2005 - QZAP - The Queer Zine Archive Project

I Knew a Boy who Bled

January 30, 2026January 30, 2026Erica

Trigger Warning for mentions of suicide attempts

Some Boys Bleed is a zine written by Samb about his experience with dysphoria and how he eventually overcame it. The zine seeks to help other trans people who may be experiencing similar feelings of distress that he once did.

The first two pages of text give a striking description of the dysphoria that Samb had been feeling while performing for classical music, feeling that these performances were something that was inseparable from his identity. He described how his gender identity and singing countered each other, being forced to carry the burden of dysphoria while acting out gender roles that no longer fit him.

What was once something he felt he could walk away from was now rearing its ugly head towards him. Suddenly, he feels stiff and his voice falters as he walks into the studio. It gets to a point where he has to leave it because he was using his performance to hide from his problems. As he writes:

“I have used having a singing voice as an excuse to not explore what transitioning might look like for me”

Leaving with the full support of his teacher, he had time to reflect. Soon, he realized that the reason he’d been stricken with years of mental health issues and suicide attempts was because of his dysphoria. By going out and acting as someone he knew he never was had hurt him. He found immediate support from his mom, noting that sometimes it’s the people who know the least that offer the most comforting support. He finishes off by asserting that he will go through with his transition for himself. The silent recognition that comes with it is all he needs.

The zine included several block print illustrations, all drawn by Samb.

The first shows a trans man binding his chest, all in red and engulfed in scratch-like flames. The illustration feels like a visual representation of the physical pain that can come with binding one’s chest, and the mental anguish that comes with dysphoria.

The next features several pairs of underwear, likely a way for Samb to parse his identity. The one following features two trans people passionately making out, with not a care for anything else but each other. After that is a much simpler illustration featuring a person in front of a gender-neutral bathroom as onlookers appear to judge them for their decision.

The final illustration is the most striking one to me. It depicts a trans man, like the one form the first illustration. Here he is posing in underwear with top surgery scars on his chest. The illustration oozes with confidence, as if it’s screaming “This is me, and I love myself for that.”

The zine also includes a section titled Some Ways to be an Ally, a list of ways the reader can help their trans peers out. It includes topics such as practicing names and pronouns, not commenting on if someone passes or not, reading books or websites that focus on trans topics and talking about them with cis people, but one of them stood out to me in particular:

“Medical information is none of your business. Some trans folks take hormones, get surgery, (change names), some don’t – and it’s not a hierarchy of being “more trans”

To me, this may be the single most important part of the entire section, let alone the entire zine. If cis people get break conventional gender norms without being questioned, then trans people should also get this freedom. Hormone therapy and surgery is not the “goal” that trans people should be expected to reach, but rather an option for those who know it will help them feel fulfilled. No amount of ‘transness’ is owed to anyone at all.

I think back to my time in middle school. In the wake of gay marriage being legalized and queer topics being discussed on a wider scale, I felt like I was caught in the middle of crossfire. I’ve had thoughts like these pass through my mind before. Romance by logic shouldn’t always be between a man and woman, and things being tied to gender was weird. But for all the positive conversation that was going on around these things, there was also a load of negative content being shared online. Much of it was towards trans people, and I was being exposed to both at the same time. I had no idea how I was supposed to feel about it.

And then one day one, during a group counseling session, one of my friends would approach me, and come out as trans. In that moment I realized that trans people were real, and not just something that existed on my phone. Since he was too young at the time to get any form of hormone therapy, I naïvely told him that exercise could produce extra testosterone, (although true, it is not a replacement for HRT) as, in my mind, it would help him on his journey through transitioning. Even then, I never questioned his mannerisms or looks, since to me all I needed to know is that he was what he asserted himself to be – a trans guy.

He even supported me as much as I did to him when I came out as bisexual, supplementing the support I didn’t get from my mother at the time (though thankfully she would turn this around). He made me a lacquer-coated wooden charm with the colors of the pride flag. It has become one of my most cherished possessions.

