Saturated with memory for me

Sometimes I do time travel workshops. I was invited to do one titled “Archives offer the possibility of survival” at the University of Texas in Austin in March 2025.1 Organized in two parts, it started with “IN THE ARCHIVE—a prompt for an encounter,” which focused on queer artifacts found in the collections of the Briscoe Center for American History. 24 people participated in the session—students, faculty, community members—choosing and documenting LGBTQIA+ items from collections of materials that I had requested in advance. Then we left the archive, to create new things: “AWAY FROM THE ARCHIVE—a prompt for the future.” We printed the images of our selections on brightly colored sheets of paper using a risograph printer, and used them to make annotated collages. The workshop concluded with a collectively-curated display of everyone’s creations on the wall.

I was so moved in that moment, seeing everyone’s capacity to directly engage with archival materials, sifting through and touching this ephemeral evidence, queer materials in queer hands. Publications, stickers, fliers, buttons, documents, photographs, scrapbooks, and then quickly, collectively, we generated an entirely new collection. I encouraged the participants to keep it as personal as possible, and to choose and document and make their work based on a logics of intimacy and felt experience while handling the items. I was hoping for an outcome where these queer artifacts might gain a new kind of life, emerging out of a collectively experienced design process that could be felt and shared with others in the room, and beyond.

To my surprise, the scholar Ann Cvetkovich attended the workshop. Cvetkovich, who is Professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at UT Austin, selected four items from the ACT UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power) Austin collection, documents from the late 1980s and early 1990s, and assembled them onto a single sheet with handwritten annotations. On her collage, she noted: These documents are saturated with memory for me, and signed her name. I’ve been thinking about it ever since, how personal her reflective note was, of course, but also how it seemed to stretch those artifacts across queer time and space, so that they might reach us there in that room, and here right now. She unlocked something encoded there within those ACT UP documents, an emotional code, by selecting them and meaningfully pairing them with her own deeply felt recollection; in that moment, Cvetkovich was also part of the archive. She gave us evidence; Cvetkovich’s assemblage was an intimate act of history making, written in feeling, to be opened up and shared through lived experience. Those ACT UP documents, saturated and overflowing into the room, were able to touch us, to locate all of us on a queer timeline that included Cvetkovich, ACT UP Austin, and everyone in the workshop.

Afterwards, I returned to her landmark book, An Archive of Feelings (2003), to recall how she describes this process of moving through “sites of investigation” to discover the vibrancy of queer culture. The book is organized—

as an ‘archive of feelings,’ an exploration of cultural texts as repositories of feelings and emotions, which are encoded not only in the content of the texts themselves but in the practices that surround their production and reception.2

In noting that those ACT UP documents were “saturated with memory for me,” Cvetkovich brings emotional and personal matters into (and out of) the queer archive, getting closer to new cultures and “alternative modes of knowledge” within a learning context—students, colleagues, and other queer kin in the room at that moment who might be able to exchange something immediate and profound, while sharing their own work.

Forged around sexuality and intimacy, and hence forms of privacy and invisibility that are both chosen and enforced, gay and lesbian cultures often leave ephemeral and unusual traces. In the absence of institutionalized documentation or in opposition to official histories, memory becomes a valuable historical resource, and ephemeral and personal collections of objects stand alongside the documents of the dominant culture in order to offer alternative modes of knowledge.3

As my research continues I find myself giving more and more attention to affect and embodiment while working in the archive, allowing personal experience to contaminate the writing. I’m drawn to these moments where my own queer body moves in and around the artifacts I study. This is my design re-education, an un-learning that uses the material conditions of language—the social and political realities of its production and distribution—as the basis for understanding typography and design. Rather than a destination, the archive has become more of a backdrop for this work, as I try to understand, move, and navigate through the evidence of queer life, searching for the public and private acts of language that shape a body, a psyche, its memories. More and more, that body and those memories are my own.

Can the personal archive be the basis for a design education? Do our own bodies have the capacity to unlock earlier acts of language, and if so, where do they take us? Domestic archives contain the residue of life, in the domestic scraps, the ephemera, in the photos that survive, that we carry and take with us—of course this evidence holds value. And I propose that it’s not just the physical artifacts, but internal images too, even immaterial ones, that deserve our attention. There are queer typographies there in our histories, letterforms and graphic shapes and symbols that spell out other languages, remembered and imagined, different intimacies. We carry them with us, internally, in our homes, our hard drives, our bodies. What is an intimate typography?

Emil J. Klumpp

There was a whole graphic program there in the restaurant my parents opened when I was seven years old, neon letters in the window, the orange number “360” on the door, the hand-painted menu. It’s mostly gone now, the space renovated again and again through the years before closing in 2017, but a few photographs remain, holding a kind of power over me, images with a capacity to stir that seems to grow with time. They conjure something enormous in me, a whole world that still dwells there; I get access with these photos. Steve and Terri opened the Mediterranean Snack Bar on January 11, 1975, and I don’t remember much from that moment, except that I was sent away to stay with a family friend for a few days while my parents worked to get it open, serving souvlaki and gyro and falafel and spanakopita in Huntington Village, about an hour from New York City. They did this for 42 years.

How could this place, not just an abstract sense of it, but a specific space and moment in time, hold some kind of queer knowledge? How might I access and share in 2025? Honestly, I’m not sure. I’m trying to see this photograph as though I just found it in an archive, as though it isn’t mine, as if I wasn’t there. My parents don’t remember anything about the large light box mounted at the back of the dining room; it exists nowhere except in this photo. The hand-painted menu looks like it belongs in a pizzeria or an old-fashioned ice cream parlor, and I wish they could tell me more, like who did it, if it was a professional sign painter, and how it came to be that the letterforms on their menu would be so exquisitely hand-painted and lit from behind. My father can’t recall. I’m scanning carefully, slowly scrubbing through all of the details in the photo, like I’m able to peer through a wormhole where I might see myself there at the checkered table cloth, the pull-down ladder that led upstairs to my father’s office just visible through the kitchen door. I was terrified of that ladder, always scared to climb up into his world, but it was even worse coming back down, because I had to sit on the edge of the opening and lower my legs into the kitchen, ashamed of my dangling body that I imagined falling down in front of the kitchen staff who worked for my father.

And that travel poster in-between the pay phone and the clock looks vaguely modernist, with lower-case sans serif letters spelling out “rhodes;” I know that the lack of an initial capital letter puzzled me as a child. I try looking for the poster now, a reverse Google Image search that yields nothing.

I ask my father to look for the original printed menus, and he texts a photo back to me from the basement; it’s black ink printed on blue paper. There’s an illustration of the Parthenon in the distance, a couple of Corinthian columns, and a field of poppies in the foreground. In Greek mythology, poppies were used as offerings to the dead. I haven’t seen this menu in decades, and it’s an instant trigger of feelings and sensations, like seeing myself in a dream, as if I’ve come across something familiar in one of the archives that I visit, except it’s from deep within my parents’ house, stored away when they retired. The menu barely survived, but it did, and that’s all that’s important. The emotional charge of this thing is substantial, saturated with memory for me, something to do with the part it played, a prop, something that was there, part of the mise-en-scène of my childhood, overflowing into this very moment.

Had I ever really seen it? These two columns on the cover of the menu couldn’t be part of the Acropolis, right? Corinthian came later. Some quick searching brings me to the Temple of Zeus in Athens, some distance away, and sure enough, it’s a perfect match. A kind of compressed space, some artistic liberties taken. I asked my father where the illustration came from; he doesn’t remember.

Floating above the ancient temple are the words “Mediterranean Snack Bar Menu” right justified in a bright, vertical typeface, a loose, unconnected script with a handwritten feel. I deduce that it’s Murray Hill Bold, designed by Emil J. Klumpp in 1956 for American Type Founders. I went searching for it at the Updike Collection on the History of Printing at the Providence Public Library, and found original marketing materials for Murray Hill promoting it as a “casual” face for advertising. It was described as a “modern and practical script design” but coded “feminine” with the sample language shown, including several advertisements addressed to “ladies.” There was nothing Greek about it at all; rather, it embodied a kind of post-war American optimism, with bouncy energy, lending itself to playful design treatments that might float the letterforms off a baseline, like on this 1958 album cover for the girls. The name Murray Hill was specific to New York City, from the telephone exchange “MU” for the Manhattan neighborhood that was home to many of the biggest advertising agencies at that time, as well as Klumpp’s studio. An ad for his hand lettering services notes his address as 299 Madison Avenue, phone number MU 2-5192.

One of those type specimens said Murray Hill would “inject a note of refreshing informality into what otherwise might be ‘just another print job;’” remarkably, “refreshing informality” is exactly how I would describe the early success of the Mediterranean Snack Bar. My father offered new food to our town; it wasn’t fast food, or a diner, or fine dining, or a pizzeria. He served what he knew: souvlaki, gyro, sausage, falafel, and Greek salad that many Long Islanders were eating for the first time. When the Snack Bar opened it had no chairs, because the Town of Huntington wouldn’t allow seating without dedicated parking, so my parents purchased high standing-only tables. A few months later, they appealed and were given permission to have seating, so they printed a menu for sit-down dining. Given Murray Hill’s popularity, I’m guessing that it was one of a few typefaces recommended to my father by the printer; it probably just felt right. This typeface played a tiny part in my parents’ success, but it’s got a firm grip on me now, something I can only encounter in this way, a door opening up into mid-century American type design from this childhood prop, an artifact that barely survived but one I will now treasure, this printed menu from 1975.

Isle of Sappho

My father emigrated from Lesvos, Greece on April 14, 1963, 12 years before the menu was printed. Docked for a few days in New York City, he decided to walk off the ship where he was employed as a junior engineer, and make his way east to the town of Huntington, on the north shore of Long Island, in search of other ways of living. Soon after, a cousin got him a job as a dishwasher at the Colonial Diner, a Greek place in town, and that’s where he met my mother, who was a student waiting on tables there alongside my grandmother and my aunt. My parents were married in 1965, my dad became a US citizen, and I was born three years later, just before the Stonewall riots.

