For the love of Zines! An approach to DIY advocacy

Zines zines zines. If you know them, great!! If you are unfamiliar with them, zines are a type of self published media, usually revolving around unconventional subjects. You'll see fanzines about popular media, punk, art, and so much more! Really, zines can be about anything, and in light of recent events, they're making a huge comeback, and my partner and I are proudly a part of their resurgence. There is so much I want to talk about in this post, because zines are well... my way of life.

I guess we'll get the scary part out of the way. One reason we see zines coming back is because of how many marginalized artists are running into the problem of censorship. In wake of the absurd amount of book bans happening in the United States that seems to have a strong focus on content surrounding race, gender, sexuality and more, we are often drowned out of mainstream media. And if that wasn't enough, social media algorithms are a nightmare to navigate as a smaller artists, and the recent changes to Meta platforms have been straight up scary for LGBTQ+ people. According to the Human Rights Campaign, Meta has removed certain policies that protect against LGBTQ+ discrimination, leading to an uprise in misinformation about the community and an increase in harassment towards queer users. As a lesbian author who writes with her partner, all of these things it's so disheartening and scary. And it doesn't stop there; even before 2025, several marginalized authors are often pushed out of literary spaces, or completely changed to fit a white, able-bodied cisgender male perspective of acceptable writing.

So why zines? Zines are making a huge comeback because of these reasons. Like a callback to their heydays, zines have always been for the disenfranchised. Zines are an art, and a way of life. They're a DIY approach to creating the spaces we never truly had as authors that want to be loud about who we are. And what I love about them is that anyone can make a zine. Zines are spaces where queer, disabled, POC, and authentic voices can be loud and expressive in ways that are unique to each author. They're a big middle finger to any force that tries to silence us, and if that's not fun, I don't know what is.

I'm surprised it took me so long to get on to zines, but despite their growing popularity, the phenomenon still seems to have maintained its underground nature. I discovered them through a class project in my senior year of college, where I painstakingly cut and pasted several pictures of birds to tell a loosely written story about the impacts of environmental colonialism, hoping it would be good enough. But the thing I learned was that anything was good enough, and that there was not really a wrong way to do it, as long as it came from the heart. Since that moment, I've been casting out zines like magic spells. I've written about disability, surviving sexual assault, and I am now writing the 4th installment in the Starcrossed Sapphics series I've done with Emily on LGBTQ+ topics. I think I can speak for Emily and I both- we love being 'zinesters.' While our works are available online, we also do our book box runs together, where we will print out a handful of our works and distribute them in little free libraries across the US. It's a way to engage, educate, and express beyond strictly posting social media content that unfortunately is getting more dicey to work with. And you know what else? Zines are an accessible way to engage in activism, and that's another thing I love about them.

My hope to you if you've never written a zine is to just try it! The hardest part is unlearning the idea that your voice isn't enough. The rawness of authenticity is what makes a zine, and it's one of the things we can do to fight back against oppression. With that said, happy zine-ing, and never stop being your loud, proud, real self.