University of Florida Thesis Or Dissertation Formatting

THIS COULD ONLY BE HAPPENING HERE: PLACE AND IDENTITY IN GAINESVILLE’S ZINE COMMUNITY

FIONA E STEWART-TAYLOR

A THESIS PRESENTED TO THE GRADUATE SCHOOL OF THE UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF MASTER OF ARTS

UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA

2019

To the Civic Media Center and all the people in it

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I thank, first, my committee, Dr. Margaret Galvan and Dr. Anastasia Ulanowicz.

Dr. Galvan has been a critical reader, engaged teacher, and generous with her expertise, feedback, reading lists, and time. This thesis has very much developed out of discussions with her about the state of the field, the interventions possible, and her many insights into how and why to write about zines in an academic context have guided and shaped this project from the start. Dr. Ulanowicz is also a generous listener and a valuable reader, and her willingness to enter this committee at a late stage in the project was deeply kind. I would also like to thank Milo and Chris at the Queer Zine

Archive Project for an incredible residency during which, reading Minneapolis zines reviewing drag revues, I began to articulate some of my ideas about the importance of zines to build community in physical space, zines as living interventions into community as well as archival memory. Chris and Milo were unfailingly welcoming, friendly, and generous with their time, expertise, and long memories, as well as their vegan sloppy joes. QZAP remains an inspiration for my own work with the Civic Media Center. At the

University of Florida, Dr. Leah Rosenberg first welcomed me to the English department as graduate coordinator, and her support in navigating the administrative process was invaluable. Dr. Jodi Schorb, as graduate coordinator and as instructor in queer theory, has helped me develop both a theory and praxis of academic community. Dr. Sidney

Dobrin challenged me to think in new ways about academic conversations and media. I am grateful to all of them. At Hampshire College, Alana Kumbier was the first librarian to talk to me about researching zines, and to introduce me to QZAP. Later, her book was invaluable for my understanding of textual and material communities. My 5 advisors at

Hampshire, Michelle Hardesty and Jim Wald, also planted seeds from which all of my

academic work continues to grow. Lastly, Alexander Ponomareff, at University of

Massachusetts, has been an invaluable mentor. My work is better for their influences; any failings remain my own. My graduate student colleagues at UF have been valuable interlocutors and sources of support through this project, particularly E Jackson. I would be remiss not to thank as well as the members of Dr Galvan’s graduate course on archives, from which this project can date its academic inception. My understanding of archives, zines, and communities were enriched by our discussions, and each is woven into the fabric of this project. In the spirit of saving the best for last, I thank Graham

Gallagher, whose emotional support has proved as inexhaustible as his intellectual comradeship. A few organizations deserve particular thanks: Graduate Assistants

United, without which it would not be possible to earn a living to complete this work. The

Alachua County Labor Coalition, which provided me with a network of support and countless resources as I began to research Gainesville and learn its history. My close friends in the Gainesville Blood Syndicate have kept me honest in this work. Above all,

The Civic Media Center has been both an incredible resource in this project, an incredible subject for this project, and a home for my heart in Gainesville. I would like to dedicate this thesis to everyone who works in the heart of the South to make and protect space for learning and community. Joe Courter, especially, has been generous with his time, care, and memories, and who’s daily commitment to living out his principles make me hopeful that a better world is possible. Claudia Acosta’s vision, passion, and deep love for zines and the CMC zine library are as the burning sun to my

6 taper light; I hope only to keep the fires lit until she gets home. Lastly, I am grateful to

Travis Fristoe, who I never met but has taught me and continues to teach me more about thinking a community than anyone else.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

page

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ...... 4

ABSTRACT ...... 8

CHAPTER

1 INTRODUCTION ...... 9

2 CAN WE MAKE THIS HOUSE A HOME ...... 21

3 CAN WE MAKE THESE STREETS OUR OWN ...... 39

4 THANKS A LOT, JERKS ...... 53

5 CONCLUSION ...... 57

LIST OF REFERENCES ...... 62

BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH ...... 65

Abstract of Thesis Presented to the Graduate School of the University of Florida in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts

THIS COULD ONLY BE HAPPENING HERE: PLACE AND IDENTITY IN GAINESVILLE’S ZINE COMMUNITY

Fiona E. Stewart-Taylor

May 2019

Chair: Margaret Galvan Major: English

This study of select zines from the Civic Media Center collection in Gainesville,

Florida, mostly written between 1990 and 2010, expands existing theories about zines by reinscribing local geographies onto Allison Piepmeier's concept of an "embodied community." Based on Benedict Anderson's "imagined community," this paper argues that zines circulated the imagined meaning of the already embodied community. Close readings of select zines demonstrate how zines were able to play an active role in building a community at the local level, as well as documenting its history. When the punk community in Gainesville became interested in documenting its past and securing some continuity into the future, it did so through preserving and cataloging zines in the

Civic Media Center, and a reading of the documents and calls for contributions around the founding of the CMC collection demonstrate how the imagined community was preserved through zines in the archive.

CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION

Crammed into a set of shelves made of repurposed heart pine from a desacrilized church floor, the Civic Media Center, a community lending library and performance space in the small college town of Gainesville, Florida, boasts more than

10,000 books. Some are from sociologist and Klan infiltrator Stetson Kennedy's personal library, supplemented by subsequent donations of books, VHS tapes, DVDs, and about 4,000 zines. The atmosphere on a given weekday ranges from library meeting room to lively debate club. Weekends see the space host community swap meets, queer brunch potlucks, and punk rock shows, when the small space is filled with local 20-somethings dressed mostly in black, dancing by the stage or spilling out into the backyard to smoke or escape the heat. The Civic Media Center is filled with the sometimes beautiful, sometimes clumsy, bric-a-brac of every left-leaning cause of the last 25 years, much of it homemade in one of the three spaces the Center has inhabited since its founding in 1992. Show attendees dance under banners from Standing Rock protests, posters calling for the release of political prisoners including Leonard Peltier,

Black Lives Matter signs, a portrait of Noam Chomsky, and propaganda made for community protests in 2017 when white supremacist Richard Spencer spoke at the

University of Florida, just a 20 minute walk away. As these ornaments and relics attest, the Civic Media center is a vital site for community organizing around local and national issues- it has been used by, among others, the Gainesville Antifascist Coalition, the local International Workers of the World chapter and the local Incarcerated Workers

Organizing Committee- but it is also vital as a space. It offers a physical place to be in community, where students, local residents, and out of town guests can build

connections, seek out information and perspectives which might be difficult to obtain otherwise, and generally feel safe, welcomed, and at home.

How and why has a space like this managed to sustain itself in Florida, a state of complex demographics but a consistently conservative political climate? Why has it outlasted many other infoshops, radical lending libraries, leftist community centers, and zine archives, particularly those not part of or sheltered by academic or taxpayer funded institutions, like public libraries or University special collections? The Slingshot1 list of radical community spaces includes those which have closed, and the number of closed spaces attests to how frequently such brick-and-mortar sites for radical organizing and community find themselves unsustainble over the long term. The Civic Media Center zine library itself has taken in the zine collection for at least one infoshop which had to find homes for its texts after closing. Even extremely well known nonprofit community spaces, like ABC No Rio in New York, suffer from both internal organizational conflicts and financial hardship, compounded by the difficulty in making rent without paying with one's ideals (Barrett 24). Tickets to shows, selling books, and good old fashioned fundraising are all part of how this space sustains itself, but part of the answer for the

CMC's longevity, I think, is in how effectively local organizers in the Do It Yourself (DIY) arts and punk community in the 1990s were able to articulate, circulate, and finally archive an imagined community, one espousing the kind of " deep, horizontal comradeship" which Benedict Anderson attributed to all nationalist fantasies (7).

1The Slingshot Collective is a volunteer collective publishing a "radical" organizer and quarterly newspaper, based out of the Long Haul infoshop in the San Francisco Bay Area. The organizer is a staple for subcultural and leftist oriented people, practically a shibboleth for leftists, and along with its contact list for radical organizations, contains a "menstrual calendar, info on police repression, extra note pages, plus much more" (Slingshot Collective Webpage).

While many modes of circulation, including face to face contact at live shows and art events, contributed to the conditions of possibility which made Gainesville's art community and by extension the Civic Media Center sustainable, I argue that zines, including the 4,000 in the Civic Media Center collection, were one way such a horizontal community structure was imagined into being. Zines in Gainesville involved creators and readers in a vision of Gainesville punk community which was politically engaged through alternative and anti-capitalist artistic production and focussed on the realization of those ideals at the local level. Zines also circulated a narrative of a coherent if never homogenous punk community within Gainesville itself. Similarly to the newspapers in

Anderson's account of early nationalist formations, by virtue of their fairly limited circulation and their shared vernacular knowledges, Gainesville zines were able to bind together readers into a sense that their community persisted even outside of the moments where they came together physically, and linked those moments into a meaningful community identity. At every stage of production, consumption, circulation, and preservation, Gainesville zines reiterate the gesture of making Gainesville. Writing a zine which expressed a concept of "Gainesville" to others who would find such a concept meaningful, distributing, reading, and contributing to other zines which shared such a concept, and, finally, developing the Civic Media Center collection with a particular mandate to document, as Travis Fristoe, Gainesville zine maker and the founder of the CMC zine collection, put it, "our histories" (emphasis mine) every step requires an ability to conceive of Gainesville, itself, as a meaningful locus of identification and action (America? 14).

Unlike Anderson’s bourgeoise as reading public, separated by thousands of miles but connected with others who they were unlikely to ever see, Gainesville punks were fairly likely to at least know each other by sight2. What was required for their imagined local community to operate as a community, as opposed to a clique or a series of missed connections, was a way of making sense of their shared experiences and geographies, a way of turning face to face contact into a meaningful community.

The distinction, in part, gestures to the latter's capacity to build and sustain institutions as a means of self-perpetuation, as well as to circulate and produce buy-in for shared ideals, including that of "community" itself. Zines, small booklets usually hand- assembled and self-published, have a long history as a means of community formation and identification. As Stephen Duncombe, author of the first scholarly book on zines, notes, the Amateur Press Associations which preceded and sometimes became fanzines set up "associations, systems of communication and distribution" (55). As scholar of fandom and fan communities Henry Jenkins notes, fanzines in science fiction fandom were able to forge shared identities through circulation, including at special events for fans, like conventions. So, from the outset, zines have served as a means of connection which sometimes includes face to face connections.

