Tag: homocore

Zine of the Gay

Heed the call: Siren


Siren CoverSiren is a fanzine by Kathie Bergquite about local and not local queer/fem music. Kathie encouraged fans to send in things to be added to the zine. The zine is an amalgamation of interviews, newspaper articles, reviews, and more. 

Hello Dykes, Spikes, and everyone nice! Arabella here, and welcome back to Zine of The Gay! This week I chose a musiczine recommended to me by my Milo, one of QZAP’s Co-founders.

I am going to see Weird Al Yankovic on Saturday, so I thought focusing on a music zine would make for an interesting post. While Weird Al may not be exactly queer, he has shown major support for the community, so props to the freak himself.

Queer music is such a great outlet for not only getting words out to yourself but others as well. Think of yourself when you were a queer teen, or maybe you are a queer teen now; either way, what music represented you? Was it literal in its lyrics, or did you have to read between the lines? I probably listened to Scary Monsters and Supercreeps by David Bowie a thousand times from the age of 16-19. But I always yearned for something outright and raw. 

Songs that read between the lines are important, but having more explicit songs to describe what you are feeling and how other queer people are feeling too is life-changing. It helps connect people with identities and phrases and even politics. I thought I was libertarian until I heard Baby, I’m an Anarchist! By Against Me for the first time. Music opens our worldview and fucks our ears. You can decide if it’s in a good way or a bad way. 

The SlitsThe first band featured in the zine is an all-female punk group from the 1970s called the slits. Their song Typical Girls describes what society traditionally expects from a woman, with the song ending with “The typical girl gets the typical boy”. The lyrics are hard to ignore, which I love; reading between the lines can also mean ignoring. The typical girl persona keeps evolving to adapt to new versions of our society, but at its core it is all to control women. It is important for us to find new ways to keep talking about it and reference ways we have talked about it in the past.

The Slits – Typical Girls

Camille Rocha holding a saxaphone
Camille Rocha

The next section got me very excited personally; it was an interview with a lesbian saxophonist. I am also a lesbian saxophonist! I started in late high school, and I decided to become a high school band director, but the community was so swamped with misogyny that I passed on it to pursue Women and Gender Studies. It feels good to be reminded that queerness isn’t the only thing we have in common with each other; we have all kinds of hobbies and worlds that connect with our queerness in interesting ways. Camille talked about having to play classical saxophone, and as a female saxophone player, I can confirm that is how it feels. Jazz is labeled “for the men,” and women are pushed to the outskirts and expected to stay soft. To combat this, I played Baritone Saxophone. It is hard to force that instrument to be soft. Camille rebelled by playing pop in groups outside of a concert ensemble setting. It is a nice reminder to know you are not alone, and that there is always another lesbo somewhere in the crowd with you. 

“Yeah, all the women were probably turned on by this mysterious leather-clad sax player.”

Girls in the Nose flyer
Girls in the Nose

Girls in the Nose were the next band talked about in the zine. They are a female punk band who have been active since 1985. In January, they did their 40th anniversary show, which I have inserted a clip of below! Their name came from men telling them they needed nose jobs, hence the name Girls in the Nose. Their song More Madonna, Less Jesus is about rejecting purist culture and embracing pleasure. In an article quoted from the zine, Tipper Gore’s wife had this to say about the band, “What this band, Girls in the Nose, are trying to do to our innocent young citizens is convert them to an anti-family lifestyle that is sure to lead them on a path straight to hell!” 

Two Nice Girls
Two Nice Girls

This giant fear of conversion is always lurking; people think if you look at em too funny, it’ll “turn them queer”. Honey, if you’re queer from a queer person looking at you, I can guarantee it is not their fault. Girls in the Nose has a very fun energy to them, and I can’t wait to dig my teeth into more of their work. Viva La Vulva!!

“I prefer to think of these bands as girls who strap it on and rock it hard.”

So what’s on your turntable this week? If you need any ideas, I hope this zine gave you some. If it didn’t, here are some albums that have been on my turntable this week that might pique your interest 

 

By The Time We Get to Colorado by Tribe 8

Tribe 8 is a lesbian punk band that was active in the San Francisco area from 1991-2005. Through writing this post, I found there is a documentary about Tribe 8, which I will be watching promptly after this post is finished. The song Lezbophobia is one of my favorite songs of all time. Growing up a lesbian teen in small-town Wisconsin, I felt like I was constantly being accused of flirting with girls or chased out of locker rooms when I was just trying to change for gym; keep in mind I didn’t even fucking like gym. Lezbophobia takes the words right from my mouth and puts them into context. Fist City is my favorite album of theirs, so I recommend checking that out too.

Bitch and Animal

Bitch and Animal met in Chicago theater school and started making music together around 1995. The duo lasted until about 2004 before going their separate ways to work on solo projects. My dog Magdalena is obsessed with this album. I played it a ton when she was a puppy, so I wonder if the influence rubbed off on her. Either way, her and my favorite song on the album is Drag King Bar. I’m into it for the drag kings and their allure, and I think Magdalena is just into it for the fiddle, but who knows her inner psyche? I let her choose her sexuality, and she chose butch radical feminist, so I suppose she could be like her mom.

“If you treat a woman like a dog, she will piss on you.”

I'm A Fuckin' Dyke! Want to See My Tampon?

Arabella (She/They) is interning at QZAP fall of 2026. She is an undergraduate at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee finishing her last year in Women’s and Gender studies. In her free time Arabella likes to spend time with her dog Magdalena and butchering the banjo.

