DIY E-Book

Amy Spencer

• Herausgeber: Marion Boyars
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2005

Beschreibung

A well informed study that champions the unsung heroes and heroines of DIY distribution in art, music, literary zines and culture. This exploration of lo-fi culture traces the origin of the DIY ethic to the skiffle movement of the 1950s, mail art, Black Mountain poetry and Avant-Garde art in the 1950s, the punk scene of the 1970s and 80s, right the way through to the current music scene. Through interviews with key writers, promoters and musicians (including Bikini Kill and Bratmobile) Amy charts the development of music outside of the publicity machine of the large companies, and examines the politics behind the production of the many 'home-made' recordings and publications available today.

Leseprobe

With love to Kat and Dan and thanks to all the amazing people who answered my questions.

CONTENTS

Title Page

Dedication

INTRODUCTION

PART I: THE ZINE REVOLUTION

A Platform for the Individual

The Writer

The Offbeat

Murder Can Be Fun

The Duplex Planet

Dishwasher Pete

The Personal Zine

Cometbus

Pathetic Life

Community Building

The Community

Zine Archives and Libraries

The Queer Zine

JDs zine

Interview with GB Jones co-founder of JDs

Homocore Zine

SPEW

Zine Feminism

The Riot

New Feminists

Interview with Lisa Jervis of Bitch zine

Mama Zines

Interview with Ayun Halliday of East Village Inky

Craft

Interview with Leah Kramer of craftster.com

DIY Literature Online

The Web Journal

The Blog

The E-zine

Interview with John Hodge of SchNEWS

Zines Past and of the Future

Interview with Teal Triggs co-editor of Below Critical Radar

Self-publishing of the Future

PART II: THE HISTORY OF DIY PUBLISHING

Zine Beginnings

Science Fiction Fandom

The Beat Generation

Yugen, The Floating Bear and The Black Mountain Review

The Small Press

New Directions

City Lights

White Rabbit Press

The Fiction Zine

The Story Tellers

Interview with short story writer/editor Amy Prior

Artists and the Zine

Art Rebels

Dada

Situationist International

The Bay Area Dadaists

Fluxus

Mail Art

Decos

New York Correspondance School

Interview with John Held curator and editor of Bibliozine

Political Zines

The Radicals

Radical Style

The Village Voice

The Realist

The Bohemian Others

The East Village Other

Los Angeles Free Press

The Berkeley Barb

The Oracle

The Diggers

UPS: The Collective Approach

The Great British Magazine

The International Times

OZ

Red Mole

The End of the Underground Press?

Mother Jones

The History of Political Zines

An Interview with John Hodge, editor of SchNEWS

Guerilla News reporting

Adbusters

Music Zines

Rock Zines

Punk

Punk Zine

Sniffin’ Glue

Search and Destroy

The Impact of the Punk Zine

Post-punk

Maximumrocknroll

PART III: THE RISE OF LO-FI MUSIC

The Skiffle Legacy

Punk

Punk Beginnings

The Blank Generation

Anarchy in the UK

Punk Heroines

Punk Politics

The Punk Legacy

New Wave

British Post-punk

No Wave

New York Post-punk

Olympia

Beat Happening

K Records

Kill Rock Stars

Grunge

Queercore

Queercore Origins

Homocore Chicago

The Personal is Political

British Queercore

Queercore Activism

Riot Grrrl

DIY Radio

Pirate Radio

Radio Caroline

Pirate Politics

American Pirates

Micropower

Free Radio Berkeley

The San Francisco Radio Movement

Low Power Stations

Internet Radio

The Birth of the Independents: Release It Yourself

Independent Labels

The Underground Network

The Age of the Indies

Choosing Lo-fi Over Hi-fi

Cassette Culture

File Sharing

Live Music

Club Nights

Festivals

Rave Culture

Guerilla Gigging

The Future

Endnotes and References

Further Resources

Copyright

INTRODUCTION

I was fifteen years old when I first fell in love with the lo-fi ideals of do-it-yourself culture, with the idea of producing a zine or a recording for yourself and passing it on to others. I was excited by the thought that you could use the resources available to you – a piece of paper, a battered guitar, a cheap tape-recorder – to cross the boundary between who consumes and who creates. It was empowering to realize that anyone, however amateur, could produce something which would be valued as a finished product. In a society where the publishing and music industries are shaped by profit-margins, what is radical about the participants of this scene is that they simply want to exchange information about the bands, gigs, zines etc they have found exciting. The primary aim is to build unique idealized networks in which anyone can participate. Michal Cupid, an independent promoter from Bristol, explains that members of the DIY underground aren’t, ‘fixated with the promise of money, they are people who want to do something just to see it happen.’

When I first began to investigate the origins of the DIY ethic, I found that similar ways of working and familiar styles echo throughout different communities, repeating themselves over and over. The lo-fi approach appears in many forms: music, visual art, film, craft, writing, political activism, social protest. However, this book concentrates on underground movements where DIY and lo-fi ideals are translated into words and music: two fundamental areas where DIY culture has always had a long history and continues to flourish.

In the printed underground, zines are joined by independent magazines and newspapers, created with similar ideas and with the recurring ambition to simply put words into print. The 1930s sci-fi zine, the dada art zine, the chapbook created by beat writers in the 1950s, small-scale radical magazines of the 1960s, punk zines of the 1970s, the zine explosion of the 1990s, online blogs and guerilla newsreporting of today all started with individuals sharing a similar DIY ethos: the urge to create a new cultural form and transmit it to others on your own terms.

