issue #1 · photocopied at 2am · free, always
WEAREnotAPHASE
THE ONE SOURCED LINE
“Queer and neurodivergent liberation are entwined.”— Queer and Neurodivergent Liberation are Entwined, stimpunks.org. Even in the loudest room, the quote keeps its collar and its link.
CUT THIS OUT
Every page in this room prints to one sheet on a bad office printer, in black and white. If it needs colour to make sense, it does not go in the zine. Try it — this page has a print stylesheet and it is not a joke.
ON THE TABLE
#1 — We Are Not A Phase. This sheet. Why the loud room keeps two careful habits.
#2 — One Root, Two Rainbows. Seven lessons on neurodiversity and gender, cut down to one sheet.
SEND US A PAGE
Scrawl your own in the margin. This room takes submissions on paper, by photo, by voice note, by AAC. Any way you have of getting a sentence out counts as writing.
The spec is the one in the box above and there is no other: one sheet, black and white, legible out of a bad printer. We set it in this room’s typefaces, put your name on it the way you spell it, and it runs in the next issue.
Want a whole room instead of a page? That is Your Room, and it is a different offer.
The hand that stills an Autistic kid’s flapping and the voice that calls a queer kid’s self a phase were trained in the same room. That is not a metaphor we reached for. It is a history with names in it, and we keep it on the wall where we can see it.
So this room gets to be angry in ten point type. Not clever. Not balanced. Angry, and correct, and cheap to photocopy.
Everywhere else we build the careful version: the citation, the caveat, the link that resolves. Those sites are load-bearing and they stay. This one is the other half of the same lung.
A movement that can only speak in footnotes has already agreed to be quiet.
WHAT STAYS CAREFUL, EVEN HERE
- Attribution.
- Not a house style — a licence. It is the cheapest thing on the page and the only one that gets us sued. Credits run in the margin in handwriting, not in a footer nobody reads. Attribution as decoration is still attribution.
- Contrast.
- Clashing is not the same as illegible. Every colour pairing on this street is deliberately wrong and deliberately readable. Ugly on purpose, legible on purpose.
Everything in this room is set in two typewriter faces and one heavy sans. The ransom note is the only place it gets loud, and the rotations are the first thing Gentle takes away.
READS FINE IN GENTLE MODE
This room is already black on white. Turning it down loses the rotations, not the argument.
HOW LOUD DO YOU WANT IT?
Starts wherever your device says. Nothing moves, flashes, or plays until you say so.