Throughout my childhood, we traveled to Lesvos to visit my grandparents in the house that they built at the center of the island, in the tiny village of Agia Paraskevi. At some point, probably as a young teenager, I figured out that Lesvos (sometimes spelled Lesbos) was the origin of the word lesbian, although I didn’t know why, and I instinctively knew not to discuss this with my father or anyone in the village. I’m pretty sure no one ever brought up the ancient poet Sappho during these trips, Sappho who was born on Lesvos in 630 BC, either in the town of Eressos or the main port of Mytilene, a queer ancestor who went on to name an entire culture with her island, a whole history, a complete identity, through the fragments of her homoerotic poetry that survived for thousands of years. I avoided telling anyone these origin stories before I came out at 18. Being gay was already a source of shame for me, even before I knew what it meant, before I understood anything about queer kin or Greek ancestry and how these identities would become so entangled for me later on. I didn’t yet speak any of the languages—Greek, queer history, gay desire—that would go on to shape my life.

What do we find in our own internal typographies? It’s an individual pursuit, a journey not easily shared, a kind of search we typically don’t encourage in design school. Instead, we rely on common, culturally-defined meanings and shared histories. That’s understandable, I know—we want students to become fluent in those cultures, those social, technological, and political forces that collectively shape our knowledge of art and design and how they came to be. But in this experiment, we approach typography differently, deeply, through the meanings we excavate in lived experience. Murray Hill isn’t Greek, and it isn’t particularly queer, but in extracting it from the basement and locating it deep within my own psyche, I can try to stitch something together. It’s just a stitch, this typeface, that language spelled out in 1975. The words “LARGE,” “SMALL,” “HERO,” and “TO GO” painted onto the menu board in their own slant so they could fit, and the way “Greek Pastry” has a different style; these are all tiny stitches. Here’s some meaningful language that played a part, a role, each letter, each word a character in my own formation.

Proximity artifacts

And then there’s another way to feed the internal archive, not just the artifacts we take with us but those we grab onto later, when we realize we were on a timeline we didn’t know existed. Filling in the gaps, I’m looking around for those designed artifacts that were there, around me, nearby, but unknown. I’m finding intimate typographies now in things that I never knew were missing, things that don’t come from my archive but still haunt it, somehow part of my memory but not held within it. Proximity artifacts from parallel timelines that jump over to haunt me, like this New York Times article that appeared in print six years after the Snack Bar opened, on July 3, 1981, Section A, Page 20, with the headline “RARE CANCER SEEN IN 41 HOMOSEXUALS.”

What did I know about the headline? I never saw it as a 13-year-old, I’m sure of it. I probably first learned about the disease from Long Island’s Newsday, so I need to look through their archive. But the NYT article is a well-known media artifact from my adolescence, from the very early years of the HIV/AIDS crisis, now easily found online. It wasn’t until thousands of cases later in May 1983—10th grade—that the disease would appear on the front page of the Times, media negligence that mirrored the homophobia, racism, social neglect, and necropolitics fueling the crisis. That initial mention in the NYT was the most visible report in 1981, and laid the foundation for how the disease would come to be perceived, “that what came to be known as the HIV virus posed no threat to people other than cisgender homosexual men and some cisgender women. Black people were not mentioned, nor were intravenous drug users, people of color, and certainly not transgender and gender non-conforming people—all of whom were impacted by HIV then, as now.”4 Ted Kerr’s writing of that media history is crucial for understanding the crisis in a more intersectional, truthful way, how “underscoring much of the reporting at the time was the real and perceived homosexuality of the early patients. Unmentioned was a more nuanced understanding of sexuality or race.”5

Weeks earlier, The New York Native published the headline “Disease Rumors Largely Unfounded” to accompany a short article by Lawrence D. Mass, M.D., the first public accounting of the disease. Mass wrote that “of the eleven cases this year that have been tentatively identified as community acquired, only five or six were gay.” Mass would go on to co-found the Gay Men’s Health Crisis (GMHC). The Native article pre-dates the Centers for Disease Control’s “Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report” (MMWR) on June 5, 1981 by only two weeks; the CDC reported on five unusual cases of pneumonia in gay white men in Los Angeles, but neglected to mention additional patients who were Black, including one straight Black man from Haiti.

As I write this now on July 3, 2025 I see the NYT headline from the summer of 1981 in my Instagram feed again. It’s there every year as a collective reminder of how far into the future we’ve traveled, but also how erasure continues, perpetuating “the exclusion from the public imagination of communities of people who are not white, gay, cisgender men who are impacted by the virus now.”6 Missing are stories about educator and activist Katrina Haslip, “one of the most important and influential leaders of the movement of HIV-positive women fighting for their rights.”7 Haslip was diagnosed with HIV while incarcerated at Bedford Hills Correctional Facility in New York in the 1980s, co-founded ACE (AIDS Counseling and Education program) while incarcerated, and later founded ACE-OUT, a program to support women with AIDS navigating housing, medical care, and life after incarceration. Haslip’s work helped expand the definition of AIDS to include “people whose HIV-related illnesses had not previously been acknowledged: women, people who inject drugs, poor people, people of color, and anyone existing at the intersections of these ways of being alive.”8 Haslip died from AIDS-related illness on December 2, 1992, but she was never officially registered as having died of AIDS because of the government’s limited definition of the disease. “I am, and have been, a woman with AIDS despite the CDC not wishing to count me. We have compelled them to,” she stated in a bedside interview at Roosevelt Hospital with a New York Times reporter.9 The expanded definition of AIDS, which she worked so hard to change, went into effect one month after her death.

We can rewrite our timelines to include Haslip’s power, activism, and fierce advocacy. I’m seeing the AIDS Memorial Quilt panel dedicated to Haslip right now for the first time, which includes expressive hand-sewn letterforms stretching and extending in space to form her name, and remarkably, what appears to be a braid of hair sewn directly into the quilt above the “n” in Katrina. The letterforms are perhaps adorned with hairs, or loose threads, I’m unsure, but the care that’s gone into constructing her memorial is deeply felt across time and space.

I’m looking through a box of random publications at the One Archives, and I come across the December 1981 issue of Mandate, a popular gay erotic magazine. I wasn’t focused on physique or porn magazines during my research, even though I knew there was incredible typography to be found on those covers. Dan Rhatigan has done some great work around this. But my stomach fell to the floor when I opened up that issue of Mandate and I saw the double-page spread that spelled out the words “GAY CANCER” in enormous letters. I couldn’t stop looking at those words at the archive in Los Angeles in October 2024, “GAY” set in Futura Bold Italic and “CANCER” set in Helvetica Light Italic, the “GAY” letters so huge that they’re barely contained on the pages, the gutter slicing right through the “A” and a bright pink horizon flatlining through the word “CANCER.” And of course I recalled the famous headlines from earlier that year, and put them all together on their own early HIV/AIDS timeline, only five months apart, for my 13-year-old clueless self. 1981 happened, and I was there, except I wasn’t. I was confused, struggling to understand my body, unconscious and far away, still five years from coming out. There I am, that summer, standing awkwardly in front of my grandparents’ house in a small village on the isle of Sappho. It may have been July or August. It may have been July 3, 1981.

These proximity artifacts look strangely familiar. I’ve lived with them my whole life, even though I’m seeing some of them now for the first time. I’m experiencing them simultaneously in 1981, in junior high school, later in college, and again in 1991 when I moved to New York City, panicky on W. 12 St. as I receive the results of my first HIV test. And now, as though they were there all along, already in my presence, collective trauma defining me, shaping who I am, who I thought I was becoming. Really, I knew nothing, that 13-year-old, that 25-year old in a back room at WonderBar, just surviving. These artifacts were never seen by me in real time, but soon after, somehow, I learned that sex = death, and it froze me. I look at these decades-old documents now and feel them like fresh triggers that open up a terror in my stomach. But the nuance and complexities and newer understandings of the disease that I’m gaining—who was impacted, how its perception was shaped by neglect and erasure, then and now, and how I’m finding evidence of that neglect in the archives I visit, and in my own memory, all of this gives me a way to unlearn some of that terror, to share, to course correct.

Maybe I’ll find more if I get closer to the language that’s slipping away now, if I look for myself over there in the trace of something that evades me. I’m bringing these moments together, out of place, out of time, close enough to touch on the timeline, even though they’ve never met before. I’m stretching out these artifacts, opening up other durations to make them longer (“being long”), so they can touch each other at the edges, so I can touch them and try to make sense of my own queer body traveling through time and space, touching other bodies, moving through like a loose radio signal, echoing back on itself, confounding and liberating all at once. What if I could hold space, a contact zone, for that script on the cover of my father’s menu in 1975 and the gay-porn-gay-cancer magazine in 1981, and the all-caps NYT headline set in Latin Elongated (designed by M. Jean Rochaix for Stephenson Blake & Co. in 1873), and the photograph of me at 13 standing in front of my grandparents’ house, all there together, with some other things too, saturated with memory for me. Maybe there’s a small dark blue Greek-English dictionary with a plastic wrap-around cover, that my father probably got for me when I was 8 or 9 at that Greek store “Prodromidis” on Bouzouki Boulevard (8th Ave.), no longer there, to help me speak his language.

Is there anything of value in these tiny stitches, or am I forcing it all into place? What else am I accessing here, if not intimate typographies? How about this: can I get closer to the language that’s always been there, accompanying me, language that I’ve always already taken with me my entire life. In a queer accounting of time, the language, the fonts, the feelings, the sounds and smells in that photograph—the confusion of all of this—it doesn’t matter if I need to gather them from different corners of the house. I didn’t see the Native or Mandate headlines when I was 13 years old, I’m sure of that, and I’ve never seen the AIDS Memorial Quilt in person, but I’m finding these things now and something’s possible with that, here in this space, in the contact zone. I’m deepening that sense of these worlds that formed me.

Is this a way to learn about design? I wonder. What is this? What do we do with this?

Queer kin

It’s May 8, 2025 and I’m walking around Park Slope, Brooklyn, looking for the Lesbian Herstory Archives (LHA). I see the planters first—they’re painted purple, white, red, and orange, the colors of the lesbian flag, so this must be it. The LHA has lived in this 19th century townhouse on 14th Street since 1992, purchased entirely through donations—a remarkable achievement that secured its future as an important destination for queer life and research. By the time it got its new home, the archive was already a legendary home-grown institution, organized since the early 1970s out of the living room of its founders Deborah Edel and Joan Nestle on the Upper West Side of Manhattan.

