A 2011 zine created by Alana Kumbier, with cover photo by David Taber. Photo from the Queer Zine Archive.
Zines
Short for 'magazine', zines are created and self-published by an individual or a group people. Zines aren't for profit; zines are vehicles to make art, to engage with your community or subculture, and to elevate voices that otherwise don't get heard. They allow people to connect, to ask questions, to stay up to date on events, or to spread awareness of issues. For this reason, zines have been particularly popular in feminist, punk, and queer circles that are generally anti-establishment or anti-capitalist. Sara Century believes that political pamphlets - from as far back as the 1700s - and sci-fi fanzines are the spiritual ancestors of modern zines. She points out that "the PoC Zine Project cites infamous literary magazine Fire!! — founded by Langston Hughes and Richard Nugent — as a potent example of an early zine".
“Zines run the gamut in both quality and subject matter, but they all share a common and salient thread — they speak for their time, they are unedited, they are personal, and they deal with things you would never read about in major publications, from the personal to the political and beyond. ”
Joey Gray, creator of Hardy, emphasized that "queer zines during the 1980s and 1990s were so much more than just queer creative content...they were acts of protest, of activism, of preservation and communication". During the 80s, this means that "at the height of the AIDS epidemic, when the U.S. government wouldn’t so much as publicly acknowledge the crisis, queer people made zines, they spread information, they provided resources for each other, and they told their stories." Today, zines like S.Kills, created by Lisa J. in Vienna, Austria, carry on this tradition by spread awareness of issues such as consent.
Zines allow us to tell our own stories, by and for each other, while creating real, tangible things that prove that we were here, that we had full rich lives and a community to share them with. Of Hardy, Gray writes that it is "a platform with which I’m able to create and share space with my broader LGBTQ community and, as a result, provide physical evidence of queer perseverance. We stand up. We fight back. We resist. We do it together. We are family."
Zines have been and are being produced across the world, but preservation - let alone digitization - can be a roadblock to uncovering all sorts of aspects of our heritage. While undertaking our research, for example, we found Australian zines to be particularly elusive. Many references were made to important zines such as Queer Zine and The Daily Plague, but no issues are easily accessible online. Florent Routoulp wrote that The Daily Plague was "an Australian fanzine that wrote about AIDS and how to live with it...I don't really feel like adding any commentary to their manifesto, which was "To badly go where no publication has gone before in providing/stealing information, humor, and humanity about the Great Adventure, aka HIV," because I think it speaks for itself." Such zines document moments in our history that are vital to learn about. This is why projects such as the Queer Zine Archive Project are invaluable. The archive was instrumental to our research, and is highly recommended for a delve into our cultural heritage.
Below are some of our favourite prolific LGBT+ zines, but if you have a favourite - or if you make one! - send us a link!
vice versa
From the ONE Archives.
According to Erica Davies at Out History, Vice Versa was North America's first lesbian zine. "Lisa Ben" - an anagram of "lesbian" - covertly created and published Vice Versa in Los Angeles beginning in 1947, using equipment at RKO studios where she was a secretary. Davies describes the zine as "a forerunner for gay American publications, providing a more wide-ranging audience with upbeat short stories, editorials, book reviews, and a letter column to entertain and inspire readers to perpetuate the existence of gay editorials and preserve the pleasure of their lifestyle." Only nine issues with a handful of copies each were ever produced, but each copy was read and passed along to other gay women. Edythe Eyde - aka"Lisa Ben"- remained active in the lesbian community throughout her life, joining the Daughters of Bilitis in the 1950s, but her legacy truly stems from Vice Versa. Many lesbian magazines, zines, and newsletters have been published in its wake, including "The Ladder" and "Lesbian Connection", and Malinda Lo at After Ellen proclaims that even "sites like AfterEllen.com are simply high-tech extensions of those carbon-copied issues of Vice Versa that Lisa Ben used to pass out at the local lesbian bar."
It is difficult to express how ahead of its time Vice Versa truly was, or the influence it has had on LGBT+ publications since. Rodger Streitmatter has written extensively on LGBT+ media in the United States, and according to his 1998 article, Vice Versa published short stories depicting a lesbian wedding, while Eyde herself maintained that there would be a time in the future - though in 1947, it would be difficult to predict exactly when - gay people would be accepted in society. Streitmatter asserts that the format of Vice Versa provided the blueprint for the gay magazines that followed. He writes that "[Ben's] written words did...express hope about the future of gay Americans - and, subsequently, the nascent genre of periodicals that she founded. In a prophetic editorial, Ben wrote: "Perhaps VICE VERSA might be the forerunner of better magazines dedicated to the Third Sex which, in some future time, might take their rightful place on the news stands beside other publications, to be available openly and without restriction.""
You can read more about the influence of Vice Versa in Streitmatter's book "Unspeakable: The Rise of the Gay and Lesbian Press in America", listen to Edythe Eyde talk about her work and life on Making Gay History's podcast, and read the issues of Vice Versa on Queer Music Heritage's website.
KRAXIMO
Kraximo was published in 1980s Greece by Paola Revenioti, a trans artist, former sex worker, and activist. Revenioti is somewhat of an iconic figure in LGBT+ history, and her adventures include running a pirate radio and organizing the first pride in Athens in the 90s. According to an interview with Revenioti, "the zine pioneered the fight for gay and trans rights, combining interviews with Greek poets and intellectuals alongside Athens street hustlers and her own photography".
“I started my magazine Kraximo because there was a need for another voice to be heard. They were tough times: the police would arrest transvestites for fun. When it’s illegal to be yourself, you have no option but to fight back. I published police brutality reports – remember there was no internet then. In slang, Kraximo translates as ‘gaybashing’. Those were conservative times. People would scream names like ‘whore’, ‘scum’, ‘antichrist’... I wanted to guide people afraid of their sexuality and values, create something fresh and revolutionary. I gathered articles, paid friends to write or translate, spent hours creating the layout, blackening my fingers, copying and cutting. I remember one issue sold out in a single day. It was like an action movie, getting unique interviews with intellectuals and combining them with artists and photographs I took of boys around Greece. ”
Electric Dirt
Published in Appalachian region of the USA, Electric Dirt is "a celebration of queer voices and identities from Appalachia and the South". Their vision for the zine truly embodies the philosophies behind zines:
“With under-documented cultures and communities, there is often a gatekeeper. An archivist, sociologist, anthropologist, or historian decides who and what is documented and who or what is omitted from history. Someone with access to higher education and resources that many folks, especially in our impoverished region, do not have. That does not happen with Electric Dirt. We rely heavily on submissions. The underrepresented and misrepresented get to represent themselves. We get to define Queer Appalachia and the Queer South with our own images and truths. By embracing a combination of contemporary technology and social media, we are in a constant state of documenting our culture, community, lives and history/herstory. Electric Dirt is a place for us to share those truths and find each other. We survive and even thrive through sharing tales of wildcrafting our queerness, foraging for pieces of ourselves within the intersections of coal mines and class, race and religion, food justice and colonialism.”
You can buy a zine at www.queerappalachia.com, and follow them on instagram.
Some more zines to check out:
Barra Magazine, from Beirut, Lebanon;
Un Bruit de Grelot, from Lille, France;
LESBO, from Ljubljana, Slovenia, which was allegedly replaced by Narobe;
Shotgun Seamstress, from the U.S.A.;
Somos, from Buenos Aires, Argentina;
Freaky Queer, from Cardiff, Wales;
Mouthfeel, from NYC, U.S.A.;
and Straight to Hell, which deserves a special mention: it was first published in the U.S.A. in 1973 and is still going today.