Image credit: “Dancing Wimmin,” by Jeanne B. in Gendertrash from Hell, Issue 1, Vol. 1 (Apr/May 1993), courtesy of The ArQuives.
In connection with the Collaboratory, Dr. Juan Carlos Mezo González was recently in Toronto for the launch of his new book, Gay Print Culture: A Transnational History of North America. It was a pleasure to hear his history of gay print culture, which foregrounded transnational networks in North America rather than the familiar Canada/US binary.
During his visit, one of my peers brought up zines, asking whether they were circulating alongside the periodicals featured in the book, as they’re frequently positioned as a central node in queer print culture. Mezo González pushed back: gay men didn’t really have a past stake in zines, and the “queerness” of zines is a bit of a misarticulation. It is predominantly a lesbian-feminist production, and perhaps not as encompassing of ‘queerness’ in the ways we like to imagine.
When I think about it, that tracks with what we actually see in our archives. There’s little sustained gay men’s presence in zine collections, which makes me wonder how zines became so firmly installed in our contemporary imagination of “alternative queer media,” and what work that framing is really doing.
Zines are so often treated today as the emblem of queer DIY culture. They’ve become symbolic proof of underground queer/punk circulation, intimacy, and pre-digital resistance. However, if their footprint is narrower than a universal queer narrative suggests, then we’re dealing less with a stable historical fact and more with a retrospective construction. Perhaps this contemporary zine revival is part of a story we are telling about queer media that serves a particular need today.
The past decade has seen a massive resurgence in queer zines: they’re sold at art fairs, curated in museums and archival exhibitions, produced in workshops, and circulated through online platforms. What once was materially underground now often appears in highly legible, even highly-curated forms. They’ve entered the mainstream under a neoliberal guise framed as investment in alternative and queer press and politics.
Beyond that, tools like Canva collapse gaps between amateur and professional production, which isn’t inherently a problem (until we consider the implications of non-consensual data extraction and AI training), but it complicates how we think about “DIY” as a category.
Platforms like Canva can certainly function as access points for under-resourced creators, introducing a different set of constraints that do generate forms of workaround creativity. But ultimately, if the aesthetic of alternative underground print is nearly fully reproducible within platform capitalism, then what, exactly, is being revived, and what is being subverted? What is zine, and what is zine simulacrum?
I think part of the answer arises when we look at the gaps between networks and aesthetics, because this is where the contemporary focus on zines begins to feel more like retreat than revival. There’s something comforting about returning to the visual language of 90s queerpunk culture. It’s grounded material: we already know how it ends.
However, that comfort is doing a particular kind of present-day work. Queerness right now is incredibly politically, socially, and materially unstable. The internet, which has been central to queer life for decades (see: Avery Dame-Griff), feels hostile and fragmented, if not entirely exhausted. And instead of fully confronting that instability, we find ourselves turning away.
It’s not that zines are empty (quite the opposite), but if we keep transposing upon them a weight they can’t bear, they’re set up to fail. We keep reaching for earlier forms of queer life as if they might stabilize the present, but they can’t. The conditions that produced those forms no longer exist.
This is why the replication feels so hollow to me. If you try to make a zine on Canva today (a well-known assignment for those of us in arts and humanities classrooms), the platform, and dozens of others like it, reproduce the surface photocopied textures, grungy layouts, and DIY typography, but without the dense, messy, slapped-together necessity-driven networks that made those forms meaningful.
Left: Cover of Gendertrash from Hell, Issue 1, Vol. 1 (April/May 1993), courtesy of The ArQuives. Right: Page 2 of Black and White Violet Collage Activism Social Issues Zine, Design Template, Canva Creative Studios, 2026.
If anything, the digital simulacrum of these aesthetics reveals the absence of those networks today. The zine becomes a kind of placeholder, a hope that if we digitally reconstruct the object, the community will reappear around it.
1990s zines weren’t powerful because they looked a certain way. They mattered because they were evidence of the people who were making them. They emerged from active circuits of exchange (mailing lists, local alt or punk scenes and local organizing, subcultural infrastructures). These networks required participation, risk, and plenty of infighting. The form followed the network, not the other way around.
Right now, queer life is still deeply networked, but those networks don’t look like zines. Instead, they’re online, uneven, often invisible as “culture”: online groups organizing housing, Discord and Signal group chats, hookup apps structuring intimacy and the thousands of ways they’re subverted, Instagram pages circulating information and events, alongside the many messy, local queer organizations we know and love. These are the digital platform pages advertising the queer arts and craft fairs where we go to buy our 90s simulacrum zines.
Beyond them, even more unstable formations like burner accounts, invite-only spaces, and the constant rise and fall of DIY HRT websites and other mediums of the sort, are constantly shifting micro-publics that are harder to name and harder to archive.
These spaces feel closer in function to older queer circulation systems than the polished “Canva revival” of print, but they don’t come with the same nostalgia. They’re messy, almost always ephemeral, and sometimes really bleak. They force us to confront what the internet has become: a space of both fast-paced survival and slow collapse.
Nostalgia might soften the edges, but the underlying problem remains: the infrastructures that once supported queer life have changed under the Internet, and no amount of aesthetic revival will reverse that.
This points to an archival tension we ought to notice. Institutions are getting better at preserving zines, print artifacts, and even early web materials. But we’re much more equipped to preserve familiar forms than what is still unfolding in unstable, digitally hard-to-capture spaces. The messier internet infrastructures are slipping past us.
So maybe the issue isn’t that zines are irrelevant, it’s that we’re asking them to stand in for something they no longer are. And if that’s true then the challenge is not to perfect the aesthetics of past queer media, but to grapple with the conditions of the queer present despite the discomfort. If we keep investing in simulacra of older forms, we risk missing what’s actually required of us now.
Ally Krueger-Kischak (any/all) is a Research Assistant on the Drag Kings Oral History Project. As an MA candidate in History and Sexual Diversity Studies, their research explores trans and queer rural histories, futurities, and working-class environmentalism in Southern Ontario.