I’d made an appointment for a two-hour research session on a Thursday evening; Nina encouraged me to go because she’d seen some Greek publications there when she visited. When I walk in, one of the volunteers asks if I’m looking for anything in particular, so I mention Lesvos—was there anything specifically about the island in the collection? They seemed pleased with the request, smiled, said oh of course, we must, I bet we do. A bit later, they walked over and handed me an archival box labeled “GREECE + CYPRUS Box 1 of 1.” I was looking for queer ancestors, both lesbian and Lesbian, here in the storied Lesbian Herstory Archive, wishing, yearning for some kind of new connection, more information, anything at all to add to the sketchy memories and limited imagery of my own archive, looking to decode these trips to my father’s island in the 70s and 80s before I was fluent in all of my adult languages. What else could I draw into the zone?

In insisting on the value of apparently marginal or ephemeral materials, the collectors of gay and lesbian archives propose that affects—associated with nostalgia, personal memory, fantasy, and trauma—make a document significant. The archive of feelings is both material and immaterial, at once incorporating objects that might not ordinarily be considered archival, and at the same time, resisting documentation because sex and feelings are too personal or ephemeral to leave records. For this reason and others, the archive of feelings lives not just in museums, libraries, and other institutions but in more personal and intimate spaces, and significantly, also within cultural genres.10

In describing the Lesbian Herstory Archives in An Archive of Feelings, Cvetkovich writes that “rather than being a specialized domain for experts, LHA is a welcoming sanctuary;” its domestic interior was once an actual home: “the downstairs living room serves as a comfortable reading room, the copier sits alongside other appliances in the kitchen, the entryway is an exhibit space, and the top floor houses a collective member who lives there on a permanent basis.”11

I sit down at the archive’s original dining table, purchased in 1973 when it was still in Deb and Joan’s apartment, and spread the contents of the GREECE + CYPRUS box out in front of me. What I didn’t expect to find inside that box was my own present self, rooted, grounded in place, in a reading room in Brooklyn. Box 1 of 1 contained a small collection of publications from the early Greek gay liberation movement, including the first few issues of ΑΜΦΙ (Amfi), the first gay magazine published in Greece, as well as HΛABPYΣ (Labrys), the first Greek lesbian publication.

Published in 1982, it was discontinued after the third issue, following economic problems and internal disagreements, but for this reason its significance for Greek LGBTIQ+ history is great. The women behind Lavrys were involved with the nascent Greek feminist movement, and also with various communist and leftist groups.12

I open the the first issue of Labrys, and I’m stunned; this is the Greek alphabet doing things I was never able to see as a child, when I struggled to understand what my grandparents were saying to me, and all of the cousins and neighbors and strangers in the village, voices surrounding me with sharp jabs of understanding and alienation. How can an entire alphabet be so intimately familiar, the sight and sound of a language so embodied in my person, so inside my youth, yet somehow so outside my mouth.

I really didn’t know what I was looking for, just feeling my way through, sensing, trying to stay in the contact zone. I turn to page 28 of the first issue of Labrys; it’s a feature dedicated to the status of gay and lesbian rights in the US. Incredibly, this article includes a photograph of a Lesbian Herstory Archives banner being carried by Edel and Mabel Hampton, an activist and early member of the archive, at the 1980 Pride Parade in NYC. The year before Gay Cancer Summer. It’s 2025 and I’m sitting at the LHA dining table with this photograph, published in Greece in 1982, and this is the sensation of time travel, my visitation from the future, of finding myself both grounded at the table and “being long” across decades. Cultures, languages, and sensations criss-crossing and transposed. Scrubbing the photo for details, I recognize the buildings in the background; they’re marching north up Fifth Avenue, the Washington Square Arch just barely visible in the distance. I had watched the NYC Pride Parade right there at that same spot on Fifth Avenue all through the 1990s. And then when I checked on Google Street View, and lined up the view—yes, they’re carrying the banner right at E. 10th St. and Fifth, where I lived from 1996 until 2003. They’re on my corner, 16 years before I got there. I was looking for Greek ancestors, and found my queer kin.

Intimate typographies

Now it’s the morning of June 28, 2025, the 56th anniversary of Stonewall, and I’m back in NYC. I’m walking towards the Stonewall National Monument, the triangle of space bordered by Christopher, Grove, and W. 4th Streets, because I want to see the changes with my own eyes, the malicious deletion of the letters “T” and “Q” from LGBTQ and the removal of the trans flags by the Trump regime, which was reported widely in the news earlier this year. Helpful staff at the Stonewall National Monument Visitors Center, funded by Google and Disney and Donatella Versace and AARP (but not the federal government), tell me that the local park rangers have been very supportive and that the most egregious changes were on the National Park Service website, where letters and language were sloppily removed and Marsha P. Johnson’s page and other content was deleted. I cross the street and look at the information panels on the wrought-iron fence surrounding Christopher Park, decorated with dozens of rainbow flags by the park rangers for Pride. Trans flags, banned by the Trump regime, were everywhere, defiantly added by visitors. A “fence exhibit” displays photographs and QR codes that lead to the modified website.

Remarkably, some of the panels displaying black-and-white photographic portraits of our community’s trans ancestors have been annotated by visitors with adhesive letters, a noble act of caretaking, a kind of queer typographic correction (and connection), an inscribing, however temporary, to identify and proclaim and sustain. In the annotations, I’m reminded that these images are saturated with memory for me, even though I never knew Zazu Nova, Sylvia Rivera, or Marsha P. Johnson when they were alive. Saturated with memory for us. The act of spelling out their names in public, identifying them by rubbing these notes down on National Park Service panels, claiming their powerful presence, calling them up into the park. The sticky letterforms remind me of Letraset typography of the 1970s, typography on portable sheets that could be rubbed down onto any surface, and in that moment I’m thankful for this, that rubbing can be writing, anywhere we want. I trace over the sticker-letters in my photos now to re-inscribe and re-transmit these messages to a different place, over different networks, to point to the power of intimate histories that get written in public, and the beautiful forms that liberated language can take when traveling across time and space. A small effort to extend the life of these lines.

ZAZU NOVA ALWAYS BE HERE

SYLVIA WILL ALWAYS BE HERE

MARSHA P JOHNSON IS HERE

These stickers in the West Village in 2025 are ephemeral love letters, unusual traces written in public, barely surviving, but they do. I’m looking at them now, and the memorial quilt panel sewn for Katrina Haslip, and the archive’s banner in the 1980 NYC Pride Parade, headlines from 1981, a Greek lesbian publication from 1982. I’m trying to locate myself on this overflowing timeline that opens up and reveals new narratives, crucial stories that I need, that I’m craving. I grab on. It’s my father’s journey from Lesvos in search of something, a menu in the basement, an informal typeface that felt just right, and my own search for fluency, in all of my languages. These are the queer design objects of my childhood, even as I see some of them now for the first time. These are my design lessons; I’m holding them close by at 7 and 13 and 23, now at 57, claiming my own quantum queer history that holds all of these moments together, some kind of energy that spans decades. As I look back to move forward, these narratives continue, all of these edges touching on the timeline, revealing other kinds of design histories, sometimes random but always specific, to be claimed and shared. These proximity artifacts stretch out along multiple timelines, long and steady, writing and re-writing themselves. These are some, but not all, of my intimate typographies.

Shortcomings

I’m less interested in how *it* actually happened, and all that’s been speculated—who’s to blame, whether it was intentional, if a designer was involved, which software was used. I’m more intrigued by the typographic error and its effects. What is the capacity of the “mistake” to stir things up? I’m trying to stay with the unexpected feelings here, in the face of hegemonic power, because domination is everywhere. A mistake of this magnitude is serious because it alters one of the most visible representations of patriarchal power. If it doesn’t get replaced, this inscription marking the tomb of Pope Francis, leader of the Catholic Church from 2013 until his death in 2025, with its unevenly spaced letterforms engraved in Times New Roman (or something close to it), will live on for eternity.

Irregular spacing (bad kerning, no kerning) is all around us, unnoticeable to most. For others, it’s an atrocity, associated with ignorance of craft or lack of training, although this is changing. As typesetting tools evolve from highly specialized to commonplace and popular, our collective tolerance for “non-professional” typography is increasing. At the same time, students in design school are taught to develop a refined capacity to see what others can’t, beyond the amateur-ish, to identify typographic standards and irregularities, and to design subtle arrangements of letterforms to produce a smooth, uninterrupted read. They learn that when spacing is “perfect,” it’s invisible, allowing content to be read directly and with the greatest impact.

In the “F R A NCISC VS” inscription, the odd spaces around the”R,” “A,” and “V” are distracting and slow down the read. But what makes the typographic error at Santa Maria Maggiore Basilica in Rome so egregious is the finality of it. How could a design mishap like this occur under such extraordinary conditions? When typography is used for extreme displays of institutional power, like an authoritarian government, a fascist uniform, a ruling body, or even the omniscient voice of a holy entity, it supports domination—the communication of a hegemonic agenda. What exactly are the ingredients of typographic power, and why do they fail here?

The typography on the tomb of Pope Francis is so unsettling because the staggered read weakens the emotional experience of patriarchal power in a highly charged context that was designed for reverence. For some (not everyone sees it), the less-perfect spacing reveals the faulty labor behind its construction. Was it intentional? Is this a queer use of type? I don’t think so. But it does accomplish this: it exposes the shortcomings (of an administrative process? of typography? of patriarchy?) and reveals that it’s entirely possible to disrupt the reading of a man’s name with a simple, perhaps accidental act of bad typesetting. Not just any name, but the name of the most powerful authority in the Catholic Church, answering to over one billion followers. When I see it, I question the singularity of the inscription’s voice. Rather than sink into awe or devotion in contemplation of his name, my eye wanders around the oversized gap between the R and the A, and I think of how it came to be—the engraver, the designer (if there was one), the clerk who made the order, the workers who cut and set the stone in place—the administrators of authority that surround and construct such a power. This is labor that is supposed to remain invisible, but instead it’s there on the surface of the stone, pushed into plain view, breaking up the smooth illusion of craft, and dragging the experience of holy perfection down into the profane world of fonts, software, and clerical mistakes.