Most studies on zines, in part because of their archival context and the types of collections made available to researchers, emphasize those zines created within the context of highly dispersed affinity groups. These include fanzines, in Jenkins, Riot

Grrrl, in Kate Eichhorn or Allison Piepmeier's valuable studies of girl zines, or zine culture itself, in Duncombe’s groundbreaking Notes From the Underground. In

2Anderson allows that even "primordial" communities with "face-to-face" contact between all members may require imagining (7).

Duncombe's work, particularly, zines form part of the ageographical, resistant, counter- culture which was the inevitable outcome of MTV’s and the increasingly commodified and nationally available generic alternative culture, as barbarism to enlightenment or possibly vice versa. Indeed, Duncombe and Piepmeier both read zine communities against geography, while Eichhorn, because of the particular historiographical questions of her project, considers geography only in the archival moment and not in the initial context of collection or publication. Clearly, for Gainesville zines which took up the issue of community, explicitly or implicitly, geography and local identity were essential. Hence, existing models for zine community scholarship are not quite adequate to explain the ways that these Gainesville punk zines operated.

Duncombe claims that the “underground,” his conceptual organizing term for the diffused pockets of individual producers who share opposition to dominant media culture, is almost defined by a lack of institutions and infrastructure (58). His privileged sites of analysis are suburban towns without significant space for political organizing, resulting in a “bohemia” which is “dispersed geographically without the resources to build their own physical spaces” (60). He goes on to claim that, with few exceptions,

“place no longer plays the important part it once did” in art scenes, having been replaced with “a non-geographical sprawl” and “networked” communities which are created partly through tours and road trips but mostly through postal correspondence, in and out of zines (55-58)3. Duncombe links this non geographical community to his

3In fact, in Duncombe's reproduced map of "bohemia," geography and cultural assumptions embedded in geography creep back in- the sites listed include New York, several cities in California, and both Portlands, Oregon and Maine, but the entire American Southeast is left off the map, as if communities like Gainesville did not exist at all, or as if the Southeast were completely inhospitable to bohemia or bohemians (60).

critique of the (in)efficacy of zines as a means to do anything more than critique culture or to operate at a more than cultural level. He further asserts that a self-defeating drive towards political purity, or reactionary fear of selling out, causes the fracturing

“microcommunities” within zines, partly because of their reliance on the personal as political (183, 71). This kind of fracturing would further preclude the kind of coalition building across difference which is inevitable when working locally. Despite noting that zines are exchanged from person to person by hand, and that Olympia, WA, fostered the riot grrrl scene, Duncombe insists that mapping the underground will reveal a dispersed, disorganized, single bohemia, rather than revealing local identities or many undergrounds, each of which could have some meaningful local impact, even if only at the level of culture (62-63). The Civic Media Center collection, while tracing connections across this underground through the widely dispersed points of origin of the zines included, belies this claim about the horizons of zine organizing through the predominance of local zines and and zines which document or trace local relationships and identities, as I will discuss through the collection's founding documents and readings of zines by early members of the Gainesville punk art world.

Piepmeier, too, works outside of geography in her account of zine communities.

While she claims that zines create “embodied communities,” she mainly reads physical encounters with zines as a site of bodily replacement, with the trace of the body involved in creating the object, and the sculptural properties of the object, what she calls the “semiotics of concrete forms,” provoking attachment and human connection across distance or time (62-70). Zines come with you to, to use Piepmeier's examples, the bus, the gym, or the tub. The pleasures of zine making and zine reading are bodily and

embodied, but it is zines which exist in space with people and act as replacements for in-person community networks, not people who exist in space with each other or with institutions who make zines (81-82). The history and attendant analytic of zines discussed above is tremendously useful for understanding many zines and archives, and all the texts discussed above offer insightful understandings of some early histories of zines and particularly those with highly dispersed publication network. However, it tends to privilege the influence of Riot Grrrl and zine communities which which share politics or social values across distance over those political communities which developed their politics primarily in a local context. Where academics have considered zines and local communities, it is primarily as pedagogical tools for connecting

University students, presumed not to identify with the local, and groups near their colleges. (Honma, Graybeal and Spickard, Weida).

To nuance the role of community and location in zines, and to model how

"imagining" communities might work in those communities which, if not exactly

Anderson's primordial village, are small enough to include significant shared geography and social immediacy, I propose a different kind of reading, developed from my work in and collaboration with the Civic Media Center's library. Working with Gainesville zines in the Civic Media Center collection, and focussing on those made in the twenty years between 1990 and 2010, I read these zines as an important means of self-articulation and political organ of a community which saw its politics as determinatively tied to their location, an attachment and a means of imagining which enabled the kind of institution building which supported the CMC. The Do It Yourself (DIY) punk music scene in

Gainesville, Florida, encompassed and intersected with a network of artists making

zines, particularly zines which documented their experience as members of that scene. I propose that, for these artists, producing zines was in part a way of describing, defining, and performing their identity as members of a local scene, which was, in turn, the means by which they expressed their commitment to an alternative ethos of politics and culture. Inspired by the at-scale activism of groups like Dischord Records founder Ian

MacKaye fronted Fugazi, punk activists in Gainesville focussed on creative outlets as activism, resisting homogenized national corporate “alternative rock” culture by creating a local scene which shared their progressive values and particularly their vision of punk as a community, one defined more through commitment to direct social and artistic action at the local level than a style or genre, although style and genre remain important preoccupations of the zines considered in this study.

Gainesville zines produced within the network I describe in this paper emphasized local and community connections, which meant their attention to issues of identities as politics were weaker than riot grrrl zines, and usually understood in the context of how gender, race, and other intersections played out in the local scene. This prioritization of the local community, of residency as meaningful political unit and as primary organizing value carried over into the creation and articulation of several community spaces, including some punk performance spaces/residences, and the zine library itself. In contradistinction to zines as ersatz bodies building real networks, I argue for zines as sites replicating and giving additional context, meaning, and, through the comparatively durable medium of print and through the CMC collection, "permanence" to already embodied relationships- relationships between people in the scene, between the scene and the town, between people and institutions, or those institutions as

extensions of personal relationships, and lastly as a site where the relationships of these communities and community members to the members other identities, communities, and needs could be articulated, reframed, argued, and addressed in ways not necessarily possible or desirable in person.

I am writing about a fairly narrow swathe of privileged texts in the CMC library, ones which I identify as having either a significant function in the imagining of community or ones with high degrees of interconnectivity with other zines and zine makers in the Gainesville scene. Necessarily, this focus will have the tendency to reenforce certain exclusions or marginalizations, and to create others. It produces an image of the “scene” which reflects only a small number of the most prolific, popular, or well-connected punks, which is never entirely identical with the “best” artists, or even necessarily the most representational of the scene as a whole. It also reflects the vagaries of chance always implicit in archive work, although in this case that is partly because the archive itself, as a social institution created out of personal relationships, reflects some of the described social connections and exclusions.

In the first section of this paper, I address how Gainesville punk artists used zines to describe and perform interpersonal relationships as punk community. Here I draw heavily on Allison Piepmeier’s theories of embodied community to argue for punk zines as performing an embodied and translocal community by writing about and interviewing each other, contributing to each other’s zines, and advertisements or reviews of other zines in the community and in punk communities with which they had a relationship, for instance via touring bands. In this way zines constituted not just a trace of communities and relationships, but active participants in making them. Here, I draw

manly on Jessica Mill's Gainesville perzines, tracing the personal and political relationships documented or performed inside them. I also use the Gainesville music zine No Idea, which was formative in Gainesville’s self-articulation as an important music scene. In this section I also write about the relationship between punk zine makers and Gainesville as a city, one with its own history, geography, and politics as a

Southern University town, which the punks variously entered as residents, students, and

Southerners. By writing about the town and the spaces their community inhabited in it in their zines, zine makers redefined and remapped Gainesville. I draw on histories of punk movements in the United States and zines as DIY politics, as well as ideas of

"translocal" space-making as a way of understanding how Gainesville's articulation of

Gainesville circulated and was performed for local and national networks. I also close- read the formal and material elements of several zines to understand how form and content coincided to create a performance of intimate, embodied, and local community.

In the second section, I address local institution building, temporary and long term, within the Gainesville scene, and how punk zines acted to support and articulate these institution building projects. These punk institutions include bands, performance spaces which doubled as homes or vice versa, shows, records, and the zine library at the Civic Media Center. Zines acted as a locus for organizing community spaces, allowed zine makers to articulate relationships within or between these community spaces, and to document and discuss their experiences within these institutions. These institutions primarily accord to those Red Chidgey identifies as the spaces of zine distribution networks, namely, "independent bookstores, café spaces, festivals, infoshops (alternative citizen's advice bureaus with libraries, free publications, and zine

distros), marches, and conventions" (Chidgey 29). I treat these institutions as extensions of the social relationships discussed in part one, made possible and made meaningful in part by the articulations of community expressed in work like the zines in question. To do so, I read Gainesville perzines which discuss Gainesville activism and the place-making practices involved in supporting such activism, including Travis

Fristoe's America? and Thanks, Jerks, and interviews with Fristoe in other zines and online zine resource sites. I also draw on zines which published local resources or schedules for local and translocal networks of consumption, like anarchist networking zine Brushfire! Here, I also write about the CMC collection itself as a place-making tool, one which, like an archive, argues for "the fundamental ways in which society seeks evidence of what its core values are and have been" (Schwartz and Cook). Unlike a state archive, which exercises power over memory in ways consistent with the hegemonic power of states, the CMC collection emphasizes a participatory ethos which further reenforces the "horizontal comradeship" the zines in the collection circulated.

The collection, in short, acted as a site to invest Gainesville in a shared past as formative to a shared future, precisely by taking zines out of circulation and into a designated space for remembrance and production.

In the third section, I describe how Gainesville zines, and Gainesville punks, explicitly reckoned with issues of diversity and inclusion in their scene through their relationships with institutions and zine circulation. Here, I turn to Jessica Mills’ writing about gender in Yard Wide Yarns, and an LP featuring women artists in Gainesville which she produced as part of her zine, and return to Travis Fristoe’s interviews with volunteers at the non-profit record store and community space Wayward Council.

Throughout, my goal is to demonstrate that zines participated actively in the act of imagining a community for Gainesville punks and DIY artists. Zines, through their cultural encrustations, in the sense of particular social meanings which accrue to physical forms, were exceptionally well suited to the needs of such a community in this moment (Hatfield). While zines did not solely determine the outcome of Gainesville art history, they did provide a means for Gainesville artists to distribute and engage in community imagining at the local level, which contributes to the longevity of their institutions, as well as to other, less tangible, products of their imagining, like the shared idea of their community itself.