Time passed, and eventually we saw each other less until he and his family moved down to Florida. Since then, I have learned more about myself, like how my gender and sexuality feel mold-able, like putty. I haven’t heard or seen him since, but I’ll always remember the mutual support we shared for each other.

Erica (she/they) is a QZAP intern working virtually for the blog. She is in her fourth year of school and second year at SUNY Purchase, studying New Media. They are queer in gender and sexuality. She enjoys photography, playing video games and working on her website.

Queer History Making / Making Queer History

October 9, 2024October 9, 2024QZAP

First things first: Happy Queer History Month! History is built upon the reality we have all agreed upon to pass down. The stories that are decided to be honored and remembered. The markers of history and how we learn about it are integral to the fabric of communities and cultures. How we commune with the tangibility of our ancestors and have a stepping stone in our lineage. It is no surprise that a key element of suppression is a historical one, that is why this month is so important.

Out of the Closets and Into the Libraries by the Bang-A-Rang Collective is a zine of radical queer moments navigating us through history…

As a young queer that grew up in spaces where non-heteronormativity didn’t exist, the idea of queer elders was a fantasy that I thought would be real once I came out the closet. Unfortunately, this wasn’t the case because of such history unmaking. Specially for queer poc. One has to go searching for history when it has been erased for you. Such a search and thirst to learn more about the history of you and your people, the truths that cement the foundation you stand on is an act of care for the legacies they made.

The creator was answered the same questions all young queer people have with such a thirst: where is our history? Where are our elders?

“When I confronted my few older queer friends, they smiled apologetically and remarked, “you don’t know these histories because a lot of people that could tell these stories were either murdered by homophobes or murdered by AIDS. The rest of us, the survivors, either don’t know our own histories or are petrified to have any sort of relationships with the younger generations, fearing the label predator and child molester.”

Remembering is an act of honoring and resistance. It is an act of learning and of loving yourself and your lineage. In all its splendid ugly and beauty. I have found that although such remembering does not come easy to history riddled with erasure, the effort that one has to learn to braid into the attempt almost makes it all the more sweet. All histories that are hidden have pressurized into a diamond in the mine of your lineage.

Queer to the Left… Queer Holocaust… Lesbian Avengers… QueerNation… QueerLiberation Army… White Night Riots… Pink Panthers… STAR… QueerFist.. Combahee River Collective… Stonewall… Gay Shame… George Jackson Brigade… Homocore… Gay Liberation Front… ACT UP… Compton Cafeteria Riot… Out of Control… Gay Activist Alliance…

If you don’t recognize one or some of these moments, this zine is for you.

Something that I deeply appreciate is the nonlinearity of the zine. Time itself is subjective and its affective realities in our minds are anything but one dimensional. When one remembers one doesn’t go through every second from the moment you are to the moment you were. Our lives and our ancestors are not neatly winded into a coil of cassette tape to rewind through. Rather time is in a perpetual vomiting and unwinding of such cassettes, our times being in constant undoing through doing. This zine reflects the act of remembering such radical moments. In such entanglements one’s memories form new connections.

To attempt chronology is to go through the structure that was the one that attempted the erasure of our history. Queering such chronology is necessary to the understanding that the future isn’t ahead of us. We cannot see the future but we can attempt to bear witness to the past to inform the cradle of our necks that nurture a possible futurity.

▲▼▲▼▲

I will not be going through the entire zine for a summary for you. I urge you to read the zine yourself, to envelope yourself in history making in such resistance work. The work that has allowed me to be semi-okay on campus with a shirt that says “I ❤ ️ Pussy”. How much queerness is synonymous to political resistance.

I do want to shout out our very own and its part to such history-making. Homocore! Zinesters! I call upon you to be history in your history:

Valeria is interning at QZAP this semester. She is in her senior year at University of Wisconsin-Madison studying Gender & Women’s Studies. She was born and raised in Valencia, Venezuela and now lives in Teejop land (Madison, WI).

Shame on Pride!