The DIY vision has become central to the underground music scene also, with the lo-fi ideals of skiffle groups in the 1950s, the punks of the 1970s, post-punk and the 80s indie scene enduring to the present day. Subverting the term ‘hi-fi’, ‘lo-fi’ music refers to a musical style in opposition to high production values. Encompassing an ideology that has been both championed and ridiculed over the decades, for some, this is the only way they are willing to make music, to others it represents an annoyingly shambolic, amateur style. It is, however, this celebration of the amateur that is at the heart of DIY scene in both music and literature – a celebration that continues today.

New technology has had a high impact on DIY culture, it is now easier to do-it-yourself than ever before. Though embracing the high-tech may seem in opposition to lo-fi creation, advancements like the internet enable a more far-reaching distribution of DIY publications than ever before. The independant ethos of the lo-fi approach has remained and the rise of the DIY movement continues. As Mark Perry infamously wrote in the punk zine Sniffin’ Glue, ‘Here’s a picture of a chord and another one and another one – now go and form your own band!’. Whether your interest is music, literature or otherwise, it really is that simple to become involved. Well, why not?

Amy Spencer, 2005

PART I: THE ZINE REVOLUTION

A Platform for the Individual

The Writer

Zines are non-commercial, small-circulation publications which are produced and distributed by their creators. Generally the zine writer is not a professional writer, nor are they being paid for their efforts, so who exactly is producing zines and why? The basic appeal of creating these home-made ‘magazines’ is easy to see – the opportunity to write whatever you want and tap into a willing audience, with no restrictions. The drawbacks are just as obvious – the time it takes to produce the zine as well as the costs involved. Many zine writers barely break even on their expenses.

Fredric Wertham, a New York psychiatrist, became interested in the fanzine phenomenon in the early 40s, while researching the links between psychology and literature. His work at first focused on the negative effects that popular culture could potentially have on an individual. He became well respected on the subject and invited to give evidence before the Senate Subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency in the 1950s. By the 1970s, he began to shift his attention to comic fandom subcultures. He tried to find out why people were publishing their own zines when they could instead be reading the mainstream commercial magazines. Instead of criticizing their work, he became intrigued by the fanzine founders – by their lack of commercial motivation and their celebration of the amateur writer. He later published these findings in his book The World of Fanzines1 and is credited as one of the first people to be interested in the psychology of zine writing2 – so the man who warned America of the dangers of popular culture became one of the first academics to be intrigued by underground publishing. In his book Wertham explains that: ‘Zines give a voice to the everyday anonymous person. The basic idea is that someone sits down, writes, collects, draws or edits a bunch of stuff they are interested in or care deeply about, photocopies or prints up some copies of it and distributes it. The zine creating process is a direct one, remaining under the writer’s control at all times. Perhaps its outstanding facet is that it exists without any outside interference, without any control from above, without any censorship, without any supervision or manipulation. This is no mere formal matter; it goes to the heart of what fanzines are.’

Zine writers are constantly asked why they write their zine. If they have something to say, why don’t they submit their work to mainstream magazines and newspapers? The reasons are as varied as the zines they produce. Some aim to relieve a sense of boredom or loneliness. Some want to feel part of a wider community. Some want to discuss their personal obsessions. Others want to validate their lives and make people understand their way of thinking. There are also those who use zines as a means of distributing information and resources to others.

Money is rarely a motivation to start writing a zine, as they are frequently created on a small budget and sold for little or no profit. In reality, as many zine writers will not break even on their printing costs, it seems odd that they are willing to invest the time and money into these paper projects. However, after the initial idea to begin a zine, the process can become addictive. The writer has an outlet to express their ideas and experiences the enjoyment of physically designing the layout of the zine and putting together the finished product.

Since their beginnings in the sci-fi community of the 30s, zines have been traded amongst writers and it continues to be common practice for them to swap zines. This enables both parties involved to avoid commercial dealings and idealistically reverts the process back to a time when exchange of goods was more common than monetary exchange. A code of etiquette has therefore developed that involves sending trades, writing personal letters and reviewing each other’s zines in your own. The zine is viewed differently from a commercial product. It resembles a gift more than a product, as it typically bypasses the profit motive. The flow of zines, and the personal network that has developed around them, resembles human contact. The zine is passed physically through the network connecting people together, sharing the sense of solidarity in their interest in the underground of independent culture.

Zine writing has thus become a culture in itself. Zine writers write about other zines and often feature interviews with their writers. Writers such as Aaron Cometbus and Dishwasher Pete (see later) have become celebrities in the zine world.

As many zines document what is going on in a particular scene and with their origins as ‘fanzines’ being produced by self-proclaimed fans, the identity of the zine-maker can be problematic. Many may not want to be restricted to this role of fan. Particularly in the music scene, they may not want those who are producing the culture that they are writing about to view them simply as consumers who then rave about them in print. This is one of the problems of the zine experience, for writers to be taken seriously as producers in their own right.

Working away from a corporate culture, which divides the population into carefully researched demographics, zine writers form their own networks around their identities. Many writers create their zines as a conscious reaction against a consumerist society. They adopt the DIY principle that you should create your own cultural experience. It is this message that they pass on to their readers – that you can create your own space. Unlike the message of mass media, which is to encourage people to consume, the zine encourages people to take part and produce something for themselves.

The zine is run differently from a big commercial magazine, as the creators have the freedom of being able to produce what they what and when they want to without the pressure of deadlines. There is little censorship, and contributors make the most of this freedom. Zines come and go, they can appear for just one issue and then disappear. They are a temporal form of media, which isn’t aimed at filling a commercially viable niche in the market but features whatever the writer feels like writing about. Sometimes, this can prove to be so popular that issue after issue is produced for decades.

As with many underground cultures there is a sense of possessiveness about zine culture. If a zine makes the transition into a mainstream magazine then it is often criticized, viewed with suspicion or seen as ‘selling out.’ Many feel that zines which do this are betraying the zine’s amateur status, one of the things that is so celebrated in the zine world.

