THIS COULD ONLY BE HAPPENING HERE: PLACE AND IDENTITY IN GAINESVILLE’S ZINE COMMUNITY By 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 © 2019 Fiona E. Stewart-Taylor 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 4 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 5 Travis Fristoe, who I never met but has taught me and continues to teach me more about thinking a community than anyone else. 6 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 7 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 By 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. 8 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 9 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