Here’s another notable moment in Rome, for contrast. This is Palazzo Braschi, headquarters for Benito Mussolini and the Italian Fascist Party Federation, 90 years earlier. The photograph depicts the building’s facade covered over with a billboard by Mussolini’s party to promote the vote of “SI” (YES) for the March 1934 national “election.” This was a single party ballot that was put to voters for approval; no other options were allowed. Propaganda for “SI” was imposed, 99.85% of the vote was forcibly achieved under duress, and fascist power was retained. Here, the typography of domination speaks to support a singular source, the voice of ultimate authority looking down threateningly from its palace to the street with a loud, one-word message perfectly set in repeating uppercase letterforms. This is typography designed to evoke fear in the seizure of power. There is no uncertainty here, no room for dissent in this representation of fascist dominance. If an election is an issue of consent—may we remain in control?—the SI propaganda was an enforced “default yes.” Authoritarian regimes erase collective agency with graphic design, architecture, monuments, and propaganda that support a singular, unquestioned voice. The fascist voice speaks in loud, predictable tones to a forced agenda.

The contact zone

My search, my drive towards queer typography brings me to this place, in considering the language and letterforms of violent regimes, because today I am surrounded by representations of power that are at once confusing, frightening, and eerily familiar. In staying close to my own experiences and feelings in the face of extreme authority, as well as those around me in my various communities, I hope to better understand the practice of graphic design and typography within the matrix of domination. I’m compelled to look at it, because this kind of design—the highly legible, controlled, regulation of design that constructs and supports white supremacy, settler colonialism, capitalism, and heteropatriarchy—is all around us now. It’s been here for a very long time—centuries—and it works to undo all of the progress that makes survival and liberation possible. The gradual rise of a more visible and emboldened extreme-right politics in the US is shifting my search deeper into the archive, back to the present, and out towards an uncertain future. If the purpose of empire is to expand, dominate, and reproduce itself at all costs, then what kind of language(s) do we shape in response? What do queer typographies feel like today? “Feel like” because I’m trying to stay close to an emotional route in this work, rather than the formalities of queer or fascist aesthetics, which only go so far. As an aging, queer body moving through an era of frightening surveillance and consolidation of unilateral power, I’m learning best by cultivating intimacy, contact, and connection in my writing, by sharing experiences embodied and felt. This is why so much of my time is spent in queer archives, which “challenge traditional conceptions of history and understand the quest for history as a psychic need rather than a science” (emphasis my own).1

So far, my cruising in and out of these spaces reveals this: that it’s entirely possible to create a contact zone for these psychic needs, a place for radically different approaches to queerness, design, typography, and time to criss-cross and encounter each other in radical difference. In gathering these unexpected figures, moments, works, gestures, and acts into one risky, porous space—the space of an idea, a thesis, an essay, a book—I’m able to share the complexities that cultivate contamination, unlearning, and growth. In establishing contact across time and space, I’m trying to work against the hegemonic urge to canonize only those who support virtuosity, and open up to risky encounters that problematize the normative and move us towards plurality.

Design normativity

Design normativity is enforced by the conservative institutions of capitalist, heteropatriarchal society that wish to maintain a controlled, visual expression of their values. The tools and materials of design normativity are the regulations, design standards, and branding guidelines of institutions, corporations, and governing structures. These policies provide the visual ingredients and communication strategies for defining and maintaining the singular voice of authority, and exclude everything else. In the construction and enforcement of design normativity, the irregular is neglected, erased, or even outlawed.

The need to spread propaganda through one nationalist voice that would read as “authentically German” led to a typographic debate in late 1930s Germany, causing leaders of the Nazi regime to create a false narrative that wrongly defined the widely-used Fraktur typefaces as “Jewish letters.” Fraktur was declared to be un-German, and outlawed. In January 1941, the Nazi regime issued a “typographic decree” prohibiting Fraktur typography, demanding that all newspaper and magazine printers change immediately to “normal typefaces.” Similarly, printers in the US issued their own proclamation boycotting the use of German-made “Nazi type,” and promoted American-made equivalents.

The hateful, anti-semitic values associated with the policies of the Nazi regime were extended into the regulation of design and typography (as well as art, architecture, music, etc); anything outside of “normal” was regarded as wayward and criminal. For the Nazi regime, “normal typefaces” meant Latin-based letters designed in an “Antiqua” style. The fractured style of Fraktur typography (from Latin frāctūra, “a break”), characterized by choppy, self-contained blackletter forms, was considered to be the “opposite” of flowing Antiqua, which evoked the smooth, connected forms of Latin inscription and the calligraphic hand.

(Fraktur) looked old fashioned; it was too ornate, too prominent, too visible: indeed, one of the arguments in favour of its use was that the Gothic script was more open to typographical experiment than the simple, definitive letters of the Latin face, which confines typeface design to tiny details, subtle shifts, small strokes and fine adjustments here and there. The letters can vary in appearance, but not too much: the constraints are high, the room for maneuver small.2

Fraktur was eliminated because the potential for variability, experimentation, and expression was seen as a threat. Irregularity had no place in a tightly controlled regime intent on the expansion of power through cruelty and violence. Later in the Nazi regime, Paul Renner’s Futura was also promoted, with its easy-to-read geometric forms and clear connections to modernity (even though Renner had been arrested by the Nazis in 1933, and later fled to Switzerland). As foreign lands were invaded and occupied, controlled legibility was prioritized; a “regular” and “normal” typographic voice was seen as the most effective strategy for communicating Nazi propaganda to non-German speakers; anything (and anyone) irregular was seen to be deviant and discarded. This was normative, legible typography for colonialism, empire building, and genocide.

Typography for domination

Now, right before me, I see the deployment of similar tactics—strategic design used to create fear and panic in the construction of authoritative rule. The Trump regime uses design in the performance of US statecraft that mimics some of these fascist examples, as well as others, employing a “militarized” command of typography and the use of bold, super legible typefaces that frequently appear in all-caps. The typographic voice of the current regime first appeared when the new administration was elected in January 2025, primarily on the White House website. They took command with a redesigned site that centralizes all of their official communications. This is where announcements are made, Executive Orders are posted, and the latest fake news is promoted through ominous movie-poster-style headlines. In the virtuous execution of typography used by the Trump regime, frightening propaganda is created about the control of entire populations, gender ideology, reproductive rights, healthcare, and immigration, all supported by good, legible typography.

The fonts used on the White House website are Instrument Serif and Instrument Sans, from a family of typefaces designed by independent type designer Rodrigo Fuenzalida for Instrument, the Portland, OR and New York, NY-based design agency. Fuenzalida lives and works in Santiago, Chile. This makes me wonder what an “authentically American” typeface might be, or a purely authoritarian one, or a caring one, or a truly powerful one. And suddenly I’m back at the very questions that prompted this book in the first place—does queer typography exist? and by extension, is there gendered typography? what about ethical typography? can a font be good, or evil? Within these questions lies an even deeper one, about the nature of letterforms: why does the appearance of language matter?

I call masculine all printing that is noticeable for its readability, for its strength and absence of useless ornament. I call feminine all printing noticeable for its delicacy, and for the weakness which always accompanies delicacy, as well as for its profusion of ornamentation.3

This statement by Theodore Low De Vinne would almost be laughable if he hadn’t been such an influential printer and scholar of typography at the start of the 20th century. 134 years later, we know that there’s nothing inherently gendered or radical or good or evil about fonts, but that it’s entirely possible to construct an affective experience through typography. That’s where it gets complicated. Those who write and perform acts of language do so under certain social and political conditions; this is how typography acts, how it does things, how it shapes language. There is always context to those declarations that qualify as toxic, or harmful, or painful, supported by people making decisions that put design to bad use.

I wonder how long all-caps Instrument Serif on a dark background will retain the power to conjure up the trauma of this particular era. Can the design surpass this moment? There’s nothing toxic about the font, but as it’s made to deliver violent language again and again, new associations form. Setting the tall letterforms in all-caps on a dark background gives the Trump headlines an exaggerated stature, as well as the quality of being shouted or barked, like the all-cap threats Trump has made on social media for years. By following the official Trump 47 White House Brand Guidelines, the tightly controlled “hero” voice of the singular commander is constructed. Control is regulated through consistent usage, repetition, and a seamless display of rigid order—the hallmarks of effective branding. Of course, the long-lasting connections between design, branding, and politics are plentiful, and have been explored in depth elsewhere.

Enforced design

Mussolini’s SI, Hitler’s Futura, and Trump’s all-caps Instrument are successful (if we can call them that, within their respective contexts) because they work to support the already-existing infrastructures of necropolitics and domination that determine which populations get to live or die. Design decisions are being made right now by people who support barbaric systems of destruction, decisions involving the militarized dissemination of propaganda, the staging of violent imagery, and the branding of terror regimes. How do we reconcile this as design educators and practitioners?

In the US, the playbook for the Trump 47 presidency, the 920-page Project 2025 Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise report, was designed by in-house graphic designers at the Heritage Foundation. It makes perfectly good use of excellent typefaces: Chronicle and Gotham from Hoefler&Co, part of the Monotype Library of typefaces and foundries. The design of the book is boring and without any distinction at all, but communicates adequately, like one might expect from a conservative think tank. The plain design of the Project 2025 document works to mask the true scope of its horrors; this is itself a kind of craft. I’m not sure there’s much more to learn about hegemonic power by looking at the good typography here, as it’s been used to disseminate hateful ideology, other than this: enforced design works to support domination. There’s a long history of good design and typography—from the banal to spectacular displays—going hand-in-hand with cultures of militarized terror, colonialism, and necropolitics. I’m bringing these particular examples into the contact zone because they cause me to question my own relationship with typography right now, in this troubling era of extraction and devolving democracy. And I’ve come to realize that the full capacity of typography, as a set of material conditions, knowledges, and practices, requires a much wider view than typically articulated by design educators: as a tool for both resistance and oppression, as support for both liberation and terror.

Acts of language

I recall Re:Vision, Future Typography, the Monotype 2025 Trend Report, and how the team who wrote that document positioned the entire field of typography as a benevolent force for advancing progress and good in the world. Chapters addressing artificial intelligence, climate change, “freedom, law & order,” and “conflict & peace” were illustrated with inspiring examples of projects and campaigns that elevate the use of good typography as a hopeful, virtuous endeavor. It even includes GenderFail’s Protest Fonts. I’m sure it’s an effective way to sell software—but what we don’t see in the Monotype Trend Report is the complete range of graphic design’s contradictions, which extends all the way from progressive movements for liberation to the politics of terror and domination that create the conditions for global oppression. Typography has a way of reflecting our current conditions back to us through contradictory acts of language that have the capacity to terrorize, inspire, embolden, inform, and confuse, and all of the other ways that language forms and frames our affective experiences of the world. As painful as it might be, we need to make space for these contradictions, and try to understand them; this is part of what it means to engage with design right now.

