"Zines are both visual and textual, messy and experimental, and often meet a personal need rather than being made for a public audience, are the ideal vehicle for describing the in-between, liminal parts of life that we all experience" - Lea Cooper

The ‘zine’ has long provided a messy format through which different types of queer experience have been able to find form. We’ve used them in different ways at QUEERCIRCLE: to invite participation, make public our research, describe mental states, convey a political message or use it as a way to keep ourselves safe.

A playful interpretation of creative health was devised by the writer MJ Barker as part of their rich A4-sized zine, Queer Creative Health. This deploys speech bubbles as well as charts and graphs, word layerings as well as visual explosions, all produced in MJ’s trademark graphic style. We believe it to be the first zine on the topic of creative health, with Queer Creative Health 2 (January 2025).

QUEERCIRCLE hosted a collection of zines titled A-Zine in our first year, which invited people to send in their own work as part of a celebration of this unique art form which “rejects the mainstream in favour of the personal, the political and the playful”. Visitors were able, amongst other things, to delve into a joyful celebration of body hair, get to know the inner workings of fungi, as well as chart the dysfunction of the gender clinic. You can come and read from our collection of zines in our Library to read across the range of these self publications.

Most recently, visual researcher, Tam Hart worked in partnership with QUEERCIRCLE, Soteria and the May Day Rooms to draw on archival materials to develop a group zine called Mad Kin: ‘a resource for political self- education, but also an archive of our siblings who resist medical coercion and control, and of the kin they’ve chosen at crossings along the way.’