Artist. Zinester. Game Dev/Designer. Graphic Designer. Hobbyist Programmer. LARPer. Creative Person.
Olivia Montoya

Ace & Aro Zines as Community History and Community Building

This is a presentation I gave at the 2019 WorldPride Ace & Aro Conference in NYC. It’s a talk based on hundreds of hours of independent research into the history of asexuality in zines and early self-published LGBT periodicals between the 1970s and early 2000s. It also discusses aromanticism in zines and how ace and aro zines are important for documenting history and community building. My goal is to eventually make a zine and series of blog posts expanding on the presentation.

This research also inspired an article on asexual zine history on queer media outlet Them. Read it here: https://www.them.us/story/asexual-zines

That article was referenced in this Slate article: https://slate.com/human-interest/2020/03/asexuality-history-internet-identity-queer-archive.html

This article and the Ace Zine Archive were cited in “The Erotic Worldmaking of Asexual and Aromantic Zines” by Ela Przybylo: https://www.academia.edu/84496803/The_Erotic_Worldmaking_of_Asexual_and_Aromantic_Zines