Girl Germs #3 (1991)

Girl Germs #3 does not look like an artifact waiting to become legendary. It looks like something that had to get out of the room before the feeling cooled.

The cover resembles a joke torn from the wall of a truck stop. A voluptuous woman straddles a motorcycle beneath the words “The Glory on Highway 69.” Her bare feet hang near the pavement, her shirt is tied beneath her chest, and the motorcycle’s rear end has been decorated with the visual vocabulary of cheap rebellion: chrome, leather, curves, danger and a license plate that appears to promise some variety of evil.

Above her, GIRL GERMS has been painted in thick white letters against a field of black. The title does not behave like a respectable masthead. It looks infectious, something growing across an image that originally expected women to remain scenery.

That tension remains throughout the issue. Girl Germs repeatedly takes materials that have already assigned roles to women, then photocopies, crops, writes over and rearranges them until the roles begin malfunctioning. Pin-ups become covers for feminist correspondence. Fashion drawings become queer self-portraits. comic-book women strike men instead of waiting to be rescued. Photographs of musicians are surrounded by handwriting that refuses to let the image settle into ordinary rock-star worship.

The photocopier does not merely reproduce the world. It gives the editors a way to interfere with it.

The first spread places cheerful fortune-cookie predictions over photographs of police barricade tape. A bold adventure is promised. Happiness and peace are predicted. Good luck, pleasant surprises and the capacity to enjoy life are supposedly waiting just ahead.

Behind every promise is the word POLICE.

The page captures the entire emotional structure of the zine before anyone explains it. Girls are raised inside a language of possibility, told that life will open if they are pleasant, hardworking and patient. Then the actual world appears as restriction, harassment, violence, sexual danger, racism and adults using authority against them.

Girl Germs does not abandon the promises. It asks why the world keeps violating them.

On the opposite page, a personal account begins without a headline large enough to turn pain into spectacle. The writer describes an intense emotional bond between girls, the instability surrounding it and the sudden recognition that another person understands a private sickness or fear. The details remain tangled because the experience itself was tangled. Friendship, identification, dependence and survival cannot be separated into neat lessons.

This is one of the zine’s defining qualities. It allows writing to remain unfinished.

The contributors are not presented as experts who have escaped confusion. They write from within it. A thought may contradict the sentence before it. An assertion may end in a question. A declaration of strength can sit beside an admission of loneliness. The page does not correct these shifts because the instability is part of the evidence.

The zine becomes a place where uncertainty is permitted to speak before someone else names it.

Several pages are built from letters sent to Girl Germs. These do more than praise or criticize the previous issue. They convert the publication into correspondence among people who may never enter the same room.

One writer discusses being the child of Chinese immigrants and the exhausting expectation that she explain her family, language and culture to white classmates. She describes casual racist assumptions, the pressure to become a representative for an entire people and the loneliness of being visible mainly as a difference.

The accompanying drawings show young women in carefully rendered outfits, posed together or holding microphones. They appear friendly, fashionable and self-contained. The images refuse the grim visual language normally used to illustrate racism. The women are not reduced to suffering. They possess style, humor and a social world beyond the prejudice being described.

The piece also complicates the idea of a unified girl culture. Gender does not erase race, class or family history. A movement built around girls can still reproduce the exclusions its members have learned elsewhere. Solidarity is not treated as an automatic biological condition. It is something that must be practiced across differences.

Another letter describes the economic divide between women who clean offices and the professionals whose workplaces they clean. The writer recalls hearing someone complain that a janitor had left a name on a desk, as though the worker’s existence were an intrusion into a space she maintained.

The story is small, but its placement matters. Girl Germs does not limit oppression to dramatic confrontations with obviously monstrous men. It notices class contempt passing through ordinary remarks. It notices which women are expected to remain invisible so that other people can experience cleanliness and order.

The magazine continually pulls the political back toward the scale of daily behavior.

A schoolgirl describes being stopped by a teacher over abandoned lunch trays, then physically grabbed when she and her friend denied responsibility. The encounter escalates rapidly from accusation to intimidation. What begins as cafeteria discipline becomes a lesson in how easily adult authority can use a teenage girl’s supposed disrespect as permission to touch, corner and frighten her.

