For three hours on the third Wednesday of every month, members of the Leving Lesbian Archive (LLA) met in Henrietta Hudson, a historic lesbian bar in the West Village district in New York City, to create a monthly zine in the same name. The space is dedicated to black lesbians and brings creatives from all over the city. LLA members decide on conceptual designs for every zine page and deliberately select materials.
While they carefully cut out magazine and newspaper clippings, laminated and stuck on top of clear building paper, the magazine designers have their personal and political realities to the Living Lesbian Archive Zine. The zine-a mini-magazine booklet-is trimmed with glitter ink and decreased with lively stickers, has an alcoholic and natural earth value.
The group pulls out of a huge stock of collage and scraping supplies to bind their creations to each other. When the design of the Zine of that month is ready, Living Lesbian Archive Co-founder Tajh Martin scans and digitizes it. Martin then completes the layout at home with the help of InDesign, pushes the phrases through mixtureand sells them on the website of the group, Livinglesbianarchive.comfor $ 5 each.
For almost a year, Living Lesbian Archive has been publishing its phrases as a way to anchor the black lesbian community of New York. The mini magazines are personally and online distributed among members of the ever-increasing community of LLA, mainly through word of mouth. Now, Living Lesbian Archive follows Martin on their move to Atlanta, one Historical queer black city.
“Being black and being queer, and living in Atlanta is the goal for many people. It is a safe space,” said Martin, who describes the city as a “Black Queer Mecca. “
The new Atlanta chapter from LLA will collaborate with its New York City Branch to publish a product that reflects more for lesbian communities outside the northeast.
A zine is born
Living Lesbian archive, and the namesake Zine, were born on a sweaty Wednesday evening in the forest-a typical Brooklyn hotspot for Sapphic partygoers.
A 21-year-old Columbia student who lived in Manhattan in 2024 found Martin their own community when they met their best friend and co-founder Essia Colón at a pregame for the classic Wednesday party. The relationship between the packed courtyard, moist with sweat and tension, and the blinding-hardop indoor disco ball is a refuge for some and a community for others.
For Martin it was a wake-up call. They realized how few spaces reflect black queer experiences.
“Elly and I were best friends,” said Martin. “And we felt like we were each other’s only black lesbian community. And we had something like:” This must change. “
Inspired by Scrapbooking, a Caribbean music class and YouTubers like BrattyxbreMartin presented a zine as a portal to build community. And Living Lesbian Archive was born.
“There are tons of queer spaces in New York, there are tons, but not many of them focus on keeping records,” said Martin.
The duo published the First numberwhich was without title in November 2024. The lid was made with bright yellow construction paper with stripes from Jellyfish Washi tape that ran vertically along the left. After it was produced, the couple decided that setting up a monthly theme for future Zines would bind the project together and set a certain tone.
The first edition introduced Living Lesbian Archive, usually with friends and mutual acquaintances. The news of a new project buzzed around the queer community in New York City, and made a handful of sale online – and while it was circulating around Martin’s social media, LLA began to collect hundreds of online views.
The next song – Martin’s personal favorite – was entitled ‘Chosen Family’. Published in December 2024, De Zine emphasized the importance of queer family and community buildings.
They noticed the growth of the group when every Zine was advertised and shared on social media. In the ten months since Martin and Colón started living lesbian archive, the organization has received more than 3,000 followers on social media and published seven songs from their handmade phrases. Martin LLAs said in the last 90 days Follow Instagram has risen 40 percent.
The reach also spread internationally. Martin remembered that he received direct reports from readers in France and Germany, which caused a moment of surprise and pride.
“I still can’t understand that this is more than just me and my friends,” said Martin, who now fills about five online orders – from consumers in the US and all over the world – and month.
“Elly and I started LLA because we had each other alone and now, because of this specifically, I made real real friends, people I talk to, people I trust. And I think they found that for each other.”
Martin first describes the archive as a community, Zine Second. In the New York chapter on average 10-15 members attend the Zine meeting of each month. The sale of the final phrases goes back directly to supplementing supplies for the organization and repaying Martin for out-of-pocket expenditure.
“I want a record of what we are doing right now, especially documenting our stories while we are happy,” said Martin. “I feel that many black queer media are pretty sad, and I want to keep a record of other emotions we have.”
‘The literature of marginalized communities’
In a world of digital stories and artificially generated photos, physical artifacts who live black queer document are a kind of protest against erasing marginalized communities.
“With the abundance of different types of media and with the abundance of tools that makers have at their disposal, I think that his own people in particular are coming back because there is something physical. They are purely original,” said Anthony Labat, a collection and archive processing at the University of Missouri, Kansas City.