But is the ethos of the zine really concerned with producing an amateur form of media? It is interesting to look at the origins of the word ‘amateur’ which, although often carrying negative connotations, is derived from the Latin word for ‘lover’. These little known origins remind us that the amateur approach can be a more personal form of communication and does not have to be equated with sloppiness, an unprofessional production or a lack of talent.

Zine writers often write about their own personal take on the world and address social and political issues. It is also clear that earlier self-published newspapers and magazines of the 60s were indeed a very important form of journalism, one which contrasted the restrictive media of the time. But can the same be said of the zines which have been published since the emergence of punk at the end of the 70s, that mix serious journalism with the zine format? Many people have argued the valid point that zine writers cannot be said to be journalists because they are not professionals and are not being commissioned to produce their work. However, some zine writing is so articulate that it could easily stand alongside professional journalism. Not all zine contributors are happy to produce work in this style, there are those who work hard to set themselves apart from the mainstream. As the independent newspapers of the 60s worked hard to create an alternative to the established papers, many zines have attempted to provide a radically different alternative to mainstream magazines.

Though it is to an extent true that zines are open to everyone – anyone can publish their own work and anyone can read it – this is slightly over-idealistic. The thousands of zines currently available have content as diverse as sci-fi, music, personal confessions and political rants. However, the writers often fit a particular profile.

Many zine writers are employed in temporary or seemingly menial jobs where they feel little satisfaction. Some writers use this as material for their zine: writers like Tyler Starr, who passes time at factory jobs by jotting down stories from his co-workers and sketching his surroundings for his zine, The Buck in the Field. He captures the lives of people working with no job satisfaction who are unable to leave due to financial constraints. Zine writers like Starr react against their experiences at work by writing zines – a creative outlet necessary to alleviate boredom.

There are countless exceptions but the zine tends to be written by a middle class, white population in their teens and early twenties. Many zine writers have challenged this assumption and produced radically different publications or have tackled the subject directly in print, but having the time and freedom to put together a zine is a privilege which many in this demographic do not question.

Zines can be criticized as being an elitist form of media. You can only have access to the information if you know exactly where to look, by talking to the right people or happening across a flyer or a zine being sold at a gig. Many people may miss out due to a complete lack of publicity and very small print runs. But the zine appears to be the perfect participatory cultural experience. Mainstream media can be, to some extent, bypassed and those involved in the scene can document their own history.

For many, the focus of zine writing is celebrating their position outside of the mainstream, having unusual interests, being a geek, rejecting the status quo. In his documentation of zine culture in Notes from Underground Zines and The Politics of Alternative Culture, Steve Duncombe claims: ‘They [zine writers] celebrate the everyperson in a world of celebrity, losers in a society that rewards the best and brightest.’3 It is this definition that best describes the position of the zine writers.

The Offbeat

That anyone can write about anything when producing a zine is both the blessing and the curse of the zine format. Some zines can be truly awful, scrappy illogical rants stapled together, others are brilliant and unique documents. As the historical development of the zine illustrates, the format can be used for any imaginable subject, and some of the most popular are those which defy classification. In some instances, before they begin writing the editors know nothing of the zine tradition and are simply inventing their own suitable format; thus creating almost by accident a publication that is recognized as a zine. These are often the best, these most cryptic and offbeat of zine offerings, giving an irreverent and truly individual perspective on the world from the writer’s point of view. Amongst these zine-oddities is Mark Saltveit’s zine The Palindromist, for people who write and read palindromes. Others focus on TV, such as Geraldo Must Die!, a rant against daytime TV talk shows, or the one-off issue in 1994 of I Hate Brenda by Darby Romeo, which was a zine devoted to attacking actress Shannon Doherty who played Brenda Walsh on the TV programme Beverly Hills 90210. Another quirky zine is Convention Crasher, where an anonymous writer sneaks into New York City’s best trade shows using fake press passes and then writes about what he witnesses.

With zines being relatively easy to produce, it is evident that people will risk publishing almost anything. As they are radically different from the commercial magazine and don’t face the same pressure to be commercially viable, and as there are no demographics, no markets, no profit and loss margins and no financial need to attract a large readership, writers don’t feel they have to be too cautious in terms of what they print. Zines celebrate the idea that you can print anything and at least one other person will want to read it.

Murder Can Be Fun

Another zine that’s certainly unique in terms of content is John Marr’s Murder Can Be Fun. Where other zines may focus on music or community, this zine, named after a favourite Fredric Brown detective novel, is dedicated to the documenting of murders. Marr is a self-taught expert on the subject, spending his weekends doing extensive research in the library. He has written a historically accurate account of the Great Boston Molasses Flood of 1919 (in which 2.3 million gallons of molasses deluged city streets, knocking over buildings and killing twenty people); chronicled every death at Disneyland since it opened in 1955, every death to occur in a zoo and also written extensively about postal-worker killings (complete with graphs!).

The Duplex Planet

David Greenberger takes a different approach, and has the changed the way many people view the zine-writing genre. He fills the pages of his zine, The Duplex Planet, not with the reckless exploits of young punks, but with interviews with the residents of nursing homes with the aim of presenting the realities of the experiences of older people in America. The project first kicked off in 1979, when, after graduating with a fine arts degree, David Greenberger began working as activities director at a nursing home called The Duplex, in Boston. He assumed that he could include the residents in his passion for painting and help them to create their own work. What he found was unexpected and radically changed his assumptions about the elderly and ideas about art. Realizing that the recreational facilities offered to the residents did little to challenge them, he connected with the residents by simply talking to them and asking, for example, what their fears were or what they thought about love. He began to produce a newsletter that encouraged the residents to write poems and answer unusual questions such as, ‘What does it mean to sell out?’, ‘If Gone with the Wind didn’t exist, what would be your favourite movie?’, ‘Would you swim in coffee if it wasn’t too hot?’, ‘Who invented sitting down?’ and ‘Which do you prefer, coffee or meat?’ These original questions, designed to provoke instantaneous answers, gave an insight into the minds of the residents. The answers were often surreal, almost visionary at times. Using humour to get to know the participants, and to encourage them to share their views, Greenberger used the newsletter as a form of emotional exchange, a means of connection. Although the questions were sometimes silly he never laughed at his subjects, instead trying genuinely to understand them.

