One sunny afternoon in May, a century-old power plant in Brooklyn was buzzing—not with electricity, but with hundreds of creatives congregating at the Black Zine Fair. Handmade booklets piled up on table after table, forming vast paper topographies of politics and activism and culture. Marginalized groups in skating! Fictional characters “that probably made me queer”! Someone else presented zines dedicated to all the TV shows they had recorded onto VHS. Still more tables hosted zine assembly. Everyone seemed to have stickers for sale. The scene evoked New York in the 1980s or ’90s, when the city was home to a thriving DIY zine culture built on late nights at Kinko’s. Only now many of the zine makers swapped online handles along with their analog wares.
For over a decade, social media platforms have served as cultural loci, and in many ways still do, but recent events have deepened the notion that digital spaces aren’t safe or effective for everyone. Once beloved platforms like Twitter have been overtaken by white supremacist speech. Meta now allows users to call gay and trans people mentally ill. TikTok has been on the verge of being banned in the US for years now. Meanwhile, the US Department of Homeland Security has announced its plans to screen the social media of immigrants and visa applicants. What’s next? Even if the bigotry and surveillance don’t bother you, major platforms often feel like content wells for advertisers and AI scavengers, picking through the detritus of influencers chasing engagement. Breaking through seems impossible.
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For those looking for alternatives, zines have taken on new importance as a way to spread ideas outside the easy reach of unfriendly eyes and unhelpful algorithms. Organizer Mariame Kaba, who cofounded the Black Zine Fair in 2024, says she’s seen lots more interest in the medium lately, especially from Gen Z. About 1,200 people attended the fair this year, and similar gatherings and workshops are happening around the world. Online, people who want to talk about abortion access or queer rights or the war in Gaza are “feeling like they can’t say certain things,” Kaba says. Zines allow them to “share personal experiences, to make connections with other people, to fight censorship, to evade the surveillance that's consistent and constant when you are on digital platforms.”
With the Trump administration and GOP lawmakers limiting access to certain kinds of health care in the US, for example, zines about DIY health care for trans people or pamphlets about self-managed abortions could become even more prevalent. “If they start criminalizing that kind of information, how will you access that information, if not literally somebody passing you a pamphlet or a flyer or a zine?” Kaba asks. “For folks who are on the left, we better figure out how we're going to transmit information about important things to each other that is not using social media.”
Zines, and their predecessors, have a long history of political and cultural impact, particularly in the US. In the 18th and 19th centuries, pamphlets helped spread messages about the abolitionist movement. LGBTQ+ people made paper booklets to share information during the AIDS crisis. Riot grrrls used them to spread feminist messages in the ’90s, the last time zines saw a huge boom.
Graphic novelist and documentary filmmaker James Spooner was just a high schooler when he stumbled upon his first zine: an anarcha-feminist zine called “Aim Your Dick” that Mimi Nguyen made in 1993. “It introduced me to the idea that a teenager could have a voice that the world outside of school would be interested in hearing,” Spooner says. He quickly made a zine of his own.