I haven’t been posting enough about my academic work recently, partially due to being too busy, partially due to being too stressed emotionally and intellectually, and partially due to a great weekend. My friend Luke and I went to California for the weekend, where I did research in the UC Davis archives for a day before we went to San Francisco for the rest of the weekend.
The Davis archives are amazing. Once they get everything archived, they’ll have the largest LGBT archives in the country. I was particularly interested in their radical 1970s zine collection, particularly Fag Rag (out of Boston), but also Gay Sunshine (out of San Francisco) and a few others. I’m not sure if Fag Rag or any of the queer rags from the 70s described themselves as zines per se, but they fit the bill.
Raina Lee, publisher of the zine 1-Up, describes zines in the bookWhatcha Mean, What’s a Zine? The Art of Making Zines and Mini-Comics:
Zines to me became an instantaneous paper rebellion. Anyone with a pen, paper, and impassioned thought could make one, rich, poor, skilled, or not. Zines are for people with something to say, right now. Zines are for people who don’t see themselves represented in mainstream media or disagree about what is being said. Zines are for those who go beyond conventional writing and opt for a melody of word and pictures, vision and thought – cut out, glued, photocopied, and all stapled together. (16)
Lee’s description gets at the multiple ways in which zines can look and act (messy or neat, a mixture of media), but also shows a limited view of them (they don’t have to be cut out, glued, or stapled). But, overall, I think it’s a pretty good description.
I’ve been reading zines since I was 17, and doing one of my own since I was 22 (starting about a year before I began blogging), though, like most zinesters, I’d like to publish my zine more often and regularly. The way zines and blogs work are somewhat similar, as I hinted at in Lisa Ede and my talk at the New Research Summit last year. They both are often about advocating for an individual’s or group’s voice, both are often written about in revolutionary terms, and both are a bit DIY (do-it-yourself). Also, and perhaps key, they both usually lack polishing and have multiple modes of communication (drawing, sketches, paintings, essays, poems, rants, letters, pictures, comics, etc.).
Lee, Raina. “A Personal History of Zines.” Whatcha Mean, What’s a Zine? The Art of Making Zines and Mini-Comics. Mark Todd and Esther Pearl Watson. Boston: Graphia, 2006. 16-18.
