the QT”, or “Queen’s Tit”. It’s made with a kitschy collage aesthetic, campily reclaiming homophobic news clippings.

The highlight of Issue 1 is two stories whose relationship to real events and people are unknown, both told in a dry, satirical, tongue-in-cheek way. “The Faggot Who Thought She Was A Lesbian” is the one that caught my eye as I was flipping through this zine to see if I wanted to write about it.

An illustration of a pair of boots, with text inside them reading "The viewer is seduced by these young men. Yet we recoil from the violence and terror... the politics of skinheads."
From QT #1

The story is about “Alex,” who tries to fit in with a crowd of a-gays who “talked about the art auction raising money for homeless children in Suweto [sic] and how politically correct they were to go to these things, even if they never bought anything because they spent it all on porn pix of white men.”

Unable to stomach that, “Alex took to wearing black, covering her eyes with thick coats of eyeliner and mascara, listening to Skinny Puppy and Nine Inch Nails, and creating an aura of doom about her personage… Alex ceased caring about whether or not she was a homosexual – she knew as long as she was draped in seven layers of black, no man would touch her cock anyway…”

Eventually, via happening across “Women Screaming”, a radio show from “the middle of Ohio”, Alex encounters a political definition of a lesbian as “someone whose primary emotional and political commitment was to other women”, and finally finds an identity that works for her. I always love to see the fag to dyke and dyke to fag pipelines in action! 💜

The second story is about “Dickie”, a fag who gets chased through an alley by a group of armed skinheads, rescued by a punk named Louis, who then fucks him against a tree in a park (it’s incredibly hot).

The highlight of issue #4 for me was its fag hag manifesto, which ends in a call for a “fag hag separatist movement, where we sleep with each other and groovy bisexuals. Fag hags and bi’s – the newest, hippest, funnest coalition ever to emerge! Deal with it!!!”.

STAY TUNED.in upcoming issues, watch for some of these exciting features: - Queer Vampires - tampon tips: just say NO to dioxins and corporations which kill and exploit women... - violence against queer punks - what to do? who to stomp on? what to wear? - censorship - have the sex police caught up with YOU yet? are they? why do some of them call themselves "feminist"? what to do? how to resist? -piercing - the joys, the pain, the instruments...true to life stories!! - crossdressing...the joys of fucking with gender!!! WRITE A STORY FOR QT - it's your moral duty to resist our repressive state in any way possible...what better way than talkin' 'bout queer punk sex adventures??? HMMMM.. VIOLENCE, VAMPIRES, PIERCING.. TAMPONS, WHAT'S THE BLOOD CONNECTION????
From QT #1

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There is, for lack of a better word, an edginess to this that I find so fun. I think there should be an infinite variety of queer media for people of all interests, dispositions, and personalities, but I personally have a soft spot for work that’s kind of mean and gross and horny and troubling, that confronts me more than telling me I am valid. 1990s queer art is a real treasure trove of this! And some of it has aged horribly, but for me, QT, along with work like the AIDS zines I wrote about in my previous post, preserves a rage that I find deeply bracing in its lack of softness and apologies and hedging. It’s not how I write, or how I live, and I might not even get along with the people who wrote those zines, but it’s the work that I’m most drawn to.

Love it. I love it when you go to punk shows wearing lipstick and army boots, and everyone freaks out. I love get all these people yelling at you, calling you "FAGGOT" I love it when you stop at the fanzine table and no one wants to talk to you. I love it when these same tables are filled with "anarchist" and "radical" literature. I love it when bands talk about how we have to stop the violence against lesbians and gays, even though none of them know what it means to live with that on a daily basis. love it when male punks say they're anti-homophobic. but wouldn't show up at a hardcore show in a dress if they had to save their lives. I love it when gay punks say they're anti-sexist, but wouldn't show up at a hardcore show in a dress to save their lives. I love it when young female punks look at boys in dresses at shows, and the jealousy is written all over their faces. wondering why that dress looks so good on them! I love it when no one thinks that doing drag is punk as fuck. I love it when punks think that "hardcore" means being more gendered than the planet of the apes. I love it when people think that a fag is something you smoke, not someone you do. I love it when het punks suck face at a show and don't think about queer punks' inability to do the same thing. I love it when het punks talk about punk to queer punks and say thatpunk is asexual anyway, and then they quote Sid Vicious or someone. Ι love it when your mother seems to get punk more than most punks you know. I love it when punk is so self-enclosed, so afraid of trying anything new or different, that it strangles itself: I love it when people have no sense of punk's history. I love it people think that NOMEANSNO is punk and Devo isn't. Punk. Love it.
“Punk as Fuck”, from QT #4