CHAPTER 2 CAN WE MAKE THIS HOUSE A HOME

Before discussing how zines produced an imagined community for Gainesville punks in the formative institution building years between 1990 and 2010, it might be useful to write a little about the context in which these zines emerged. Gainesville,

Florida, was in the 1990s, and is today, a small University town, with a student body which, for all the rigor of a flagship public university, leans culturally towards greek life, bar drinking, and football tailgating. Perhaps as a result, there is a very porous town and gown border for students who are punks, leftists, and artists; those students, in short, more likely to leave town to avoid a football game than to attend one. The University dominates the West side of town, with a thin strip of cheap pizza places and bars which cater primarily or exclusively to college students, designated "midtown," separating campus from downtown proper. In downtown, a few art galleries, bars both fancier and more divey than those midtown can sustain, a handful of restaurants, the library, and the town administrative buildings all cluster around main street. Northeast and

Northwest of Main Street are residential areas. South and East of Main Street is

Porters, the traditionally black community in Gainesville. Until gentrification introduced

"luxury student housing" in the form of apartment blocks around mid and downtown, a process which started around the early 2000s and continues today, rental homes mainly took the form of low, old, somewhat ramshackle, buildings, some remodeled into apartments and some split internally amongst groups of friends (America 5, Resh).

Imitation Victorian style homes and 40s and 50s ranch homes were more common and readily available than studio apartments or one bedrooms in larger complexes, tending to promote cohabitation by friends and collaborators. Further out, some warehouse

space was available at least through the 1990s, which was sometimes used as a practice space for bands or housing for punks (Resh, Replay Dave).

In the 1980s, Gainesville began to emerge as a notable punk rock city. The arts culture common to college towns, and the already exceptional local live music culture, met the political punk zeitgeist from another Southern town, Washington, DC. DC bands varied, like all punk scenes, but the city became an exemplar for constructive and politically minded punk through the DIY ideals of record label Dischord and the bands affiliated with them or which they influenced1. As the punk scene gained steam locally,

Gainesville bands played at any bar which would take them, and other regional punk bands, including the legendary DIY band Fugazi, would play the area and stay in

Gainesville with local punks (Walker)2. Supported by relatively inexpensive rent, an audience of young people with ideals or at least grudges against authority, and connected to other Southern cities with similar populations, Gainesville became a hub in a “translocal” DIY leftist art world as well as an art world itself with local hubs and peripheries of cultural production. I take “translocal” from Rachel Emms and Nick

Crossley's study of the “underground metal world” of the UK, where they describe a scene or art world as "translocal" when it is an individual node in a greater system, one which retains a distinct local identity but participates in and defines a network as well.

The Gainesville DIY punk scene, and particularly the zines in it, were necessarily

1Mat Sweeting, mailorder distributor and general dudies for No Idea records, which is the most active, organized, and significant record label in Gainesville punk history, describes the label as formed on the Dischord model. (Depping and Galeana, 2013) 2Much of my history of Gainesville punk prior to 1990 is derived from Matt Walker's able history of bands and music in Gainesville Punk. While Walker's focus differs from my own in that he focusses on social relationships as apolitical and sustained primarily through live gigs, rather than engaged in local identity as a politics and circulated through texts, I derive much valuable context from his work.

translocal because their circulation, through zine networks and through touring bands, traversed and in this way helped define the borders of Gainesville.

Gainesville zines circulated in Gainesville as well as outside of it, and performed, documented, or articulated Gainesville punk identifications to Gainesville audiences. To understand how they did so, and how the embodied community in Gainesville zine making was like and unlike previous studies of embodied zine communities, the ageographical bohemia or the dispersed suburban Riot Grrrls, I will first summarize existing zine scholarship on embodied communities and then read Gainesville zines for their performances of location in relationship to Gainesville's punk scene. Starting from another Gainesville story, Allison Piepmeier's Girl Zines starts with an account of a

Gainesville zinester, although Gainesville is not mentioned by name. Sarah Dyer published a feminist comics zine, Action Girl, and curated, listed, reviewed, and networked other zines by women in the Action Girl Guide zine, which she started in

1993. As recounted in Piepmeier, Dyer created the Action Girl Guide to be a space for women's art and writing, which she felt compelled to do after experiencing sexism in her local punk community. Specifically, she received less credit for her work in organizing local punk shows and publishing a popular punk zine, No Idea. Rather than a valued organizer, Dyer felt was treated as "just" the girlfriend of the man behind the project, Var

Thelin, while men who worked the door or set up amps were praised for their work

(Piepmeier 2).

Zines, for Dyer, become an alternative community space, one where women could network against geography through their affinities of politics and identity. Action

Girl Newsletter, therefor, becomes a corrective to the specific punk politics of

Gainesville, or to No Idea, the Gainesville punk fanzine published between 1985 and

1998. The story Piepmeier tells about Sarah Dyer is consistent with Piepmeier’s overall claim about zines: that through zines as ersatz bodies with real corporality, a real community can form, one which will make up for or replace inadequate local organizing and inadequate local networks of care. Piepmeier regards these communities of affinity, realized through the strong affective ties of touch and the trace of human artistic labor as a kind of carework, as perhaps the best possible means of reorganizing sentiment under neoliberalism (186). I think it’s worth taking a closer look at the complications and ideals of the community Dyer left, to try to understand how zines operate to confirm community identities which operate based on an affirmation of the local as a meaningful politics and a meaningful way of organizing affinity. To do so, I turn first to another

Gainesville feminist zine artist, Jessica Mills. My intention is not to pit Mills and Dyer's stories against one another, especially as adds for Action Girl Guide in Mills' perzine

Yard Wide Yarns suggest that they knew each other and were friendly. Rather, I believe that Mills' zines will allow me to read the specificity of Gainesville zines back into

Gainesville, making it not a cypher for inadequate local communities, although it has and had its inadequacies, but a space which was developing and circulating particular ideals of community through zines.

Jessica Mills was a productive if not uniquely prolific zine maker and documenter of the Gainesville punk scene during the 1990s. She recorded several 7" records and one full length album as a saxophone player with the moderately well known Ska band

Less Than Jake. Despite performing and recording with the band from 1993 to 1998, if you want to hear her play, you'll have to find an original printing of their record or a

bootleg live recording, because her band re-recorded the masters for Pezcore with a different horn player. Like Sarah Dyer, Jessica Mills ultimately found herself sidelined from her primary artistic engagement in Gainesville music, even after quitting her teaching job to return to Gainesville to play with the band. Mills also quit her long- running zine, Yard Wide Yarns, in 1998, the same year she left Less Than Jake. She shifted her attention to her new child, and a column about punk rock parenting in punk rock staple periodical Maximum RocknRoll, later writing a book about being a parent and activist published through Microcosm press. While, ultimately, she left Gainesville and the "scene," her writing about Gainesville seems more positive than Dyers account in Piepmeier. Through Less Than Jake and Yard Wide Yarns, Mills was highly connected in the Gainesville artworld, and her work in turn was vital to the act of imagining a Gainesville punk community. Her work in Yard Wide Yarns will anchor this portion of my study, as I discuss how zines reenforced in-group relations and contextualized the social and political elements of the community's artistic production as equivalent and inseparable. Features like quotes, interviews, and advertisements strengthened community ties already performed through live events and in-person interactions, and Mills' work is an excellent source of all of the above. It was not the only zine which created these connections or circulated them, but it seems like a fairly representative example of zines doing work to imagine Gainesville. Her work did not necessarily do more to imagine Gainesville than any other zine, but her work is less explicitly about Gainesville punk than, for instance, Travis Fristoe's America?, and therefor a better site to understand the roles of readership, writing, and circulation in imagining community through zines. I also draw on No Idea, founded by Var Thelin, to

which Sarah Dyer was a contributor, to discuss how advertisements, reviews, and live music reporting fostered a sense of community which is inseparable from the politics of

DIY punk. No Idea actually precedes Yard Wide Yarns, and therefor I will start with a brief excursus into the "art world" it formed in, discuss how it participated, and then move to Yard Wide Yarns' role.

Less Than Jake was one of many bands to emerge out of the University of

Florida, where twenty-somethings with leisure time and nascent independence either formed bands to express themselves or reinvigorated bands from their hometown in the light of a viable audience of similar predispositions and material conditions. Spoke and

Radon, for instance, the two bands which were probably the most popular punk bands in Gainesville in the early and mid nineties, even if they never saw the kind of out of state popularity as Hot Water Music or Less Than Jake, included University of Florida students and band members who had moved to participate in Gainesville punk. One example of the porousness of the town/gown border is the number of University students who were formative in bands and other Gainesville art institutions. Of the primary objects of this study, Mills, along with many other Less Than Jake members,

Jon Resh, the guitarist for Spoke, and Travis Fristoe, of the Civic Media Center, several zine projects, and bands including Moonraker and Reactionary 3, all attended the

University of Florida. Fristoe was attracted to Gainesville in part because it already had a reputation as a punk town, and other bands moved to Gainesville from other parts of

Florida entirely because of the town's reputation as hospitable to punk (Brisk Walk,

Resh). In other words, Less Than Jake benefitted from the Gainesville DIY "art world," to borrow from the sociology of art. While I generally describe the Gainesville zine and

DIY punk community as a scene, the concept of "art world" also readily applies. As

Emms and Crossley note, the notion of a “world,” instead of a scene or field, can encompass interactions, events, networks of participants, resources and resource distribution, and, most relevantly to this particular study, “processes of identity formation implicated in these various aspects” (Emms and Crossley 113). The Gainesville art world was, in physical terms, made up of the map or network of performance spaces, amateur venues, friendly bars, warehouses, and friend's houses (and the spaces which were two or more of the above) where music was written, shows put on, and zines published. This is the space of the “collective action” of art making, “where “making” includes perceiving, interpreting, and appreciating, such that audiences belong to this collective, alongside artists and various support personnel” (Emms and Crossley 112).

Punk and DIY scenes like the Gainesville art world in this study particularly share the characteristics Emms and Crossley attribute to “specialized” music worlds, namely

“'bottom up' collective action” and non-material “sources of value” including cultural capital within the in-group, which may and often do conflict with profit motives or

“material resources” (113). These characteristics of punk are often accompanied by a strong sense of horizontal community, strong affective ties to both institutions and the principles those art projects are meant to literally embody (Culton and Holtzman,

Barett). In other words, many of the factors which enable the imagining of a community, in the Andersonian sense, were already in place. When Gainesville zines began to circulate, in the mid eighties, they were well situated to articulate this ethos and produce buy-in for it.