June 6, 2023June 6, 2023QZAP

Even though this Zine of the Gay project is inspired by Pride month, we at QZAP want to make sure we look at Pride critically. Today’s Zine of the Gay is Shame on Pride! created by Abuzar in 2005. The original zine was created as a part of Queer Diversity, a community focused on the relationship of radical queers to (at the time) modern day Pride in Toronto. Though this zine is specifically focused on Pride Toronto from almost twenty years ago, the messages are still applicable and we encourage you, dear reader, to keep an eye out for racist, transphobic, sexist, or classist behavior at any Pride celebration you go to this month.

Before even giving a table of contents, the zine starts with newspaper clippings from the New York Post and New York Times recounting the Stonewall riots, reconnecting readers with the reason we have pride in the first place. After the table of contents, Abuzar addresses their readership:

Calling all Radical Queers, Trans People, Youth, Sex Workers, Poly People, Anti-Poverty Activists, & Allies:

Sick and tired of the main streaming of the “Gay Movement”?

Frustrated at being pushed out of and excluded from queer spaces?

Angry at getting kicked out of a queer community we helped create?

… If you’re a pissed off and unapologetic hooker, tranny, gender queer, radical, lived/worked on the streets, or an ally, it’s time to fight back!

They then follow what happened after Stonewall, as white gay people began to push down other sexual and gender minorities in order to assimilate into mainstream culture. Abuzar says that in their pursuit for mainstream acceptance, “It doesn’t matter how many of us are murdered, go missing, or find ourselves excluded, bashed, or beaten. The band plays on like the single minded machine that it was always meant to be.” Pride has now become another part of this single minded machine, becoming a co-opted event “that perpetuates homophobia, transphobia, racism, sexism, social classism, economic classism, polyphobia, bodyphobia, binary-dominance, sex negativity, erotophobia, ableism, ageism, anti-sexwork sentiment, systemic exclusion … in short, all of those issues that it was meant to address and fight.”

There are also other pieces within the zine that address Stonewall’s origins, the internal oppression in gay culture, and how “more acceptable” queer people “sic cops on “less acceptable” queer people at Pride.” There is also a piece on how the fight for gay marriage “dismisses and ignores the decades-long struggle of feminist movements to abolish or establish progressive alternatives to the marriage system imposed by governments and churches over previous centuries of gendered exploitation, colonization and oppression. Instead, the debate encourages non-heterosexual partners to identify the legitimacy and “equality” of their relationships as the ability for those partnerships to be “permitted” by the same legal and religious authorities which have historically dominated, exploited and excluded women from participation and decisionmaking [sic] roles.” These argumentative pieces all support the majority of the body of the zine, which is focused on alternative queer spaces at 2005 Pride Toronto.

The main point of this zine is that rather than just creating alternative spaces for queer people, we need to also actively resist the co-opting of queer spaces. The body of the zine highlights organizations offering alternative spaces and resisting the co-opting of Pride, with events such as Resist! Rovolt! Celebrate! held by Limp Fist to stand against the corporate sponsors of Pride, Whores And Dykes Unite! organized by the Sex Professionals of Canada which is a march supporting trans people, sex workers, natives, and other POC within the greater Dyke March (a politicized, corporation-free, queer alternative to Pride), as well as the events held by Queer Diversity called the Renegade Community Fair and the Protest Against The Cooptation of Pride, both of which looking to dissent against Pride in the community fair and parade. Abuzar writes about these events, saying:

We refuse to participate in Pride in a manner complicit with their oppression. We refuse to be tokenized by Pride and dissent against it’s marginalization of the queer community.

Kit Gorton is a current intern at QZAP and graduate student at University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee in library science and English, with focuses on archives and media studies. A rather queer Hobbit, Kit is most often seen collecting things (such as leaves, rocks, books and the like) or doting on their cat, Good Omens Written in Collaboration by Neil Gaiman and Sir Terry Pratchett.

Tag: 2005

I Knew a Boy who Bled

Queer History Making / Making Queer History

Shame on Pride!

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