A friend who’s a couple years older than me in chronological age, but more importantly, came out as trans in the early 2000s, over a decade earlier than I did, was talking recently about the enormous capacity that queer people of their microgeneration have for brushing things off without taking offense, and their dismissiveness about their own experiences of violence (“Nothing that bad even happened to me, sure, I got gaybashed every once in a while…”).

I have been thinking about this a lot! I think it lies near the heart of the infighting around books like Sarah Schulman’s Conflict Is Not Abuse, and in a lot of failures of communication and understanding amongst queer people of different ages and generations. There are a lot of ways of metabolizing pain. I think it can be very beautiful to choose softness and gentleness, but I want people who do so not to write off bitterness and rage, confrontation, and the power of laughing off immense violence and danger with dark, dark jokes.

I wouldn’t have based my whole darn life around zines if they hadn’t turned out to be such a weirdly good way of connecting with people, and of finding people who are moving through similar experiences. Spending time in the QZAP archive, I’ve found a lot of writing that mirrors my own experiences, but they are reflected back to me differently in each instance. They reflect contexts different from my own, make different assumptions, imagine different readers, and map the edges of acceptability in different locations than I might be accustomed to. They expand my sense not just of the breadth not just of queer experiences, but of ways I can make sense of my own queer life.

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.

Infected Faggot Perspectives & dark AIDS humour

Zine of the Gay

Cover of Infected Faggot Perspectives #12

The cover of Infected Faggot Perspectives #12, dated to December 1992/January 1993, and priced at “$3.00 or free to the infected”, confronts the reader with a caricature, signed to Rick Cole, of an emaciated figure in a hospital bed, strangled by IV lines, stuck full of needles, and dripping sweat. The zine’s tagline, which seems to have appeared on every issue, was:

“Dedicated to Keeping the Realities of Faggots Living with AIDS & HIV Disease IN YOUR FACE Until the Plague is Over!!!”

The zine dates from a time when AIDS was high in the U.S. public consciousness, following, for example, shortly after the death of Freddy Mercury, but a few years before the availability of the combination therapies that began to make HIV/AIDS more survivable for many of those able to access them.

I am about a generation younger than the generation of (Western, white, not necessarily street-involved, because we know now that the virus had been killing people for decades before it became known here) people most affected by AIDS. I was spared those traumas but grew up with a huge absence where my elders should have been. As far as I remember, I first learned about HIV/AIDS through saccharine, pitying, heterosexual representations like Philadelphia.

Image of a satirical American Express ad, where the credit card is labelled "AIDS Express", with text reading "BECAUSE MEMBERSHIPHAS ITS ITS PRIVILEGE ! ! ! ! !.!!! AIDS EXPRESS (DON'T LEAVE HOME WITHOUT IT, GIRL!!!) W. WAYNE WAYNE KARR, AKA THE FABULOUS VIEJA SIDOSA, CONCEPTUAL CONTROL QUEEN OF THE UNIVERSE, CO-CREATOR & CO-EDITOR INFECTED FAGGOT PERSPECTIVES; MEMBER SINCE AT LEAST 1983 (PROBABLY A LOT LONGER THAN THAT)"
From Infected Faggot Perspectives #12

The records that people who were actually living with AIDS left, as they fought for their friends’ lives are deeply precious to me. A crucial component of this cultural legacy is a dark, dark, dark gallows humour, suffused with rage at the abandonment of PWAs on both individual and cultural levels, the physical messiness of living and dying with AIDS, and the social messiness of organizing amidst mass sickness, death, and grief.