He printed the answers to these questions in the newsletter. Originally intended to be just for the residents’ entertainment, the readership of this newsletter soon grew. It was among his writer friends that Greenberger first discovered there was an interest in his project outside of the nursing home. Noticing that they were reading it as though it were literature, he realized that the writing had value and deserved to be published. The zine format was ideal for this project and he therefore began to produce little chapbook issues filled with writing, photos and illustrations, each with a theme, including subjects as diverse as coffee, gravity and broken hearts to Frankenstein.

The humour of the residents turned many of them into cult figures. They became characters that the reader could get to know through their responses. Greenberger was looking at them differently. He wasn’t interested in compiling an oral history project, which concentrated on the memories of the residents’ past while ignoring their present. Instead, he wanted to capture an essence of who they were.

It is human nature to try and connect with other people. But whereas most zine writers are typically trying to connect with others who are similar to themselves, Greenberger sought to communicate with people different from himself, believing that it was important to try and overcome the generation gap that may exist between young people and the elderly. In a culture where youth is so highly valued, and the ageing process so greatly feared, he uses the zine medium to explore the reality that people do not really change.

Although the Duplex nursing home closed in the mid-80s, Greenberger continued to work on his project and after moving to Upstate New York decided to interview residents in several nursing homes. His original idea has escalated, his zine has grown, and now his readers are able to understand what he first experienced when talking to the elderly residents and what they have to offer.

Although very different from any other zine printed before or since, The Duplex Planet has had a great following: achieving high numbers of readers and notoriety in the zine world. It has spawned a comic book series published by Fantagraphics, an anthology, entitled Duplex Planet:Everybody’s Asking Who I Was, published by Faber and Faber, spoken word recordings, theatrical presentations and a series of concerts recorded for New York Public Radio. The residents themselves have become known outside of the nursing home. The often eccentric poetry of one resident, Ernest Noyes Brookings, has been worked into the lyrics of many bands. Michael Stipe of REM was a subscriber and asked another resident, Ed Rogers, to design the lettering for one of their albums. Other residents have contributed to an exhibition of drawings and sculpture.

Dishwasher Pete

Dishwasher Pete’s ambition is to wash dishes in every state in America and write about it. These written accounts have become his zine. Issue No. 7 finds Pete at a cafe in Boulder, No. 8 at an Alaskan fish cannery, No. 9 at a seafood restaurant in New Hampshire and No. 11 at restaurants in Montana, California and Ohio. He doesn’t want the responsibility of a job he feels tied to and is happy to travel across the country working temporarily in each town. He loves the sense of freedom that it brings to his life, and relishes the addictive experience of walking out of jobs – as having few responsibilities he allows himself the freedom of spontaneous quitting.4 He enjoys the drifting life, travelling across America in search of plates to wash. He is re-enacting the great American journey, glorified by the early pioneers, the hobo heritage, the beat generation and the hippies but coupling it with the sense of late 20th century malaise that seems so typical of young people’s lives. Dishwasher Pete has discovered almost an underground workforce, high school drop-outs to college graduates working in backrooms washing dishes. He celebrates these characters and glorifies their work by documenting the history of dishwashing in his zine, from historical facts and literary references to dishwashing to the social attitudes the general public hold towards dishwashers today – attempting to give it the sense of seriousness that it lacks. He is a kind of guru among dishwashers. He enjoys this work and regularly finds others who are content with the job despite being surrounded by people telling them to find a proper career.

In many ways, he is typical of young zine writers. They often find themselves working in menial jobs, unwilling to ‘sell themselves’ to any employer and only prepared to work the minimum hours possible to get by, but wanting to do something different and, through the zine, having found a way of doing so. They can write down their thoughts and explore their everyday experiences and find an often-captivated audience. Dishwasher Pete is one of these zine writers. Through writing about the details of his life, the methods he has devised to pass time at work and the people he encounters, he has produced a zine that may at first appear trivial but in fact makes fascinating reading. Of course, though no one else writes a zine quite like this, there are countless other zines that chronicle an individual’s life. Often people who feel that they have something to say, even if it is about themselves and they don’t want to try and publish through conventional routes, become zine writers.

Dishwasher Pete’s popularity, and the appeal of the offbeat zine, has transcended the underground world of the zine. Like many of the best zines, he has found an audience in the mainstream. In June 1996, he was invited to appear on American television on ‘The Late Show’ presented by David Letterman. Few watching the show would have realized that the man that was sitting chatting with the host was not in fact Dishwasher Pete, who was too shy to appear and had sent a fellow dishwashing substitute. He used the story as a feature for the next issue of his zine. Although he did not appear himself, Dishwasher Pete was the first zine editor to be invited on television.

The Personal Zine

As the zine moved quite rapidly away from being focused on one particular art movement, one specific music scene, just one band or one television programme, their writers became less interested in being fans and more interested in writing about their own lives. The zine moved away from being the ‘fanzine’ and became an important arena for writers to write about themselves and still find an audience.

Many zines produced are of a very personal nature with those who often felt isolated due to their physical location or social pressures adopting the zine as a voice with which to explain their situation and a way to turn to others for support. Many similar zines formed a supportive network for their writers and these individuals gained a form of consideration rarely found elsewhere. The emotional punch of autobiographical writing made the personal zine a unique document.

