Zines have been a symbol of anti-establishment sentiment for decades. Across multiple subcultures, these independently produced, handmade magazines proliferated after the birth of the first high-speed Xerox copy machine in 1969, taking on special significance for the queer community over the course of the late 20th century. Because zines could be self-produced, they quickly became vital to LGBTQ+ culture, allowing independent creators to reclaim personal narratives that had been manipulated and even villainized by mainstream media. This was an age before the internet, when mail was the best way to transmit subversive and radically inclusive messages.
As Dr. Margaret Galvan, an assistant professor at the University of Florida who specializes in comics and visual culture, phrases it, the premise of zine-making was: “How do we build [a] network to welcome people in all these different places?”
While the term “zine” itself comes from science fiction fan magazines, or fanzines, that were popular in the 1960s, the riot grrrl and queercore movements of the 1980s and 1990s spawned a new era for the format across LGBTQ+ subcultures, including the drag community. Drag zines bloomed and continue today, their development emerging parallel to — and later becoming — part of queer history, stretching from Vaginal Davis’ groundbreaking ’80s zines all the way to Cheeks Voila’s new publication Lips, which launched at Mary’s Bar in Brooklyn this February. Lips is printed with red ink onto vellum pages, designed and assembled by Cheeks herself. As with many other zines, it is a product of passion, made by someone putting art into the world for the sake of artistry itself.
Now that there is such a thing as mainstream drag, zines are still a way to tell one’s own story, and to highlight one’s own version of drag separate from versions of the art form that might be watered down for a broader audience. And while the drag zine universe is expansive, I’ve selected just a few below that echo the shape of drag’s history over the last 40 years. Here are six zines that capture the evolving art form of drag, from archival gems to contemporary provocations.
Legendary artist, activist, and creator, the divine Ms. Davis christened herself and her style as “terrorist drag” in the heteronormative Los Angeles punk scene of the 1970s. Experimenting with and hacking away at gender norms, she became part of the burgeoning queercore movement, an essential ingredient of which was zinemaking. Perhaps her most famous creation among many is the deliciously gossipy and dissident Fertile La Toyah Jackson Magazine.
As a student at UCLA in the late 1980s, Vaginal Davis worked in the university’s career counseling office and used their Xerox machine to produce FTLJM. It became one of the most influential zines of the time.
“At this time also there started to be zine conferences called SPEW where everyone gathers… everyone in the scene would have known about Vaginal Davis’s work,” Galvan says.
Indeed, Davis headlined a performance at said convention. Not only did she address the culture she was a part of, she managed to capture the performative, expressive post-punk queercore world in a 2D format, which is not easy to do, according to Isabella Tjäder, Curator of Learning at Index - The Swedish Contemporary Art Foundation, which is now hosting an exhibition of Davis’s text-based work, HOFPFISTEREI.
The fact that Fertile La Toyah Jackson Magazine was a dominant force in the zine world, and incorporated drag, no less, is incredibly powerful. Seeing drag documented in traditional media spaces at the time was extremely rare, and even more rare was the possibility of seeing drag-related media created by drag artists. Davis made space for herself the way she saw fit, and in doing so made space for others. Still, Tjäder says, Davis never saw the work she was doing at the time as anything more than something to be thrown away. Only now, as the understanding of drag’s importance has changed – even among its original participants – are drag zines now being showcased in galleries and museums around the world.
Now a regarded chronicler of New York drag, drag queen Linda Simpson was also the founder of the zine My Comrade, which ran from roughly 1987 to 1994, with a few additional issues produced periodically. “Before I even had started doing drag, I was an observer of the East Village drag scene and I thought that was really exciting, so I wanted that to be a big part,” she says. “But I think the main motivation was just that it was during the peak of the AIDS crisis, and I just wanted a gay liberation outlet, something that would provide some hope, and some entertainment during these dark times.”
As the AIDS crisis hit New York, many queer people saw their chosen families decimated. Activist groups like ACT UP emerged, but there was also a need for uplift that people like Simpson channeled into art. In a queer world where many had previously seen drag as either underground, a nuisance, or both, drag artists became figureheads of joy and encouragement, as Simpson notes. “For the most part, the drag scene did not get much attention whatsoever, so I wanted to give a voice or a space to people that didn’t often get it,” she says.
My Comrade featured original writing and photoshoots, with drag ever-present. Like Vaginal Davis’s work, Linda Simpson’s My Comrade has also since been the subject of gallery exhibitions and, in 2021, its archive was acquired by Harvard’s Houghton Library.
