Decidedly Non-Commercial: Zines, Zinesters and Queer Community
Homozone 5 pamphlet by Robyn Scott (now Robyn Adams), from the Periodicals Collection at the GLBT Historical Society.
Visual rhetoric professor Margaret Galvan, of the University of Florida, is the author of a recently published book, In Visible Archives: Queer and Feminist Visual Culture in the 1980s, out this autumn with the University of Minnesota Press. Her project explores how publishing practices and archives have shaped understandings of the visual within feminist and queer activism.
For an upcoming book project on LGBTQ cartoonists, Professor Galvan consulted the GLBT Historical Society’s archives, drawing extensively on examples in our Periodicals Collection, as well as from dedicated zine collections such as the Larry-Bob Roberts Collection. We interviewed Professor Galvan to learn more about zines, a unique, and often transgressively queer, form of visual artistic expression.
Can you explain to those of us unfamiliar with this genre how zines are distinct from comics?
Margaret Galvan: Zines are self-published works that really vary in their aesthetics, but often include text and image collaged together and sometimes include new or reprinted comics. A big part of zines is not only the zines themselves, but the community that arises around them—there are even so-called “distro” zines that collect together lists of zines to purchase and often include reviews. In LGBTQ print landscapes, zines nestle alongside the vibrant grassroots press, but zines do not aspire to professionalism, regular publication schedules, or steady distribution and instead celebrate their do-it-yourself, amateur nature.
Cover of an issue of Girljock, edited by Roxxie, from the Periodicals Collection at the GLBT Historical Society.
In the 1980s and 1990s, the Riot Grrrl and queercore subcultures inspired a proliferation of zines made by individuals across the globe. The GLBT Historical Society has a strong collection of queer zines, thanks especially to certain queer zine makers (i.e. zinesters) who donated their personal collections. For my research, Larry-Bob Roberts’ papers and zines were crucial. Roberts was an early queercore zinester originally out of Minneapolis who self-published Holy Titclamps, full of personal and guest essays, as well as images, on a fairly regular basis for 19 issues from 1989 until 2003. Early on, he started reviewing other queer zines, and this section grew larger every issue until it became a distinct zine of its own, Queer Zine Explosion (QZE), which he published for 21 issues until 2009.
The exhaustive nature of QZE was vital for my research, and I spent a long time reading through his reviews and identifying zines where comics were a prominent feature and then I started requesting those zines. There were a number of relevant zines in his own collection, but a greater number are integrated into the larger Periodicals Collection, and it wasn’t rare to come across a friendly letter addressed to Roberts tucked inside a zine—indicating not only that it was one sent to him for review, but also evidencing the warmth of community connection that undergirded this decidedly non-commercial publishing enterprise.
How did our archives provide insights for your NEW Book PROJECT?
Cover of an issue of Girljock, edited by Roxxie. Artwork is by Trina Robbins. From the Periodicals Collection at the GLBT Historical Society.
MG: Queer Zine Explosion was a starting point for so much of my research. When I went to look at the zines and comics reviewed in it, most were available and often in near complete runs. The society has a strong collection of Bay Area zines and comics, but there were also a lot of materials from farther afield thanks to Roberts’ collection. UK queer zines from cartoonists like Rachael House, Sina Shamsavari, Jeremy Dennis, and others gave me a sense of the vibrant queer zine scene in the UK and gave me a firm grounding in cartoonists whose work I rarely encounter in other US archives.
Moreover, seeing the full-run of Roxxie’s Girljock (1990–1997), a zine about lesbian athletics that became a glossy magazine, was transformative to my research on lesbian comics community in the time period, as I learned that the zine was generated out of a Bay Area Cartoon Club that existed for some time in the early 1990s. Also, I encountered a whole bunch of trans comics and zines from the period by artists who were unknown to me and are not recorded in comics histories, and I’m now writing an article that discusses works like Hedda Lettuce’s Dragnett (1991) and Robyn Scott’s (now Robyn Adams’s) Homozone 5 (1992) comics series and proposes a broader history of trans comics that seeks to pinpoint where and how trans creators made comics over time.
What can we learn from zines about LGBTQ life in the 1980s and 1990s?
MG: Zines do a great job of illustrating the vibrancy of LGBTQ culture from a variety of personal perspectives, and the comics in them play with notions of how to represent queer life. There were zines about nearly everything, so you can get in touch with queer perspectives about different aspects of culture. For instance, I looked at a bunch of comic zines that embrace the superhero genre and create LGBTQ superhero teams as a loving sendup of the genre. By creating LGBTQ individuals as superheroes, these artists were claiming a sense of power, echoing the work of drag artists embodying classic Hollywood divas. Overall, you got a sense of how this format really helped facilitate community before the internet as folks connected through the mail and felt less isolated.
Margaret Galvan is an assistant professor of visual rhetoric in the Department of English at the University of Florida. She was the Distinguished Junior External Fellow at the Stanford Humanities Center at Stanford University in 2021–2022.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.