Cometbus

Aaron Cometbus attracts a cult-like following. Viewed by many as a modern-day Jack Kerouac, he currently produces a zine called Cometbus; an autobiographical account of a punk kid growing up, of travels across America and life in punk houses. This zine succeeds in standing out as an original amongst the mass of zines in print by the virtue of the talent evident within Aaron’s writing.

Cometbus was started by Aaron in 1983, when he was just thirteen years old. He has continued ever since, writing about his own life, his friends and the punk rock scene. Starting by printing five hundred copies at a friend’s place of work, he could not have known what an impact his zine would have, how long it would run for, or the positive effect it would have on the zine scene. He just wanted to connect with the punk scene that was around him in Berkeley. As with many others, the zine seemed an ideal means by which to gain access to a music scene. By writing a zine you could be an insider, have direct access to bands and a means by which to communicate with others with the same interests. However, unlike other zines, Cometbus soon moved away from concentrating solely on music and started to include essays and travelogues as well as short stories. Aaron realized that the punk scene was not just about music, that the sense of community was also important. He saw that writing about people’s lives and collecting their stories was an important contribution to the scene, and one which he was happy to make. He began to record the details of his own life within the punk community – the travelling across the country, the experience of living in squats, dumpster-diving for food and his adventures at punk shows. His zine soon began to bridge the gap between the punk zine and the personal zine. Like the best stories, he started to write about the major themes of life – falling in love, the strength of friendships and the struggle to live a life that is right for you. The zine has become a means for him to record his own life story, the photocopied hand-written pages feel like a letter to a close friend – one which his fans are eager to read.

Pathetic Life

Doug Holland’s Pathetic Life is a different type of personal zine. Instead of celebrating his life within a community, it comments on his life apart from one. Living in San Francisco, Holland describes himself as ‘unskilled, uneducated and unkempt, with missing teeth, a scraggly beard, old clothes and bad manners’. He chose the name for his zine from something an ex-girlfriend said to him, ‘You’ve got no money, no friends, you live in a slum, you never do anything interesting and you’re too damn fat to have sex. Your life is pathetic.’

In his zine, he records the details of his everyday life – how people treat him and how he feels as an outsider. He is the perfect example of someone who gave himself a (previously lacking) voice through his zine. In the everyday world away from zines, he is not paid much attention but through his zine he attracts readers who are hungry for more information. This zine predates the internet web journal but is very similar in terms of content.

Community Building

The Community

The impact of the small scale magazine, the self-published book or the zine lies not just in the act of producing the work but also in its distribution. For some writers, the zine experience ends with producing their zine and knowing it is being read. Chip Rowe, zine writer and author of World Of Zines,5 believes that the zine is simply a magazine, not a cultural experience aimed at building a community: ‘I don’t think a zine is produced to build communities. It’s produced to satisfy its creator. When it’s made with anyone else in mind, it’s a magazine.’ Others disagree, believing that the fundamental purpose of zine-making is to reach out to others, finding a common bond and form alliances. For many writers it is this community-building that is the most important part of producing their zine. Networks are forged which serve to support not only the zine community but also artistic and activist activities.

Distribution is the biggest problem for the zine-maker. Once they have spend hours writing and putting their zine together they must find their readers. There are few places to sell them – only specialist record shops, in person at events or through a distribution company. It used to be that many zines were created almost in isolation, with little opportunity to circulate information about the zine beyond its founder’s immediate circle. Many zines operated like this, just focusing on one local music scene because of the logistics involved in distributing it further afield.

Things began to change when a zine enthusiast called Mike Gunderloy, who was based in a small town in New York State, realized that there was a need for a publication that would review zines and list where you could buy copies. Having recently moved from the West Coast, where he had been active in sci-fi fanzine publishing, he stayed in touch with his friends through letter writing. He wanted to keep these friends up-to-date with recommendations of what he had been reading. After repeating himself in letter after letter, he realized that these lists could be mass-produced. In true DIY style, having identified the need, he decided that if anyone was going to produce this publication then it might as well be him. He named his review Factsheet Five, after a short story by English science fiction writer John Brunner. To begin with he reviewed sci-fi publications. Gunderloy saw similarities between different types of zines. Reading sci-fi zines in the early 80s, it became apparent to him that no matter what their subject, all of their creators evidently shared a similar sense of alienation from the mainstream press. When his research led him to a whole world of other types of zines, from the political to the humourous, he immediately realized that he enjoyed them too. He decided that in Factsheet Five, he would list all the zines he reviewed alphabetically so that zines with different subjects would be featured alongside one another and his readers would not be restricted by subject. Without Gunderloy’s efforts, different types of zines would have remained in their subcultural ghettos and different genres of zine would never have merged.

The first issue of Factsheet Five appeared on May 4th 1982, with a print run of fifty copies, which he sent to friends. It was just two pages long and contained eight reviews. This quickly grew, however, as word began to reach zine writers that by simply sending their zine to Gunderloy, they would be reviewed and their readership would almost definitely increase. Before this point, most zines were sold by word of mouth. For the first time, zine writers became distinctly aware of each other on a much larger scale. Zines had previously been created almost in isolation. Zine writers from the same town may have known each other and zines were sometimes traded cross-country and overseas but no one really knew what was happening on a wider scale.

The popularity of Factsheet Five showed that there was certainly a need for such a publication, so Gunderloy began cataloguing the hundreds of zines that he received. He later referred to Factsheet Five as, ‘the stupidest time-saving idea I ever had.’ By the late 1980s, Cari Goldberg Janice joined Factsheet Five, first as art director and then as co-editor, and the newsletter was being produced bi-monthly with nearly a hundred and forty pages of reviews. The 1980s were the time when the number of zines in print surged. This was in part due to easy access by many to photocopiers, a relatively new form of technology, but also because now there was a strong network through which to sell your zine. It may also be that for the first time, through Factsheet Five, there was an indication of just how many zines were being produced, and many zine writers suddenly realized just how many others were producing zines.