No Idea, which Var Thelin began publishing in high school in the mid 80s, was the Gainesville zine with the widest circulation, reaching a few thousand copies per print run at its height in the early nineties. In some ways, the story of No Idea is a synecdoche for a history of Gainesville punk up to the present, as it expanded from a tiny zine read and distributed mainly through Gainesville punk networks into a magazine with a circulation of several thousand which argued for the specificity of a Gainesville punk scene that punks around the country should look to for inspiration. As a record label and the parent organization of The Fest, a punk festival barely balancing its local roots with the relatively high production values and profit motives of punk as a commercial genre, No Idea still represents a highly charged site of punk imagining for

Gainesville. Through No Idea, Var and his friends and colleagues were able to narrate a history and identity for Gainesville, first, through explicit textual features on Gainesville as a scene with a distinct identity and ethos, even when it was not entirely clear what that ethos consisted of besides supporting Gainesville bands. Second, through advertisements and publishing zine and local record distro addresses, No Idea created a sense of punk Gainesville as existing in real space, extending into homes and mapping onto the real businesses, institutions, and buildings which people experienced as making up the material fabric of Gainesville existence. By circulating this "map," readers could either imagine the real places described in the zine, or add the "secret" knowledge of punk networks to their own commutes and errands around Gainesville.

This created the sense of "simultaneity" described in Anderson's account of print nationalism; even when a No Idea reader was not engaged in punk or DIY cultural

activities, they knew that, across Gainesville, others belonging to their community were around.

Similarly, the multi-page spreads of Gainesville shows which appeared throughout the run of No Idea would allow those who had attended to recognize themselves and, by seeing themselves in the context of the show and the show in the context of the magazine, understand themselves as part of a community. For those who hadn't attended, they might recognize the space and the general feeling of attending such a show- or aspire to it. This is similar to the archival community participation Alana

Kumbier describes in curating the personal photographs of queer performance artist

Aliza Shapiro- the pleasure of self-recognition or recognizing "our" indie celebrities combined with the pleasure of treating those photographs as a kind of history for a still- active community, as opposed to one which has been consigned to history (Kumbier

158).

Just as Shapiro's roles as organizer, participant, and documentarian of these shows come together when she publishes photos on her website, "promoting" an alternative way of living and participating even compared to indie scenes dominated by straight and cis men, No Idea's extensive show photography put images of what

"Gainesville" was back into circulation in Gainesville, publicizing and promoting attendance at these shows as a way of constructing Gainesville punk identities. As

Danika Jorgensen-Skakum writes about the zine release parties for queer feminist zine

Fourth Wave Freaks in rural Alberta, Gainesville shows and their documentation through zines created both an embodied community through attachment to the zine as a material, tangible, artifact and attachment to the community itself through the safety and

affirmation of these shows in the context of a general geography and culture not necessarily friendly to such communities (Jorgensen-Skakum 169-171). Without assuming an equivalence between the hostility for queer identities in rural Alberta and punk identities in suburban and collegiate Florida, both spaces required remaking and reconceptualizing to accommodate progressive ideals and communities, made possible by parties and by the circulation of those parties through zines, like No Idea.

Writing about Gainesville in No Idea tended to take on a boosterish or special pleading aspect. Issue 11, from 1995, introduces Gainesville with “Welcome to

Gainesville, Florida. This is our home.” The writer, possibly Thelin, but not certainly given the expanding staff involved in the production of No Idea, describes Gainesville as

“a vital, thriving, constantly regenerating community” which “both supports and partakes in the local band experience. On almost any given night, you can go down to the

Hardback and see your friends, or people who could easily be so, banging away and releasing their creative energies...” The implication here is that, first, simply being at the

Hardback indicates a shared set of, if not values, tendencies, tastes, and traits which could easily transform into friendship. The Hardback therefor becomes not only a space for seeing music but a space to participate in a community. Why, if this is intrinsic to the space or sufficiently realized through experience at shows, write about it at all? Besides love for the space and shows, it functions to reenforce the meaning of that space, to invite others to see The Hardback and the shows there in the same way that the author does. While No Idea certainly was read by Gainesville punks, perhaps equally important is the knowledge that well-informed Gainesville readers would have: that this image of

Gainesville, this definition of their community as a community defined by its supportive,

friendly, and above all local identity, would circulate nationally. No Idea had a readership in the thousands by the mid-nineties, including readers well outside of

Florida (Walker). This meant that punks in other nodes of the translocal DIY network would had read about Gainesville as having a "local band experience" and a particular punk ethos. Gainesville readers could therefor define their community borders, effectively creating a difference between themselves and outsider readers both in

Gainesville, those who, for instance, did not have friends in the making at the Hardback, and those who might like to be at the Hardback but were separated by distance, and could only be told about it. While lacking the arbitrariness and physical disconnection which Anderson considers the defining factor of early print capitalism's imagined communities, but zines were clearly addressed to "a specific imagined world of vernacular readers" which allowed Gainesville readers to separate themselves from other punk worlds, elsewhere (Anderson 63).

On the following page in the Gainesville section, under a spread of photos of local bands, the writer provides “ancient history” and “current history,” the latter split into bands on the compilation CD included with the issue and those not. Some of the blurbs for bands which make up the current history of Gainesville comment on the bands' social position in the Gainesville scene, including descriptions of their live shows, or that they recorded at “Turd Studios,” itself an institution in Gainesville punk history as the first affordable recording space for punk bands closer than Tallahassee (Walker 84-85).

Here, it is clearly important how the bands see themselves in relation to Gainesville, or how the writers see the bands' participation in Gainesville centered activities, like recording albums or playing shows. By publishing these affinities and distributing them

to audiences inside and outside of Gainesville, No Idea disseminated a Gainesville punk ideal, effectively interpreting the parties and shows which it wrote about as a meaningful group identity. Without print as a medium of dissemination, this would have been limited to those participants who were at the Hardback on a given night, or who knew the right

Gainesville punks to participate in this idea of Gainesville.

To return to Jessica Mills and Less Than Jake, Yard Wide Yarns is an example of how zines strengthened and reenforced the formation of group identities of audiences, artists, and producers within the Gainesville scene as members of that scene through the production and circulation of other punk identities. As a zine maker herself as well as a member of a regularly performing punk band, Mills was ideally situated to both describe the scene in-group and disseminate a community identity through Yard Wide Yarns. By producing this identity through a zine, one which included her feminist political commitments as well as the general DIY anticapitalist ethos which pervades zine-making, Mills tightened connections between identifying as a Gainesville punk and identifying as a leftist, because the two were imbricated in a relatively popular text working to perform and create Gainesville punk identities. Unlike No Idea, it is somewhat unlikely that Yard Wide Yarns was deliberately trying to make Gainesville legible to an outside audience, although there are a few features which address the city specifically.

One regular feature of Mills' Yard Wide Yarns was informal "interviews" where whomever happened to be at a show or whichever acquaintances Mills happened to encounter during a given day- a happenstance determined largely by participation in, familiarity with, and access to the social spaces Mills frequented as a highly connected

member of the Gainesville DIY art world. A representative group interview, in Yard Wide

Yarns #3, is introduced thusly: "I was in the record store on Saturday afternoon, hangin' around after Jon finished his solo set, & decided to 'mini-interview' the general populace of other hangin'-outers..." A guide is provided to the initials of each respondent, "just to prove I didn't make all of this up!!" and the participants are mostly recognizable names from the Gainesville punk scene. No explanation is given for any of these names- it can be assumed that the readership of Yard Wide Yarns would either be familiar with the names involved or would not care who they are. I assume the former, based on some familiarity with the names involved, and the assumption that Yard Wide Yarns circulated primarily in a Gainesville context, at least initially. Some of the names included Jon

Resh, who was a zine maker, guitarist for the popular local band Spoke, and resident of

Spoke House, a punk house and arts space. Steve-O, although it's not certainly the same Steve-O, since it's not an uncommon nickname for punks, was a zine maker who contributed to the local zine Hey Suburbia. Samantha Jones played in Vanbuilderass and Crustaceans, both of which sometimes played with Spoke. Alan Bushnell owned the Hardback Café, the same one described in the No Idea feature described above.

Dave Rohm was, and now is again, the frontman for Radon, a Gainesville punk band which, thanks in part to Var Thelin of No Idea's support of their work, was an inescapable feature of punk life in Gainesville at the time. Pat Hughs wrote the zine

Kung Fu Zombie. In short, for a connected punk reader, or for a punk reader who also read the zine reviews and record reviews in No Idea, these names would have been familiar, even if they were not personal friends or acquaintances, and would have been recognized as someone significant, if you were interested in Gainesville punk.

None of their answers, nor the questions, are particularly illuminating about

Gainesville, the respondents, or anything of any measurable social or political weight.

Question one is "if peeing is #1, and pooping is #2, what is #3." Answers range from

"wiping... or cleaning the toilet" (Jon Resh), to "throwing up 1/2 eaten spaghetti" (Buddy

Schaub, possibly referring to Gainesville in-joke music genre/life philosophy,

"Pastacore"). While it might have surprised Jon Resh's landlord, based on Resh's account of life in Spoke House, that he knew how to clean a toilet, this interview and its publication act more to interpellate the hangers-out into a social community, through the interaction and its subsequent publication and distribution, than to actually inform people of anything "worth" knowing. In the same way that, according to Benedict

Anderson, reading daily news from far-flung parts of a nation formed a national identity, reading responses to a toilet-based question at a hangout session the reader might not have attended builds a sense of participation in the social world that fosters such hangouts.

Aside from the possibly universal humor of scatological jokes, the interview derives its meaning from two things- first, that the interviews took place in a common social space and following an art event, meaning it was an event characteristic of the

Gainesville art world and consisting of its regular members. It is both a product of and productive of social engagements- the interview was part of hanging out, it prompted its participants to speak and be recorded as present in that space at that time. Second, when the interview entered circulation, it did not merely act as a trace that this had really happened, that the hangout really occurred and was not "made up," as Mills puts it. It entered circulation both to the in-group of hangers-out and those who were likely to

recognize them from the bands with which they performed, creating an extended group identity through its circulation.