With a name that blends 1920s queer slang with the titles of teeny bopper magazines like Tiger Beat, Pansy Beat was another chronicle of downtown New York queer life in the 1980s and 1990s. Drag artist Endive was its original cover girl. The zine also featured now-legendary artists like Lady Bunny, Connie Fleming, and Leigh Bowery, offering something of a love letter to the neighborhood’s culture.
Pansy Beat co-founder Michael Economy says the zine was inspired by My Comrade and the urgency of the AIDS crisis. “There was a sense of, if you didn’t do it today you’d never get the opportunity. [Pansy Beat] was very frivolous, but it was sort of the point,” Economy says. “We basically felt like eventually all of us would be dead.”
Against the looming darkness of AIDS, Economy felt empowered while building something. Pansy Beat produced only five issues – always with a free condom – and regularly sold out. The issues were reproduced as a book in 2018.
“I would just say to anybody, especially anybody young that feels like they want to have a voice, make up any kind of little zine or art zine or write or collage and draw pictures or take a photograph and put it out there,” Economy says.
Dragnett — Hedda Lettuce
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“Dragnett was a Kinko’s masterpiece, stapled with a side of rebellion,” drag artist Hedda Lettuce quips via email.
Dragnett, inspired in part by My Comrade, was a comic the beloved New York drag performer designed in the 1990s that reimagined fellow artists and friends as superheroes fighting police and homophobia in the city. Lettuce was struggling to find a place in the world, she tells me, and drag became a way to both express herself and resist the mainstream.
“I thought, why not take this rebellious vibe and cast these fabulous misfits as the champions? My zine was my megaphone: I wanted to shout from the rooftops that I wasn’t just another face in the crowd. It was all about these badass queer heroes saving the world from the clutches of the patriarchy and giving the cops a run for their money,” she says.
As Galvan writes in her essay “Comics as Trans Literature,” Lettuce’s Dragnett gives “a quick snapshot of the lives, culture, and struggles facing drag queens and queer and trans individuals more broadly in the period. Creating themselves as superheroines, these drag queens become iconic in a whole new way.”
Lettuce “wanted to showcase drag as this powerhouse of sass and resilience,” she says. “We weren’t just surviving; we were thriving.”
Brooklyn-based photographer, drag artist, and performance artist MTHR TRSA first began producing zines in 2015 to share the film photographs she had been producing as an artistic counterpoint to corporate gigs. Each had a different title, and featured drag in some way, but the most recent is No Lash?, a commentary seeking to unravel beauty standards placed on drag.
“No Lash? is not just about kiki shade. It’s also about the 37-year-old woman who comes up to me at my home bar drinking the house white wine asking me why I’m not in a heel,” she says. “Your mom and your aunts all of a sudden know what drag is. They watched one season of MTV RuPaul’s Drag Race and now they’re [a] top-tier drag critiquer… it’s my true anger towards this really sick expectation of what this drag beauty standard means.” TRSA’s work is part of the ongoing conversation about how modern drag has been affected by mainstream forces, and a testament to the subversion that is still possible within the form. In the grand tradition of those before her, TRSA’s zines are both a tool of self-expression and community building.
Before the New York-based photographer, writer, and drag artist Voxigma Lo ever appeared in drag on a stage, she appeared in drag in her zines. Her first, Feeling Feministic, arrived in 2017. The form first interested her for the relative quickness and ease of production, the beauty in its imperfections, and the way it created conversation. Zines allowed her to write her own narrative — a running theme in contemporary drag as mainstream media latches on to the form. Through zines and through her writing, Voxigma Lo found not just her drag persona but also herself, she tells me. Each zine is a different, separate work with a different title, and a new work is on the horizon.
In the world of zines, Voxigma is stimulated by the prospect of putting drag in print. “There’s something about seeing someone from the hours of 10 p.m. through 3 a.m. but having them be on a piece of literature,” she says. “In a nightlife space, what you say on the mic, it’s for those 60 people in the room and for whoever’s watching on their [Instagram] stories if they happen to record it and post it. And then the zine feels like it’s for literally anyone who comes across it and then gets passed down to them.”
For Voxigma, zines are a way of existing outside of the ephemerality of the moment while still having a memory of it that’s not on your phone. Making zines is also a way to preserve the edginess of drag. “[Zines and drag] can both be DIY, messy, punk. We need to remember that. Huge-name publications and huge shows… that doesn’t ring true to me in my experience of either drag or zine culture,” she says. “Let’s keep them punk. Keep your makeup crunchy. You’ll figure it out.”
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