Around 15 years ago, Midwest natives Milo Miller and Christopher Wilde — connected by their mutual love for punk rock and activism — decided to merge their personal zine collections. They only owned around 350 zines, but they were laying out the foundation of what would become Milwaukee, Wisconsin’s Queer Zine Archive Project (QZAP), one of the largest exclusively queer zine archives in the world.
“Chris and I met in 2001 when we were living in the Bay Area,” Miller tells them. “We were both co-organizers for Queeruption, which was an ongoing series of weeklong gatherings for folks who were sort of politically radical anarchist punks, sex-positive and all that. Around that time, my housing situation was falling apart and I moved to Milwaukee not long after 9/11 to live with my family, to figure out what I was going to do next.”
Wilde and Miller had stayed in touch, and the following year Wilde moved to Milwaukee. That’s when the seeds of the Queer Zine Archive Project — those 350 zines — were planted, and the co-founders transformed a corner of their dining room into the headquarters. It wasn’t long before Miller and Wilde had amassed several file cabinets worth of zines, and they moved their growing collection into an empty apartment unit downstairs.
Today, QZAP holds upwards of 2,500 items, including non-zine ephemera such as 90s queercore show flyers and pamphlets announcing rallies that once circulated in ACT UP chapters around the country. About a quarter of the collection is available online, updated and cataloged IRL by a close-knit team of volunteers, interns, students from nearby universities, and zinesters-in-residence, giving Midwesterners and folks on the coasts the opportunity to dive into some rarely seen queer history.
QZAP is nestled among good company in Milwaukee’s Riverwest neighborhood. It’s walking distance from member-run bars such as Riverwest Public House and local LGBTQ+-owned gathering places like Art Bar. The area has a reputation of being one of the most community-oriented hotspots in the city, so it’s not unusual to stumble across festivals like Riverwest FemFest, a yearly weekend celebrating the work of folks on the femme and nonbinary spectrum, or the notorious RW24, a 24-hour long bike race, during a night out with friends.
Inside the cream city-brick clad garden floor of the couple’s Riverwest home sits QZAP. While Pansy Division plays in the background, Miller guides me past a wooden produce crate jam-packed with personalized mixtapes. The names of Heavens to Betsy and Bikini Kill songs are scrawled across the cassette inserts, echoing the stockpile of original prints of riot grrrl zines from the early 90s that are also part of the collection. A Kill Rock Stars and K Records-heavy vinyl collection, donated the previous summer, awaits categorization. There’s a photocopier and saddle stitch stapler — just in case inspiration strikes — along with a fold-out sofa near the entrance.
In between extemporaneous tidbits on metadata and cataloguing processes, Miller recalls hosting low-key dance parties and family dinner nights with visitors in the upstairs kitchen, and it’s not uncommon for the couple to house those interested in helping maintain the archive here in the archive. Miller, a graphic designer, and Wilde, a historian, welcome longtime creators and newcomers alike, and resemble the friends you might bump into at a queer punk show happening in the basement of any given city across the Midwest. They both don piercings and either well broken-in Doc Martens or dark nailpolish, and wear a mix of mostly black and washed denim.
“We’re not the kind of archive you’d see at a university. You don’t have to put on a pair of gloves to look at any of the materials here,” Miller says. “We’re zine-makers. We’re queers. We’re punks. We’re part of the community that we are archiving. Our mission is to not just preserve zines and make them accessible digitally, but also to promote zinemaking to a wider community, specifically to the queer community.”
Miller jokes about the deeply-ingrained humility that is “Midwest nice” and living in what many consider a flyover state. But there are a number of misconceptions about residents of the Midwest that go, in our conversation, unremarked upon: This idea that Midwesterners are entirely isolated, for example, and that time seems to stand still in the region. That the sense of conformity among Midwesterners is so ingrained that individuals become indistinguishable from one another. The Milwaukee that we both know is a textbook rustbelt city in close proximity to endless acres of farmland where the voices of queer, disabled, undocumented, indigenous folks and people of color struggle to survive in the aftermath of what has been a now-longstanding conservative administration (both local and national), and have experienced nothing but hostility for years. For all a zine archive can’t do — change legislation or raise impressive amounts of money — QZAP’s preservation of voices often shut out of critical dialogues offers an essential service and sense of agency to LGBTQ+ folks in Milwaukee and beyond.
