This Zine Is Creating Black Queer Community—In New York, Atlanta, And Beyond

For three hours on the third Wednesday of every month, members of the Living Lesbian Archive (LLA) convene at Henrietta Hudson, a historic lesbian bar in New York City’s West Village neighborhood, to create a monthly zine by the same name. The space is dedicated to Black lesbians, bringing together creatives from all over the city. LLA members decide on conceptual designs for each zine page and deliberately select materials.

As they carefully cut out magazine and newspaper clippings, layered and pasted on top of bright construction paper, the magazine designers funnel their personal and political realities into the Living Lesbian Archive zine. Topped off with glitter ink and garnished with vivid stickers, the zine—a mini-magazine booklet—has a corporeal and naturally grounding value to it.

The group pulls from a vast stash of collage and scrapbook supplies to tie their creations together. When the draft of that month’s zine is ready, Living Lesbian Archive co-founder Tajh Martin scans and digitizes it. Martin then finalizes the layout at home using InDesign, prints the zines through Mixam, and sells them on the group’s website, LivingLesbianArchive.com, for $5 each.

For nearly a year, Living Lesbian Archive has been publishing its zines as a way to anchor New York’s Black lesbian community. The mini magazines are distributed in person and online among members of LLA’s ever-expanding community, mainly through word of mouth. Now, Living Lesbian Archive is following Martin on their move to Atlanta, a historically queer Black city.

“To be Black, and to be queer, and to live in Atlanta is the goal for a lot of people. It is a safe space,” said Martin, who describes the city as a “Black queer Mecca.”

LLA’s new Atlanta chapter will collaborate with its New York City branch to publish a product more reflective of lesbian communities outside the Northeast.

A zine is born

Living Lesbian Archive, and its namesake zine, were born one sweaty Wednesday night at The Woods—a quintessential Brooklyn hotspot for sapphic party-goers.

A 21-year-old Columbia student living in Manhattan in 2024, Martin was finding their own community when they met their best friend and co-founder Elysia Colón at a pregame for the classic Wednesday party. The nexus between the packed courtyard, humid with sweat and tension, and the blindingly-loud indoor disco ball is a haven to some and a community to others.

For Martin, it was a wake-up call. They realized how few spaces reflect Black queer experiences.

“Elly and I were best friends,” Martin said. “And we felt like we were each other’s only Black lesbian community. And we were like, ‘This has to change.’”

Inspired by scrapbooking, a Caribbean music class, and Youtubers like BrattyxBre, Martin suggested a zine as a portal to build community. And Living Lesbian Archive was born.

“There are tons of queer spaces in New York, there’s tons, but not a lot of them focus on record-keeping,” Martin said.

The duo published the first issue, which was untitled, in November 2024. The cover was made with bright yellow construction paper with stripes of jellyfish Washi tape running vertically down the left side. After it was produced, the pair decided that setting a monthly theme for future zines would tie the project together and set a certain tone.

The first edition introduced Living Lesbian Archive, mostly drawing in friends and mutual acquaintances. The news of a new project buzzed around the New York City queer community, making a handful of sales online—and as it circulated around Martin’s social media, LLA started garnering hundreds of online views.

The next issue—Martin’s personal favorite—was titled “Chosen Family.” Published in December 2024, the zine highlighted the importance of queer found family and community-building.

They noticed the group’s growth as each zine was advertised and shared on social media. In the ten months since Martin and Colón started Living Lesbian Archive, the organization has gained over 3,000 followers on social media and published seven issues of their hand-crafted zines. In the last 90 days, Martin said LLA’s Instagram following has risen 40 percent.

Its reach spread internationally, too. Martin recalled receiving direct messages from readers in France and Germany, prompting a moment of surprise and pride.

“I still can’t fathom that this is more than just me and my friends,” said Martin, who is now filling about five online orders—from consumers in the U.S. and across the world—each month.

“Elly and I started LLA because we only had each other and now, through this specifically, I have made real genuine friends, people who I talk to, people who I confide in. And I think they found that for each other as well.”

Martin describes the archive as community first, zine second. In the New York chapter, an average of 10-15 members attend each month’s zine-making meeting. Sales from the finalized zines go directly back into replenishing supplies for the organization and reimbursing Martin for out-of-pocket expenses.

“I want a record of what we’re doing at this time, especially documenting our stories while we’re happy,” Martin said. “I feel like a lot of Black queer media is pretty sad, and I want to keep a record of other emotions that we have.”

‘The literature of marginalized communities’

In a world of digital stories and artificially-generated photos, physical artifacts that document Black queer life are a kind of protest against the erasure of marginalized communities.

