Intense whimsy seems like a bit of an oxymoron, but Toronto’s queer pagan punk zine somehow fits the bill. Consider this bit from Paul’s ruminations on television: “I have personally witnessed a coven of witches stare engrossed at the boob tube as the Canadian men’s relay race team won the Olympic gold medal. Personally, I found it disorienting in the extreme to hear a robed, pentacle-laden gathering of pagans gleefully exclaim ‘We whupped American Butt.’ ” This zine also gleefully features scraps of inquisition-age accounts of people being tortured to death for their supposed involvement of the devil. But, somehow, the tone of these weird little snippets is jovial, almost like: ‘isn’t that cute, and guess what.. they still do that stuff.’ Hey it doesn’t say anything like that in the zine, I’m just reading into it. There’s also a double-page spread with a letter from Broken Pencil (concerning an evangelist speaker named Bob Larson and a queer protest against him speaking), a response from Paul which he calls “a snapshot of one little moment in my pagan brain” and a brief discussion of the validity of his response. Interesting stuff, and, one gets the feeling, not altogether serious; “No, silly,” Paul writes, “of course we’re not going to kill you. You just can’t play in our magic treehouse….”
zine, #4 / main creator: Paul / $1 / 16 Keystone Ave., Toronto, ON, M4C 1H1