Many zine writers can recall when they first discovered the medium of the zine. One such writer was Chip Rowe, who as well as producing the Book of Zines published the paper zines This is the Spinal Tap Zine and Chip’s Closet Cleaner. He explains, ‘My first influence, and for many zinesters, was Factsheet Five – I remember the moment I picked it up at the Guild Bookstore in Chicago – because that’s how I discovered this community of people doing what I was doing. I didn’t know it had a name.’

Gunderloy reviewed every zine that he received and sent free copies of the completed Factsheet Five to their creators in exchange. This method had its drawbacks as some readers thought that people were producing low-quality, unoriginal zines just to receive a free copy of Factsheet Five. Now zine writing became more accessible, it seemed easier, and hundreds of people were inspired to start their own zines. With so many people doing the same thing it was felt that there was strength in numbers and the zine community expanded rapidly. With the increase in zines, many critics believed that quality began to suffer as standards dropped. It was becoming so easy to produce a zine that people were not putting as much effort into their creations as earlier zine founders.

This increase in zines not only meant that zine readers had more choice, but that Gunderloy had much more work to do compiling Factsheet Five. After moving the operation to San Francisco, the job that he had set out to do became overwhelming and he quit in late 1991, after finishing his 44th issue. He confessed that by this point he was spending as much as fifteen hours a day reviewing all the zines he was receiving. ‘I’ve reached the point where I can no longer invest my entire life in this project for the low [financial] returns it has been giving me lately.’ As well as the time he spent on Factsheet Five, he also compiled his guide How to Publish Fanzines in 1988, which is now available in electronic format on the internet as a resource guide. Gunderloy and Goldberg Janice also co-authored The World of Zines6, and began publishing books, such as Merritt Clifton’s The Samisdat Method, about low cost off-set printing, as well as producing a compilation tape entitled ‘Music for the Terminally Purplexed’.

Although Gunderloy realized that he needed to quit, he also knew that Factsheet Five was an invaluable resource for zine writers and fans and could not be lost. He sold it to Hudson Luce, an unemployed chemist from Kansas who claimed to be distantly related to the late magazine mogul Henry Luce. Luce’s time working on the zine was brief and he completed just one issue. He found that the project was just too large and passed it on to former computer consultant R Seth Friedman in 1993. Friedman held ambitions to improve Factsheet Five and started by organizing it by subject and produced an index to each issue and continued running the magazine through the 90s.7 In 2005, there are plans to revive the publication. It has found a new home in Arlington, VA and its new editors plan to produce a bi-monthly magazine with an estimated print run of ten thousand copies.

Not everyone believed that there was room for only one comprehensive zine directory. In 1993, John Labovitz launched his online E-Zine List with twenty-five entries. By 1999, it contained more than four thousand. Brent Ritzel began his bi-annual Zine Guide in late 1997 as an alternative. He did not know that Factsheet Five was struggling or that new editor, Seth Friedman, was finding the work-load overwhelming. Ritzel simply felt that Factsheet Five was becoming cynical and jaded. He found himself wanting to provide the alternative. He was not new to zines – he wrote a Chicago-based music zine called Tail Spins and during the process had been compiling his own database of zine information which he felt he ought to share. He took a different approach to Factsheet Five. Instead of simply listing or reviewing zines, he presented something more akin to a survey of the zines in print. Using the survey which he printed for readers at the front of Zine Guide, he produced a guide to his favourite zines.

Doug Holland, writer of Pathetic Life, began his own alternative called The Reader’s Guide to the Underground Press, from his home in San Francisco. He was not aspiring to produce the next Factsheet Five. He wanted to review fewer zines and be completely honest about their quality. If a zine was bad, then he would say that it was bad. Most zines reviewed others well because of a sense of camaraderie, but Holland felt that this approach meant that there was a lack of quality control in the zine world.

Guides like Factsheet Five were vital in strengthening the zine world, making it much simpler for people to make contact one with one another and develop networks. Communication plays a key role in developing any form of community, in the zine world as much as anywhere.

Such resources have been of great importance in building the zine community. Stephen Duncombe recognizes that they are, ‘absolutely critical. Without institutions like Factsheet Five that served as nodal points – or virtual community centres – there would have been either isolated publishers or scattered networks. By being able to see all these zines listed every month you not only had the ability to contact others outside your local network but you also had a much larger sense of being part of a real subculture – a zine world.’8

The networks that developed through zine distribution mirror in many ways the internet communities that exist today and can be viewed as one means that people found to spread information before the arrival of the internet. Within the zine world there are links from one publication to another, so the interested reader can follow a network, a trail much like the linked computer network. In zine distribution, the postal system is used as a mass means of communication and indeed the zine network has always been dependent on the postal system. This has developed from the mail art use of the postal network – the use of networks working through the postal system developed into other guises.

Not only do magazines like Factsheet Five attempt to tie the community together but zine distros have had an important part to play. The distro is a distribution centre for a number of zines, much like a little mail order shop. The distro became popular during the 90s riot grrrl era, when countless were run including collectively run Riot Grrrl Press and Ericka Bailie’s Pander Zine Distro. The remarkable thing about the distros was that this wasn’t just zine founders looking at ways to improve their own circulation figures, these centres were staffed by individuals who sometimes didn’t even run zines, who simply wanted to ‘help the cause’ and work towards getting the information that they cared about out to the relevant audience.

