“I believe that telling our stories, first to ourselves and then to one another and the world, is a revolutionary act. It is an act that can be met with hostility, exclusion, and violence. It can also lead to love, understanding, transcendence, and community.” -Janet Mock1
Introduction
When I was fifteen, I wrote my first zine. I cut and pasted it together, had my mom make a few copies of it at work, and then I took it to school to pass out to friends and potential friends. As I wrote and published more, it became a part of my identity. It became less about how I perceived pop culture and more about how I saw myself. How I saw my friends. How I was lovelorn. Which bands I liked. What feminism meant to me. My zines reflected what I liked and who I thought I was each time I felt the urge to stay up all night and write. My zines are basically a running record of how I changed and how my identity developed over approximately eight formative years of my life. I wanted badly to know who I was and to connect with like-minded people who would help me continue to grow into who I am today, for better or worse.
I never felt as if I fit in with any social groups in my hometown, so I looked outward. It was several years before I had access to the Internet, so I relied on letters and “friendship books,” which is how I found out about zines. A friendship book is a small, usually staple-bound book where each person decorates a page and includes their interests along with their address in order to find new pen pals. One of the pen pals I met through a friendship book sent me her first zine and it blew my mind that even I could just self-publish and self-promote my way into friendship and belonging. Being a “zinester” became a huge part of my identity, and I learned more about different cultures and identities than any white, poor, small-town West Virginia girl could have done without leaving home. What does this have to do with my students? In short, I was a teenager once, and I developed my identity while learning about different cultures and “kinds” of identities through reading, writing, and sharing. I was both validated and challenged by people I encountered, and I emerged on the other side of puberty and young-adulthood ready to fight for people whose identities, unlike mine, were marginalized.
One of the very best friends I met through zines was Cuban-American and queer. I met him before he transitioned into the first transgender and then transsexual man I knew. I was immediately supportive even though I didn’t really understand it at first. The only thing I really had to understand came easily: he needed to do whatever he needed to do to feel comfortable in his own skin. My only real concern was the threat of transphobia, which made me fear for his safety. Later, my concerns were focused on his health, as he got testosterone and medications from the Internet because he didn’t have insurance. He was one of my best friends and I just wanted him to be whoever he needed to be without psychological and physical pain. He was an amazingly gifted writer and had experienced abuse that was honestly beyond my comprehension, but he was still one of the funniest people I had ever known. We would stay up on the phone making jokes that only we were nerdy, weird, and dark enough to get. We both loved Buffy the Vampire Slayer and the comparatively short-lived soap opera Passions. In short, we connected on a level that transcended gender, and I want my students to make those kinds of connections with people they encounter. Our differences are strengths, and I want my students to start understanding that.
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