Her account concludes without a triumphant resolution. She reports the event because it happened and because somebody should know.

That simple act is central to the publication. Girl Germs is a witness made from staples.

The zine does not have the power to investigate the teacher, repair the school or guarantee that the writer will be believed. It can give the incident a destination outside the institution that produced it. The story can leave the hallway, enter the mail and appear before strangers who recognize its structure.

A later page addresses queer girls directly. Its artwork borrows a cosmetic advertisement in which one woman applies lipstick to another, then surrounds the image with repeated versions of the name Veronica. Beneath it, a young writer calls for a revolution that includes lesbians, poor girls, nonwhite girls and girls who do not recognize themselves in the narrow image of acceptable rebellion.

The commercial beauty image becomes intimate in a different direction. Makeup is no longer preparation for male approval. One girl is touching another girl’s face.

Elsewhere, a longer piece speaks to young lesbians who may believe they are the only one awake with these feelings. The writing is startlingly direct about crushes, masturbation, secrecy, school and the strange mixture of certainty and disbelief that can accompany recognizing one’s sexuality before there is a safe public language for it.

The page does not speak from the polished end of a coming-out story. The writer remains partly afraid, partly amused and still surprised by herself. She offers companionship rather than a formula.

That distinction gives the piece its power. It does not promise that everything will immediately improve. It says that another person has been in this room.

Throughout Girl Germs, the word “girl” stretches far beyond innocence. Girls desire, masturbate, fight, play instruments, experience racism, remember abuse, fall in love with one another, distrust adults and argue about politics. The word is not used to preserve youth as purity. It becomes a way of claiming the experiences that respectable culture dismisses as immature, hysterical or temporary.

The zine refuses to wait until these writers become women whose pain can be narrated with adult composure.

The central interview with 7 Year Bitch provides the issue’s largest block of conventional music journalism, but even this refuses to behave conventionally. Photographs are cut into irregular shapes. Interview responses are pasted over black backgrounds. Handwritten phrases crawl around the margins. The band’s name occupies an entire page in enormous type, turning an insult into architecture.

The group members discuss how they learned their instruments, how the band formed, their songs, touring, labels and the treatment of women inside punk. Their answers are funny, competitive and occasionally uncertain. They disagree without the interview trying to manufacture conflict.

This is not a finished legend speaking from a documentary. It is a young band figuring out what it is while somebody writes the answers down.

The musicians are asked about being described as a “girl band,” and the conversation exposes the trap hidden in the phrase. Attention can be useful, especially in a scene where women have been discouraged from playing. But praise framed around gender can also imply that the music belongs to a separate and lesser division.

A male band is permitted to be mediocre without becoming evidence about all men. A woman playing badly can be treated as proof that women should not play.

The interview returns repeatedly to survival. Women musicians must learn instruments while being watched for failure, endure sexual commentary, negotiate promoters and travel through scenes where aggression is treated as authenticity. They must also resist the pressure to become inspirational symbols with no room for ordinary weakness.

The photographs show the band members playing, laughing and leaning into microphones. They are not solemn representatives of a cause. They look like people having the thrilling and irritating experience of being in a band.

That ordinary pleasure matters. Girl Germs is not solely a catalogue of injury. Music remains one of the ways the pages breathe.

A poem about boys doing the pogo examines the dance floor as contested territory. Punk movement is supposedly free, but the freedom often belongs to bodies large or aggressive enough to occupy space without fear. Boys crash into one another and call it release. Girls calculate whether entering the same area will mean being knocked down, grabbed or blamed for not understanding the ritual.

The zine notices how quickly rebellion creates its own customs, and how those customs can reproduce the hierarchy outside the club.

That criticism reaches its clearest form in a handwritten page beginning with a deceptively simple question: what is punk?

The writer rejects the fantasy that punks are a chosen class of social outcasts automatically cleansed of mainstream prejudice. Punk institutions can still be racist, sexist, capitalist and heterosexist. A person’s haircut, records and distance from football players do not guarantee moral insight.

The handwriting makes the argument feel immediate, as though it was composed while frustration was still moving through the hand. There is no decorative image to make it more attractive. The page is almost entirely thought.

This may be one of the most important pieces in the issue because it turns the zine’s suspicion inward. Girl Germs does not simply divide the world into enlightened punk girls and stupid outsiders. It asks whether punk identity itself can become another form of self-congratulation.

