LAFRENIERE, Steve — Dennis Cooper, Gary Indiana, Kevin Killian, David Sedaris, et al. The Gentlewomen of California [Help Others / Say No to Democracy, no. 4]

LAFRENIERE, Steve — Dennis Cooper, Gary Indiana, Kevin Killian, David Sedaris, et al. The Gentlewomen of California [Help Others / Say No to Democracy, no. 4].
[Chicago: self-published, 1990]

Side-stapled (280 x 215 mm). [36] pp. One full-page color photographic title-page, xerox black-and-white illustrations; stray spots. In red printed upper cover, blue printed rear cover; some dampstaining at head affecting wraps and text-block, wraps with creasing, upper cover with larger crease at lower right corner & two short closed tears. Very good.

Steve Lafreniere’s closely guarded, mail-order queer zine, this issue with a head-spinning list of “contributors”: Angela Carter, Dennis Cooper, Gary Indiana, Kevin Killian, David Sedaris, My Comrade, and more. An artist’s magazine comprising bootlegged writing from other publications, xeroxed alongside porn and handmade elements, Lafreniere’s publication is the rarest and most handcrafted of these early punk, queer zines.

Dennis Cooper, in an editorial on this counterculture publishing scene, and one of the few extant contemporary references to the publication, writes:

 “Chicago is [...] ‘house’ to perhaps the most underground zine, The Gentlewomen of California (the address is a well-kept secret). Editor Steve Lafreniere is one of the city’s best-known entrepreneurs (for lack of a better word), and his occasional Xeroxed publication is founded on the principle that ‘everybody owns everything.’ Therefore it’s a highly discriminating repository of images, fiction, quotes, and essays swiped from other places. Lafreniere crops, enlarges, defaces, prints them on various colored and textured papers to create what might be considered an (ugh) Artist’s Book, if he wasn’t such a terrorist.”

Cooper goes on, in fact, to describe this very issue: “‘Say No to Democracy’ and ‘Homosexual Men Arm Yourselves’ read two of the messages masked into the zine’s topsy-turvy design. The latest issue involves texts by Jacques Attali, Gary Indiana (on Mapplethorpe), Angela Carter, Paul Bowles, and New Narrative writers David Sedaris and Kevin Killian, plus doctored erotica galore, including an actual page ripped from some porn magazine and scratched with the slogan, ‘Where’s your mind now?’”

The Gentlewomen of California was born out of the homocore movement, a term originally coined by Bruce LaBruce and G.B. Jones in their Toronto-based zine J.D.s. The term sought to re-politicize queer art and writing, situating it in a punk ethos and aesthetic. Tom Jennings would soon adopt this name for his San Francisco publication, and a number of queer punk publishers began to issue similar zines across the country — seeking to rail against what they perceived to be gay life’s yuppification and capitulation to bourgeois American culture, due to (somewhat) greater political power in the wake of the AIDS crisis. Jennings would describe his publication thusly, “One thing everyone in here has in common is that we’re all social mutants, we’ve outgrown or never were part of any of the ‘socially acceptable’ categories.”

In 1993, Lafreniere commented on the importance of the ‘queer’ label, seeking to contrast it with wider ‘gay’ culture:

“Instead of using a mainstream middle-class heterosexual model, ‘queer’ really celebrates more the real perversity and diversity of sexuality in general ... But within queer culture, homocore kids who like punk rock are even more marginalized. They’re like a subculture of the queer subculture of the gay culture. It’s more than just a taste in music. Punk filtered through queer is a very different idea than punk that was filtered through middle-class America or working-class England when it was originally happening. It’s not just gay people getting into punk. It’s using punk as a form of music to express a whole other set of concerns, desires, anger. And fun things, too.” 

Also a curator and promoter, Lafreniere was the principal organizer of the legendary SPEW: The Homographic Convergence. Held at the Randolph Street Gallery in Chicago on May 25, 1991, SPEW was the first queer zine festival. 

Extremely rare. OCLC locates only three copies of any issues held institutionally. SAIC holds an additional issue, not accounted for in OCLC. None are the present issue.

PROVENANCE: Ira Silverberg

REFERENCES: Dennis Cooper, “Homocore Rules,” The Village Voice Supplement, New York, November 4, 1990, pp 92-93; Chris Dickson, “Punk Filtered Through Queer,” Reader, Vol. 22, No. 13, Chicago, January 7, 1993

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