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Teen Meat is the best magazine in the world for guys who fantasize about guys fantasizing about Big Macs. There's a huge Beverly Hills potential with this publication, meaning we could still accurately place it in history even 50 years from now—it's 90s pop digested and thrown up by gay WASPs amused by anything and everything, meat in particular. They combine junk food and erectile dysfunction into the same article—and somehow it fits. It makes us horny and hungry at the same time, which is a strange but fantastic combination.

Unfortunately, I couldn't find an image of this one, but it was an Australian fanzine that wrote about AIDS and how to live with it. It was a direct competitor to DPN, and was published around the same time—yes, the dark years. I don't really feel like adding any commentary to their manifesto, which was "To badly go where no publication has gone before in providing/stealing information, humor, and humanity about the Great Adventure, aka HIV," because I think it speaks for itself. But if I had to pick an article that sums up the content, it would be the one about making a homemade HIV self-contamination kit. It's amusing, fun, and French gays have never had this kind of auto-derision on the illness.
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Here's another one that can be shelved in the "post modern perversion" section of your heterosexual brain. Scum Bag specializes in such eccentricities as fisting, daddies, backrooms, and glory-holes. I have a special affection for this magazine because it was the first gay zine that I ever read. The magazine's graphics are based off of stupid collages and illustrations, and are really well done.

The name of this one is fairly self explanatory. Fag School is about the gay community, or "school," itself. It is (was?) published and written by Brontez, one of the San Francisco gay scene's most influential members. Brontez interviewed queer and lesbian bands and told of his "sexcapades" to a totally smitten readership. The background images were all printed on a broken photocopier and the overlaid texts were written in the tone of the very best 80s queer punk magazines. This mag went so far in its role of school master that it once taught its readership "How to Become a Go-Go Boi step-by-step."

This was the fanzine inspired by Wobensmith's Outpunk Records, a label specializing in queer punk bands. It pushes the gay punk aesthetic to the extreme and, on flipping through, it really seems as though every member of this entire secret scene was inspired by both Suicidal Tendencies and the Smiths, musically and shredded-denim-jacket-wise. The editors wrote about any mainstream publications they abhorred, the worst straight bands on planet Earth, and the difference between queercore and heavy metal. The mag folded in '97, probably so it could avoid the 2000s.
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Little Ceasar was a fanzine launched by Dennis Cooper in 1976 and described by its creator as a "punk rock literary journal." Inside Cooper compiled poetry, portfolios, fiction, and fiction of fiction. It was mainly a compilation of arty intellectualizing and reflexive thought—along the lines of Cooper's later work. Little Ceasar cut ties with any stupid lo-fi aggressive zine ideology, but held on to the "total freedom to speak your mind without reprehension" part. This could be the reason that Cooper spoke only of himself and his life. That might sound self-absorbed, but it worked—Cooper is the sort of Uber-Mensch entirely capable of giving his readers mental boners just by talking about his grandparents and why he prefers chorizo pizzas.

Fanzini, with its lovely Latin name, was a major influence on gay 70s culture. The magazine was produced with three pieces of string by John Jack Baylin and made up the tip of the avant-garde before punk came along and knocked the underground embryonic structure of the mid to late 70s. Inside were drawings and collages by John Dowd, who salvaged the images of Disney cartoons and combined them with obscene photos—most of the time resulting in guys recognizable only by their thick mustaches and leather jumpsuits. The guys from Butt count Fanzini among their editorial influences, especially in tone and passion for ridiculous fabrics.

Bimbox exemplified "the politicized homosexual avant-garde" at the end of the 80s and beginning of the 90s. Bimbox brought the population's attention to the existence of a lesser known community that fucked people of their own sex and were against everything most people considered normal. To show their aversion to all middle class bourgeois heterosexual norms, the guys behind the mag spent most of their time showing gigantic erect penises. Nevertheless, their extreme ideologies and Manichean attitude toward the world (us = nice, them = wankers) often drove them to intriguing and unpopular positions: they were in favor of total separation between gays and straights, and sought a homosexual socialist utopia. It's a shame that these dreams of a Promised Land were prematurely laid to rest by the sharp reality of US Customs, who confiscated their second issue for pornographic content.FLORENT ROUTOULP