Ericka Bailie’s Pander Zine Distro, started in 1995, continues today. She explains that distros play an important role in the zine network. ‘As anyone whose zines Pander carries can tell you, without the distro their readership wouldn’t be what it is. Pander does all the hard work of making sure as many people as possible have access to your publication. I can often sell (around the world) more zines for one person than they’ve ever sold before.’9

She continues to explain that, although valuable, the distro does have its drawbacks. ‘The major downside to this is the feedback factor: too many people think that because they’ve received a zine from a distro instead of the zinester this means they are exempt from having to write to the zinester about their zine. If no one ever offered feedback and made connections this scene would die.’

For Bailie, communication is a vital part of the zine writing experience. ‘If you’re not receiving feedback, what’s the point? You wouldn’t be involved in the scene at all, you’d just keep your publications to yourself. But the point is that you want to share, you want to experience that sense of community, because it’s comforting (mostly) and exciting to find like-minded people who share your passion.’

Other projects have been run to increase the access people have to zines, working to strengthen the community. The Zine Yearbook, a yearly anthology of small press writing, was started by Jen Angel and Jason Kucsma in 1996, and is now in its eighth year. Each edition is a collection of excerpts from publications printed within a certain year and with circulation of less than 5,000 copies. This snapshot of independent publishing is produced in book format and distributed to shops making it much more accessible than many of the zines it features. This allows the general public a way into the zine world, thus alleviating a common concern among many zine writers who work to make the network as open to everyone as possible, without compromizing its independent nature.

Zine writers have realized that the strength of the zine community lies in communicating directly with one another, helping to provide resources and shared knowledge so that other people can start to write their own zines. One such conference organized by Jason Kucsma in 1999 developed into the Allied Media Conference. An annual event giving all those working in all forms of independent media – zine writing, film making, art activism – a physical space to communicate. Such events put independent media in a stronger position to work against the corporate control of the mainstream. Only by working together can people form a strong alternative.

During the 1990s in the US the riot grrrl movement championed the zine as the ideal format to spread their collective manifestos and more personal viewpoints. In the spirit of bringing young women together to discuss their experiences and the impact of riot grrrl, the format of a conference seemed ideal. Conferences specifically devoted to the zine highlighted the importance placed on these little paper magazines that could be easily produced but could contain so much powerful information. Such events also tried to encourage wannabe zine writers to put pen to paper, so workshops were organized to give people the confidence and the push they might need in order to begin their own zine. Established zine writers gave talks on different aspects of zine-making and by supplying pens and paper and printing facilities encouraged others to get writing during the course of the workshop. Dozens of new zines began in this way, fuelling the increasing numbers of those already in circulation.

One organization working currently as a resource for potential zine writers to put their words into print is Grrrl Zines A-Go-Go. This organization was formed in 2002 and travels to community venues and non-profit organizations in San Diego and Southern California and holds zine and book-making workshops. Elke Zobl10 is one of the main organizers of this group effort and she explains their aims: ‘The group especially focuses on the empowerment of teenage girls through the production of zines and artist books. The DIY ethic is the cornerstone of the political aspect of Grrrl Zines A-Go-Go. We believe zine-making embodies the phrase “The personal is political” by encouraging active participation in the creation of one’s own culture and independence from mainstream media. We think that this is especially important for teen girls who discover a new avenue for expression that is uncensored; something that they can produce alone, without the need for experts or expensive tools – their tools are their minds and a pen – anyone can do it. It is a truly democratic form of media; everyone who reads a zine can create one. Every reader should be a writer and zines make this possible, removing the fear of writing and emphasizing the process for each person.’ Such an outlook illustrates how self-publishing is viewed by many as an activity to share, and not in any way elitist. The sense of community and co-operation which runs through the zine network is best illustrated by the presence of such organizations.

Zine Archives and Libraries

As zine writing developed over the decades the numbers of zines produced was immense. Those involved in zine networks realized the relevance of what they were doing – creating a valued alternative to the mainstream media. As well as the organization of zine conferences, zine festivals and workshops, zine resource centres have been set up where people can go and learn how to produce zines, and there are independent zine libraries where you can go and read vast zine collections. One novel idea aimed at exposing people to independent publications who might not otherwise see them, is the Bookmobile bus: a Vintage 1959 air-stream trailer which travels around America and Canada sharing zines. This volunteer-run tour takes a collection of artists’ books, zines and other independent publications to promote non-corporate media to groups as diverse as schoolchildren, prisoners and the elderly, groups who may otherwise never see the potential of do-it-yourself publishing.

Over recent years other organizations have began to be interested in zine writing as a cultural phenomenon, and academic and public libraries, as well as online archives, have begun to work on archiving zines. Stephen Duncombe explains the need to research and archive zines, ‘They are something that is a bit of an anomaly today: a culture that people produce and distribute themselves, instead of merely consuming something made by experts and sold by corporations. While zines themselves may be relatively unimportant, the implications of this DIY ideal are huge. What would happen if we all decided to produce politics in this way?’ Viewing independent publications as historic documents that need to be preserved and researched is an idea that is growing in momentum. Zine writers have begun to donate their zine collections to libraries for preservation, following the lead of Factsheet Five’s Mike Gunderloy, who in 1993 donated five hundred boxes of zines to the New York Library. In a sense, this work of archiving zines is grounding the zine network, providing a physical space for readers to experience a sense of the scope of the scene.

Elke Zobl, who documents zine history on her site grrrlzines.net, explains why she feels that the voices of marginalized groups producing zines need to be preserved. ‘I am drawn to zines because they reflect the unfiltered personal and political voices of people from different backgrounds, countries and interests. We don’t get to hear those voices, especially those of girls and young women, women of colour, working class women, queer and transgender youth – in mainstream, adult-run media. Historically, these voices have been erased and forgotten and that’s why they are so important to document and preserve.’ She continues, ‘Zines document not only people’s daily lives and their participation in social and political life but also the cultural zeitgeist and certain historical moments. They are vivid and important examples of alternative self-publishing. Because print zines often have a short publishing lifetime and are difficult to catalogue, many libraries have not archived them. The same is true for online zines – they are not preserved at all. Right now I am working on a database to document and preserve e-zines for the future. In the years to come, grrrlzines.net will be important archival documents illustrating a long tradition of feminist alternative and grass roots publishing.’

