queer indie publishing manifesto

In the 1960s-80s, gay and lesbian publishing was blooming in the US (alongside other liberation movements). Various activist groups were gathering together, setting up underground printing presses, and distributing newspapers (e.g. Come Out!, Common Lives/Lesbian Lives, Gay Liberator, Gay Flames, Dykes & Gorgons, Lavender Woman, Lesbian Tide, and many more) — to inform local communities about current queer issues and events, and to create spaces for collective discussion. As it was impossible to squeeze such content into the mainstream papers, they learned to produce and publish their materials autonomously. How? In these pre-internet times, activists were quick to pick up the latest developments in printing technology — from stencil duplicators (mimeograph and later on risograph), originally intended for schools and offices, to offset printing and photocopying (xerography), that were both becoming increasingly affordable and available to the general public. Alessandro Ludovico draws a really detailed overview of these developments in the chapter “A history of alternative publishing reflecting the evolution of print” in his book Post-digital Print.

It was not only the United States where the gay and lesbian movement developed their own alternative publishing models. In her thesis Two Stories of Feminist Publishing, Lara Dautun recalls the history of the Women in Print Movement of the late 60s-70s in The Netherlands. In short, the Movement thrived by publishing autonomously and in small low-budget print runs. It is also a deeply inspiring story of collective power — everyone was bringing their skills to the table, teaching them to each other, and engaging in both manual and mental labour to avoid recreating hierarchies among themselves.

Then, the late 1980s and early 1990s saw the “queer zine explosion”. At the time, desktop publishing software became widely available, which meant that anyone with a personal computer and a printer at home could become a (self-)publisher. Queer people that grew up on the gay lib newsletters and DIY punk zines got their hands dirty with glue and markers, their minds busy with unvoiced stories and ideas, and their friends loaded with stacks of copies to give out.

Not only did the 90s’ zines spread vital information within communities, but they also stepped into self-exploration and self-expression territories. Julia Bryan-Wilson shares her experience with the zines of that era in her essay “Cool Older Siblings: Queer Zines as Queer Theory”: Part of what queer zines meant to me in the 1990s, from my late teens into my early twenties, was access — access not only to life-saving information but also to new identifications and other subjectivities that I might not otherwise have been capable of imagining.

I know we tend to think about zine culture in more recent terms, but radical queer and trans publishing was so important in the 90s, connecting communities outside of traditional spaces of power, just before the internet and social media really transformed everything.

I’m at a party. A friend of a friend comes up to me. “I have something for you!” — they’re handing me a zine. The cover reads “DIY VOICE” in dancing cut-and-paste collage letters, and then — under a black-and-white illustration of three men hugging and singing — “A voice masculinization resource zine [blank line] By Lichen” in a typewriter font. The twenty-four-page zine is printed in black-and-white on six A4 sheets of cheap-ass office paper. The sheets aren’t cut, and the zine is bound with a thick and soft purple embroidery thread. It feels a bit weary on the edges: it’s surely been held, opened and read before. Also, I must note that the person who just gave me the DIY VOICE isn’t called Lichen. They run away before I can thank them. Later, I show the zine to my partner and he smiles: “Oh, I printed this on my work printer!”

Flipping through the zine, I gasp! Twenty-four pages full of priceless information that’s pretty damn hard to “just google”: from exercises and safety tips to the science behind voice training and a list of other helpful resources (it had taken me long miserable hours of online searching for this back when I was a teenager). One day, my other friend asks whether I know any tricks on “how to sound more masculine pre-HRT” and I hand this zine over to them. Once I need it again for reference, I find it online and see the colourful original for the first time. I smile to myself: suddenly one diagram with a colourful gradient makes more sense. But other than that, I prefer the black-and-white printed version by far. It has something that the colourful pdf just doesn’t… It has intention and care put into it by the people who printed it out and bound it with the embroidery thread. It holds stories of all the people who read it before and will read it after me. And it somehow feels more friendly and accessible to actively read and use, rather than saving it on one’s browser’s reading list and never coming back to it.

To me, DIY VOICE is an example of how the smallest quickly-and-cheaply-made queer zines still play a significant role in the distribution of life-saving information within our communities up to this day.

I’m at the IHLIA LGBTI Heritage archive in Amsterdam. IHLIA’s online catalogue lists thirty-nine titles when searching for “zines”. Before my visit, I carefully select eighteen of them and kindly ask IHLIA’s team to dig them out of the archive’s endless boxes. And so they do! (Many thanks to Gerrit, Amber and other IHLIA employees and volunteers!)

Among all these gems of queer indie publishing, my attention gets immediately attracted by MOSHPIT QUEERCORE ZINE #7: COMMUNITY CARE. It comes in a package: a magazine, an insert-sheet and a cassette (I must confess I haven’t listened to the cassette, but I’ve read all the lyrics). MOSHPIT #7 feels like a proper magazine. It is put together by a team of six people and includes contributions by at least sixteen others spread over forty-eight almost-A4-sized pages. I take my time to go through them page by page. Essays, comics, interviews, artworks, poems, memes, and even a quiz! The magazine comes from Leipzig and is bilingual — some of its words are only in German, some have translation to English, and some are English-only. It strikes me as a wild mixture of people and ideas — varying from serious research-heavy inquiries into queer feminist theory and US’ politics to freeform artistic explorations of queer sexuality and kink, punk culture and mutual aid. Design seems chaotic yet effective. Even though it’s quite clumsy for a ✨professionally-trained✨ eye — there’s evidently no grid, one too many fonts, and some image placements spark questions — overall, it radiates the punk DIY hastily-made feel which compliments the running theme of the zine.

