Pride Zine Night: Some Context

Jun 26

Written By Kieran

Fun fact about QLL: we’ve got a handful of zinesters behind the scenes! Zines have been an important part of subcultures and alternative communities for almost a hundred years. Personally, zines have been a critical part of my political education as well as a creative outlet and source of connection to people with shared interests and new exciting things to say. QLL is so excited for our first zine night, which is tonight, June 26th 2025, 6-9pm in your own time zone. I can’t wait to see what y’all make!

I’d estimate that about 75% of the time I talk about zines, someone asks me what they are. That’s both a very easy and a very complicated question! In some ways, it’s like asking what it is to be queer. There’s a basic definition, a long history of creating shared culture(s), and so many ways that someone can subvert our expectations of queerness, while still being queer. So that’s a big point to start with- anything can be zine, if that’s the intent of the creator. There are no rules here, no right or wrong way to make a zine.

There might not be any rules, but there is a history and understanding of the medium, and knowing a bit more about the history of zines helps us maintain and evolve zine culture with our own contributions. So we come back to the question: what is a zine?

Zines (pronounced like the end of “magazines”) are hand-produced independent publications, typically made in a DIY booklet format. They aren’t distributed like books, magazines, or newspapers are, instead they are shared between people in whatever way works for the creator. Zines have always been popular in underground or alternative communities, partially because the non-commercial and DIY ethos of zines aligns with the values of punk, anarchist, queer, and anti-capitalist communities (just to name a few). While you can usually buy a zine from its creator, the point of them isn’t to make a profit. The point is to make something you want to share, exactly how you want to make it.

A brief(?) history of zines:

In the 1930s, the first zines were being made. The first zine was probably The Comet, which was a group publication by the Science Correspondence Club in Chicago. Zines became very popular with sci-fi fans, and the typical zine would contain fiction as well as discussions of scientific advancements. Even prominent sci-fi authors like Ray Bradbury and Robert A. Heinlein made their own zines. These zines are considered “fanzines” today, but that term wasn’t coined until 1940.

Early zines were duplicated by hand- typing or drawing each zine individually. If you could get access to a mimeograph machine, it would go much faster. The Museum of Printing describes the mimeograph as a tool for “printing by means of a duplicating press with an electric pen for cutting stencils.” With the mimeograph, you only have to make a single stencil, then use it repeatedly to make many copies of your zine.

We got our first (known) queer zine in the 40s! Edythe Eyde (also known as Lisa Ben, an anagram of “lesbian”) published Vice Versa, “America’s gayest magazine,” in 1947.

By the 1950s, zines had already been used to subvert censorship and address subversive communities directly. This only intensified under McCarthyism, as the government repressed creative expression and persecuted leftists, homosexuals, entertainers, and academics. The Underground Comix movement made zines to reject censorship by the Comics Code Authority, addressing controversial topics, making political and cultural commentary, and pushing the boundaries. Prominent underground comixs artists include Robert Crumb and Art Speigelman (Yes, the guy who wrote Maus).

The Underground Press movement began as newspapers rooted in totalitarian resistance movements, which were often illegal, with dire consequences if anyone making or distributing them was caught. These newspapers inspired and influenced the development of political informational zines. In the 1960s, all of this paved the way for a publication boom in counterculture communities, especially racialized and otherwise oppressed communities.

Believe it or not, copy shops played a key role in the history of zines. Prior to copy shops, copy machines were usually found in offices or other less-accessible areas. In the 70s, copy shops made copy machines easily available to many more people, making zine-making cheaper and faster than ever before. At the same time, punk was growing. When the two met, it was love at first sight. Zines are perfect for punk culture, with its focus on DIY and authentic, uncensored expression. Punk shows became spaces where you would expect to find zines- being handed out for free, sold at the merch table, or traded.

For a lot of people, if you mention zines they will think of riot grrrl immediately. The riot grrrl movement started in the early 1990s and expressed political positions and countered patriarchal norms in music, activism, and zines. Several riot grrrl musicians and bands had their own zines- Kathleen Hanna loves zines, so there’s the Bikini Kill zine, and the Le Tigre zine (titled “Snarla”). The queercore movement has origins deeply rooted in punk and riot grrrl of the 1980s and ‘90s. Donna Dresch, the guitarist and founder of the punk band Team Dresch, published a zine called “Chainsaw”, which eventually became a record label. Other important queercore zines include “J.D.s” (short for “Juvenile Delinquents”) and “Homocore”.

Yet again, changes in technology impacted zines dramatically. A new form of zine appeared with the rise of the internet: the digital zine. Physical pages can be scanned and shared as a digital file, or the zine itself can be created digitally (If the zine is designed on a computer but printed out for distribution, that would not be considered a digital zine). People upload and share and/or sell their digital zines on platforms like ZINESTERS: Digital Zine Platform; Issuu.com; and itch.io.

But the internet didn’t just change how people access zines- it has changed the kind of zines that people are making. In the past, many zines provided instructions and information that wasn’t easily accessible. Because much of that info is easy to find online now, zines today are more likely to address personal narratives and creative ideas.

Diversity in zines has also changed over time. BIPOC have always been involved in zines and the communities that create and share them, but overall the world of zines has been a majority white, cis, male world. Many people and collectives are working to correct the underrepresentation, like the POC Zine Project. With this work, the zine community has grown in the last decade or so to celebrate the diversity of creators, and zines are more than ever confronting racism and intersectional issues in alternative communities.

I can’t do a QLL blog post without highlighting more cool queer projects! We love The Queer Zine Archive Project (QZAP), a free searchable database of queer zines with links allowing users to view or download electronic copies of zines. If I can be a nerdy cataloguing librarian for a moment, one of the coolest things about QZAP is their metadata schema, which is based loosely on the Dublin Core standard and is called xZINECOREx. I just think everyone should know that. And everyone should know about QZAP and check them out!

We hope you’ll join us tonight to make zines together, no matter how far apart we all are. Let us know what you’re making, and maybe even send us some pictures for us to share with the rest of the QLL community!

Happy Zine-ing!

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