A similar feature to the group interviews, "not so famous quotes," collected quotes from Gainesville staples- Dave Rohm and Jon Resh make repeat appearances, along with Samantha Jones- and published them stripped of their original context. While the obvious humor is the decontextualization itself, as any phrase which makes sense in a specific context will be a little more ludic or ludicrous without it, the more pressing operation is the re-contextualization into Yard Wide Yarns. Besides the function discussed above, the fact of re-writing into a uniform hand, and their placement together on the page, redoubles their interpellation into one community, and invites readers to take them together as a communal experience, a representation of and, through circulation, experience of 'listening in' and sharing in inside jokes. The effect is the same as the interviews. When put into circulation, the zine restores the immediacy of the interactions as much as it serves as a documentation or trace. The zine therefor creates in group identities for those quoted and, through the act of circulation, for those who read the zine while in the context of the scene in which it circulates. Reading the zine allows participants to understand themselves as a community, and makes "reader" a viable community identity, as cited from Emms and Crosley above. Travis Fristoe echoes this notion of a community as consisting of creators and readers alike when he lists ways to get involved in punk- “Hobbyist, careerist, amateur, collector, academic, critic, participant, fan, reader, writer” (America? #14). Like Leah Misemer's

"correspondence zone," wherein readers are able to participate actively in the content they love by publishing those interactions, those quoted are interpellated into a

community via publication and circulation. Unlike Misemer's examples, this community was primarily local instead of national, and served as one of many ways community identity was created. How zines, themselves, as objects, activated these relationships has to do with what zines are as much as what was in them.

As Piepmeier points out, zines have physical presence, what she calls "sculptural elements," as well as tending to be hand made, and thus carrying the trace of the artist, friend, or community member who made them. This tendency, Piepmeier argues, allows them to bring people into an embodied community, feeling stronger affective connections to the creator through the materiality and handmade qualities to the objects. Piepmeier's privileged objects are perzines by girls, ones which tell life stories and involve the reader in a feeling of closeness with the personal life of the creator.

Given the social content of the Gainesville zines described above, the same affective connection, the same feeling of embodied community, would apply to the social world described in the zine. Zines like Yard Wide Yarns and No Idea would be physical manifestations of and invitations of closeness with Gainesville, as much as with Mills or

Thelin. The embodied relationships between zines and zine readers would tend to further encourage a feeling of involvement and investment in the community described in the zine, one the reader is told, explicitly in the case of No Idea, they need only to attend the right shows or support the right causes to be involved in. Thus, zines were active participants in meaning making and the interpellation of participants in bands, shows, or zines into the ideology of Gainesville's punk community.

While it is possible the identity created through zines' interpellation would be only a fannish one, oriented around consumption and artistic production. However, as noted

above, the zine was not only comprised of hang-out content. In Yard Wide Yarns #2,

Mills reprints a certificate she received with Less Than Jake for playing a benefit show for a Gainesville women's health clinic to fundraise for women in need of abortions they could not afford. By printing this certificate, part of a broader culture of direct material aid for local causes by local bands, in the same zine as a group interview, readers are given the option to identify with a punk community which is defined by its direct support of local leftist or progressive causes via DIY art and music. The political gesture here is similar to one Jon Resh describes when his band, Spoke, organized benefit shows for shelter and homeless services provider St. Francis House. Admission was paid in canned goods, or hygiene products at a second event, this time featuring Less Than

Jake on the bill. Resh describes his feeling of satisfaction at providing direct material aid to his community, rather than simply giving money. He describes the shows' success as a rebuttal to the "American compulsion for financial gain" (Resh 101). What is less important here is whether donations of canned goods or hygiene products purchased by punks and donated by the "box load" are actually effective material aid. Instead, this local action, written into the history of Gainesville punk, constitutes a way of thinking about being in a local community as anti-capitalist and oriented towards direct mutual aid which is characteristic of anarchist and DIY politics but specifically mapped onto belonging in the local punk community.

Other features, requiring less space to explain, enabled groups to establish identifications with Gainesville punk, without depending on the element of "trace" or record. Advertisements and acknowledgements further involved readers, and Mills, into

Gainesville punk. In each issue of Yard Wide Yarns except the final one, Mills thanks a

number of people and groups, including "the boy parts of Less Than Jake," establishing the position she and the band held in relationship to each other and their readership- just as readers might be interviewed by hanging out at the Hardback, they might become part of the text of Yard Wide Yarns in the acknowledgements simply by knowing Mills, thus entering circulation as part of the art world. In the 1997 issue of Yard

Wide Yarns, Mills runs an advertisement for Dyer's Action Girl Newsletter, a Gainesville connection, and a connection to the network of girl zines Piepmeier has so ably mapped. This ties Gainesville in as a node on the network of girl zines, as much as the translocal network of touring bands, which would include Fugazi and Less Than Jake as unequal participants in the same network. These textual and material features enabled the circulation of Gainesville punk as a kind of imagined community within the embodied community of actually going to Gainesville punk shows. The next section will address how taking zines out of circulation enabled a historiographic turn in Gainesville punk's self-imagining.

CHAPTER 3 CAN WE MAKE THESE STREETS OUR OWN

Zines are apparently ephemeral. They are produced cheaply, with cheap or free labor and cheap or free materials, not built to last. Nevertheless, they have endured both as a social object, still being produced in vital creative networks around the world, and, increasingly, preserved in archives. When zines entered the academy for the first time, it was alongside a cohort of zinesters who cut their teeth on Riot Grrl and brought their collections into the academy or archives with them. Jenna Freedman at the

Barnard library is one example, and the Riot Grrrl collection at NYU libraries, which includes many zines, was curated by Lisa Darms, who had attended college in Olympia with Kathleen Hanna (Eichhorn). As the women who had made zines came of age, they began to seek out places that their collections could come of age as well, into institutional histories and public memory. One of the most significant donations was from Sarah Dyer, an artist rather than a professional academic, whose collection came to live with the women’s papers and ephemera collection in Duke University's special collections. Here, and even in grassroots archives like the Queer Zine Archive Project in

Milwaukee, zines tend to be cut off from their original circulation context and instead organized by their collector, in the academic institutions, or simply by title in much of

QZAP's collection1. This is a perfectly reasonable and quite useful means of categorization and storage, and will tend to preserve some social networks, but does not tend to provide clear knowledge of original social context, as zine collectors collect

1The QZAP collection is an incredible accomplishment in many ways, and deserves more space than I have here. Its collection is organized in ways which include alphabetical by title, by donor, and a collection donated from an infoshop, which is kept together.

many zines, those local and those otherwise, without necessarily distinguishing within their own collection. The Civic Media Center collection in Gainesville acts quite differently, having been conceived of as a project in documenting and sharing local history, and, in doing so, having taken on a role in defining the stability and continuity of the imagined community in the zines it collects. In this section, I will focus on the Civic

Media Center's zine collection as the exemplar of institution building to preserve and sustain an imagined community, while also discussing zines within that collection which work to involve other brick and mortar institutions or physical geographies into the community through a similar interpellation as described above. I argue, therefor, that the institutions take on roles in the imagined community through their circulation as participants in community described in the zines. In other words, when zine makers, who often belonged to one or more of the leftist projects or organizations described, wrote about these projects, organizations, or spaces, these institutions became involved as part of the imagined community of Gainesville punk rock. This both gave the imagined community a real space to understand themselves as situated in and it sometimes gave the organizations, spaces, or projects the additional staying power created through being valued as part of what makes a community meaningful and possible.

The Travis Fristoe Zine collection, posthumously named after its founder and most dedicated curator, is one part of the library at the Civic Media Center, a volunteer- run grassroots leftist community space and "info shop" in Gainesville. Founded by

Travis and his friend Yvette in 1997, after Fristoe returned from library school in

Tallahassee, the collection has just over 4,000 cataloged zines. The zines were

collected between 1997 and the present, with the most active collecting years being between 1997 and 2015. There are also several boxes of uncatalogued zines awaiting processing, some of which may have been previously cataloged, while others are entirely new. Unlike the Barnard or Duke collections, until very recently no formalized official collection policy existed2, and while women’s zines and Riot Grrrl influenced perzines are represented in the collection, they do not represent a majority, nor any significant plurality. The collecting impetus was quite different than the era or subject oriented goals of the NYU, Duke, and Barnard collections. It was meant to gather zines from across Gainesville, from out of the “closets, bathrooms and coffee tables” of

Gainesville and into a central location where they could be shared by the Gainesville community. Here, in contrast to taking a zine into a bath to connect with someone far away, as in Piepmeier's example of the value of zines as creating embodied community, the embodied community already exists, is already created from the proximity of one bath to the next and the likelihood that the zine makers and bathers know each other.

Instead of taking zines into private spaces, Fristoe proposed making zines public. This is an obvious mirror of Derrida's conception of the archive as a move, first, "from the private to the public" through "domicilation" (emphasis in original), as they left private homes and instead inhabited the communal "home" of Gainesville's left-aligned artists

(Derrida 10). Possibly it also makes the Civic Media Center an official home, that is to say both it makes it the official domicile of the zines, supporting and certifying their role as historical documents, and it brings the domestic practice of reading, collecting, and

2This is consistent with the reluctance to categorize or be categorized which Duncombe identifies as a hallmark of zine culture- while Duncombe offers a brief taxonomy of zine types, he notes that readers of zine review zine Factsheet Five were deeply resistant to any effort at organizing the reviews by genre, type, or category (56-57).

sharing zines into the Civic Media Center, which then enters the domestic and communal sphere. The impetus for the collection and the sources from which they were drawn were both local, and as a result the collection has a strong representation of zines from Gainesville and across the Southeast.

The 1997 issue of Yard Wide Yarns also includes a call for contributions for the new Civic Media Center zine library. Probably created by either Fristoe or Yvette, calls particularly for old ands new Gainesville zines. Here, Fristoe and Yvette are specific about how they understand zines to operate: "nobody tells our sordid little histories better than we do... and zines serve as markers of that history" (Yard Wide Yarns #8, ellipses in original). The Civic Media Center is described as "trying to document that collective history," which notably is not identical with trying to collect documentation of history. Arguably, this means that the zines are part of history, rather than traces of history, and that upon being domiciled in the archive, they enter historiography rather than being always already traces. "Please stop by the CMC and use the zine library," the note closes, "it's there for everyone." Explicitly, "everyone" in Gainesville, or everyone who reads Yard Wide Yarns, should identify with this history and participate in both its curation and collection and in the act of reading which will involve them in these histories.