To me, MOSHPIT QUEERCORE ZINE is an example of how queer people from different backgrounds can come together to create something niche yet wide-reaching, with the potential of building a community around it. As the editors put it in the intro note: Queercore doesn’t mean to be extremely queer, but to point to the origin, the core, of queerness. To endure contradictions and the diversity of queer existences.

I’m at the Athenaeum Nieuwscentrum bookshop in Amsterdam. There’s what they call an “artist talk” or a “conversation about making and publishing queer zines”. One of the artists in question is Dan Rhatigan, the author of Pink Mince zine. The talk is very informal and chaotic — the audience is small, the shop owner is offering drinks to everyone, Dan Rhatigan — together with another artist Auke Triesschijn — is showing some old gay porn magazines he collects and works with. I’m leafing through all the Pink Minces that are on display, occasionally taking notes of what’s being said.

Pink Minces are deliciously tempting. Layers and layers of striking pictures, professionally typeset text, playfully collaged archival material, thoughtfully chosen typefaces, neat layouts, high-quality printing, and smooth-to-the-touch pink covers with an intriguing fold. Rhatigan confesses:
Pink Mince started with me making recreations of the layouts of gay porn magazines without the pictures, carefully recreating typography. It’s about material as much as content. I make the production so hard for myself! For example, in the 2025 autumn issue of Pink Mince there’s at least four different paper types and three or four different printing techniques, there’s a folded centre sheet, and so on…

Apart from materiality, Dan Rhatigan stresses that his project acts as a rescue mission for the old gay magazines in his collection. At first, he was collecting them just for inspiration, but later realised that many of those mags are valuable to archive and save as part of queer history before they get lost and forgotten. Now, Rhatigan works hard on making his archive more accessible — he maintains a personal wiki page called “The Hot Type Club” with a breathtaking number of titles.

To me, Pink Mince is an inspiring example of how editorial design can be applied to archival material to reclaim and revitalise it, making queer history look sexy and appealing to wider audiences, and unboxing all that precious old stuff from the archives.

I’ll admit my discomfort with the idea of a museum exhibition of zines. Because the zine is always a super-local and anti-institutional phenomenon, and because it seems nonsensical to try to create a timeline or overview of a movement so vast and unruly. As unruly and non-conforming as queer zines are, they resist to be classified, analysed, or otherwise restricted by any structure (be it a timeline, overview, categorisation, or a mere description). I’m reminding myself over and over again: I’m not defining queer zines, I’m not putting them into boxes, I’m not attaching any labels onto them. Yet, I am defining queer zines that I make, I am putting them into postage boxes, and I am attaching shipping labels onto them. And, oh boy, does this feel good!

The tangible materiality of zines feels so valuable to me. Digital content can disappear overnight, but a zine has the potential to last forever. Although, I must admit there are many queer zines that exist and circulate primarily on the web these days — as ready-to-print pdfs, photos of analogue publications on social media, or even interactive open-source webpages. I find myself in this trap too — I’m certain more people encounter my zines online, rather than bump into them offline. It is a whole different story though, and I believe it deserves a whole separate essay to be told. As for now, I’ll allow myself to leave it at this…

“[…] Through social media platforms, we have more than ever access to the button “publish”, but we don’t necessarily have control over the mechanisms and conditions in which it happens. Publishing is a question of distribution, not only in its potential (a stock of books, a pdf ready to be printed on demand, a website pushed online...) but also in its actual reception by a public.” […] Striving for more inclusive and sustainable publishing practices therefore also means to facilitate and critically reflect on, as designers, not only the access to contents, but also to tools and platforms. We, queer designers and makers, should be aware of what hides behind the smoothness of mainstream digital tools, platforms and algorithms. With that awareness, we can refuse to comply with the demands of homonormativity and rainbow washing, and find our own ways to commit deviant acts of knowledge dissemination and community building. The tools and materials needed to make a zine are minimal, making it one of the most accessible forms of art and information exchange. We can share these tools with each other, and facilitate the exchange of diverse, contradicting queer existences through collective making and distribution of content.

Queer zines are our tools for resistance in the face of mainstream corporate design culture. They offer spaces for community building and collective action. They amplify voices of those who survive and subvert the dominant, heteronormative and patriarchal power dynamics in human relationships. They scream about political and social issues and call for change. They whisper about dreams and hopes for different, queerer futures. They spread radical care and unconditional love.

If there can only be one thing that you take away from this chaotic, layered, multi-voiced, non-exhaustive, lost in translation and ever-to-be-continued text, I hope it will be this:
If I can’t find what I want, I guess I can make it.
Or even better yet, I’d say: I guess we can make it together.