Sexuality as Hidden

robotmad@gmail.com

This zine was sent to me by Zinemonger Distro, a distro that distributes free zines. Awesome! Go check out the site to find out how you can get some!

Sexuality is a big part of many people's lives. Identifying as queer, or somehow "outside the norm", in regards to sexuality can be easy or it can be difficult. There are many factors involved and no two people are ever going to have the exact same experience.

The writer of this piece discusses growing up in a house with a parent who wasn't particularly happy to have a queer identifying daughter (and tried to ignore the whole thing), early relationships, keeping your sexual identity secret from your friends, and if you can still self-identify as queer if you're in a long term, monogamous relationship with someone of the other gender (which reminded me of some of Erika Moen's experiences as chronicled in her webcomic Dar).

A lot of the story was vague, either to protect identities of those involved or because the author wasn't comfortable giving more details (which is fair enough), and I feel kind of bad saying this, but none of the information was new to me. I don't mean to diminish the experiences the writer went through, and I understand that writing about these events can be incredibly cathartic, I think it's just that I've read a fair number of autobio coming out stories, and it depresses me that people still have to go through with that shit. Boo hiss. Grow up world.

Gender Fuck What issue 1

haveagooddayproject@gmail.com
genderfuckwhat.tumblr.com

I enjoyed this zine about genderfucking and genderqueering. The author discusses sexuality, gender, conforming to society, sex, and language in a personal way, comparing their own views to what they imagine other people might think or do.

It made me think about what I consider myself to be, why I sometimes act the way I do in relation to things like gender and sexuality, what I find attractive in other people (created in part by a list of "girls and female types I like..." that includes "tall or short girls", which I thought was awesome), and how I conform myself to society. Why do I wear eye makeup when I do? Why do I wear dresses when I do? When do I keep thinking girls with short hair who turn out to be lesbians are cute?

And then there was a piece that I find quite depressing. It talks about how when, as a teenager, the author was walking home one evening when a middle-aged man walking the other way asked "Wanna fuck?". I wonder what this reveals about our society that there are people who would do that, and that it seems you have to live with that sort of thing if you are a female in today's world. How can I make it better?

Of course, I must admit that I wasn't totally aware of all the various definitions of terms used in this zine (what exactly was 'genderqueer'?), which led me to look some of them up on Wikipedia. I'll leave you with this quote from when the article on genderfuck was up for deletion. I think it is completely hilarious.

"This articlefuck is a neofuckologism. Wikipedia is a not a fuckslang dicfucktionary."

Sometimes the discussion pages are the best part of Wikipedia.

Ricochet Ricochet Ten

By Jenna and Emma (I think)

This is clearly made by at least two people, but exactly how many, and who, I'm not entirely sure. I do know that one of them used a not very good typewriter for most of her parts meaning that it is quite hard to read the sections where the text was very light in the original.

The content is rather strange. Well no, that's unfair, the content is what you expect: book reviews, zine reviews, event reviews, a scene report, the experience of eating a frozen, microwavable burrito, anecdotes, queer stuff. It's all fairly basic zine fodder.

It's just the writing style is...hard to describe. It's as though you crossed a bubbly teenage girl with a vegan, queer activist.

"Like I started to feel that I needed to engage with films outside of the homo ghetto. But oh my god, literally everything I read makes me mad cus it's stupid heronormative shit that doesn't relate to my life."

To be honest, that's not the best example but I can't really bring myself to reread this entire zine with half of it written in badly reproduced type writer, parts of it written in a back and forth which is incomprehensible as it doesn't say who is saying what, and all of it written in a style I do not really enjoy.

I mean, the content isn't all horrible or anything, they recommend some good comics (anything that tells people to read Stuck Rubber Baby is at least a little good, though I wonder about the inclusion of Junko Mizuno in their queer comics section), there's a very frustrating piece on a pizza place that offers vegan cheeze on their pizza, but uses milk in their crust (wtf!), an amusing overheard quote about Beyonce being a witch, and the idea of a "sex attic" instead of a "sex dungeon". Awesome!