Here are some past, recent, and very current typographic moments that I’m bringing into the contact zone as I try to make sense of how plain acts of language can be used both to support and counter violence, in fraught moments of turbulent upheaval. How do we make sense of design and typography here in the zone?

• the embroidered letterforms visible on the back of an ICE agent,

• the printed letterforms on signs and shirts spelling out ICE OUT OF LA and FUCK ICE, being used by protestors in Los Angeles in June 2025,

• the printed shields used by the California National Guard in June 2025,

• the perfectly painted letterforms spelling out “I AM AN AMERICAN” hung outside a Japanese immigrant-owned store in Oakland, CA that was shut-down the day after the Pearl Harbor attack in 1942,

• the cover of Gaysweek from September 1978, the first gay weekly publication in NYC and the first Black-owned and edited mainstream gay publication;

• Paul Chan’s “Boulder Font” protest signs that turned the Westboro Baptist Church’s hateful designs inside-out in 2018,

• a social media post by @homocommunist on World AIDS Day, 2024,

• print-on-demand Trump flags typed in Arial Black hanging outside homes all across the US right now

• the DVCE (meaning DUCE, (duke), or “The Leader”, referring to Mussolini) pavement mosaic at Foro Italico, the 1930s fascist-era sports stadium in Rome, Italy

• the front cover of the The New York War Crimes, November 9, 2023.

These fonts only matter because they perform certain effects on language in public space. They use legibility to deliver messages that make visible not only the language at hand but who declares it, during highly charged moments of struggle. They use (and reuse) the restrictions and regulated design assets of constraint-based branding as their raw material to make claims for or against violence.

Queer as reused; reuse as queer use.4

A queer use of type is an irregular language act, a way to make language do something unexpected in the face of power. One such tactic is mimicry, seen in some of these examples. Alan Bell re-used the Newsweek logo to claim new forms of space and power through publishing when he founded and published Gaysweek in 1977, the first Black-owned and edited mainstream gay publication and New York City’s first gay weekly (Bell later went on to publish BLK, BLACK LACE, and other groundbreaking queer publications). Similarly, Writers Against the War on Gaza have used the instantly recognizable form of The New York Times to defamiliarize with their own newspaper, The New York War Crimes, since 2023. The “FUCK ICE” messages seen on the backs of protestors in Los Angeles mirror “POLICE ICE” in form; Paul Chan makes perfect copies of the Westboro Baptist Church’s hateful designs for his own. Thinking through Sara Ahmed’s work around “queer use,” we can see these as typographic acts of reuse as queer use that are both weaponized and caring, reusing the tools and materials of power to achieve certain effects. They turn the tools—the brand guidelines, the design constraints, the materials of domination—upside-down and inside-out, by using them for counter purposes. They “load up” the language with a reinforced armor that strikes at how hegemonic power works, by reusing its materials and speaking its language. These fonts matter because they play with perception in the instant read, and slow down the experience for a second look. “But it is not just that use is a restriction of possibility that is material. Restrictions can also become material through use.”5

The typographic error

Nat Pyper wrote a letter to me recently about care, in response to my “Cruising” essay, which I share here in order to continue these thoughts.

I went to a Johanna Hedva talk where they lamented about ‘care’ being used as rhetorical cover by cultural institutions who have no real investment in actual caretaking and whose accessibility considerations are abysmal. Then the new Stereolab album came out, and I was struck by the lyrics in ‘Aerial Troubles,’ the second song on the album:

The juncture invites us to provide care
(Palliative)
Dying modernity
While offering antenatal care for the inception
Of the new yet undefined future

Which of course resonates so much with your essay. And then in thinking about Hedva, I wondered about the deployment of ‘caretaking’ and who uses it and for what purpose. Surely there are those on the right who will say that their xenophobic Christian nationalism is an effort to take care of a certain possibility or worldview or world, that is, a future. (And to a lesser degree, Vignelli and his ‘six,’ although some of those quotes are very icky and no less xenophobic.) So then that made me wonder about different kinds of caretaking. And which is the kind that I value? Maybe there are different and opposing forms of caretaking: a caretaking that closes down vs. a caretaking that opens up; a caretaking that is destructive/severing vs. a caretaking that is creative/reparative; a caretaking of power vs. a caretaking of people. And of course all of this is wrapped up in this question of consent, of who gets to lay claim to what, or who. Is that kind of caretaking which is destructive and forecloses possibilities actually caretaking or is it, as you name at the end, just domination?

In caring for a world, for a future, in the kind of caretaking that destroys, or opens up, or repairs—it’s somewhere in this full spectrum of an ethics of care that I return to the typographic error. Or rather, not the error itself, but the absence of design perfection—the glitched, deviant, non-normative, and sometimes rageful practices that aren’t used to build empires, aren’t replicated in graphic design canons, nor celebrated at awards ceremonies. Can the refusal to deliver perfect legibility be an act of care, a worldview, an intentional practice, even? Deviant design—hand-made letterforms, odd spacing, crowded pages, encoded messages, mimicry, unpredictability—exposes labor and reveals the messiness of political life and work in the collective. Some kind of evidence of human life is made real there in the disruption of the perfect read, in the slowed-down act of reading variant bodies of design that makes felt the work of shaping language.

Deviant design can be a strategy for survival. We must stop imagining apocalypse / genocide + we must imagine liberation (2024) is a work by artist Demian DinéYazhi' that depends on a slower read and the power of layered language that gets “loaded up” and deployed through the coded, queer use of language. DinéYazhi's practice focuses on indigenous and LGBTQIA+ people and white supremacist capitalist heteropatriarchial colonization. They created We must stop imagining apocalypse for the 2024 Whitney Biennial, a typographic poem constructed in neon that was installed on three separate metal stands. 13 letters in the poem flicker to slowly reveal a hidden message: “free palestine” The work faced west through the gallery window and was visible from outside the building. I wish I’d been able to see it in person.

The full poem reads as follows:

“we must stop imagining destruction + extraction + deforestation + cages + torture + displacement + surveillance + genocide! we must stop predicting apocalypses + fascist governments + capitalist hierarchies! we must pursue + predict + imagine routes toward liberation!”

DinéYazhi' described the hidden message—

Free Palestine is a call for a permanent ceasefire and an end to occupation, genocide, forced migrations of Palestinian peoples and the right of self-determination for Palestinian peoples. It asks us to consider what healing and building future societies could look like if we were all liberated from disharmonic and divisive political systems, police states, and nation states.6

We must stop imagining apocalypse is a hand-made work where typography is key but the font itself is of less importance, where the queer use of language in the form of an irregularity (a hacking in how it acts) deepens its meaning. The queer use of language here depends on patience and perception, an awareness of the irregular, and thinking with Sara Ahmed again, a re-use of one condition in order to direct towards another.7 It’s an encoded act of language that performs non-normatively through time and space: the variable letters signal emancipation. “Queerness is . . . a performative because it is not simply a being but a doing for and toward the future.”8 The flickering of light that spells out the message “free palestine” is delivered by the artist as a kind of generous caretaking, a reprieve from the perfect read, one that opens up possibilities because the variance appears slowly, triggered by the work of the viewer. The flicker reveals something new that emerges as a challenge to its context—the systemic silence and complacency of the institutional art world where the work is situated.

We must stop imagining apocalypse only partially delivers itself for viewers accustomed to an Instagram-quick read in a blockbuster museum space. In what might be seen first as a benign error, a flickering letter, the lingering view gives way to more—to variability, a kind of irregularity that is outlawed. A real sitting with the work directs to an opening, towards a “new yet undefined future,” a future free from genocide and tyranny. This is a strategic approach to shaping language that depends upon the seduction of art-world perfection that we might expect in a setting like this (the exquisite craft of the display, the red-orange glow of the neon, the curation of a world-class collection of art), but it only really gets to work once we sit and open ourselves up to the irregular. In the irregular is the potential for new practices, new knowledges, new contaminations in the contact zone. In the irregular is new language.

What brings you into the space of the archive might be a desire to get lost, the kind of driving known as cruising.

Cruising is a way of moving with ‘no specific destination;’ the ultimate goal is ‘to get lost [ . . . ] in webs of relationality and queer sociality.’1

Cruising wasn’t on my mind when a stranger walked into the reading room at the One Archives and sat down at the table next to mine, just as the doors opened at 9AM. I saw him waiting for several boxes of material to be wheeled over in a cart, and I probably didn’t notice him again until I came back from lunch. At some point, he stood up and started photographing folios of oversized prints and collages, his back to me, and I was intrigued. I had already been at the archive for a week, mostly alone in the reading room, so certainly I was curious about this new body suddenly sharing the space with mine, yes—and curious about some of the artifacts he was looking through as well, from what I could glimpse. He was going quickly, turning things over in fast motion, not really examining the pages closely. I found myself comparing his research tactics to my own, judging his carelessness, but who knows, maybe he was in a rush, perhaps he was searching for a particular item. I was curious if there was something in those boxes for me too, as if he was also looking for queer typography, or what. I really wanted to know what was driving him, and this is what drove me into an encounter.

I miss cruising in physical space. I know that it still happens, but the parameters have changed. Cruising before the apps was an important part of sexual life and community for many queer bodies, a chance to connect under the protection of anonymity, a way to privately claim space for wayward activity in public, at the piers, in the parks, in the bathrooms, in bars, in libraries, left over from when sex was outlawed. Cruising was the only form of communion for some, an extension of community for many. From the first reporting of HIV/AIDS as a “gay cancer” in 1981 until the arrival of PrEP (Pre-Exposure Prophylaxis) in 2012, the specter of disease and death shaped many aspects of cruising in physical space—the behaviors, environments, accessories, permissions, and meanings produced in and around sex in public. For some, it was also a way to resist isolation, an escape, to get to know a place (or create a place), to know who was around, to learn, to drift, to get lost. Driving closer to those connections, to cross queer time and space, was a kind of liberation for me, and I suspect for others, too. Another kind of survival network. It was also very risky.