“With the abundance of different types of media and with the abundance of tools that creators have at their disposal, I think zines in particular are coming back because there’s something physical. They’re purely original,” said Anthony LaBat, a collections and archives processing associate at the University of Missouri, Kansas City.

“You don’t have to set up a subscription or a Patreon or a Squarespace or anything else like that to actually make your zine and get it out to people,” he added.

The self-published magazines came with the invention of copy machines in the 1930s. As copy shops and machines became commercially available, the DIY-style of zines grew more popular in the 1960s. In the 1990s, zines were a primary reference point for punk and hardcore music reviews and DIY bands finding their footing on the fringes.

Zines have seen a growing resurgence since the 2000s, as the digital media market has become increasingly oversaturated, according to LaBat, who has been archiving zines for more than ten years. As an archivist for a library whose collections date back to the ‘70s, LaBat said that zine-making was always about the underdogs.

Creating physical zines requires community gathering, handiwork, and prints that live on indefinitely.

“Zines are the medium, the literature of marginalized communities,” LaBat said. “Zines were created and have kind of proliferated in the underground because they are an avenue of pure expression. There is nothing in between you and your audience.”

He pointed to older publications like The Advocate and The Ladder, as well as Vice Versa, the first lesbian zine—launched in 1947 as “America’s Gayest Magazine.” Many of these underground publications, LaBat said, were crucial points of access for the queer community.

At the time, some of these magazines were the only reference point for accurate information about the HIV crisis, being that major media outlets had become untrustworthy and fearmongering.

Digital ownership has paved the path for a lack of control over the media many people consume, with licensing issues, censorship, and a complete loss of access to many versions of music, books, and movies.

“Many archives only exist because of what people have decided is valuable enough to keep,” LaBat, a dreary reminder that all media, paper trail or not, can easily be obscured.

In this way, LLA’s zines recall the kind of archival work underway at the Lesbian Herstory Archives, an archival museum that collects sapphic history artifacts dating back to the 1970s. They’re all projects dedicated to documenting real life experiences not documented elsewhere.

How archiving can heal

While Martin is eager to expand the organization into Atlanta, they emphasize that the new chapter will stay true to its original values—tight-knit and scrappy. They’re now focusing on selling more zines, expanding Living Lesbian Archive’s reach, and solidifying a new community in Atlanta. More than anything, though, Martin hopes the zine will become a household name among archives, much like the Lesbian Herstory Archives.

It’s about more than legacy, Martin said—it’s about preserving a true, complete record of this particularly fraught moment in history.

“Elly and I would always talk about how LLA is inherently political, because community building is exactly antagonistic to what the [Trump] administration wants,” Martin said. “They don’t want us to come together, and they want to erase our stories. And I feel like this is our way of fighting against that.”’

That community became increasingly important when Colón died suddenly in January 2025.

Colón’s impact and loss reverberated through the group. They honored Colón with an altar, flowers, photos—and a special edition of the zine the same month, titled “New Beginnings.” It featured poems by members, photographs of friends, and letters in memory of the late LLA co-founder.

As time passed, Living Lesbian Archive continued guiding the community in processing this monumental loss. The fourth issue, titled “All About Love,” was printed in February 2025. The first page spread features a simple magazine cutout spelling “Elly,” followed by a scrawled message of gratitude: “Thank you for giving me and all of us somewhere to belong.”

LLA has created a space for members to process heartbreak, hope, and belonging, all while documenting it.

And that’s what record-keeping, in whatever form, is all about, said LaBat.

“The importance of maintaining archives as a record of history is so much more important now, because there are a lot of people in power who like to create the truth to suit their own agendas,” LaBat said. “With the archives, it’s hard to do that, because the material doesn’t really lie. It just is. It’s just there.”

It’s not just about fighting to record the current moment, Martin said, it’s also about honoring the past.

Martin and their co-creators honored Juneteenth and Pride month in a particularly lively June issue, titled “Prideteenth.” The June zine featured snippets of Pride culture in New York City, like visuals of Wednesday nights out, and cutouts of West Village essential summer bars, as well as an announcement of LLA’s expansion into Atlanta—topped off with a picture of a U-Haul.

Building a multi-city community

In August, Martin hosted the first meeting of Living Lesbian Archive’s new Atlanta chapter. With community members having met in Atlanta and New York City to construct the issue from scratch, the August zine, following the theme of Black August, is on its way to publication. Digitized and designed in coordination, Living Lesbian Archive now operates in two major cities.

Martin said they hope this expansion will create a tangible record of the experiences of Black lesbians in America for decades to come—long after Google Drive, iCloud, and Meta have become obsolete.

“I want some little 22-year-old dyke to look at our zine ten years from now and be like, ‘Wow, this is really cool,’” Martin said. “That’s what I want. I want us to last.”

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