Travis Fristoe, founder of the zine library at the Civic Media Center and an essential figure for any history of the Gainesville zine scene, was particularly attentive to the ambivalences of DIY politics as politics. He was deeply committed to creating and inhabiting alternative spaces of cultural production and consumption, as well as more ethical consumption and production generally. He was also deeply suspicious of

tendencies, including what be believed to be his own, to turn activism into lifestylism.

For this section, I turn primarily to zines Travis either wrote or curated to try to understand how Gainesville punk understood its politics and institutions in relation to the scene-building and subcultural identifications described in part one, in order to distinguish communities with institutions from lifestyles with participants, arguing that archiving the imagined community circulated in zines was one element in making the transition to the former from the latter.

Fristoe did a number of single issue zines or collaborations, but his longest project was America?, a perzine he published between approximately 1998 and 2013.

Because of Fristoe's involvement in nearly every punk institution-building project in

Gainesville, as an employee of No Idea, leaseholder for Wayward Council, the nonprofit record store, librarian at the public library and zine librarian at the Civic Media

Center, as well as volunteering with other organizations like Books for Prisoners and living in at least one converted warehouse space/art collective, Fristoe's America? documented and circulated particularly important discourses on what punk Gainesville was and could mean. In America? #5, for instance, Fristoe wrote about the impact of gentrification in Gainesville, lamenting that the "student ghetto" by the University was replaced with nicer houses boasting nicer cars in their driveway. By contrasting the punk Gainesville he lived in with the political process of gentrification, Fristoe aligns punk with local politics and politics of location- Gainesville punk was opposed to the eradication of affordable housing, and the changing character of Gainesville was a challenge to the punk art world and its distinctive local features. It also suggests that he

was thinking about how to preserve and institutionalize the Gainesville circulated in zines like his America? and Mills' Yard Wide Yarns.

Another of Fristoe's zines, America? 9, provides a more direct meditation on the role institutions play in Gainesville punk, and would have circulated Wayward Council, a nonprofit record store Fristoe was involved in. This is similar to how Mills and No Idea circulated the Hardback as a social space. The difference is the intentionality of

Wayward Council, founded as an intentional political space, while the Hardback was a show venue, aligned with Wayward politically but not conceived as such. While

America? 9 is mostly a tour diary, affirming Gainesville's role as one node among many in the punk network of the Southeast, it also offers an opportunity to think about how institution mapping was circulated in zines. On one page, Fristoe's loopy cursive introduces Wayward Council, a nonprofit record store/co-op and community space, underneath which a blunt sans serif font specifies: “The day the war started.” In the paragraph which follows, Fristoe writes that “whispers followed (him) all morning of the

Pentagon and World Trade center bombings- murmurs at the post office, at the bank, at the bagel shop” and seeing “patriots” walking up and down University Ave before opening the record store. University is the main east-west street in Gainesville, which defines the Northern border of the University of Florida main campus as well as, at the other end of town, bordering City Hall.

At the time, Wayward Council had a storefront on University Ave, so the “patriots” would probably have been marching past Wayward Council and the Civic Media Center, which had a University Avenue location for a number of years before rising rent forced it

Eastward and Southward. While a nonlocal readership could infer, at least, that it abuts

the University, and that it is probably a notable street, the social geography of

Gainesville's art world would not be obvious to them. Knowing what was where in

Gainesville changes the reading, making the patriot march more of an incursion into the always already contested public spaces and institutions leftists artists had carved out in

Gainesville as much as an echo of the intrusion of whispers of war into the less marked sites of normalcy, like the post office and bagel shop. Fristoe goes on to ask, echoing

Duncombe's critique of alternative cultural spaces, what Wayward Council really contributes in the face of war. “And what of the Guided by Voices pure pop songs I had been enjoying? What of this entire room full of distractions and slogans that we fight so hard to keep running?” Fristoe links corporate, or at least other than strictly DIY, music production and the extremely demanding, politically committed world which includes

Wayward Council, as both questionable responses to a world on the brink of war. He goes further, linking the existence of even spaces like Wayward with American imperialism: “we've been living on borrowed time, avoiding inevitable economic recessions at the expense of the rest of the world.” The “we” is America, but it seems to also be Wayward Council, which, for all of the hard work involved, exists thanks to the ability of its volunteer staff to give their “surplus” time and labor to the store. The record store and the contested space of University Avenue are put in the context of American empire, making the zine and its relationship to cultural production more politically engaged and more geographically marked. Fristoe is thinking through his punk identity and DIY politics in the context of American empire, but partly because of the incursion of unwelcome patriots into the space he and other punks have created- their interventions locally have created spaces and institutions where they are able to support

the "slogans" they believe in. While Fristoe's doubt in the efficacy of DIY politics to change America is perfectly reasonable and no doubt sincere, he also circulates a concept of Wayward Council and other DIY institutions as real and meaningful exclusions or oases from the patriots on Main Street.

Before Wayward Council closed, Fristoe compiled a collection of interviews with volunteers, titled "Thanks, Jerks." He published it as America? #11 but with the series number located inside the zine, in smaller text than the title on the cover. He thus located the communal memory building project within the broader history of Gainesville punk which America? set out to document, including the process of gentrification which threatened it. The format is fairly straightforward: all volunteers who Fristoe was able to contact are asked the same questions about who they are and what their role in

Wayward Council is or was. They are also asked about their experience with Wayward, including how they feel about Wayward's efforts to be a progressive and inclusive space particularly in terms of gender. Their answers are appended to a photograph or drawing of them. The community is then able to see themselves laid out in print together, more permanent and tangible than the encounters in the store and drawing together volunteers who might not have ever met.

Sometimes the act of producing a zine, deliberately and collaboratively creating a tangible object which results from, creates a trace of, and further circulates local connections constitutes a kind of institution building itself. "We Don't Go To Their

Parties," a Gainesville comic anthology, collected comics by Gainesville artists and particularly those about Gainesville. The name suggests the cliquish inclusion and exclusion which is characteristic of many social scenes, but also firmly locates both "we"

and "they" in the same frame of reference- we choose not to go to their parties, but we know about them, we could go, we are, probably, invited. It further collects the contributors to "We Don't..." as the "We" in question, and, implicitly, invites the readers in, to also not attend their parties. The title is obviously tongue in cheek, satirizing the cliquishness and fracturing endemic to even the smallest punk scenes, but it also performs real work to create and circulate a notion of we. Fristoe's contribution, illustrated by Tom Hart, is a bike tour guide to Gainesville. By circulating this bikeable version of Gainesville, like his descriptions of Main Street and Wayward Council in

America? 9, Fristoe reenforces a sense of local knowledge as local activism, and participation in alternative ways of being in local spaces as a kind of activism as well, one which could circulate among readers and equally become an archival document of what Gainesville was like and who participated in it.

One zine which helped Gainesville's punk community articulate their institutional relationships was Brushfire!, founded in 2008 by the Orlando Food Not Bombs collective. Food Not Bombs is a national group with networked but independent local chapters, dedicated to providing free meals to houseless people and activist events using ingredients either donated or rescued from corporate surplus. As a decentralized organization, oriented more around meeting direct and immediate local needs than a particular philosophical or identitarian alignment, Food Not Bombs shares the same approach to political action as the Gainesville punk scene at this time, one hardly unique to Gainesville. Both act more as a loose affiliation around shared interests, ideals, and particularly projects rather than an articulation of programs or ideologies.

Probably as a result of this decentralized but networked ethos concentrating on

immediate local need, Food Not Bombs chapters are frequent producers of zines, and

Brushfire! was meant to circulate and perform community participation through resource sharing and horizontal, anti-capitalist, cultural production.

Brushfire! number one declares itself “a monthly newsletter for the Florida anarchist movement”3. In asserting that there was such a thing as a Florida anarchist movement, and further claiming there was enough to be reported on to fill at least two planned years of issues, Brushfire! might have surprised readers outside of Florida, or even many within it. The plan was for the Orlando committee to compile and publish the first issue, and for every subsequent issue to be the responsibility of a different anarchist community in Florida. Unsurprisingly, Brushfire! struggled to find contributors and editorial collectives willing to participate consistently, as available labor power for any project is limited, but, also unsurprisingly, Gainesville put out an issue. The

Gainesville issue includes features on local left-aligned activist projects, including the

Civic Media Center, Wayward Council, then celebrating its tenth anniversary, the

Gainesville chapter of Food Not Bombs, the Radical Bike Project, the local IWW chapter, and Books to Prisoners, which includes a contact numbers for two organizational leaders, Melissa and Travis, the latter possibly Fristoe, as he wrote in several issues of America about packing books for the organization.

Each organization's offering looks like it was designed independently and submitted to the magazine separately, as each has a quite different look. The Civic

3 While I have tried to correctly number the issues of Brushfire! From which I draw quotes, the issues in the CMC collection are not stapled, and at least one has the wrong cover, as two different covers, with two different numbers, are on the same contents. It is also possible, given that not every informational article, poem, or vegan recipe has a date attached, that some individual pages have become separated from their original issue at some point in the last ten years, and inserted into a different one. This is a concern for a historian of Florida anarchist culture, but for my claim, that Florida DIY spaces did engage in institution building and did so through zines, it is less important whether a given article reports on May 2008 or September 2008.

Media Center has a neatly typeset three pages of information on the history and mission of the organization, and how it sees its work as a community space, infoshop, and physical location for political organizing. This text emphasizes both the Civic Media

Center's connection to Gainesville and the role an info shop serves in “incubating” revolutionaries for work elsewhere, through a list of the kinds of organizing work former coordinators have gone on to do, in labor and media particularly. Wayward Council has a hand-written announcement of its 10 year anniversary, nestled in a dense layer of text explaining the volunteer ethos of the space, where everyone is essential for the space to operate, down to the person who takes money at the door. If that seems, in the context of this paper, like criticism of Dyer for wanting more recognition for her work than the door guy, I do not mean it to be. Rather, I want to draw attention to how an ethos of "horizontal" organizing can obscure the persistence of inequalities rather than amend them, while it is also a reaction against and corrective to other inequalities. This is the problem addressed in the next section: how did zines and attendant DIY politics reenforce exclusions and in-group identifications as well as create spaces where those excluded could discuss their experiences?