A quantum encounter

I wasn’t thinking about cruising in the archive on that particular day in Los Angeles when the stranger walked into the reading room, but the story turns in that direction. Curious to know more, I used my phone to zoom in and take a photograph of the label on one of the boxes on his table. I saw the words: Gerardo Velázquez Papers. The name looked familiar, perhaps because I’d seen the finding aid on the archive’s website. I typed it into Google and one of the first results to appear was a font designed by alphabet artist Nat Pyper.2 That’s when everything started to unfold—Nat had used source material from Gerardo Velázquez (1958–1992) as the basis for one of their fonts, in a project titled A Queer Year of Love Letters (AQYOLL).3 Maybe the source material had even come from one of these boxes on the stranger’s table! Eventually, Nat’s project grew to contain 12 fonts, each one informed by acts of writing, design, and publishing in queer history. I looked at the Velázquez letterforms again on my screen, the extended double-strokes splayed out at rough angles. They voiced a particular texture: jagged, queer, punk, taking up space, spreading out, jumping off the screen. Oral and active and raucous.

I quickly texted Nat, thrilled with where my curiosity was taking us. The stranger, their research, Nat’s research, my own, convening here in the reading room. “hey I’m at the one archives, and just realized that gerardo velázquez’s papers are here, is this where you found your source material?” Unknowingly, the stranger next to me had set up the conditions for a quantum encounter. A reply: yes! Of course, I had to let the stranger know. I apologetically interrupted his research to gesture to my screen, where he could see Nat’s font, and asked him if he knew that Velázquez’s materials had been used to create these letterforms. His answer surprised me: yes, he knew about the font from Amalgam, a design journal published by Pouya Ahmadi, who I also happen to teach with at RISD. That was issue #4, which contained an essay that I had contributed: “What is queer typography?” In the essay, I wrote about Nat’s work, and featured images of the fonts. I explained—yes, that essay where you read about the Velázquez font, it was written by me. And I’m here right now in this reading room, for an entire month, to expand those ideas about queer typography into a book.

Later in the week, over dinner, the man, no longer a stranger, described his research to me, which was focused on the Chicano punk music scene, and this is what had brought him to Los Angeles. I told him that because of our encounter, I had requested the same boxes he had, so I could also go through Velázquez’s papers after he left. I never found the club flyer that was the source for Nat’s font, but thanks to the encounter in the archive I learned a lot about Velázquez, his punk band Nervous Gender, and his life in Los Angeles in the late 1970s and 80s. He died of complications related to HIV/AIDS in 1992.

I saw Velázques’s zines and the artwork that he created for Nervous Gender using Letraset rub-down letterforms and textures, and read through lots of “filth poetry.” Velázquez published zines “with titles like The Annals of Selective Annihilation and The Gay Death List that used acidic satire to chronicle his experience as a gay man living with HIV.”4 He kept sex journals, and they’re all there, stored in folders in the boxes. He kept notes about hook-ups, cruising, phone numbers, comments about the encounters he was having, sometimes just a single word. I opened one book, titled “JOURNAL OF SEXUAL ACTIVITY VOL I OCT 20, 1985.” On a page dated 11-12-85, he wrote “Remember these?” at the top, and it reminded me of that one page in L.S. Alexander Gumby’s scrapbooks titled “Your History.” Velázquez had pasted small slips of paper with names and phone numbers in the journal, presumably men he’d met. One was a receipt with “Have a beer on me” written on the back. His annotation: “+$5 bill under the stall (toilet prostitute?).” Were the funds given or received? No way to know, but lots to imagine. These pages were so deeply intimate, so incredibly personal, that I had to stop photographing. And then I had to stop reading, because it felt invasive.

Later, while visiting Nat in Brooklyn, I told them this story about the stranger and the encounter in the archive, and how this led me not only to Gerardo Velázquez, but also back to Nat. And Nat told me that when they were researching in the archive they found a napkin inside one of the sex journals. Nat said that Velázquez had written in the journal

that this person in the next stall was jacking off, and that when they were done, he took the napkin and wiped the cum off the wall. And that was the thing. And then he was writing below it. And at first I was like, what am I touching? You know, but then it was also incredible, this literal document of these two people. So he already had this kind of archival spirit in his own work.5

Love Letters

That archival spirit is also in Nat’s work. It’s what draws me to their practice, which I’ve been following for years, since they were a graduate student in graphic design at Yale. AQYOLL connects queer acts of writing, found in the archive, to contemporary acts of queer typing, in the form of type design and font files, and this project was one of the foundational inspirations for this book. To get lost in the archive with the work, the poetry, the journals, the cum, to cruise through these moments in the reading room beside this stranger, was just one of the surprises that Nat has given me throughout the evolution of their project. I would describe it as a kind of desire, even—a lustful drive to connect, in that each of Nat’s fonts sets up the conditions for an illicit encounter, a convening in queer time. As Nat describes it, “so much of the work is about reaching across this abyss,”6 the void of HIV/AIDS, which left so many of us, and those before us, cut-off from each other behind the limits of straight, linear time and the conventional constructs of history. In reaching across the abyss, this “being long” across queer time and space, a gathering occurs.7 I see it as a form of time travel, a quantum queerness where acts of writing, and bodies, can connect, protect, and persist.

A total of nine individuals and two collectives are the subjects of Nat’s project, which shapes its own archive of renegade acts and lives (two of the fonts are based on projects from one collective). AQYOLL points towards ways of living, working, publishing, and surviving that are barely visible outside of queer history, or sometimes even within. Nat frames the entire project with a love letter, addressed to a dear writer, and refers to the fonts as time machines.

These machines take me back—to Robert Ford and Black gay and lesbian underground publishing in early 1990s Chicago; to the Lesbian Alliance, a socialist-feminist enclave in 1970s St. Louis, Missouri; to G.B. Jones and queer punk filmmaking in 1980s downtown Toronto—but they also take me forward to unknown futures through the act of writing itself. In use, these fonts engage the past as a provocation. They engage the past as a verb.

One of the subjects of AQYOLL is Ernestine Eckstein (1941–1992), a Black lesbian activist who was an outspoken member of the Daughters of Bilitis, the first national civil rights organization for lesbian women in the US. In October 1965, Eckstein participated in one of the first Annual Reminder protests. These were early homophile demonstrations organized by Frank Kameny and the Mattachine Society of Washington in response to the Lavender Scare. Eckstein carried a hand-lettered sign in front of the White House that displayed the message “DENIAL OF EQUALITY OF OPPORTUNITY IS IMMORAL.” In photographs taken by Kay Tobin Lahusen that day, Eckstein appears to be the only Black woman participating in the demonstration, and her courage as a visible figure in the early movement for gay and lesbian liberation—particularly for Black women, two decades before the concept of intersectionality was to be formally defined—is astounding.

Nat used Eckstein’s hand-lettering on her White House sign, as seen in those photographs, as the basis for the fourth typeface produced in the series, titled “Ernestine Eckstein.” There are 15 uppercase letterforms in the font, representing all of the letters visible on Eckstein’s sign in the photograph that’s most associated with her action that day. Nat completed the alphabet by imagining a set of 11 accompanying lowercase letters. The numbers 1–9 are depicted as multiple Eckstein figures picketing with her sign; the asterisk is represented by Eckstein herself. The idea of opacity is also present in the font, represented by underline glyphs, which stand in for absent letterforms, and nod towards Eckstein’s own survival tactics:

The surname Eckstein is a pseudonym that she used to protect herself from those who might use the knowledge of her sexuality against her. For this reason, letters not visible or included on the sign are replaced by an indefinite underline to reflect Eckstein’s strategic social opacity.8

Some of the letters appearing in the words DENIAL and EQUITY, which Eckstein drew along a curve at the top of her sign, appear similarly askew in Nat’s font, their positions in time and space fixed and transmitted directly from Eckstein’s score into the future. When combined with the non-tilted letterforms, the visual effect is rhythmic, like a kind of walking, stepping, or marching from letter to letter, across time and space.

I have no interest in saying how people should or shouldn’t use the fonts, and that’s kind of the idea too, that I don’t know what will happen. I want these to be used in new ways and I don’t know what those ways are yet, so I don’t want to prohibit use beforehand. They’re just fonts. That’s kind of the font’s superpower—you can use the font, but you don’t own it. The font persists. You have that history in your computer.9

When I downloaded “Ernestine-Eckstein-font.zip,” it unzipped into two files: the .otf font file itself and a .txt file titled “ErnestineEckstein-ReadMe.txt.” The text file contains a brief narrative about Eckstein, telling of her significance as “a visionary who understood the interwoven nature of oppression and the importance of cross-cultural coalitions,” and information about how the typeface was designed. There’s also a copyleft notice, giving users the right to freely distribute and modify the work, as long as the same license is retained. These notes about the font, the conditions for sharing it, and the remarkable history that inspired it all travel within the .zip file, deposited onto every computer where it’s downloaded, which means that the distribution of the software and the circulation of these histories get to extend far outside of either Eckstein’s or Nat’s control. And this is essential in understanding the intention of the project—that it’s very much about the future creation of new, unknown language.

I feel like an impulse that I’m always fighting against is control, and wanting to have control over the way things happen. In one way, this is just the starting point. The fonts in and of themselves are just fonts. It can’t end there, you know? And that’s when the fonts become powerful—when they’re used for writing. That’s why it’s so important that they’re fonts and why I want people to use them, because that’s when they gain power. That’s when they become these really interesting things—when people use them to make the world.10

The Ernestine Eckstein font is not a tracing of her hand-written forms, nor is it a “revival” typeface, not only because the source material wasn’t a typeface, but because Eckstein’s original letters never died. As I think through this, I’m inspired by type designer Robin Mientjes’ work around revivals and the language that we use to categorize and qualify type design that uses historical source material. Mientjes suggests that we consider these type design projects as acts of translation, rather than as “copies” or “improvements,” and this is a useful framework for thinking through AQYOLL.11 Nat’s fonts are interpretations of inspiring, lesser-known moments of language in queer history, translating their original contexts (and ideologies and technologies and meanings) into newer ones, “and that, by definition, changes the thing. That’s the secret behind every translation: when you read a translation of a text, you now read the words of two writers.”12 With Nat’s project, we might extend that logic even further: in AQYOLL, Eckstein’s public act circulates in relation to the other figures in the collection, in a generous act of publishing, becoming entangled across time and space. As active, collaborative end-users—in using the font itself to type new language—we enter this polyphonic conversation in multiple senses and tenses. Webs of relationality and queer sociality, for sure—past, present, and future ways of writing, speaking, and being.