Some zine writers feel that academic interest will dampen the creativity of the zine, confining it to academic circles perhaps, and archiving will lessen the sense of immediacy. Others view this interest as a valuable opportunity to preserve generations of zine writing.

The Queer Zine

In the 1970s, following the emergence of punk, those punks that were gay felt dissatisfied with the options of either participating in the hardcore punk scene or the mainstream gay scene. Neither scene was willing to accept them fully: they could either be queer in the punk scene or punk in the queer scene. As many individuals identified with both scenes, they realized they would need to create their own new and radical scene to challenge the accepted boundaries of each – and so Queercore was born.

The first zine with queer content began in New York in the early 1970s. Ralph Hall, an activist in the post-Stonewall radical gay movement called Gay Activists Alliance, produced his zine Faggots and Faggotry under the name FIRM–Faggots International Revolutionary Movement. The zine was filled with homoerotic line drawings, poetry and political commentary. The content was largely personal, including reflections on love, sexuality and politics. It was radically different from anything else being produced at the time and, in the early days of the punk zine, proved to be both different and shocking. As with the later riot grrrls, whose identification of a need for a very particular kind of zine meant their publications gained a wide readership extremely quickly, the queer zine rapidly evolved and, accompanying the growing numbers of queer individuals in punk music, became a force to be reckoned with in DIY culture.

The term ‘homocore’, which would later become interchangeable with the more inclusive word ‘queercore’, first appeared in the title of the influential zine by Tom Jennings and Deke Motif Nihilson in 1988. Dissatisfied with the current zines they were reading, which typically focused on the often macho, sexist and homophobic hardcore punk scene, they found inspiration in the writing of Bruce La Bruce and GB Jones.

JDs Zine

Lesbian filmmaker and musician GB Jones and her gay male friend Bruce LaBruce had begun their zine, JDs, a few years earlier in Toronto, Canada, in 1985 and filled its pages with news of the queer music scene that was beginning to take shape. They were disillusioned with the tendencies of punk culture to be tailored towards the straight male and were angered by its often overtly sexist and homophobic attitudes.

Neither did they fit into the traditional gay club scene, which dominated 80s gay culture and favoured music by pop bands such as Erasure and Boy George. Political action and social pressures had already begun to establish social spaces for gay people to meet and socialize but these had quickly developed into a homogenous culture with strict codes of dress and behaviour. Queer punks, such as Jones and LaBruce, experienced a sense of exclusion from these seemingly accessible spaces. Jones explains that, by the time they started JDs in 1986, ‘…all the JDs gang had been thrown out of every gay bar in Toronto… It was obvious we weren’t consumers of the ‘right’ clothes, shoes, hairstyles, music and politics that the rigid gay and lesbian ‘community’ insisted on: we didn’t subscribe to the racism and misogyny and their ridiculous segregation of the sexes, either. Plus we were poor.’ 11 Such factors alienated the pair and their friends from the standardized gay experience. Without access to support from the gay community they needed to create their own alternative. LaBruce explains their position, ‘We weren’t so much trying to build a community as create the illusion that there was already a fully-fledged, swinging movement of queer homosexuals happening in Toronto, even though there was only two dykes and one lonely faggot.’12

He continues, ‘One of the main impetuses behind JDs was to rant against the direction the punk movement was going in at that time. The early punk scene was much more adventurous and sexually experimental, particularly as it emerged in London and New York in the late 70s and Southern California in the early 80s. Like the early gay scene, it was a refuge for all sorts of people who engaged in nonconformist behaviour, from criminals to oppressed minorities to sexual outlaws of all stripes. By the mid-80s however, with the advent of hardcore, a certain sexual conservatism crept into the scene. The macho posturing of the speed metal heads and the skinheads and the other mosh pit habitués resulted in a regression to a kind of high school mentality, with the jocks on centre stage and the girls and fairies on the periphery like wallflowers. So with JDs, we tried to poke fun at the macho boys by putting them in compromizing, homosexually charged contexts and pointing out the homoerotic nature of their antics. We would get visiting band members drunk and make them take their clothes off and take pictures of them with large phallic objects beside them and publish them in our movies and fanzines. We were brats in that regard.’

In response to their sense of alienation and exasperation at the narrow lifestyle choices offered to them by the hardcore punk scene and the mainstream gay scene, Jones and LaBruce turned to the traditionally punk medium of the zine to express their views. By creating JDs, they aimed to reach others with similar attitudes in order to network, share ideas and develop an alternative culture, which would blend queer and hardcore identities.

JDs is seen by many to be the catalyst that pushed the queercore scene into existence. La Bruce explains the reaction. ‘Sitting behind our little desks at 3am in the morning with our glue sticks and scissors and pencils and take-out coffees, we never thought that our little fanzine would become an international phenomenon with fans all over the globe. We obviously connected with a disenfranchised minority within the minority who felt they weren’t being represented.’ The zine had a fairly long lifespan, it ran till 1992, and its influence exceeded these years in print.

Interview with GB Jones, co-founder of JDs zine and member of the queercore band fifth column.

Was JDs a conscious reaction against the punk and hardcore scene?

‘JDs was a conscious response, as opposed to an unconscious reaction, to the punk and hardcore scene but bear in mind that those scenes weren’t taken particularly seriously. Our goal, vis-à-vis the punk scene, was to antagonize.’

Were you consciously trying to build a queer community?

‘Yes and no. We were vigorously uncompromizing but aware that like-minded people were out there, ready for a change and astute enough to appreciate our aesthetic.’