Brushfire! replicates the decentralized organization of community institutions in

Gainesville, linking them through their publication in a single space, just as they are linked through physical proximity in the city of Gainesville, and by the overlap in attendees, volunteers, and organizers which sustained them. In an archival context it comes to act as a trace of these community connections, but at the time it would have performed a linking function, as well as connecting the Gainesville institutions to like- minded "scenes" described and performed in other issues of Brushfire!, which, as a

result, maps the individual identities of each community as separate hubs in a translocal network. Their connections as well as their differences are reenforced and performed by the single volume per location structure, with the serial publication of different issues linking the locations within Florida and the individual focus of each single issue separating them and insisting on single, local, identities for each. That the Gainesville chapter of Food Not Bombs needed its own space in the Gainesville issue, rather than being considered an extension of the Orlando chapter, is proof enough of this concept.

By 2008, when Brushfire! was founded, the internet was an equally if not more viable resource for distributing these resources- while social media was not yet totally ubiquitous, it was probably easier for an organization to create a webpage than to create a zine, and, with the proliferation of home computers and relatively affordable non-dial-up home internet, it was likely to enable more people to access the resources and information in question than a zine would. We must therefor assume that Brushfire! was not a zine because it was easier, more efficient, or necessarily more enjoyable to make than a webpage, although the pleasures of zines as physical objects are well documented (Piepmeier, Jorgensen-Skakum). Instead, with both Brushfire! and Thanks,

Jerks, we must ask if there was something about the moment of internet ubiquity which made the tangible paper object seem more valuable and necessary than creating a website, or necessary in addition to putting information online. Piepmeier writes, of a one of a kind zine compiling two friends' emails, that the tangibility and material qualities of zines make them feel more real than digital information, that they take on ersatz bodily qualities which are warmer and more affectively involving than emails

(Piepmeier). I concur, with the caveat that, in this case, Fristoe was already thinking in

archival time, but an archive which was meant to support actually existing local relationships more than create new connections through unexpected proximities. The

Civic Media Center zine library is the most important site of institutional, local, and relational identification in this section, and Fristoe's consistent articulation of its purpose serves as a guide for reading the collection and the function of zines within it.

Brushfire! was likely to go into the Civic Media Center library before it was even sent to Orlando's Food Not Bombs, as Travis Fristoe, the likely compiler of the zine, also organized the Civic Media Center zine collection at this time. In the second to last issue of America, Fristoe writes, still ambiguously, about working at the zine library, by then well established for several years. As part of a series of brief pieces about libraries he has visited or worked in, Fristoe describes cataloging the collection as “marginal work,” unlikely to be used by many people, unlikely to last. “Still, there is a vindication in treating these marginal pieces the same way we would a bestseller. These are our histories, our versions, however mawkish in hindsight or lost to the larger world”

(America? 14). This is, I think, the heart of the collection- a conscious effort to collect and preserve Gainesville's histories, regardless of if the larger world accepts them, because it vindicates the work of building community, and makes it available for future and past Gainesville residents, however few. By gathering the zines together, they are taken out of private circulation and enter into a new context, their function as embodying and defining local communities becoming a trace because it was once something else.

While this may seem more like the traditional function of zines in archives, the active collection practice, focussing on zines which are already in Gainesville, in the private spaces of community members like their bathrooms or living rooms, suggests a direct

translation of those already existing private relationships, those circulated as an imagined community in No Idea and Yard Wide Yarns, into the institutional context. In the next section, the inclusions and exclusions, and the thorny questions which must arise when the personal is positively affirmed as a site of the political, are considered in this context.

CHAPTER 4 THANKS A LOT, JERKS

Gainesville is for hecklers. So wrote Jonathan Resh, in his account of touring with Spoke cum love letter to punk rock and Gainesville. Gainesville crowds could be raucous and strange, a cultural quirk which both Resh and Fristoe note as a sign of affection, but which one can easily imagine seeming otherwise. A live recording by

Gainesville’s dearly beloved Radon includes the audience booing on the track "Bryan’s

World" and imitating cats meowing on "Chinese Rednecks." Incidentally, Sarah Dyer, who would leave Gainesville embittered by her punk experience, drew the sleeve for the original pressing of “In Your Home!,” on which both tracks originally appeared4. The title

“Chinese Rednecks,” like “Rasta Guy,” from Radon’s album 28, indicates some of the more problematic, to put it mildly, aspects of Gainesville’s mostly white punk community. Fristoe would write, in his elegy/meditation on what Radon meant to

Gainesville, that the "Rasta Guy" was real, that Radon had captured, in describing him, something important and true about Gainesville as it was in that moment (Fristoe and

Cometbus). This is consistent with the meaning-making process for local consumption which Fristoe affirms elsewhere, but it does also tend to make the "Rasta Guy" a character rather than a community member.

Resh’s tour diary or bildungsroman, Amped, details the seamier side of the punk houses which were essential to artistic production in Gainesville- destroyed windows and minor altercations with the police, both mostly harmless but indicative of how

1Because Gainesville art world community members have made a determined effort to document their own history, in scattershot fashions and in ways not necessarily recognized or recognizable by academia, I occasionally rely on sources as historical which do not meet standard expectations for documentary evidence- an anonymous fan website, in this instance. The Gainesville Band Page, http://gainesvillebandpage.blogspot.com/2011/07/radon-in- your-home-7.html, accessed 3/2/19.

Fristoe's ethos of deliberate care, and Mills' productive application of punk rock for social change was not universally embraced. While Mills and Resh were apparently good friends, or at least thrown together frequently, based on his frequent appearance in the Yard Wide Yarns quotes page, Mills is referenced only as the girlfriend of one of

Resh's bandmates, and only because her band, Less Than Jake, was playing a show with Spoke. This is consistent with the sidelining Dyer describes. More troubling, one moment in Amped sticks out not for its deliberate reckoning with issues of gender, but for its absolute failure to do so. Resh, who mostly presents himself as a dweeby kid with a knack for loud guitars but also for reading quietly, decides to try having sex with a

"groupie." The fan in question is young, quiet, and, by Resh's account, had been trying to get personally cozy for a long time. Resh decides to pursue her apparent attraction, but does not stop when she becomes mostly unresponsive and, when she bleeds significantly upon sexual penetration, worries primarily about his own risk of contracting an STD (Resh 102-107). Later, he finds out from mutual friends that the girl had never had sex before. While Resh doesn't recognize it as such, this account sounds very much like, at best, Resh misunderstanding the signs of revoked consent, and, at worst, an outright rape. The fact that Resh reports this story as simply one of many anecdotes, together with van breakdowns on tour and loving the suiza sauce on enchiladas at

Gainesville tex-mex restaurant El Indio, constitute the fabric of a life in Gainesville punk suggests that such stories of dubious consent were likely a norm, and circulated comfortably with other Gainesville punk rock experiences.

Given Mills and Resh's apparently comfortable personal and artistic relationship, this is a bit of a surprise. Mills did use her platform in Yard Wide Yarns to discuss issues

of gender and sexism, including in the final issue, where she gave an account of her life as a woman, broken down into stages to describe how each was impacted by societal misogyny (Yard Wide Yarns #7). Here, and in the context of Less Than Jake's less than honorable decision to rerecord the masters of the album she appeared on, her recognition of the "boy parts of Less Than Jake" in the acknowledgements of the first six issues of Yard Wide Yarns takes on a different tone, no longer the community building performance it was previously and now a legible difference between Mills' activist bent and the rest of the band's passive punk identities. Mills had always used Yard Wide

Yarns to discuss misogyny and to promote local women in punk rock. One example of the latter was her release of a 7" vinyl album featuring four Gainesville all-women bands, Crustaceans, Fluffy Kitty, Vanbuilderass, and Ovarydose, with Yard Wide Yarns

#4 in 1995. Similar to No Idea Records release of a 7" featuring local bands Spoke,

Radon, Gruel, and Bombshell in 1992, coincidentally four all-male bands, Mills was putting into circulation an argument about the composition and quality of Gainesville punk rock. While she was careful, as was Sarah Dyer in advertisements for Action Girl found throughout the run of Yard Wide Yarns, to note that this was about support for women and not rejecting men, it did constitute an intervention into the meaning of

Gainesville punk and encouraged the circulation and adoption of actively feminist punk identities within the context of DIY- she chose to curate and publish the 7" through her zine, rather than through the local recording studio or through No Idea, which at that point was able to release music from non-local bands like Samiam and Jawbreaker alongside Radon and Spoke. Records and the sale, circulation, and production of music

as a DIY project are essential to how Gainesville saw itself and therefor essential to understanding how identity and politics were discussed or dismissed in the scene.

The title of this section is from a title Travis Fristoe gave, in slightly abbreviated form, to the interview project with volunteers at the nonprofit record collective he ran. It is also the title and final lyric to a track off the self titled EP by Fristoe's band,

Reactionary 3. It seems to me both the lyrics and the title may be a reference to the heckling culture in Gainesville, which sits in curious relation to both Fristoe’s own famed gentleness of disposition- author Lauren Groff writes that he once made and brought her an entire vegan cake because she was having a bad day when he ran into her by coincidence- and with the project in Thanks, Jerks, itself. Here, Fristoe organizes the interviews in part to serve as the kind of "telling our own stories" which he considered vital for the survival, and partly as a way of working through a real problem of inclusion and exclusion. As discussed above, Fristoe asked participants how they saw gender parity and inclusion at Wayward, and while most answers tended to affirm that

Wayward, itself, was a positive space, they often contrasted this with the punk scene more broadly, consistent with what Jessica Mills called the "boy's club" of punk rock

(Yard Wide Yarns #4). Thus, the same zine could both affirm and enact institutional memory and presence and dispute hegemonic narratives within the same space. If, as I have argued, Gainesville used zines to reenforce and give definition to the loose affiliations which developed out of parties, shows, and conversations, to develop institutional memory and meaning out of such personal relationships, then they also allowed for spaces of dissent and critique, even if in ways limited by the access and context of their circulation and publication.

CHAPTER 5 CONCLUSION

As outlined above, the Gainesville art world understood itself as one hub in a translocal DIY art world, defined by its direct intervention into local place making and art production as well as occasional direct material support for local left or progressive causes. In this context, zines circulated as embodied instantiations of already embodied communities, giving meaning to and inviting identification with existing relationships.

The title of each section has been borrowed from a lyric from Fristoe's band,

Reactionary 3, as a kind of tribute to the work music did in tying together the ideals with the actual community. The title of the paper, however, comes from one of Fristoe's favorite bands, Radon. Fristoe, in his exegesis of Radon's work as place-making and place-defining, agreed: "this" could only be happening in Gainesville (Fristoe and

Cometbus). Like the somewhat breathless prose of No Idea's local history, past and present, Fristoe believed that something in Gainesville was worth institutionalizing and supporting, for all of his doubts about the efficacy of his own veganism and zine making to effect radical change.

