Miss Thing

“Things aren’t better when they become more widely disseminated—that is not the thing.” Sasha Frere-Jones’s history of THING, once billed as “Chicago’s National Black Underground Queer Arts Magazine,” respects the short-lived publication as a cultural forerunner but pays closer, finer attention to the ways in which THING set itself apart and stayed there. Frere-Jones engages the ’zine as an appreciative outsider, sifting through the inside jokes and finding delight in the intimacies they encode. “Without an internet to instantaneously connect disparate mythologies and affinities cross-country,” he writes, “these magazines created worlds that could stay safe, themselves, unborrowed.” Reading about THING feels like discovering a raunchy time capsule, assembled with care by a small group of friends who held great affection for each other.

For anybody active in pre-internet DIY underground in the early 1990s, the smell and feel of newsprint is an express back to a world of zines that THING both embodies and from which it meaningfully departs. We were reading catalogs, supermarket circulars, phone books, and all sorts of local information on newsprint. We didn’t think of these as islands at the time, but they were: independent, strong, unrelated. THING was an avatar of the black, queer culture that ended up providing a basal layer of everyday speech, but it was also a local, gnomic instance of Chicago culture that mattered to a small group of friends, an example of positive limitation that is hard to instantiate now. I love reading this anthology not because it was the acorn of today’s social media forest—and it is—but because it shows pockets of friendship and activity that are not represented elsewhere, that strengthened themselves and others.