“You do not have to subscribe or a patreon or a squarespace or something else to actually make you Zine and to release it to people,” he added.
The self -published magazines came up with the invention of copying machines in the 1930s. As copy stores and machines were commercially available, the do-it-yourself style of Zines became more popular in the Sixties. In the nineties, Zines were a primary reference point for punk and hardcore music reviews and do -the -self -bands that found their foot on the edge.
Zines have seen a growing revival since the 2000s, because according to Labat, the digital media market has increasingly become oversaturated, which has been archiving for more than ten years. As an archivist for a library whose collections date from the 70s, Labat said that making Zine was always about the underdogs.
Making physical phrases requires community collection, crafts and prints that live indefinitely.
“Zines are the medium, the literature of marginalized communities,” said Labat. “Zines have been created and spread a bit in the underground because they are a path of pure expression. There is nothing between you and your audience.”
He pointed to older publications such as The lawyer And The ladderas well as Vice versaThe first Lesbian Zine – launched in 1947 as ‘America’s Gayest Magazine’. Many of these underground publications, Labat said, were crucial access points for the queer community.
At the time, some of these magazines were the only reference point for accurate information about the HIV crisis, because large media had become unreliable and fear of fear.
Digital ownership has cleared the path for a lack of control over the media that many people consume, with license problems, censorship and a full access to many versions of music, books and films.
“Many archives only exist because of what people have decided is valuable enough to keep,” Labat, a gloomy memory that all media, paper path or not, can be easily obscured.
In this way, the Zines of LLA reminds the kind of archive work on the Lesbian Herstory ArchivesAn archive museum that collects Sapphian history artifacts that date from the 1970s. These are all projects that focus on documenting experiences from the real lifespan that have not been documented elsewhere.
How archiving can heal
Although Martin wants to expand the organization to Atlanta, they emphasize that the new chapter will remain faithful to its original values-Tight-Brey and Scrappy. They are now concentrating on selling more Zines, expanding Living Lesbian ArchiveThe reach and solidification of a new community in Atlanta. However, Martin hopes that the Zine will become a household name among archives, just like the Lesbian Herstory Archives.
It is about more than legacy, said Martin – it is about preserving a real, complete record of this particularly loaded moment in history.
“Elly and I would always talk about how LLA is inherent politics, because community structure is precisely antagonistic towards what the [Trump] Administration wants, “said Martin.” They don’t want us to come together and they want to erase our stories. And I feel that this is our way of fighting against that. ” ‘
That community became increasingly important when Colón suddenly died in January 2025.
The impact and loss of Colón reflects through the group. They honored Colón with an altar, flowers, photos – and a special edition of the Zine the same month, entitled ‘New Beginning’. It contained poems by members, photos of friends and letters in memory of the co-founder of the deceased LLA.
As time went, the living lesbian archive continued to guide the community in processing this monumental loss. The fourth song, entitled “All About Love”, was printed in February 2025. The first page spread contains a simple magazine -cut spelling “Elly”, followed by a scribbled message of gratitude: “Thank you for giving me and us all somewhere.”
LLA has created a space for members to belong to heartache, hope and, all during documentation.
And that is what keeping records, in whatever form, is about, Labat said.
“The importance of keeping up with archives such as a record of history is now so much more important, because there are many people in power who like to create the truth that fits their own agenda,” said Labat. “With the archives it is difficult to do that, because the material is not really lying. It’s just. It’s just there.”
It is not just about fighting the present moment, said Martin, it is also about honoring the past.
Martin and their fellow makers Eerden JuneteENTH and Pride Month in a particularly lively June edition, entitled “Prideteenth.” The June Zine contained fragments of Pride Culture in New York City, such as Wednesday evening visuals, and recesses of West Village Essential Summer Bars, as well as an announcement of the expansion of LLA to Atlanta stopped with a photo of a U-haul.
Build a multi-urban community
In August, Martin organized the first meeting of the new Atlanta chapter of Living Lesbian Archive. With members of the community who met each other in Atlanta and New York City to rebuild the problem completely, the August Zine, after the theme of Black August, is on the way to publication. Digitized and designed in coordination, Living Lesbian Archive is now active in two major cities.
Martin said they hope that this expansion will create a tangible record of the experiences of black lesbians in America for the next decades – long after Google Drive, iCloud and Meta have become outdated.
“I want a small 22-year-old dike to look at our zine in ten years and would be like:” Wow, this is really cool, “said Martin.” That is what I want. I want us to last a long time. “
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