Font files as archives

Font files are persistent—they’re installed on every computer. A font file is always already an archive. Each one contains a history of its making in the form of drawings, names, technical specifications, code, and marketing materials that point to myriad historical references, design influences, and intentions. But to consider font files as carrier bags of queer histories—voices and stories that reference liberated language outside of type design—is a different proposition. The power of “fonts as queer material” that “engage the past as a verb” opens up an endless potential for the distribution of counter-histories across time and space, especially when the files circulate freely under more generous rights agreements. The work of Emily Sara (“504 Font,” 2023), Erin Moore (“Five Fonts Inspired by Lesbian Hand Lettering,” 2022), and Paul Chan (“Alternumerics,” 2001–2005) should all be noted here, each engaging with the past as a provocation, and to be expanded upon in a future post.

Zuzana Licko may have been one of the first to design a typeface that contains its own embedded counter-history. “Mrs Eaves” (PDF specimen) is Licko’s interpretation of Baskerville (1757), which she named after Sarah Eaves, a woman who had a complex, life-long relationship with John Baskerville in the 18th century. Sarah Eaves was Baskerville’s live-in housekeeper, mistress, and assistant in printing. Later, upon the death of her husband Richard Eaves, she married Baskerville, and eventually, after his death in 1785, became the proprietor of his printing and publishing business.13 Licko designed Mrs Eaves in 1996 and the font is still sold and distributed today through Emigre, the type foundry that Licko co-founded with her partner Rudy VanderLans in San Francisco in 1985. By prominently naming Baskerville’s hidden partner, Licko surfaces new connections to the kinds of labor that are frequently forgotten, dismissed, and erased in history, particularly the work of women and femmes under heteropatriarchical domination. Each time Mrs Eaves is named, purchased, used, and read, a counter-history is recalled and sustained. This is cruising, yes, a queer history told through the radical translation of a legendary work, a re-writing of typographic lineage through a feminist act of framing and citation.

“Naming names” is a crucial practice in the work of Tré Seales, who designs and distributes fonts to “represent, recognize, and inspire meaningful change” at Vocal Type. On the website for his type foundry, Seales writes that “by placing marginalized histories at the heart of our designs, we contribute to a more inclusive, reflective, and powerful design culture.” This includes “Marsha,” one of Vocal Type’s 17 typefaces that reference outspoken activists and freedom fighters like Carrie Chapman Catt, Rubén Salazar, Martin Luther King Jr., and Eva Perón. “Marsha” is a single-weight display font based on the lettering on the Stonewall bar sign as seen in photographs around the time of the Stonewall riots. The typeface is named after Black trans activist Marsha P. Johnson, and is available for $30–$120, depending on license type. A brief history of the bar and Johnson’s significance is included on the Vocal Type site.

GenderFail’s Protest Fonts, which Be Oakley creates from hand-lettering that they find in photographs of protest signs, are less interpretive and more like tracings, with a direct visual connection to the original forms. There are a total of 14 freely-available fonts in Oakley’s project so far, including “I am your worst fear; I am your best fantasy / FIRST GAY AMERICANS,” which references two different handwritten signs from early gay rights protests. One is a photograph of lesbian activist Donna Gottschalk carrying the message “I am your worst fear; I am your best fantasy” on a hand-lettered sign at the Christopher Street Gay Liberation Day parade in NYC in 1970; this was the first ever “pride parade,’ marking the one-year anniversary of the Stonewall riots. Gottschalk was a photographer who documented early gay activism in the 1970s, as well as the life of her trans sibling Myla. Gottschalk exhibited her life’s work in “Brave, Beautiful Outlaws” at the Leslie Lohmann Gallery in 2018. Gottschalk is identified by name on a poster that’s displayed on the GenderFail download site. But the histories conjured up by the project, from Stonewall to the first pride parade to Gottschalk’s role in queer history and her presence in the photograph, do not travel with the font; this seems to be consistent with all of GenderFail’s fonts, which download only as a single .otf file. The other sign used in this font, “FIRST GAY AMERICANS,” is from a photograph taken at the National March on Washington for Gay and Lesbian Rights on October 14, 1979, with the photo credited to Joel Rinne and Earl Colvin; the authors and carriers of the sign are not identified. Curious, I searched for more information about the photographers Rinne and Colvin, and found many of the couple’s photographs documenting gay life in the 1970s and 1980s; this 2015 obituary for Colvin is quite moving in how it traces his little-known involvement in early gay and lesbian activism.

These “archive fonts” take on a powerful charge for those who use them as writing tools. When they’re deliberately framed with information about the source material they set up the possibility for further encounters and deeper relationships in queer time. These connections might also be available to the reader, further down the line, especially if there’s a “note about the type” to accompany the material and associate it with the referenced histories. Still, while “I am your worst fear; I am your best fantasy / FIRST GAY AMERICANS,” is prominently cited here in the April 2025 issue of The Brooklyn Rail (paired with one of Nat’s fonts)—Donna Gottschalk’s name is not.

So, what about consent? How does permission work when cruising around with those who are no longer able to speak for themselves? Who can lay claim, or not lay claim, to these irregular works, these raucous histories? Nat responds:

I’m not interested in the sort of authorship that lays claim to something. Most of these fonts (AQYOLL) are about people who aren’t around anymore, and they can’t speak for this work. They can’t take accountability for it—and likewise, I’m making a font that looks like their work, but I can’t take accountability for their work either. I started to think about authorship less in connection to authority, but more so in relation to caretaking. I’m putting this stuff out there and I’m not going to lay claim to it, but I will take care of it when it’s out in the world. That’s the commitment I’m making to the work.14

In caretaking, it’s possible that the act of publishing itself, whether it be books, fonts, zines, music, images, or other media transmitted into the world, might set up the conditions for an encounter, a stirring of curiosity or desire, or an embodied connection, even. Publishing as an intimate, relational proposition is an idea that Nat borrows from lesbian singer, songwriter, and musician Gwen Avery,

who said, ‘you’re putting out something that we can hold on to until we can reach each other.’ I think that’s a beautiful way to think about publishing—we put out this thing that we can hold onto until we can actually connect. This is the thing that we can have in the meantime.15

There’s so much abundance to be found in the drive to an encounter, an unfolding of relations set into motion by the things we circulate in the world. We might discover the possibility of sharing across time and space, and maybe it’s there that queer typographies emerge, where language connects us. The possibility of contact, this desire to touch, to be in some relationship with significant others, with neglected ancestors who were difficult, who made trouble, who didn’t fit in. Nat says that

this work is so meaningful for me, because in all of these different ways, these people that I’m interested in were resisting isolation and resisting alienation. And they were finding ways to persist against that, in unconventional ways, in ways that made sense for them, and going back to Ernestine and these incredible acts, an inability—or a refusal—to be isolated.16

Mutuality

In my conversation with Nat, I learned that caretaking can be a counter force to control. What I’m learning is that it’s possible to model an art or design practice (perhaps any practice) like this, as a set of relationships that centers radical empathy and affective responsibility, and that there seems to be something particularly queer about this, about stepping away from control towards each other. On a parallel track, addressing archival studies, Michelle Caswell and Marika Cifor ask these questions:

What happens when we scratch beneath the surface of the veneer of detached professionalism and start to think of record-keepers and archivists less as sentinels of accountability [ . . . ] and more as caregivers, bound to records creators, subjects, users, and communities through a web of mutual responsibility? Furthermore, what if each of these four relationships—archivist and record creator, archivist and record subject, archivist and record user, and archivist and community—was marked by radical empathy?17

I’d like to borrow Caswell and Cifor’s inquiry and bring it closer to design, even as a way to think through queer design. What if a design or writing or publishing practice focused on the ways people are linked to each other and larger communities through webs of responsibilities, a practice that emphasizes “particularity, connection, and context rather than abstract moral principles?”18

Stepping away from control towards each other feels queer because embracing control is one of the hallmarks of virtuous design. As an educator, I can’t help but consider AQYOLL and other “archive fonts” against the heavy burden of traditional design history and the ways the design canon has been written to favor certain forms of success. Design exceptionalism demands its own kind of isolation, imposed on those who are perceived as visionary, in the form of hero worship. For so long, designers have learned to view certain type designers as singular genius figures who perfectly embody everything about a particular style or way of working. In western education, until very recently, those icons have mostly been white, cis-gender, European or North American heterosexual men who were celebrated on their own as isolated heroes, apart from the labor practices, social conditions, and political contexts that helped construct their success.

Recalling the “silent partnership” of Sarah Eaves in Baskerville’s success, Mientjes breaks down our relentless fixation on hero worship in the type industry, and how it leads to “unquestioning belief:”

Claude Garamond didn’t work alone in his foundry. No foundry where hot type alloy was melted was operated by the one designer, punch cutter, matrix justifier, floor sweeper, lunch chef, and also a salesman. It asks for too much to believe that he worked alone. But as a consequence of his celebrity, what we primarily have is the idea that Garamond was a singular visionary who is the sole cause of the success of his work. Hero worship also leads to unquestioning belief. “When in doubt, use Caslon.” This is of course an exaggerated example, and I don’t know any designers who say this, but the idea that the name Caslon has become so strong and so singular is not based on merit, but on celebrity. The various incarnations of the Caslon type foundries have had many, many type choices available for typographers, varying in purpose and quality, and a blanket statement like this ignores that complexity.19

Virtuous design

When in doubt, use Caslon. Massimo Vignelli (1931–2014) and other Modernists did say almost exactly that. Vignelli was a mentor for me, of sorts. I came to an early understanding of typography in the 1990s by working closely with designers who had worked side-by-side with him and Lella Vignelli at Unimark and Vignelli Associates. I learned about graphic design from those who inherited his values and built their own practices around the logics of extreme control, classical restraint, and rules-based “high design” with great rigor (and success). By association, I quickly came to believe in their beliefs, and took on a Vignellified way of doing design that I still find difficult to shake, with an unwavering reliance on Helvetica, grids, flush-left justification, and white space. Having never gone to school for graphic design, I didn’t know how to look beyond the “master’s principles” that were given to me, and I absorbed them uncritically.