Fristoe moved away for a second time in 2013. It is unclear if this move would have stuck or, like his stint in library school in Tallahassee, he would have eventually returned, with his new family, to bike across the former student ghetto and to do the marginal work of maintaining the archive he founded. Instead, he killed himself in the summer of 2015. While the community had begun to respond as it would to any participant who had moved away, as Mills had in the early 2000s, Fristoe's death was of an entirely different order of meaning. It seems to me to require a reconsideration of how the embodied community which the archive, as a grassroots space comprised of

texts which circulated in the same space as the archive itself, was closer than usual to the documents it preserved. I was drawn to the problem of the "community" in a community archive as a collaborator with what I am considering the second "generation" of the archive, when it is maintained by a group with little immediate social contact with the initial creators, despite some 'intergenerational' continuity in volunteers at the Civic

Media Center outside of the zine collection.

The lived relationships which produced the archive and which supported the archive as much as it preserved their trace were altered, permanently, by Fristoe's death as of communal trauma. When I became involved with the Civic Media Center, it was following another communal trauma, albeit ultimately a minor one, the visit of neo- nazi Richard Spencer to the University of Florida campus. This event drew new organizers to the Civic Media Center to effect a community response, including myself and other graduate students. Upon entering the space, I was struck by the history hanging on the walls- the briccolage like assembly of different actions, different moments when the "community" had come together, as we were then. When I began to volunteer with the zine collective, it quickly became clear to me that, despite the fact that most of the current volunteers were young twenty-somethings who had never known Travis, the archive itself contained a confused public mourning, a site of unresolved community trauma at the heart of the space and at the heart of Gainesville's collective memory, the same collective memory which papered the walls. How and why this would be specifically traumatic, or why this death would be different than that in any other archive, when archives are traditionally composed of the dead, became a driving question for my research. I believe that part of the answer is explained above: the

exceptional closeness of archive to subject, and the role of the texts in the archive and of archiving in forming, rather than remembering or documenting, the community.

In 2017, when I began to work with the collection, it was experiencing a moment of transition. The zine collection had been in stasis for a few years, with Fristoe gone and zines, in general, no longer as central to how Gainesville punk and art circulated its communal identification. After Fristoe's death, a few friends had attempted to revitalize the library in his memory, including curating a display shelf of their favorite work in the collection. Afterwards, around 2014 or 2015, a local zine artist and University of Florida student, Claudia Acosta, had taken over regular maintenance tasks like reshelving and updating catalog entries, but she had little contact with Fristoe or other zine makers from the earlier generation, partly because of the natural population turnover which occurs in college towns. When I joined the Civic Media Center Zine Collective, supporting Claudia in curation and maintenance tasks, I found it hard to avoid questions, first about who Fristoe was and why our zine library was named after him, but also why we had so many zines about Gainesville. I found this overrepresentation of the town in the collection which housed it counterintuitive to what I had learned as common wisdom about zines, which was that they were mostly "random," hyper- personal, diaristic, and political in their engagement with issues of popular culture or representation, and not in local politics. Because of Fristoe's urgently written call to recognize history, it also felt imperative to uncover the history and community he described. It seemed, and this is the case for so many community archives, that there was a trace or presence, similar to Eichhorn's description of her affective encounter with the work of a particular artist in the special collections at Duke University, one who she

wanted to feel "lived" in the archive, no matter what happened to the artist in real life.

However, unlike Eichhorn's encounter, what I found did not direct me only to Travis, although the beauty of his writing, the clarity of his vision, and his premature death both make him a powerful force in the archive. Instead, I was drawn to try to follow Travis in his projects, in completing the histories and historiographies of Gainesville which he suggested. The relationships seemed as present in the archive as any individual who had written from within them, and the geography and landmarks of old Gainesville, bars, performance spaces, past locations for the Civic Media Center, seemed to beg to be uncovered and remapped. Still, they also seemed inaccessible, impolite to ask about, because of the fact of Travis' premature death, which sacrilized the archive but also made it a site of shared trauma for the people who were precisely not there, not working with these documents which they had, in some instances, themselves produced.

Mourning in the archives, or the problem of loss and grief in archives, is particularly well documented in queer archives and queer theoretical conceptions of archives. If the grassroots archive is a "home" for people and documents, as Ben Power

Alwin says of the Sexual Minorities Archive, or as many researchers experience with the

Lesbian Herstory Archive, what does it mean to a community archive when it is shocked by the loss of a particularly central participant and theorist of its work (Rawson,

Besette)? This is part of why I have worked through the "living" circulation of these zines, not as already archival documents but participants, themselves, in how meaning making and local identity were constructed. Like all archives, the CMC zine collection served and served an ideological function for the people who built it and who use it; it enabled the transformation of living documents into community history. Like the archive

itself, like Wayward Council and the punk houses where shows took place, were active participants which read meaning into this social community through collective imagination and reading practices. How and why grassroots archives have a different temporal relationship to death and memory, as parts of living radical institutions, is a question for another project, but I hope I have gestured here to why that is a meaningful one, and why embodied local communities have used zines differently than geographically separate affinity groups.

LIST OF REFERENCES

Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities.Verso, 2006

Barrett, Dawson. “DIY Democracy: The Direct Action Politics of U.S. Punk Collectives.” American Studies, 52:2, 2013, pp 23-42.

Bessette, Jean. Retroactivism in the Lesbian Archives: Composing Pasts and Futures. 1st edition, Southern Illinois University Press, 2017.

Chidgey, Red. "Free, Trade: Distribution Economies in Feminist Zine Networks." Signs: Journal of Women in Society,vol 35 no 1, 2009.

Culton, Kenneth R., and Ben Holtzman. “The Growth and Disruption of a ‘Free Space’: Examining a Suburban Do It Yourself (DIY) Punk Scene.” Space and Culture, vol. 13, no. 3, Aug. 2010, pp. 270–84. CrossRef, doi:10.1177/1206331210365258.

Dave, Replay. CoffeeBreath 2. Self published, Gainesville, FL, 2004.

Derrida, Jacques and Eric Prenowitz. "Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression." Diacritics, vol 25., no 2, Summer 1995, pp 9-63.

Duncombe, Stephen. Notes from Underground: Zines and the Politics of Alternative Culture. Microcosm, 2017.

Eichhorn, Kate. The Archival Turn in Feminism: Outrage in Order. Reprint edition, American Literatures Initiative, 2014.

Emms, Rachel, and Nick Crossley. “Translocality, Network Structure, and Music Worlds: Underground Metal in the United Kingdom.” Canadian Review of Sociology, vol. 55, no. 1, Feb. 2018, pp. 111–35. EBSCOhost, doi:10.1111/cars.12181.

Food Not Bombs Orlando. Brushfire! 1. Orlando, FL 2008.

Food Not Bombs Orlando with Gainesville, FL. Brushfire! Gainesville. 2008.

Fristoe, Travis. America? 1. Self published, Gainesville, FL.

---. America? 2. n.d., Self published, Gainesville, FL.

---. America? 3. n.d., Self published, Gainesville, FL.

---. America? 4. n.d., Self published, Gainesville, FL.

---. America? 5. n.d., Self published, Gainesville, FL.

---. America? 6. n.d., Self published, Gainesville, FL.

---. America? 7. n.d., Self published, Gainesville, FL.

---. America? 8. n.d., Self published, Gainesville, FL.

---. America? 9. n.d., Self published, Gainesville, FL.

---. America? 10. n.d., Self published, Gainesville, FL.

---. America? 11. n.d., Self published, Gainesville, FL.

---. America? 12. n.d., Self published, Gainesville, FL.

---. America? 13. n.d., Self published, Gainesville, FL.

---. America? 14. n.d., Self published, Gainesville, FL.

---. America? 15. n.d., Self published, Gainesville, FL.

--- "We Don't Go To Their Parties." n.d., Self Published, Gainesville, FL.

Fristoe, Travis, and Cometbus, Aaron. Radon. Cometbus and No Idea, Gainesville, FL, 2012.

Groff, Lauren. Florida. Riverhead books, 2018.

Galeana, Erika. No Idea Documentary, YouTube, 24 Aug. 2013, www.youtube.com/watchv=pp50AoISCoA

Hatfield, Charles. Alternative Comics : An Emerging Literature. Jackson : University Press of Mississippi, 2005.

Honma, Todd. “From Archives to Action: Zines, Participatory Culture, and Community Engagement in Asian America.” Radical Teacher, no. 105, pp. 33–43.

Jenkins, Henry. Textual Poachers: Television Fans & Participatory Culture. New York: Routledge, 1992. Print.

Kumbier, Alana. Ephemeral Material : Queering the Archive. Sacramento, CA : Litwin Books, LLC, 2014.

Mills, Jessica. Yard Wide Yarns 1. n.d., Self published,Gainesville, FL.

--- Yard Wide Yarns 2. n.d., Self published, Gainesville, FL

--- Yard Wide Yarns 3. n.d., Self published, Gainesville, FL

--- Yard Wide Yarns 4. n.d., Self published, Gainesville, FL

--- Yard Wide Yarns 5. n.d., Self published, Gainesville, FL

--- Yard Wide Yarns 6. n.d., Self published, Gainesville, FL

--- Yard Wide Yarns 7. n.d., Self published, Gainesville, FL

Piepmeier, Alison. Girl Zines: Making Media, Doing Feminism. New York: New York University Press, 2009. Print.

Rawson, K.J. “Archival Justice: An Interview With Ben Power Alwin.” Radical History Review, no. 122, May 2015, pp. 177–87.

Resh, Jonathan. Amped: Notes from a Go-Nowhere Punk Band. Viper, 2002.

Schwartz, Joan M. and Terry Cook. "Archives, Records, and Power: The Making of Modern Memory." Archival Science 2, 2002.

Thelin, Var, et al., No Idea 8. Gainesville, FL

---. No Idea 10. Gainesville, FL. 1992

---. No Idea 11. Gainesville, FL. 1995

Underfoot, Matthew Vincent Preira. Brisk Walk 3. Self published, Gainesville, FL.

Walker, Matt. Gainesville Punk: A History of Bands & Music. The History Press, 2016.

BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH

F. E. Stewart-Taylor completed a Master of Arts in English in spring of 2019. At time of writing, they remain at the University of Florida to complete a PhD, and in

Gainesville to continue working with the Civic Media Center.