 So I'm probably, seems like maybe the only person here who doesn't draw and so there's no slides here, you're just going to have to look at me. And so one of the things about Zine Fest is of course it's all about being super commercial and selling a lot of zines. So this is my short piece, it's called the buy my zine rant and this is all the reasons why you need to buy my zine. You need to buy my zine. Here's why. First off, if you're one of those people who doesn't own any zines, you need to buy my zines so that people don't think you're illiterate. If you're a straight person, you need to buy my zines so you'll know what one of those freaky queers thinks. If you're a mainstream gay, you need my zines so you'll find out that there are other ways of expressing homosexuality culturally. If you're a non-mainstream queer, you need my zine because finally someone is putting down and writing the things you've always thought. If you're someone with a short attention span, you need my zine because it's digestible bite-sized pieces. If you're someone who likes music, you'll dig the references you'll find here. If you're someone who likes spoken word, you can imagine me reading these pieces in a snide sarcastic humorous way and you can buy my zine and laugh. If you're broke, you need to scrape money together and buy my zine or else go to the library and read my zine at the zine library. If you are rich, you should be a patron of the arts and buy my zine. If you're a fundamentalist Christian, you need to buy my zine as evidence of the decadence of modern society. If you're a college professor, you need to assign my zine to your class so they all buy copies. If you are an internet addict, my zine will help wean you from your compulsion. My zine will cure illness, lift depression, incite revolution, build stronger bones and improve your hairstyle. You can't live without my zine. So buy my zine already. And it probably goes for everyone's zine here. You probably should buy everyone's zine. And they'll be around this weekend. So next thing is, I'm going to read something from my book. This is The International Homosexual Conspiracy. It's published by Manic Depress and I'm going to read a piece here called Preserving Gay Culture. I have a new excuse for my consumerism. I am preserving gay culture. Whether I'm purchasing a plaster cast of Michelangelo's David, the latest reprints of Gordon Merrick novels, Gay Porno magazine's designer clothes, designed by gay designers of course, or Freedom Rings, I am preserving for posterity the highest pinnacle of our glorious gay culture. This is not because I'm addicted to shopping or for my own benefit, I'm preserving these items for future generations of gay people. I'm currently constructing a tomb which is to contain my mortal remains carefully embalmed in the manner of the ancients, along with those possessions which will convey to some future archaeologists the gay culture as it exists in the current dynasty. Imagine some thousand years hence as some future Howard Carter breaks through the wall to find a dusty room crowded with the ephemera of my real life. Enema bags, dildos, cock rings, pinky rings, nipple clamps, cone bras, wigs, posing pouches, all gilded in bejuance with fans and lapis. My pet cat's mummified and a treasure trove of gay culture. After all, we are the ones who harbor the pinnacle of western culture. Visit your local mega-record store if one still exists where you reside and enter through the soundproof doors to the classical music section. You will find nobody there but gay men. Sure, there are plenty of gay Philistines shopping for techno out in the rest of the store, but in this section one finds the true elite of the gay world, the crème de la crème. Similarly, who visits art galleries? Heterosexuals only know to visit museums when must-see shows are hyped. Let's face it, the muses are fag hags and pernasses is a cruising ground. When I buy, I am not similarly propping up capitalism, participating in a system in which elites buy luxuries while the poor do without. No, I am building a new Alexandria, an empire whose glory will be in dust. And now I'm going to read from this short scene called Hangouts, which I made its debut at last year's Zinefest and I will have copies this year as well. And it starts out on the cover with, I just realized something that has gone largely missing from my life, Hangouts. Right after college, several of my college friends started an art gallery in St. Paul called Speedboat. It wasn't about making a million bucks on art. It was about hanging art by people they were friends with. Eventually, half of the space became a coffee shop called Motor Oil Industrial Coffee, and the basement was a place where local and touring bands played. There were thrift store couches and coffee was super cheap. You could just go check out the art and sit around and read the zines on the wire racks and talk with friends. One of my pals lived in an upstairs apartment. So that's one type of Hangout. The other was a book or record store where I knew people. I looked back and realized the first place like that was The Hungry Mind, the bookstore on Grand Avenue near McAllister College where I spent a lot of time as a kid, particularly in the science fiction section. Many of the people who worked there were current or former college students and there were people who pretty much had autonomy over different sections of the store, like Ann who ran the kids in science fiction sections. I buy a lot of paperbacks but also just hang out and read and browse in the store and talk to the people who worked there. After college I'd go hang out at a brother's touch which was a gay bookstore owned by Harvey Hertz. Harvey had been an addict in New York who had stories of hanging out with Tim Buckley and Laura Nero at the Fulmore East. He'd moved to Minnesota to go to rehab, got sober and stayed. You couldn't take the New York out of the man though. He spoke in an almost incomprehensible Brooklynese and was a lot more direct than the kind of people that Minnesota nice could stand. He'd started Minnesota's first gay bookstore and had to endure crank calls, bricks through window, homophobic graffiti, and people who came to look at porn without buying it. None of which he suffered in silence. You'd hear about it when you hung out with Harvey at the store. If a gay writer was not such a sellout to pass by his store in favor of a straight indie or chain bookstore, you'd see them at Harvey's first signing, Dennis Cooper, Sarah Shulman, et cetera. If you feel like researching further, you could examine back issues of equal time, the LGBT newspaper where Allison Bechtel worked to see ads listing who else passed through there. Eventually the competition, particularly from online bookstores, was too much and Harvey closed the store. All right, let's see. So anyway, there's more of that and I have pictures of flyers and so on in here. So anyway, I just want to wrap it up and thank you.