Zine Review:
Boyoboy: An Altarts and Culture Zine
Writing-wise, this zine is like most zines with a bunch of contributors: uniformly okay. The best parts are the parts not copied and pasted directly from Wikipedia (come on, guys! You can do better than that!), like Chris Gulian’s detailed reviews and Kenji Tokawa’s poem “Reminders.” There’s a bunch of different stuff in here–record reviews, a Halloween mixtape, a two-page list of movies featuring queer characters–but I don’t feel particularly qualified to review a zine meant for young gay guys (as far as I know, I am only one of those three things) so I gave it to Daniel, a friend of mine who is young, gay and a guy. From the email he sent me after reading it: “I liked the long list of stuff they weren’t gonna mention” (on the back cover: “abfab boy bands circuit parties underwear cher” etc.) “but simple stuff like the clusters of photos and all the different fonts made it feel school-project-y. I’d read another one if they got better at doing layout.” (Emma Healey)
Zine, Vol. 2 Issue 2, $3, boyoboyzine.com, [email protected]