American Counterculture, Glimpsed Through Zines

The first zine that I ever read was called Snotrag, and its author was a straight-edge hardcore fan, bike enthusiast, and occasional raver who lived in Vermont. I was none of these things; our main commonality was that we were both at debate camp. Snotrag was just five photocopied pages folded in half, but having it handed to me felt like an intimate gesture. Each page was filled with wobbly, hand-arranged columns of riffs, interviews, reviews of basement shows and seven-inch singles, and recaps of debate rounds, with little graphic design beyond the occasional boldface album title and a photocopied ACT UP sticker. There were two pages left completely blank, presumably by accident. I recall a feeling of discovery, not just of new musical genres or bands but of the fact that you could be into so many different things at once: punk, Derrida, nanotechnology, AIDS activism, Islam, the great outdoors. I was inspired to start my own zine as a way to test out different poses, to figure out whether I was a dreamer or a cynic, a zealot or a snob, though my sense of taste was less confident. I mostly cultivated a political stance out of everything I rejected. Figuring out what I actually loved would come much later.