DIY Culture
In 1994, queer zine culture was flourishing. This was largely in response to a cultural zeitgeist in which grunge music, third wave feminism, and slackers—the latter being the poster children of Generation X—were creating a dialogue around anger, misogyny, and disaffection. Just the year prior to the queer zine explosion, popular singer Melissa Etheridge came out at Triangle Ball, the LGBT celebration in honor President Clinton’s inauguration Triangle Ball; Lea Delaria was the first openly gay comic to do a stand-up set on a late night talk show, and the first Dyke March was held in Washington DC, on the eve of the historic LGBT March on Washington. In pockets across the country, recognizing a lack of representation in mainstream media, influential voices emerged from a variety of communities—from queercore bands to Riot Grrrl—, wielding a fierce DIY ethos centering otherness. All of these moments laddered up to a prolific output in 1994 by queer zine creators, from Hysteria to Venus Infers. Queer zine culture responded to the confluence of change, this cultural onramp for queer zine creators to publish zines that dismissed the binary, channeling the frustration they may have felt, as well as generating new opportunities for creativity, connection, and community.
Social commentary, political activism, and self-expression have long been the backbone of zines; Reactionary and revealing, zines are a snapshot of a historical timeline. Creating a zine is a radical act of expression, of flipping off a finger to the binary, and of creating something that is personal, of value, and your own. If you were queer in the 90’s, you could easily find a zine that spoke to you—at your local record store, at bookstores, even stores devoted solely to selling zines and magazines. Being a part of this scene was to be part of a club that was subversive and proud, groundbreaking and familiar, inclusive and intersectional: zines created by our communities, for our communites, however you identified. Anyone who had a point of view and access to paper and photocopy machine could—and would—create a zine.
Full disclosure, I had a part in the 90s era zine scene, as the co-founder of BUST, the third wave feminist zine, which launched in 1993. Anger certainly fueled my personal sense of non-representation in mainstream media, plus the overarching nefarious war on women, on people of color, of the LGBTQ+ community, and BUST was my contribution in addressing it.
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Not seeing yourself represented in the mainstream was an incentive for many zine creators; the supermodel was an iconic visual paradigm that dominated pop culture in the 1990’s, especially in women’s magazines and advertising. Fat Girl, A Zine for Fat Dykes and the Women Who Want Them launched in 1994, a zine where fatness and queerness were celebrated in unison, created and published by a collective of like-minded people. Fat Girl Issue #3 notes in their editorial letter that “Fat is a big, fat deal for most of us…We don’t claim to have the answers. We just wanna talk about it. We’re here to give fat dykes and our friends a space to get down and dirty with this stuff,” a conversational intimate tone, centering and quantifying the safety of the space. In Fat Girl Issue #3, there are “Tips For Dating Fat Girls,” on being “Fat and Healthy,” personal essays, reviews, interviews and pictorials, each page in celebration to and of the Fat Girl audience, a quintessential ethos in zine culture.
Zinesters often used their self-created platform to dispel stereotypes, such as female athleticsm, as well as celebrate the lesbian (female? queer?) presence in sports. Girljock’s founder Roxxie wrote that their team believed “in the value of being part of a new lesbian-positive athletic female universe.
We are all disgusted with the butchphobia and lesbophobia which has held back the women’s sports world” and that “there is one more myth floating around out there: that lesbians who play sports are better lovers. Of course, dear reader, that one is true, true, true; and I would never let all my sports friends down by letting you think otherwise.” Intimate, funny and whole-heartedly a fan of the athletic power of a queer woman, Girljock is clear that if you are a lesbian who cares about sports, this is the zine for you. In the LHA entry of Girljock, you’ll find an interview with then-editor of On Our Backs, icon Susie Bright, a comic from Angela Bocage, and more of editor Roxxie’s empowering battle cry for the dispensing of gender-biased stereotypes.
Humor is often a way to tackle what is painful as well as a way to entertain, and in Genderflex, a self-described “polygenderous publication,” editor Bille Jean Jones does both. In the LHA entry of Genderflex issue, the proudly trans Billie Jean addresses the readers as “Dear Siblings,” and launches into several pages of concerns, critiques and cheekiness over the state of things, in Winter of 1994, “Hay! Wake up!!” they urge, ending their scathing and hilarious prophetic letter with “Transgender Rights is the movement of the moment, fueled by the runaway train of Billie Jean Blabs.”
Genderflex is informational, offering updates on San Francisco Transgender Ordinance, the San Francisco parade, and other local events, with a note that “The events may be attended in drag [dressed as a girl], drab [dressed as a boy] or blend [be laconic enough not to define]” and a Gender-Related resource guide. This issue also features a confessional essay, “Perspective from a Transgendered Man” and an essay on “The Intersex—Who Are They and What Do They Want.” In just sixteen pages, Genderflex does indeed flex its DIY spirit, handmade and clearly queer.
Fat Girl, Girljock and Genderflex offer a crucial historical time capsule, insight to what was going on in the lives and on the minds of queer people in 1994: part-battleground, part-playground, and wholly DIY. Each of these zines harness the power of DIY’s autonomy of expression, addressing the core audience of like-minded queer people who are seen, spoken to, and heard by the editors, writers, photographers, designers who have particpated in the creation of the zines. These are but just three of the queer zines in the LHA, a small sample of what is available to you. The LHA zine archive is accessible here. Also, do check out the Queer Zine Archive project, a “living history” of queer zines not just from back in the day, but those emerging as I type.