Xem Skaters is a community queer skate zine founded by Aimé Dabbadie in June 2016. It was created with the aim to start the conversation about homophobia, transphobia and genderqueer visibility in the skateboarding scene.

The zine is constructed on the community editorial basis. Aimé published “Call for Submissions” inviting all genderqueer and genderqueer-friendly skaters to submit all kind of content that could fit in the zine format for each issue. Submissions were sent from various places in the world including Chile, France, Australia, U.S.A, the U.K, Spain, Germany, Denmark, Sweden and many more. Aimé handled the editorial process, ran interviews with selected skateboarders and artists for each issue and created playlists of queer-fronted music as well as queer zines and books recommendations. The submissions took the form of poetry, testimonies, photographs, drawings, artworks, music lyrics, band presentations and more. The zine was also meant as a tool for queer skaters to connect and avoid feeling isolated and an easy format to bring to local skateparks to raise awareness about queer and trans inclusivity.

The zine was mainly made of analog collages and followed the usual A4 double sided black and white format in order to be easily printed anywhere in the world. The PDFs were shared with local actors of the skate scene in different countries so they could print it and distribute it for free during women and/or trans separatist skate sessions and meet ups.

Aside from making the zine, Xem Skaters organized punk shows as release parties, queer skateboarding try-out and spot crawls for queer, trans and women identifying skaters in Malmö and Copenhagen.

Aimé announced that they would not produce any more issues of Xem Skaters in late 2019 as the zine was meant as a conversation starter and a visibility maker that they thought was no longer needed with the rise of exposure of queer skaters in the mainstream media and the rise of queer owned brand and change makers in skate scene worldwide. To mention some of the major ones: Unity Skateboarding (US), There skateboarding (US), Pave The Way (US), Siblings (UK), Skate like a Girl (US), Marginal Skateboards (CA).

The zine is still available for purchase here or for FREE in PDF format for printing. Follow this link: XEM SKATERS PDFs + Printing instructions