Photo courtesy of Queer Zine Archive Project
Milo Miller and Christopher Wilde of Queer Zine Archive Project
Milo Miller (left) and Christopher Wilde (right)
A treasure trove of LGBTQ+ history lies in an unassuming Riverwest duplex home. Since 2003, the Queer Zine Archive Project (QZAP) has preserved DIY and small press publications of queer communities from around the world. What started as the combined zine collections of co-founders Milo Miller and Christopher Wilde has ballooned to over 4,500 archived items in their physical collection and about 600 in their digital database.
QZAP operates with a collectivist, non-hierarchical and non-commodified approach. Their mission is to keep these chronicles of LGBTQ+ history alive while not gatekeeping any such queer experiences. While not a nonprofit, QZAP does take interns, and they open their archive to researchers and historians.
Miller is a Milwaukee native, and Wilde is from the Twin Cities. Both zine makers themselves, Miller and Wilde met around 2001 through queer and DIY punk circles in California. Once they moved to Milwaukee together, QZAP started as an outlet for them to compile collections of queer folks telling their own stories. At the time, Miller and Wilde had about 350 zines between the two of them.
Sharing Information
“People have been writing about all these experiences about queerness in all different forms, and they’ve been self-publishing them in these weird little booklets, maybe making 100 copies,” Miller explains. “As folks who are interested in organizing and community-building, how do we share this information? That’s how we were thinking.”
“It was fortuitous meeting people who were into zine librarianship,” Wilde adds. “Our collection policies are basically to replicate how zines are usually traded or purchased in communities, like zine fests or through the mail.”
The QZAP collection encompasses a variety of topics ranging from music to short stories to sexual health to trans liberation to drag culture. It contains material from at least 15 different countries and in over a dozen different languages, including from Argentina, Palestine, South Africa, India, Ireland and Italy. QZAP stickers have been spotted as far away as Halifax, Nova Scotia and Melbourne, Australia
Building Connections
“Zines have permeated over a lot of cultures,” Wilde notes. “There are definitely folks doing similar things to us in different parts of the world and it’s good to build connections to these things. We’re just one node along this whole constellation of the world where zine culture happens.”
The collection preserves rarities like an original Bikini Kill zine as well as a Vice Versa periodical from 1947, which is one of the earliest known lesbian magazines. QZAP spotlights different items in their collection by way of their “Zine of the Gay” posts.
|
|
Early on, QZAP participated in community programs like Project Q with the MKE LGBT Community Center, and they helped Milwaukee Zine Fest for a number of years. QZAP continues to vend at community events and fests, plus they facilitate zine-making workshops in Milwaukee and beyond. Miller and Wilde have also participated in lectures and panels at universities, libraries, and conferences.
Digital Communities
As Miller points out, in today’s age, queer digital communities have become vulnerable to surveillance and censorship by the reactionary, conservative powers that be. “It makes it not conducive to actually building communities and exchanging knowledge. The world has changed in ways where the most commercially accessible spaces have self-censored to the point of being ineffective.”
Miller and Wilde’s current goal is to take a full inventory of everything in QZAP, which has been an ongoing process of theirs since COVID hit. QZAP has merchandise for sale, including their latest “toy book” zine Queer Space Communism - An Illustrated Manifesto as well as shirts and buttons. Got a zine for QZAP? Fill out their form at gittings.qzap.org/zine-donation-form/. Follow QZAP on Instagram @queerzines or on Bluesky @qzap.bluesky.social.
“These aren’t just activist tools but peoples’ lives,” Miller shares. “The way that we build communities through storytelling has become way more important to us, and I don’t know if we’d want to be doing anything else right now. The other things in our lives keep feeding into this.”
Miller and Wilde plan to revamp the QZAP website and acquire some new furniture in the near future. A wish list for items they need is posted on their website, and they take monetary donations as well. New zines land in their collection every week, after all.
