The AZA currently has two curators:
late 30’s, queer aroace neurodivergent spoonie. Into non-normative relationships, the anarchism of RA and ranting about neoliberlism (sometimes in zines). One of the many things I like about zines is how they encapsulate fragments of ace and/or aro community history-in-progress. I started this project and am still involved but these days I play more of a secondary role.
Olivia is a 30-year-old biromantic gray-aro (gray) asexual from the Northeast United States. She’s been talking about asexuality online since 2011. It took her a bit longer to figure out the aro part of her identity. Olivia has made dozens of zines over the years, many of which discuss asexual and aromantic identity from her perspective. The first zine Olivia ever bought was an ace zine, which led her down the rabbit hole of zine culture and ace and aro zines specifically. Olivia is responsible for finding most of the zines in the database (due to a combination of Autistic obsession, ADHD hyperfocus, and stubborn persistence) and for the redesign of the website and database. She still occasionally updates the Tumblr as a means of keeping track of new finds before they go into the database.
She has also branched out into researching asexuality and aromanticism as represented in other DIY queer print media that can’t necessarily be defined as zines. As a result of the hundreds of hours of research she’s done (lots of painstakingly keyword searching digitized archives and reading the context of specific words and phrases.) She’s in the process of writing a book about how asexuality has been discussed in said media and the evolution of the usage of the words “asexual” and “asexuality” in these spaces, with a focus on the years 1950-2005. She spoke about her research at the 2019 WorldPride Ace & Aro Conference in New York City, which can be viewed here.
She also is responsible for Ace Jam and Aro Jam, the first ace and aro themed game jams, which continue to run every year in January and February respectively. Find out more about Olivia and her work at http://www.oliviamontoya.com/. She can also be found discussing ace and aro stuff on Twitter @paradoxrevealed, where she’s just as likely to be found talking about video game development and live action roleplaying, as well as on Instagram @oliviam.11, where she occasionally posts zine stuff, selfies, and cat pics.
ace zine archive 