Directed outwards at a wider audience, AIDS gallows humour, alongside actions like the political funerals of ACT UP, aimed to force those not yet affected by the virus to confront the reality that people were dying young in excruciating pain, and nursing, burying, and mourning entire social circles in the face of public indifference and hostility.

Directed inwards at fellow community members also grappling with AIDS, dark humour offered a pressure release from those same realities. It’s not actually possible to live full-time as a tragic, saintly victim, sometimes you’ve got to laugh.

Line drawing of someone on their hands and knees simultaneously pissing, shitting, and vomiting, with the word "END" above it

IFP offers arch advice like, “let’s face [it,] an AIDS Queen isn’t Glamorous until she is way below 100 [t-cells]… sorry, girls, maybe next year… keep trying.” Its articles share useful resources, like “Around the World in AIDSy Days”, which gives travel advice for PWAs, including resources for DIY healthcare, and considerations of border restrictions for poz people, but also opens,

“Hey girlfriend… wanna take one last trip to a tropical paradise before kicking the bucket but you’re afraid ‘cause you’ve heard there’s a 50% or better chance you’ll get something other than fucked during your visit & then what would you do?”

Other articles vent anger at fairweather friends of PWAs, and the unique social dynamics of the AIDS crisis:

“People with AIDS are often abandoned… but the deathbed is well attended and there is plenty of loud crying at the memorial – Nice new outfit there.”

At times, the zine’s tone is more straightforwardly sincere, as with its long obituary for Cliff Diller, who was among the founders of the West Hollywood SM party Club Fuck!. IFP’s memorial for him includes beautifully specific and evocative moments like:

“A celebration of Cliff’s life took place in L.A. on Sunday Oct. 25, the highlight of which was a performance and ritual by Aztec fire dancers. Over 100 friends gathered, most wore green, ate lasagna, ceasar [sic] salad, and pulled together. Instead of feeling, I am over this, I left feeling that, yes, I can do this one more time.”

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Cover of Diseased Pariah News, a zine printed in black and white on green paper. Above a photo of two hands, there is a speech bubble reading "The blood of over 100,000 Americans who have died of AIDS, Mr. President? You're soaking in it!"
Diseased Pariah News #1 (reprint)

One of the most famous examples of dark AIDS humour is Diseased Pariah News, an influential AIDS zine published from 1990 to 1999. All eleven issues of it are available to read online at the Internet Archive, and it is well worth your time. It offered a similar combination of resource-sharing, irreverence, and political rage, with the first issue declaring its mission to “provide a forum for infected people to share their thoughts, feelings, art, writing, and brownie recipes in an atmosphere free of teddy bears, magic rocks, and seronegative guilt.”

Another example of grim AIDS humour in the QZAP archives is AIDS Kills Fags Dead, by Eric Deutsch, whose title references a shirt worn by the singer of metal band Skid Row (although misattributed to Axl Rose in the zine itself, for what it’s worth).

A collaged zine page, featuring an image of two people having sex outdoors, a statue of someone lying down, and a list of rules for safer sex in French.
from AIDS Kills Fags Dead

According to an academic article on “Counterpublicity and Corporeality in HIV/AIDS Zines,” Infected Faggot Perspectives ultimately ran to 14 known issues. There is at least one issue held in Duke University’s Bingham Center zine collection. There is a copy of issue 6 in the Columbia University Libraries and of issue 8 (April 1992) at the ONE Archives at the USC Libraries. Traces of it are also scattered online.

The writing in IFP is mostly under pseudonyms like La Vieja Sidosa, Pansy Ass Faggot, and Trixie Trash, but the zine appears to have been the work of W. Wayne Karr, who died in 1995 and was remembered for his advocacy around access to AIDS drugs, and Cory Roberts-Auli, who died in 1996, after writing a final essay about facing his death, which was published with a preface remembering him for the depths of his solidarity with the often-neglected population of women living with AIDS.

He wrote,

“When I think of what is ahead of me, I feel almost a sense of relief. I know I am capable of letting go and I look forward with a sense of adventure to what lies ahead. If all of you hearing or reading this could step outside of your own emotions for a moment and be happy for me and for my freedom, you would see just how ready I am for this to be over. I’ve been carrying this disease around for many years and I am elated to be free of it. Of course, I have little to no information about what lies ahead, after all, I have never died before. Still, I can’t help being excited and scared at the same time.”

