Bruce LaBruce on zines

Filmmaker, writer, and photographer Bruce LaBruce starts in final post in my series of interviews about zines, with this one being mostly focused on what was happening in the `80s.

LaBruce co-edited the punk fanzine J.D.s with GB Jones and, like Jones, jumped right into things when we started chatting. Here it goes...

BLB: My involvement in it was all about the punk scene. Zines started out initially in the music world as fan publications for bands and singers and stuff. That kind of transmogrified in the punk world into a more political version of that original fan publication.

Friends of mine in Toronto, like GB Jones who was doing an amazing fanzine called Hide, came out of that music culture. Some had some homosexual content but it was kind of more subtle and subtextual.

When GB Jones and I started an actual queer punk fanzine it was our way of reminding punk rockers that the roots of punk were actually quite queer.


LW: Where did you see zine culture heading as the `80s were ending?

BLB: We were doing it before the internet, so everything was done by mail. It came out of more of an art practice as well and collage and cutting and pasting and doing something very hands on with glue and glue sticks, appropriating images from other sources, like mainstream magazines and porn magazines and fashion magazines and jumbling it up with our own material that we shot. So it had that whole collage aesthetic, but it was very tactile.

With the rise of the web in the `90s, in a way zines became obsolete and everybody had a webpage and it became more popularized. The internet just made that kind of self-expression accessible to everybody, so it became less specialized and more widespread.

LW: Zines also seemed more accessible, though. A lot of stores carried them on consignment. There was a lot of support.

BLB: There were also distribution networks that were more independent as well that don’t exist anymore.

I was in New York recently and somebody was promoting a Butt-style gay publication which is kind of the new thing. Butt caught the tail-end of the fanzine era and now they’re more web-based, but they kind of launched hundreds of these small format alternative queer publications of all kinds.

And this one was from Australia and this guy was in New York looking for distribution and he was shocked that there were no more gay bookstores or independently run retail and distribution stores.

When I would go to New York in the `80s and `90s there was a place called See Hear and it was this incredible small store on 7th Street and it was all alternative publications, but also rare art publications, imprints and really early punk publications. Of course they closed down at least 10 years ago I think, but yeah, those kinds of independent distribution networks are less common now. It’s all corporate.

LW: When you and GB Jones published your zine manifesto in MRR, what kind of influence did it have on zine culture ?

BLB: That was the great thing about punk. Despite the fact that we ran into certain homophobic elements in the secne, it was still a pretty wide open community and they were pretty inclusive of all alternative and non-conformist expression.

But at the same time, something like MRR or Flipside, they didn’t have so much queer material. That was always our thing, that the early roots of punk were strongly queer and sexually diverse, and by the end of the `80s, because of hardcore music and thrash and metalcore and all these macho movements, it had become somewhat homophobic.

So the fact that we were being published in MRR and Flipside and being distributed by Fact Sheet Five and distributed by alternative distributors made quite a big impact. It was sort of a watershed moment and we launched a whole slew of queer fanzines.

I think we were kind of acknowledged as spearheading this explosion of work.