Photo by Flickr user holisticgeek

The Queer Zine Archive was started in 2003 as a way of preserving and promoting queer DIY publishing, making queer zines available across time and space. From an initial 15 zines, the QZAP has continued to expand and recently celebrated its 5th birthday! Check out the website to find out about recent additions to the archive, ways to contribute, info about new projects (including the QZAP:Meta zine) and other ways to support this awesome archive.

Founders, Milo and Christopher were kind enough to answer some questions about the project.

Why did you decide to make an archive of queer zines? Was it always going to be a web-based archive?

QZAP
When Chris and I first met in 2001, we discovered that together we had upwards of 300 queer zines that we had collected out of our own interests or via trades. We began a discussion of how important we thought they were both personally, and also because of what they represented – a look at queers’ lives, stories, and histories that are seldom visible through mainstream media. We kicked around various ideas of how to best preserve and share these documents and decided that putting them online was the way to go. In the way we’ve built QZAP, these zines can transcend borders, and have become accessible to many more people than those who might have originally seen them.

Had you been involved in other zine projects before this? As a creator? Distributor?

QZAP
We’ve both been zinesters for many years. In the 1990s Chris was the creator of a zine called “Abrupt Lane Edge” and helped produce other arts publications. He also participated in several queer zine events over the years such as SPEW 3 in Toronto. I worked on a couple of zines previously, but really got my start in 1999 with a zine called “Mutate.” So far I’ve done 10 issues and additionally have made several one-off zines, a vegi cookzine called “SoyBoi: Queer Adventures in My Vegetarian Kitchen” and currently self-publish a zine called “Gendercide.” Additionally, most members of the loose QZAP collective are all zinesters in some form. When we have interns or volunteers, we ask them to make zines as a requirement to better understand the material that we’re working with.

I know the archive went offline for a while earlier this year because of technical complications. Can you tell me a bit about the technical basis of the project, both originally and what you’re using now?

QZAP
The Queer Zine Archive Project has been based as much as possible on free open-source software. We originally started out of our home on a Pentium 3 computer running OpenBSD. We quickly moved to a Linux-based server that was housed in a closet at a local cyber-cafe. When the cafe went out of business, we moved to a data center in Texas. After our crash, have relocated to a data center in Los Angeles.

Currently, the server is running on Debian Linux with Apache 2, MySQL, and PHP. Our website infrastructure is built on Joomla!, and the current archive is based on Gallery2.

In our workspace where we scan the zines, we run dual-boot Macintosh desktops (Mac OS X and Linux) and use Ubuntu, GIMP, XSANE for scanning, and have just started working with a closed-source library cataloging system to help us keep track of our titles as well as aid searching what we physically have in the collection.

Philosophically, we use F/OSS software because it is representative of what many zinesters have done over the years. It’s inexpensive, modifiable, and accessible to most people with a little know how.

Do you work most closely with zine creators or is there a network of distributors/collectors who contribute zines?

QZAP
A combination of the two. Many individuals will send us their zines to be included in the archive, and we have also received five large donations from people’s zine collections each containing fifty to one hundred zines each. While we started out with just 300 or so, we now have well over 1000 queer zines. The oldest document in our collection dated back to 1973 and is from Buenos Aires, Argentina. The most recent came in the post last Thursday. We have zines from more than a dozen countries and in several languages.

Is the project still primarily archival or is there a distribution aspect of it now that people are adding newer zines?

QZAP
We see ourselves as an archive with an educational mission. Our purpose is to make queer zines available for research and personal enjoyment, but we don’t discount the fact that in some ways we might be seen as a digital distro. That’s not our intent, and we try to follow the US “Fair Use” doctrine as close as possible.

Have you notice a flow on effect of archive-type projects? Do you get lots of people contacting you asking advice?

QZAP
We’re fairly well connected to other zine libraries and archives around North America, but for the most part each one has it’s own way of structuring itself.We try to help folks as much as possible with their projects, but mostly we encounter librarians and archivists who work with more institutional archives (Public and academic libraries.) Part of the reason we use F/OSS software is so that others can see and use the tools we do to make their own projects, whether they’re archival in nature or not.

What are the future plans for QZAP?

QZAP
We’ll keep scanning zines, and are slowly working toward establishing a physical space where people can come and view or check out the zines and documents.

This interview cross-posted with permission from Dandizette.net