Mia Mingus, the writer and activist in disability justice and transformative justice, writes a blog titled Leaving Evidence, with the description,

“We must leave evidence. Evidence that we were here, that we existed, that we survived and loved and ached. Evidence of the wholeness we never felt and the immense sense of fullness we gave to each other. Evidence of who we were, who we thought we were, who we never should have been. Evidence for each other that there are other ways to live–past survival; past isolation.”

Zines like Infected Faggot Perspectives, Diseased Pariah News, and AIDS Kills Fags Dead, left evidence of their creators’ immense creativity, brilliance, and a mordant, furious, catty, grief-laden, exquisitely faggy sense of humour. I’m grateful to have these zines available to me, and to count those who made them as my elders and ancestors.

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.

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.

Pure Evil!

What better way to start your summer than with a little Evil? This punchy drag zine catches the eye with a well composed photo of Lipsinka on the cover. The issue is dedicated to wigs, “the art of illusion through the power of fake hair.”

The first section includes reviews, of film, theatre, literature, and food, which are so conversational and frank they feel more like chatting with a friend. Next is an interview with Bobcat Goldthwait, stand up comedian and “Police Academy 2” star, promoting his film Shakes.

Centrally this zine is an ecstatic homage to the wig, with interviews from Charles Busch, Lady Bunny (creator of Wigstock, the original drag convention), Julie Halston, and Lypsinka, each explaining how fake hair has made a difference in their lives. This zine also includes a comic hand drawn by Hedda Lettuce, entitled “How to Pick Up Straight Boyz” which really speaks for itself. If you’re looking for a snapshot of the drag scene in New York in 1992, (and who isn’t?) look no further.


Dac Cederberg is a summer intern here at QZAP. He’ll be reading and reviewing zines on the blog through August.
Dac recently graduated from the University of Montana with a degree in English Literature and Creative Writing. He’s a cisgender gay man, he/him pronouns, from Missoula Montana. His alter ego is drag-queen bombshell Lady Dee. He doesn’t quite know what he wants to do with his life yet, but he loves reading, writing, TV, pop culture, and all things queer. He’s a Gemini and his favorite color is purple. Feel free to contact Dac through QZAP with any questions or comments.

 

Erotica

Erotica.  Sometimes that word feels super loaded.  Like it thinks it’s BETTER than pornography.  But it’s not, really.  And it doesn’t think that.  It’s just different.  Maybe a little more ‘arty.’  Possibly less visual, though not necessarily.  Here at QZAP we’ve got a good mix of both porn zines and erotica zines.  While it’s sometimes hard to know the difference, we think that these two zines lean more toward erotica.

First, there’s IQ: The Sex-zine for Girls who like Girls who wear Glasses.  It’s more of a traditional zine of it’s era in that aesthetically it’s of a cut-and-paste / clip art / rando shit visual style.  The content is sexy and funny and as the title suggests, aimed at a certain demographic.

The next zine that we added this week is Inciting Desire #2.  This is further along on the artsy-fartsy erotica spectrum. The production values are much higher with some slick 1992-era desktop publishing layouts, deliberate typography, and artful black and white photos.

Finally, we also added Gawk #6 from the good folks who brought us Diseased Pariah News.  This is NOT erotica, but it is the comics issue.  There’s a delightful multi-page spread of Gay World: 3025, the continuing adventures of Captain Condom, and as with the other two, a page of zine reviews amongst other great comics panels.

On a completely different topic, we’ve been playing around with Instagram, so if that’s your jam you can follow us at @queerzines.  We’ve got it set up to post to our Facebook page and Twitter feed, too.  Isn’t technology neat?

500 Zines and Counting

Archive.qzap.org has 500 zines and bits of ephemera in it.  Our 500th record is a zine out of Boston called Rock Against Sexism.  This it the 4th issue, from 1992.  It’s got a ton of interviews, a discussion about Political Correctness (funny, we’re having similar discussions almost 25 years later), zine reviews, and a report back from an ACT UP/Boston fundraiser

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