The Queer Zine Archive Project: If You Don’t Know, Now You Know

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Rachel’s Team Pick:

Happy Monday! What do you do on weekends? Go outside? Have fun? Hug people with your legs? Mostly I like to type things into search fields on the internet. This weekend I tried typing “queer zines” into some things because I felt really strongly that I wanted more of them in my life. It turns out — and maybe this is obvious — that someone (well, several someones really) has used the internet to make this possible!

Typing “queer zine” into places will find you a lot of neat things, but one of my favorite things that I’ve found is the Queer Zine Archive Project. It’s exactly what it sounds like. According to the principle of fair use as archivists, there are literally dozens (maybe more? I can’t count) of queer zines from the thirty to forty years ago to now just waiting for you. It’s not new, but did you know about this? I didn’t know about this. Just a few things you can enrich your life with via QZAP:

+ Learn to make a harness out of bike parts!

+ Read about making zines as a suburban married dyke!

+ “Map and Visitor Guide to Things I Found in My Back Pocket”

+ “I got the title from a Prince lyric because Prince is fucking awesome and also because it pretty adequately sums up the nature of what this zine means.”

+ Thoughts on privilege and also “Invasion of the Nipple Snatchers”

+ A handbook on sexual assault for queer and trans youth!

Can you find all these? (Unofficial scavenger hunt??) Even if you don’t, you can still buy zines, donate to QZAP, submit your own zine, and check out suggested reading and information on events and distros. Also though, building your own harness out of bike parts. That seems important.

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Rachel

Originally from Boston, MA, Rachel now lives in the Midwest. Topics dear to her heart include bisexuality, The X-Files and tacos. Her favorite Ciara video is probably "Ride," but if you're only going to watch one, she recommends "Like A Boy." You can follow her on twitter and instagram.

Rachel has written 1142 articles for us.

15 Comments

  1. One of the founder’s of QZAP came into my LGBT Studies class last semester, and it was quite awesome (I live in Milwaukee where it is based). He brought zines for us to look at and basically gave a lecture about how important zines were to the queer community. So great you guys posted this!

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    • Ditto! One of the founders came to my class at the University of Alabama and told us about the project and read some zines with us and it was awesome. This year we’re going to be distributing some zines in celebration of LGBTQ History Month. And our GSA is working on creating our own zines now! Yay Zines!

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  4. Hi! I’m one of the co-founders of QZAP. Someone shared this story (and your site) with me this morning. Thanks for the shout out. Currently QZAP has just over 400 queer zines online. They come from at least 15 countries, and there are zines and ephemera in at least a dozen languages. We’re always happy to help folks find out more about queer zines and queer zine history, so please contact us if there are questions.

    xoMilo

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