Not a zine -- but I just finished @plettsky's new book/essay/pamphlet -- On Community. It's a quiet, thoughtful mediation on what the word actually means and all its strange contradictions.
I've been looking forward to this one -- Plett's another one of those writers that looms large over my early days of gender satori. If Nevada punched me in the face and said "you were trans all along, dummy" it was A Safe Girl to Love that started to show a retired transvestite she wasn't as dissimilar to bonafide, according to Hoyle, trans women as she thought.
I think about that Topside cohort (or the myths that swirl around it) a lot. What might have been if I was five years younger or didn't fall so deep down the alcohol hole in the early 2010s as my first run at being queer sputtered out. On Community touches on Casey's Topside years a bit, but its scope and ambition are much wider. The book's better for it.
I found myself most attracted to the small bits of "normal" life -- Casey talking about the faith she was born into and her complicated relationship with it, conversations with uncles, Tim F-ing Hortons (I grew up in Buffalo, and Toronto was my New York for a bit). I found myself looking forward to the days when my own hard, awkward, and precious years of early transition finally fade into the background and I can just live for a bit.
The book made me think about the communities I've lingered on the edges of over these decades of adult life -- internet forums, music/concert fandoms, the Kinsey 6 proto-TERF infested gay communities of the 90s, countless open source software communities, Portland's club land and house parties of the 00s -- and how I always came back to alone because community meant either being perceived or pretending to be something I wasn't, and how damaging alone can be.
Good book -- worthy of inclusion in the long list of thinking on community and civic life. You should read it.