Thirty Years in a Circle- Sacred Debris Anniversary x 2 (Patreon)

Ten years ago today the first iteration of Sacred Debris, at least in its digital form, launched. 

Thirty years ago this year, the first iteration of Sacred Debris, a stapled and photocopied print zine, launched. 

It's weird to have sent thirty of my almost fifty years focusing so intently on one field of study, but there's also a comfort in it. 

Thanks to everyone who's supported us along the way (mostly you folks) and here's to another... not necessarily ten years, but at least till it stops being fun?

What follows is the first post on Sacreddebris.com, posted Jan 1, 2014:

Twenty years in a circle.

By Shawn Porter On January 1, 2014 · 12 Comments

I used to make zines.
Truth be told, I still do. Photocopied, stapled zines. Analog. Circulated via the US Mail. The best thing about them was that they invariably ended up in the hands of people who were genuinely interested in the subject matter. Some independent bookstores like 3 Birds or Quimby’s had zine sections, but most zines, mine included, never had that kind of distribution. You had to want to find us.

In early 1994 when I started the Sacred Debris zine, there were surprisingly a lot of options when it came to Body Modification periodicals. PFIQ (Piercing Fans International Quarterly) was still in print, as was Body Play and Modern Primitives Quarterly. In the Flesh and Tattoo Savage could be found on newsstands. The UK had Piercing World and Body Art. There were other body modification zines; tattoos were covered in Tatmag and there was I am not my body out of the Pacific Northwest. There has never been a time where so many avenues were available to people interested in learning more about modification.

And then came the internet. It changed things. Radically and completely. In my (aborted) talk for the APP, “A selective history of contemporary body modification” I ended the presentation in 1995 with “BME, SPC, the rise of the internet and the Death of Body Modification.”

BME went online in December of 1994. SPCO followed in mid-to-late 1995. Encouraged by the amount of content that came flowing in once BME was ‘seeded’ with surgical photos from my collection, Shannon Larratt split BME up, adding /extreme and /hard to focus on surgical/advanced modifications as well as pornography featuring modified devotees. October 2000 saw the IAM community site’s arrival, and in the fourteen years since we’ve seen thriving sites, blogs and communities pop up covering every conceivable way there is to modify the human body.Print died. PFIQ and Body Play ceased publication. Body Art and Piercing World went away. All of the different voices and experiences that they offered slowly merged into just a few outlets.

And now, twenty years later, I’ve found myself returning to the beginning. Sacred Debris (dotcom. Not the zine. But more on that later) is a repository for people interested in Body Modification’s history, and hopefully it’s future. We’re glad to coexist in a world where BME, Scarwars, Tattoo Snob, Occult Vibrations, Bodymod.org and thousands of other sites provide great content. It’s intention is not to compete but to offer a different perspective that will cover everything from amputation to (editors note: find something that starts with z) and everything in between. It’s an experiment for me; most of my projects over the years have been single person entities. The hours of work that will go into Sacred Debris- from scanning hardcopy photographs, sorting, viewing, capturing, editing and uploading vintage videos (featuring luminaries like Jack Yount, Sailor Sid Diller, Dr. Ronald Brown, Todd Bertrang and more) to writing and soliciting original content will be massive. One way or another this material needs to be archived for future generations. My hope is that the community will get behind us and interact with the content-comment and discuss, submit and assist or even just crowdsource materials for our archival.

I don’t want to make the site about me. I want to make it about us. Our history. Our future. Mission statements are supposed to give you an idea on what to expect- but if you come along on this journey I’m happy to say that you can throw expectation out the window and just enjoy Sacred Debris for the wonderfully all-over-the-place experience that it has the potential to be. ‘Archiving and Celebrating the Culture of Body Modification’ is our goal- and wether the content we give you will be from the 1970s or from tomorrow will be anyone’s guess.

So please. If you like what we’re doing, please let us know. Please help us out by donating content, participation in discussion, financial assistance or resources to keep this going. While the past is available mostly to those of us who were around in the ‘good old days’ the future can belong to you, if you’re willing to put the time in.

Thank you for checking out Sacred Debris. We’d love to hear from you, so let us know what you think!

respectfully yours,

Shawn