In the face of A.I., can zines save queer stories?

If you’ve been online this year, you might have experienced a barrage
of popups announcing new artificial intelligence features: Your search
engine results might have A.I. answers pinned at the top and you might
have seen an A.I.-generated video of bunny rabbits bouncing on a
trampoline.  

People are using A.I. for anything imaginable like
writing love poems, press releases, professional emails, food recipes,
and some are going as far as finding romantic companionship from robotic
reassurance. 

And while some people call A.I. tools an
“advancement” — with the ability to help people create, think, connect ,
and even love — others are calling it “the death of the internet,” and have desires to go back to “old tech” and, with that, older ways of consuming news, media, and entertainment.

And then there are the human impacts: In addition to being fraught
with environmental impacts, A.I. chatbots fueled two recent incidents of
suicide including teenager Adam Raine in California and a murder-suicide by Stein-Erik Soelberg in New York. 

The way the Internet is changing is also playing a part in erasing LGBTQ+ history.

“AI
is created within an already oppressive system, which means it will
likely exacerbate inequities and inequalities in representation on the
internet, and in the digital history books, for all marginalized people,
including LGBTQIA+ communities,” said Ames Meeks, co-director of
Arizona Queer Archives in Tucson. “Not having accurate and adequate
representation has repercussions for future generations of queer people,
who will not have a shared or clear history.” 

By February 2025,
more than 8,000 web pages across a dozen U.S. websites were removed,
many of which held data specific to LGBTQ+ people and many contained
words like “inclusion” or “transgender.” In addition to the recent web
page changes taking place this year, a wider wiping of internet content
is occurring. 

Pew Research Center states 38 percent of webpages
existing in 2013 are no longer accessible and one in five government
webpages contain broken links to references and other sources. The
overall removal of webpages along with other scrubbing of queer
information and art references across the web means both A.I. tools and
humans alike have less online sources to pull from when gathering
information. 

In short: Queer histories are being erased from our
online spaces faster than we can capture them. In its place,
do-it-yourself styled zines have filled that gap for people. 

India
Johnson runs Late Night Copies Press with her partner Aiden Bettine out
of Minneapolis and publishes zines about queer history and archives,
do-it-yourself culture, and erotica.

“We’ve really only been able to see ourselves in print for 50-ish
years. That’s not a lot of time, and we should fiercely defend our
ability to tell our own stories and shape our own narratives, as well as
retain ownership over them after publication,” Johnson said. “I feel
like each generation of LGBTQ people has to discover print for itself.”

That’s where zines have entered the conversation.

Zines are black and white or colorful, small self-published,
independent booklets that contain any topic and medium under the sun.
Zines can be bright containers of writing, photographs, comics, lists,
poems, collage and anything in between. They contain personal writings,
recipes, dreams, stories, illustrations and more. And for the people
making zines, they can be an antidote to decaying online spaces and
AI-generated writing and art. 

Another reason why zines are
powerful? “Because it isn’t a person,” wrote Cathy Fastwolf in her
article “A.I. Will Never Write a Zine,” published in the zine “The
Future is Zines” in 2023. “A.I. will never write a health zine about
covid or mental illness, because A.I. has no unique flesh body, no
thought or feeling linked to individual brain cells. It can’t bond with
other zinesters or discover how its individual identity fits into a
larger zine community, because intrinsic to the definition of zines is
the concept of do-it-yourself. And A.I. has no original self with which
to do it.”

Zines have a long history of being one of the only media showcasing queer experiences. 

Older
examples include “Fire!!” conceived by Langston Hughes and Richard
Nugent in 1926, and Edythe Eyde’s, aka Lisa Bean, 1947 “Vice Versa” zine
for lesbians. Zines are unedited historical documents of queer art,
societal struggles, and cultural lexicons spanning many decades. They
cannot be easily erased, tracked, or banned. The relevance of zines and
independent publishing is reiterated with each passing year of
censorship, sanitation, and discrimination.

To combat ongoing
erasure, independent and academic libraries preserve queer histories by
cataloguing and digitally archiving zines, audio transcriptions, videos,
photographs, and more. 

Some archives are open to the public to
visit and some are stored in searchable online databases. Nationally,
you can find queer archives at LGBTQ Iowa Archives & Library, Gerber
Hart Library & Archives, and Tretter Trans Oral History Project to
name a few. 

In Arizona, there are numerous queer archives
including Arizona Queer Archives, Arizona State University’s Bj Bud
Memorial Archives, Wasted Ink Zine Library’s Queer Collection, and
Arizona LGBT+ History Project.

But where zines have in the past
been used as just a way to express community art or political messaging,
those involved in zine archives said they see more people making zines,
and using them in different ways — as alternative sources for
trustworthy news.

Charlie Alexander, a co-owner of Transgender/Nonbinary Education
& Trainings in Albuquerque, says zines are being more valued within
the last few years as people move toward community interdependence: “I
have co-written multiple zines on transition-related topics as a way to
combat misinformation especially during this political moment when it
has become harder to find information on transition.” 

Meeks, with
Arizona Queer Archives, said they’re seeing more people, groups, and
organizations create zines in response to the 2024 election,
surveillance, censorship, and A.I. They recently received a $3,000 grant
from Arts Foundation for Tucson and Southern Arizona stART to support
this effort and collaborate with 6 local organizations to create zines.

Even
news outlets are beginning to use zines to widen their readership. One
zine published early August 2025 titled “Starved For Care”was
created by the Investigative Reporting Lab at Yale in collaboration with
Arizona Luminaria. This zine artistically details the experiences of
Mary Faith Casey who was jailed in Pima County on charges tied to her
homelessness. Casey didn’t receive proper medical care and eventually
she died. The zine discusses additional potential negligence in Pima
County jails and highlights numerous similar instances across the
nation. 

In a world of evolving tech-fueled surveillance, erasure,
and misinformation, self-published paper zines are here to stay. A.I.
might not be the advancement we want and need. The next time you catch
yourself doom scrolling or about to ask A.I. a question, maybe consider
picking up a zine instead or make one of your own.