2023: control the message and how it is conveyed: on zines and personal websites

Recently I had the pleasure of teaching a class of incoming Colorado College students for a day on the topic of zines and their role in queer liberation movements, with the goal that at the end of the few weeks of class they would make zines themselves.

When I asked the students who had heard of a zine, only one student raised their hand, having only just learned about zines from their senior art class.

I want to take a moment to say here here what I said to the class:

If you are an artist, writer, creator of any kind, you should be making zines. And if you are a college student, that is the best time to make zines! Printing on campus is usually free and with the cost of tuition you should basically just run a zine business out of your dorm room.

Zines represent everything we should be fighting against, even now in a time with more representation available of more ideas, there are still forces that seek to censor. The algorithm silences queer/trans creators and creators ofcolor. Recently, the Asian American Literary Festival was canceled by the Smithsonian for featuring programming for trans and nonbinary writers. There are forces that seek to silence you, while also saying "You need us. to be an artist, you need our platform, and our approval." Whether that's an institution like the Smithsonian or one of the major social media companies.

While zines are an analog delight that all should enjoy, it's true that digital space is near impossible to escape. Especially for artists.

I've found that I often feel guilty about social media. Like I should be using it to highlight what I'm doing and if I'm not recording my process with the plan of posting it, then I'm wasting an opportunity to market myself. I record a lot of process clips, but when the time comes to edit them into reels and Tiktoks, I just find myself unable to do it.

The truth is, I hate making social media posts. I hate writing copy. It does not excite me. The Internet, which I basically grew up on, in chatrooms, forums, and my own website that I ran through middle and high school, slowly became a foreign and seductive contortion of its former self, my window a portal into an addiction of all the bad news I didn't want to see, but that would grab my attention anyway.

In recent weeks, I've been switching my website from Squarespace to Neocities (Nicois dot gay) because I was inspired by the old web and the web revival movement. Browsing through Neocities sites made me feel excited about the Internet again! The combination of unexpectedness - clicking through webrings, where each new site might be a page of dead links or a sensory explosion of color and music - and intentionality - curating a page of buttons to websites I enjoy, want to revisit, and share with others. As a new webmaster, the experience of making a space that is fully customized to my aesthetic vision, as opposed to social media, where most platforms demand the creators to conform to them. Platforms that prioritize posting often, and not posting quality material but rather material that increases screen time and engagement, whether that engagement is good or not.

If you are an artist, I recommend exploring what sharing work online looks like beyond the culture of virality and algorithms. What space do you want to carve out for yourself, both online and offline. Who are you without the control of what is viral, appropriate, monetizable.

Zines and web revival share a common ethos: your creativity should run wild. The platforms and mediums you use should enhance your art and message, rather than your art fueling platforms and institutions that will demand your conformity.

As I embark on webmastery, I find myself having to untrain the parts of me that I cultivated out of a need to be seen, at the expense of the actual joy of sharing my work and using art as a way to connect with others. The more I work on the site, the more my vision for what's possible starts to grow, and I must stretch my skills and knowledge to match it. Literally - there are boxes I am trying to break out of.

The same thing happened to me with zine making. My first zine was just a chapbook of my poetry that I made in 2015. As I continued exploring the medium, vision became an exciting problem to solve. For instance, in creating "play. impact," a book of kinky queer poems, with my friend Joy Young, I could only see the book as a body, and the question became: how do I bind this book? The answer was: much like a body.

I'm the creation of my website, I decided I wanted my poetry page to have an option to present a random poem, because that is often how I have found my favorite poems. I never knew where to expect a poem that would really knock me back. Perhaps a podcast, perhaps

In an era that wants your frequent, easy, consumable content, make anything but. Make zines. Make Neocities. Have ways of sharing that are not dependent on the approval of institutions and robots that would just as quickly demonetize and deplatform you as they would make you viral.

I am going to keep sharing my work on the places where I've built my audience, but having a little digital corner of the Internet to call my own, to tailor to my liking, where it won't be taken from me at a moments notice (or if it is, well, at least I have my files and domain name) has been a comfort. I am also working on shifting to new social media platforms like Cohost which operate by a vision of how social media could be.**

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