Queer Futures Zine
Ed. Ciara Maguire
Self-published
Bursting out of Glasgow’s ever-thriving zine and self-publishing culture comes a collective vision of glittering potentiality. Queer Futures, edited by poet Ciara Maguire, is a compendium of imagined futures by queer writers, collectives and artists. At once utopian and provocative, the collection positions itself at a turning point for society at large, and dares to propose a future ‘unbound by heteronormative structures of time and movement… [which] must also be an anti-racist future, an accessible future, a future free of borders.’
Some of the futures here are biblical in scale; reimaginings of history and mythology. Chris Timmins announces that, ‘i rewrite the bible: jesus turns/water to white zinfandel’. In Aischa Daughtery’s poem ‘I CALL MYSELF DYKE NOT JUST BECAUSE I AM, BUT SO YOU KNOW YOU’RE NOT ALONE’, a lesbian lineage is traced, formed from the ribs of Anne Lister, Audre Lorde and Leslie Feinberg, and resulting in the pathos of a teenager watching The L Word in a locked bedroom. Daughtery’s succinct description of dyke becoming as ‘natural as/lunch or as vast as revolution’ reflects the collection’s vast leaps from ideological fury to smaller, intimate wishes.
Hayley Jane Dawson’s queer future is ostensibly a smaller ask, more reachable, but no less longed for: ‘I want to take it and make it my own with you/chickens, log fires, the lot’. Their domesticated rural daydream is accompanied by drawings of swans, mammals, lesbians, all touching, on torn paper scraps—bittersweet, like a washed-up memory of a once-possible dream. Some utopias are smaller still— the trinket-like image of Georgie Brooke’s ‘A Poem That I Keep Folded In My Purse In Case I Ever See You Again’ is representative of a whole parallel life that remains out of reach, heartbreaking and resonant.
The zine’s visual contributions, at their best, allow its central ideas to fly. Garry Mac’s ‘MANIFESTOPIA’ is rousing, but their centrefold artwork imagining a birthday in 2062 is a freewheeling marvel of spiky future language and delicious sci-fi phrasing (‘ritualistic death by luvbom’). Sedona May Tubbs’ photographs of shirtless and fishnet-swathed queers posing on rooftops and reaching up to the sun are subtly moving. Their queer joy stretches to eternity, but is doused in splashes of paint or acid—a possibility for the future, or a crushed longing from the past?
It’s fitting that proceeds of the zine are to go to the Small Trans Library’s relief fund: Queer Futures can be read as an extension of the ways in which queer people have always created our own pocket universes of solidarity, hope, and pleasure—whether in pursuit of frivolity or great need, or a combination of the two.
—Claire Biddles