To understand Jack Hengesbach, or Genderplasmic as they’re often known in online spaces, it is integral to know that zine-making is at the core of who they are. So is the San Francisco punk scene, and a solid opportunity to mosh, which is the act of a concert crowd running and slamming into each other to the beat of typically hardcore music like punk, metal, and rock. Jack’s hard to miss in the crowd. Their mohawk and patch-clad outfits stand out, arms and legs swinging to the beat, and often starting the mosh pit. Jack is best known for a viral tux dress creation on their Tumblr and its subsequent zine, The DIY Guide to making your own Tux dress. Other zines they’ve produced include Feminist Disability Zine, My Gender Queer Diary (reprinted in 2025), WHAT ARE WE ALLOWED TO SAY (2022), and DIY Punk Fashion on a Dime (2024).
I had a chance to ask Jack a few questions about their experience as a zine maker and zine lover. Their zinemaking questions powerful institutions, explores politics and identity, therefore aligning with the United Nations Sustainable Development Goal of Peace, Justice, and Strong Institutions.
Q : How did you get into zine making? What was your process like when you started to make zines, and why did you choose this medium over others?
Jack: I don’t remember exactly how I started making them, but College was a foundational place for discovering zines. I was making them like crazy in college. I would typically just make 8 folds, which is a one-page zine that you fold into 8. It’s the most accessible style of making zines, and I love them with all my heart. So I would make crappy zines. I would write just whatever in them - sometimes they were diary entries. I made this one zine about all the stuff that was in my bed that day, with illustrations. I didn’t have a bedside table, so I had books, clothes, and my vibrator. I used the gender and women’s studies printer to print like 50 and hide them around campus. I was getting really into witchcraft as well; I made an 8-fold with three other people about witchcraft, and would make zines for finals. I’m revamping one of the best zines I made in college. I made it when I was 18,a and it shows. There’s a lot of glitter on it. My friend Daniel said that’s what he loves about my style of making zines, that they’re all very handmade. I feel like that’s just partly because of lack of resources. I don’t have access to Photoshop. I don’t have a tablet to draw with. I have pencils, scissors, glue, glitter, and whatever scraps of paper I can find.
Q : Do you experience any pushback in using terms like ‘transsexual’ and ‘fa**ot’? They’re terms that people sometimes associate with ignorance, or that have historically been used in a discriminatory way. How did you find reclaiming them for your own identity worked? What’s the difference you find in reception between the two?
Jack: People get a kick out of this one zine I made called F–k you I love punks. I have this one page that says “boots to bigots,” and it always makes people smile. I made it at a workshop that I organized at [comic store Silver Sprocket.] I think the communities I’ve built around myself tend to be very open and loving of the queerness that I put out, which is centered around self-love and self-empowerment. I put fa**ot d*ke power in there because I believe in the power of gender queer people. For the most part, it’s kind of a shock to people that I use those words, like in my last job, saying, ‘I can’t believe you use the f slur like it’s nothing. ’ My coworkers loved it - it’s part of that micropublishing world. We have more freedom to express ourselves and embrace those older histories and reinvent ourselves with those words. You can put your whole self into it.
Jack’s zines are made with found materials, crafting supplies in their possession, and the printers they currently have access to. In the past, this has been the printer attached to their Gender and Women’s Studies program, or the one at Silver Sprocket Books, where they used to work. The look of their zines, while a product of their style, is largely a result of their limited resources. They’re made with the pens they have access to, scraps of paper or magazine cutouts that capture their eye, and hit on something they’re thinking about. These have ranged from subjects like disability and feminism, punks, DIY advice, and gender queer identities, but are always a passion project.
Feminist Disability Zine is a great example of their use of accessible materials, and personally stands out as one of their best. The zine was created as a final project for a course on Feminist Disability Studies, highlighting essential elements of this area of feminist studies, as well as core readings and theorists. To put all of this together in an easy-to-read work, Jack used what they had access to: the course syllabus, course readings, paper, their department’s printer, pen, and pencil. The zine includes condensed breakdowns of disability-focused feminism, including introductions to concepts of class and disability, the history of disability and eugenics, as well as queerness and disability and disabled art.
My Gender Queer Diary, a zine Jack created at 18, is packed to the brim with collages, self-portraits, and handwritten notes. It does, indeed, look and read like a diary, with bits and bobs glued together, but that is what makes it profoundly meaningful. It has the sincere vulnerability of a passionate late teenager.
Jack, in conversation, is critical of this and other early work: “There are so many run-on sentences. There’s so much bad grammar. I’m my own worst critic.” They reflected on this a bit before adding, “But then people still love the zine.” The project and its contribution to the course later led to their fellowship at the San Francisco State Longmore Institute, an academic organization dedicated to the study of disability history and theory.
Regardless of Jack’s plans to improve upon their old work, Feminist Disability and other zines find renewed life in new readers. They display their reflections on queer identity and politics, topics and experiences that many who pick up their zines resonate with.
You can find more of Jack’s zines and other art on their website or through their Instagram @genderplasmic.