Don't be a dick!
Don't be a dick!
Because I love you all, the full interview from PISSUE 1 with Lavender Zines Archive.
Hey wicked pisser,
I have a little treat for you! I wanted those of you who haven’t been able to get your hands on a copy of the physical magazine to get a taste of how delicious PISS is… so I decided to share a few interviews I did from the first issue.
The first one is with Kylle St. Trail who you will remember as the wonderful person behind Lavender Zines Archive we talked to a few months ago. Well we got into a whole lot more than who to follow on Instagram! So here is that piece for you, so cleverly titled: “DON’T BE A DICK”.
It feels like every gay boy had that seminal online moment when they opened up tumblr and decided they were finally going to type out the letters g-a-y for the first time. We all knew that something big would happen, but when the floodgates finally parted and the pictures started to load on our screens, the world was never the same. Hot guys on your phone (or your mom’s computer). Some of them doing things you didn’t really understand yet, but learning starts somewhere, right?
For so many young queers, the internet is the first place they feel safe discovering more about their sexuality. It’s a wild west of erotic information, community boards and long-lost media that confirms to each generation that encounters it they don’t carry the burden of being the first to feel the way they feel. For Kylle St. Trail, founder of Lavender Zines Archive, an Instagram page and website dedicated to sharing and preserving queer print media and erotica, the journey was much the same. “I was a huge fan of Elvis Presley as a kid. So that era, the 50s, 60s and 70s was my favorite. Then I started digging around Tumblr, finding old gay photography and seeing a lot of Mel Roberts. I stumbled onto this and really everything felt gatekept.”
Lavender Zines, which has just under 5,000 followers on Instagram, is a response to the feeling that there wasn’t enough queer material out there in the world. “I’m also very into free education, free knowledge and sharing knowledge with people because I think it’s so important and community building,” said St. Trail, who posts sneak peeks into the contents of his archive a few times a week, covering the model’s money-makers with big lavender stars. Go-to titles like Hustler, Mars and Mel Roberts’ Catalog of Male Models represent the type of gay erotica many of us know and love: tan guys, no clothes, illustrated scenes with proportions mor concerning than Barbie’s. But as Kylle would tell you, the archive goes deeper than big dicks on a Tuesday afternoon.
Eurocentrism and pervasive ideals of beauty which revolve around whiteness and maleness have meant that there is less diversity in the material available on the market to save. “It’s harder tenfold to come across stuff that features black men, Black women, people of color, lesbians. But I love the search because it’s my job as a white queer youth to get this shit out here, you know?”
But luckily, he admits, “I’m an eBay slut,” and has no problem spending hours at a time typing in key words like “gay,” “transgender,” “queer,” “vintage” and “erotica” into the search bar in the hopes of digging up gold. Once Kylle does find the material, sharing it on his social media is a 50/50 game of whether the material will be taken down or not. Shortly after our interview, I tried to collaborate on a post with Lavender Zines Archive, sharing something to both our platforms at the same time. The feature which enables this to happen wasn’t available for Kylle, likely because of the type of content he posts. “I posted a magazine called Hustler and I forgot to censor it. So, you saw the guy’s penis in the Instagram feed. And I had been up there for hours. When I went back and realized, I took it down and reposted the cover of the magazine censored. That lasted 10 seconds.”
In the digital age, a certain freedom of expression available in the queer print media of the past seems to be slowly evaporating. It was in 1958 the postmaster of Los Angeles Otto Olesen sued the queer magazine, One: The Momosexual Magazine, which had been running from 1953. The issue which precipitated the lawsuit featured a story titled, “Sappho Rememebered,” about a lesbian love triangle, a poem about gay cruising and an ad for the magazine, The Circle, which often ran pulp romance. All of this was seen to be “obscene” under the Comstock laws which regulated what could be sent through the mail. (Today, some conservatives including Supreme Court Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas, believe that it is possible to suspend all abortions by invoking the same law as every part of an abortifacient it at some point sent through the mail.) One, Inc. v Olesen was decided without oral argument in the favor of the magazine, the first time the court had ever ruled on homosexual issues and setting up a precedent for greater free speech. Seven years later in Washington D.C. itself, Leather! began to be published in 1965 and flourish.
This decision opened the door for more publications like Sapho, Lesbos and Female Mimics to grow alongside gay titles. “But it wasn’t until 67 frontal male nudity was legal in magazines. But in this interim period, you see a lot of drag, trans and lesbian stuff. I think that’s where you see more people be able to write each other and letters through existing magazines realizing we can have a publication of this like Female Mimics,” says Kylle. That title, which featured a range of trans celebrities like Cochinelle and local drag and ‘crossdressing’ figures provided an outlet for conversations about gender identity which didn’t fit in between the hard dicks of popular erotic gay titles. It’s one of his favorites because, “there’s sensitivity towards a lot of things. People are writing about their gender confirmation surgery.”
These titles are essential to share because they pick up dialogues which had been happening in other parts of the world, as in Berlin, about the future of queerness, trans identity and homosexuality which was largely erased before World War II. The research of Magnus Hirshfeld and his colleagues at the Institute for Sexual Science, “Unfortunately, that history got burned away.”
“We wouldn’t be here as in , the gay community, queer community as a whole, without the drag queens, without the trans women, trans women of color, doing everything for us,” Kylle says solemnly, “I’m super grateful to have people send me stuff. It’s such a really cool feeling. Because it’s so rare, and this is history— a little fucking matchbook is proof that we’ve always been here, you know?”
Even though Lavender Zines is accessible to anyone regardless of sexual orientation, Kylle doesn’t spend a second of his day worried about how straight people might react to the content. “Our whole fucking system is catered to heterosexuals, so why should I cater to them too. I want to cater to the queer people. If you’re straight, cool, visit the shop.”
Despite digital censorship and algorithmic challenges about getting the work out there, maybe the sheer volume of content being uploaded and shared with surpass the public’s ability to register their discomfort. “We have this army of people who have voices and are able to be loud in millions of homes through their phones. The big difference is how fast we can become a community.” There’s still a gap in queer owned media compared to the golden age of the gay magazine in the 1980s as LGBT identification was up to 7.1% of the population in a Gallup poll as recently as 2021. Part of this is because there are fewer and fewer independent publishing houses dedicated to queer media. “Califran Enterprises published a bunch of shit in the 1960s,” reminded Kylle, but today, “It’s the companies we hate the most,” like Meta and Chase sponsoring corporate pride events, parades, museum shows and online influencers. That’s why projects like Lavender Zines Archive are an essential space for disseminating this information outside the grasp of a media establishment which feeds on the status quo.
But the future of queer media? “That’s going to have to be put in the hands of individual people, individual publishers, individual artists; and community, community, community with a capital C.”