The movement is being challenged before it has fully acquired a name.

Other pages become more visually fractured. One writer surrounds a drawn body with scattered memories of a mother, childhood fear and sexual trauma. The words multiply around the figure until the body seems trapped inside recollection. Sentences change size, direction and pressure. Some are boxed, others scratched or repeated.

The page does not illustrate memory. It behaves like memory.

There is no orderly beginning. A phrase returns because it has not finished happening. Family roles, fear and bodily sensation overlap. The handwriting becomes darker where explanation fails.

Beside it, a poem describes sexual violence through a black field, a partial face and fragments of text descending across the page. The white spaces between phrases become pauses in which the reader has to supply what the writer cannot or will not narrate continuously.

The issue never treats these accounts as tasteful educational content. Their forms retain panic, anger and confusion. They resist the smoothness through which institutions often make testimony easier to consume.

Even the pages about intimacy remain unstable. Photographs of girls kissing are arranged beside a homemade cassette track list. A personal summer becomes a sequence of songs, bodies, jokes and private names. The tape is simultaneously diary, gift and evidence of a small world that existed between larger events.

Another piece takes the form of a close conversation with someone who may be manipulative or emotionally dangerous. The writer’s voice moves between invitation and refusal, tenderness and self-protection. She recognizes that affection does not automatically make a situation safe.

This emotional literacy is one of the zine’s quiet achievements. It understands that harm does not always arrive from a stranger wearing the correct costume of evil. It can grow inside friendship, romance, admiration and scenes that describe themselves as liberating.

The contributors are trying to invent boundaries while already inside the relationships that require them.

The review pages reveal the physical network supporting all this writing. Demo tapes, seven-inches, zines and bands receive compact notices accompanied by postal addresses. Heavens to Betsy, Go Fish, Holy Titclamps, Riot Grrrl, Tantrum and numerous smaller objects appear together without a hierarchy separating professional releases from something duplicated in a bedroom.

A few dollars and stamps can open another route.

These pages are not peripheral filler. They are the zine’s transportation system. A reader who feels isolated can write to another city, order a tape, trade publications, discover a band and possibly become the next contributor. Each address is a door cut into the paper.

Near the end, a page announces an upcoming Riot Grrrl tour with a long column of dates crossing the country. Read now, the list resembles historical documentation. Inside the issue, it is simply a plan.

That difference is enormous.

The people arranging these shows do not know which names will become canonical, which clubs will disappear or which photocopied statements will later sit in university archives. They are trying to find floors to sleep on, venues willing to book the bands and enough people in each city to make the next drive possible.

The movement exists here as logistics before it becomes history.

This is why Girl Germs #3 feels legendary without behaving like a monument. It captures riot grrrl while it is still being made from mail, arguments, crushes, cheap copies, unsafe schools, band practices, conflicting politics and the discovery that another girl somewhere has felt the same impossible thing.

Its politics are not flawless or complete. The issue strains toward an inclusiveness that it cannot guarantee. Some pages speak more confidently than others. Certain images remain borrowed from the same mass culture the zine opposes. Contributors sometimes disagree about what liberation should look like.

But the publication leaves those tensions visible.

It does not offer a brand called empowerment. It offers a place where empowerment is being attempted, doubted, corrected and passed to someone else.

The photographed copy carries another layer of movement. Its rear cover contains the Girl Germs post-office-box address in Olympia and a later mailing label for a zine library in Allston, Massachusetts. The object has traveled farther than the private moments described inside it. What began as stapled communication among scattered young people became something saved, recirculated, scanned and read decades later.

The photocopy degradation is part of that journey. Faces collapse into black. Fine lines disappear. Tape edges become permanent borders. Some sentences require effort to recover. Each generation of copying sacrifices detail while allowing the issue to continue moving.

The object survives through damage.

Girl Germs #3 matters because it does not merely report that a feminist punk movement existed. It shows the social tissue forming around it. A girl writes about racism. Another reports an assault by a teacher. Another describes queer desire. A band answers questions. Someone challenges punk’s innocence. Someone reviews a cassette. Someone prints an address.

No single page contains the movement.

The movement is the current passing between them.