PRIDE

column, whose name he’d changed from Tee Parties to Tee: Word, opened with a story about Terry Martin partnering with Ford on a jazz-themed party at infamous Lakeview nightclub Medusa’s (for which Ford finagled a one-day beer-and-wine license for the ordinarily alcohol-free juice bar).

It didn’t take long for Thing to find readers—including a few who were inspired to do more. Malone Sizelove, an advertising art director who’d befriended Ford and Adkins on the nightlife scene, asked Ford if he could come work for Thing. Ford told Sizelove that he’d like to bring him aboard, but he’d feel bad about ditching his current art director. “I found out later he was the art director,” Sizelove says.

Sizelove asked Ford for his blessing to make a queer zine with a slightly di erent bent—it would be entirely about nightlife, built on photos and bar gossip. Ford was encouraging. “Robert was one of the most generous, kind people I’ve ever known in my entire life,” Sizelove says. In 1991, as Sizelove worked to launch his queer monthly, Gag (which would become the weekly Babble a year later), he reached out to Ford with questions about computer technology and printing.

totally and completely and unapologetically what they were.”

Ford had a Macintosh computer, a copy of Adobe PageMaker, and an idea: He wanted to publish for an audience whose needs weren’t being met by white queer zines or by relatively straitlaced Black queer magazines such as BLK. He saw an underpopulated niche where an irreverent, underground zine aimed at Black queer people could thrive. Out of that came Thing, which debuted in November 1989.

Ford’s friends began getting into zine making around the same time. Bouyer launched Planet Roc to promote events at Holsum Roc, and it slowly grew from an events calendar into a hub for poetry and short fiction. Lafreniere published The Gentlewomen of California and became an active participant in a growing international network of queer zinesters who communicated largely by mail. He expanded his circle by finding unfamiliar publications in the ads of zines he already had, and he shared work by a wide range of queer artists and writers in a photocopied packet that he sent to a growing mailing list. One envelope at a time, he helped build a new queer community distinct from and opposed to mainstream gay culture.

“Mainstream gay culture was racist, sexist, boring—and these zines were people expressing the same thing all over the world,” Lafreniere says. “That’s why we started calling ourselves ‘queer’—we wanted to set ourselves completely apart from mainstream gay culture. ‘Gay’ was kind of a negative word, as far as we were concerned, even though we were gay.”

The debut issue of Thing got right down to staking out its territory. Warren wrote a personal tribute to gay disco icon Sylvester, who’d died the previous year from complications of AIDS; Adkins provided Black hair-care tips next to a Ford essay about queer phone-sex lines; erotica and poetry shared a two-page spread; and the cheeky Bunny & Pussy gossip column appeared the page before the lists that would also become a regular feature of Thing (the categories constantly changed, but in that issue they included “most embarrassing comeback efforts” and “some girls that gay men are stereotyped to love and emulate”).

It was brazen to a fault: it printed a David Sedaris essay that had been copied (possibly without Sedaris’s knowledge) from one of the packets Lafreniere had sent to his queer zinester mailing list. And it unabashedly spotlit its creators’ inner circle, though without excluding everyone else: Adkins’s scene news

Author and historian Owen Keehnen sees Thing as one of the publications that gave him space to establish himself as a writer—he was an occasional contributor, and the zine provided him with a place to express his queerness in his writing. “It was a zine that really was about claiming who you are and being your outrageous self, if that was what you were feeling,” he says. “It hit at the right time, where suddenly it didn’t seem as important to be like the gay mainstream.” on May 25, 1991, Randolph Street Gallery (then at 756 N. Milwaukee) hosted SPEW: The Homographic Convergence, a queer zine convention organized by Lafreniere and Larry Steger. For about six months, Lafreniere had been sending letters and making phone calls to recruit zinesters and writers from around the U.S. and Canada with whom he’d been in touch. The convention’s 60 or so participants included G.B. Jones and Bruce LaBruce, the Toronto punks who’d sparked the queercore movement in the mid80s with their zine J.D.s . LaBruce screened his first feature film, No Skin Off My Ass, and at the afterparty—which also featured Vaginal Davis and DJ sets by Ford and Adkins—Jones performed with her band Fifth Column.

Mark Freitas, a queer-zine advocate and