Image is a black box with a white skull and crossbones. The skull has pigtails, and the crossbones are lollipops. Queer Spotlight presents: The Lollipop Generation - A film by G.B. Jones. With opening shorts curated by SEEN. Sunday, June 7th, 2026 at 6:00pm. Cactus Club. 2496 S. Wentworth. First Milwaukee Screening in 18 Years!

Return of the Lollipop Generation

We are super excited to announce that we’re collaborating with our friends at SEEN and Cactus+ to bring The Lollipop Generation back to Milwaukee. This is the 2nd time we’ve been able to screen this raucous and radical movie by one of the pioneers of the queercore movement, filmmaker, artist and zinester G.B. Jones, and we’re beyond thrilled to share it again.

Sunday, June 7th, 2026 at 6:00pm.
Cactus Club
2496 S. Wentworth Ave.
Sliding Scale $10-15
GET TICKETS HERE

 

“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

∇Δ∇Δ∇Δ

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.

Militant prancing pagan homos: Queer zine parties in the ‘90s

Zine of the Gay

The zine BLOT #2, laying atop a pink mesh shirt, on a dirty black and white checkered floor. Printed on white paper, the half-letter size zine has an image of a child's face, with the word "ASEXUAL" across it.

I’ve been thinking a lot about nostalgia as I spend time in the QZAP archive. My posts this week and next will be about items in the archive that relate to events with a queer zine focus. And it’s really hard to read these materials and not to feel envy those who got to attend them.

Issue #2 of the zine BLOT is held in QZAP’s archive, but not digitized. The zine documents two queer events that took place in Toronto in 1993. I grew up in rural Ontario, about 5 hours away from Toronto, and was 6 years old in 1993. The place I grew up in was pretty bad for weird little fruity kids, and it is bittersweet to read about events that were happening in my lifetime and in a place not too terribly far away, but that were nevertheless worlds apart from my own experience.

SPEW was a queer zine event that took place 3 times in the early ‘90s. The first edition was held May 25, 1991, in Chicago, the second, February 28 – March 1 in LA, and the third and as far as I know, final, version, took place May 15 and 16, 1993, at Buddies in Bad Times in Toronto.

There’s a really cool little documentary about SPEW 1 that’s available online:

Steve LaFreniere, the organizer of SPEW1, was stabbed in the back by homophobic passers-by on the street after one of the SPEW events, but fortunately, he recovered. It’s always important to temper your nostalgia with a realism about ways that things were also more or differently fucked up in times past.

The SPEW 2 writeup that I linked above opens by quoting the words that appeared over the door of the event, which would definitely make me pretty darn hyped for what was to come:

“GAY TO QUEER- Begin to revel in your sexuality. Trained, disciplined, butt fucking, cunt spreading, militant prancing pagan homos. No apologies. No compromise.”

Text reads "“It’s accessible and cheap. Zines, videos, performances, weird shit, party with live bands. A homocore alternative-queer thing (this is not a “convention”)” There is a handwritten annotation, "Hey!" with an arrow.
From Queer Zine Explosion #7

SPEW 3 is previewed as follows in Queer Zine Explosion #7, an issue of the handout published by Larry-Bob Roberts alongside his zine Holy Titclamps:

“It’s accessible and cheap. Zines, videos, performances, weird shit, party with live bands. A homocore alternative-queer thing (this is not a “convention”)”

BLOT #2 describes SPEW 3 as including “an informal round table discussion on zine production, [including] distribution [and] low cost production,” including QZAP’s own Chris Wilde! There was a zine fair the second day with “close to 60 different zines”, and readings from Charlie from MATCH and Lydia Landstreet. I couldn’t find anything online about MATCH or Lydia Landstreet, but I’d be curious if anyone has info on them!

The evening event sounds like a lot of fun, with “a two-member noise group from Michigan called MATCH, and Toronto’s own Ignatz and Chicken Milk (now know as Venus Cures All)”, as well as “a snack table
 with mostly vegetarian food”, “a slideshow of ‘50s lesbian trash novels and other queer media”, and TVs playing Bruce La Bruce’s No Skin Off My Ass and “videos about Toronto punk, Crash’n’Burn and Not Dead Yet”

From BLOT #2
From BLOT #2

BLOT #2 also documents a queercore party on Saturday August 15, 1993, also in Toronto, featuring screenings from GB Jones, and performances from Daddy Carbon (who I also couldn’t find anything out about) and, again, Ignatz. The author of BLOT notes that it was “really nice to see fags and dykes together having fun and to see a pretty equal split between girls and boys.”

The best answer to what to do about nostalgia is usually to try and identify what in particular you’re yearning for, and to figure out ways to bring that about in your present and future life. That’s a tall order for a messy, sweaty, sexy queer in-person gathering, from the perspective of 2024, year 4 of the forever pandemic. I’m sure there’s still lots of events of that description going on, but they’re less accessible than ever to my disabled friends and dates and comrades. How can we build events and gatherings that capture some of the feeling of events like these, but that are adapted to make space for as broad a swath of queers as possible, in an ongoing pandemic?

Next week, I’ll be writing about Queeruption, a radical queer gathering that’s taken place 12 times between 1998 and 2017. QZAP’s archives have materials from five of these, as far as I can tell. Let’s see what we feel nostalgic for, and what we’d like to leave in the past.

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.

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