In a 1991 interview with Vignelli and Ed Benguiat in the September/October issue of PRINT magazine, on the occasion of retrospectives for each of them at the School of Visual Arts, Philip B. Meggs introduced Vignelli by saying that “he probably did more than anyone else in what has been called the ‘Helveticazation’ of America, converting countless major corporations to Helvetica and grids.”20 Captivated by the self-proclaimed greatness of the cult of Vignelli as practiced by many design firms in NYC at the time, I was myself converted, easily mimicking his forms, and using them in my own client-based work well into the 2000s.

The title of Vignelli’s 1991 exhibition at SVA was “A Few Basic Typefaces,” showcasing the man’s career through the four typefaces that he’d used for the majority of his work: Bodoni, Century, Garamond, and Helvetica. On the poster for the event, Vignelli proclaimed that

in the new computer age the proliferation of typefaces and type manipulations represents a new level of visual pollution threatening our culture. Out of the thousands of typefaces, all we need are a few basic ones, and trash the rest.21

This declaration went on to become one of Vignelli’s most enduring statements, forever associated with his particular brand of Modernism, and the ways in which he shaped and influenced design in the US and Europe. Later, Vignelli expanded the dictum to include two more typefaces (Futura and Times New Roman), for a total of six, which he published in The Vignelli Canon in 2009.

Heteropatriarchy persists through the celebration of itself; it prioritizes the perpetuation of power through its own reproduction. Vignelli’s status as one of the most iconic designers of the 20th century was built upon his own perpetuation of the exclusive standards, beliefs, and principles of “high (white) culture” that he practiced throughout his career, and the celebration of those values in the typographic work of a few European and American men—namely Giambattista Bodoni (Bodoni), Linn Boyd Benton (Century), Claude Garamond (Garamond), Max Miedinger & Eduard Hoffmann (Helvetica), Stanley Morison (Times New Roman), and Paul Renner (Futura). When questioned about American pluralism, Vignelli said this:

The fact that we have pluralism is a terrific thing. It’s the nature of the country. It’s the nature of the cultural output. The fact, however, that this cultural output is not as high as it should be is another, completely different, matter. So I think that out of this plurality of people, the common efforts should continue for the improvement of quality at every level.22

I’m considering Vignelli’s characterization of the “plurality of people” in relation to the queer Black, brown, Asian, trans, femme, disabled, immigrant people gathered by Nat and others in their archive fonts. I can’t help but look at Vignelli’s call for the “improvement of cultural quality at every level” in relation to the white men who designed his legendary typefaces. And when thinking about moving away from control towards each other, I juxtapose Vignelli’s six typefaces with the 12 fonts of AQYOLL, and realize how I’ve always been searching for the queer counterforce to virtuous design; I’ve always been on a quest for queer typographies.

In prescribing cultural supremacy with a set of restrictions, we elevate ourselves into a false position of purity and universal authority, as Vignelli did in asserting that all other typefaces should be trashed, and in that same interview, declaring that the type foundry Emigre “is a factory of garbage” (later, famously, he collaborated with them).23 In publishing his beliefs in the form of a manifesto, he encouraged others to follow, and guaranteed his own canonization. Vignelli’s perpetuation of “superior quality” in the form of design perfection, control, and restriction is in direct opposition to the movement and energy of cruising across queer time and space. Holding on to something until we can reach each other means nothing in relation to Modernism’s legacy, because the end-user of “high design” is powerless, unable to translate or collaborate with the individual greatness of the patriarch’s work, which remains enshrined in the canon, pointing only towards itself and its own reproduction. In hero worship, the most appropriate form of reverence is mimicry, and the false perpetuation of the hero’s genius: “So long as I copy this surviving design, surely I am also copying its virtues.”24

The matrix of domination—capitalism, white supremacy, settler colonialism, and heteropatriarchy—demands virtuous design and hero worship because power is perpetuated under the falsehood of purity. Virtuous design is precise and controlled—it contains, restricts, dictates, segregates, and isolates with “superior standards”—which might look like an all-white group of honorees at the National Design Awards in one regime or like an executive order “Promoting Beautiful Federal Civic Architecture” in another. As an educator I’m searching for ways to resist the grip of virtuous design’s totalizing reality, and to share other ways of making the world, especially those ways that resist the reproduction of structural domination.

Designing across

“The here and now is a prison house. We must strive, in the face of the here and now's total­izing rendering of reality, to think and feel a then and there,” writes José Esteban Muñoz on the very first page of Cruising Utopia.25 Ernestine Eckstein, Gerardo Velézquez, Robert Ford, G.B. Jones, the Goddess Bunny, Martin Wong, Third World Gay Revolution, the Lesbian Alliance, Sarah Eaves, Donna Gottschalk, Joel Rinne, Earl Colvin, Marsha P. Johnson, and the other subjects named in these archive fonts—artists, designers, publishers, printers, dancers, filmmakers, zine makers, activists—resist alienation with queer acts that point elsewhere. Queer typographies set us up to collaborate in a web of mutuality that goes on and on. I’m coming along for this drive.

Queer typographies can’t be found from above, but rather across.

In cruising together towards unknown destinations, we encounter other legibilities, understandings, utterances, and languages—the mess of plurality over purity. This is what fuels my drive, my driving desire to get lost in the wayward voices, approaches, qualities, forms of expression, and ways of living that might be found in cruising queer spaces. This is where I might reach across the abyss towards a typographic encounter with a stranger, a new body in the reading room, which needs a kind of horizontal movement, a stretching, an opening out and across in our survival towards those significant others, seen and unseen, who are doing things differently. We produce and share the abundance of cruising in the annotated sex journal, in the toilet stall, in the rub-down letters on the club flyer, in the camera’s view, in the unexpected touch across the void, in the vulnerability of stepping out—in the circulation of love letters. Queer acts invite collaboration. Queer acts move us away from totalizing control towards each other. Queer acts are a freedom to move back and forth and across, and to persist across time and space with love, extraordinary care, and agreement, driving together towards something else.

Beatrice Warde, the American type scholar, writer, editor, and Monotype publicist, wrote that good type should be invisible, a window to be looked through, not at. “The book typographer has the job of erecting a window between the reader inside the room and that landscape which is the author’s words,” she delivered in her legendary address “Printing Should be Invisible,”1 making use of several metaphors to explain her concept of invisible typography. Warde’s canonical “crystal goblet” theory, familiar to anyone who has studied graphic design in the US, proposes that good typography must be neutral, like a clear glass for holding the red wine of the author’s content. Now, we look back and see that Warde presented us with an odorless, anonymous glass of liquid in a vacuum, totally neglecting the social, political, and material conditions of drinking (and of reading, writing, and designing). Consider what happens when we zoom out from Warde’s glass so that the entire scene comes into view. What else is on the table? Who’s serving the wine? Are we drinking in a restaurant or a house or at a state dinner? Is it morning or night? Who made the glass? Who’s drinking with us?

Multiple realities come to life.

Warde’s lonely crystal goblet doesn’t serve all, or anyone, really. Graphic design as a perfectly neutral backdrop, separated from social and political dimensions, is a dangerous falsehood. Declarations of graphic design’s neutrality like Warde’s are easily debunked, linked to colonialism and whiteness, as Jen Wang wrote in 2016:

Graphic design is no more neutral than any other product of society. More than that, as an arm of Western cultural development, it is implicitly a function of neocolonialism and all that it has engendered. When Paul Rand declared that design and social issues be kept separate, his statement implied that aesthetic judgements were akin to universal truths that form in a vacuum. Ignoring the social context that informs aesthetic choices, and the political role of art and culture, exemplifies a privilege of whiteness—a privilege that enables the white person as the voice of authority.2

Warde’s ode to neutrality makes use of another metaphor to convey the concept of clarity of transmission—the human voice. She writes in “The Crystal Goblet” that “type well used is invisible as type, just as the perfect talking voice is the unnoticed vehicle for the transmission of words, ideas”3 (emphasis mine). Here, Warde aligns perfection with invisibility—the unnoticed. That which is reduced, unheard, unseen. She conjures up the human voice again soon after, in the essay “On the Choice of Typefaces,” first published in The Monotype Recorder in 1933:

The legibility of a typeface has an exact parallel in the audibility of a human voice. . . . The smallest variation in serif-construction is enormous compared to the extent to which a disc of metal, in a telephone receiver, vibrates to electric shocks produced by one voice and another; yet we find it easy to deduce from one such set of vibrations that an old friend is asking us to ‘guess who this is’!4

This is yet another dimension that was considered, another axis for measuring legibility: the audible spectrum of addressability. Warde (and others) drew a line from silence (unnoticed, quiet tones, unheard) to loudness (amplified voice, signals, shouting). Again, I think about the conditions of conversation, addressivity, and listening, and the endless variables absent from Warde’s tableau—who’s conversing? What’s being transmitted—a secret? an agreement? a manifesto? Who else is speaking? Who goes unnoticed (reduced, neglected, removed) in the pursuit of design perfection?

Let’s reconsider Warde’s “clarity of transmission” and her impossible quest for transparency, for neutrality—which has gone on to influence generations of designers and design educators—through the dimensions of gender identity and queer visibility. Wayward techniques for survival under heteropatriarchy and capitalism disrupt the simple axes drawn out by Warde, making use of strategies like refusal (refusal to go unnoticed, refusal to use a name . . . to express an identity . . . to show a face . . . to reveal one’s agenda), variability (to shift, to switch, to mask, to change one’s volume, to kill off, to reveal), and confrontation (of material conditions, of lived realities, of messiness, of plurality). These strategies, among others, are needed for negotiating the constant turmoil of oppressive conditions under the matrix of domination, which seek to reduce. “The opaque is not the obscure, though it is possible for it to be so and be accepted as such. It is that which cannot be reduced, which is the most perennial guarantee of participation and confluence” (emphasis mine).5

In queer terms, we might consider this right to variability to be a logics of the permeable closet, with legibility taking on greater dimensions. The permeable closet encompasses both visibility and invisibility at the same time—silence and signal, transparency and opacity, knowledge and ignorance—rather than the fixed binary axes of Warde’s model. When we see transparency and opacity as integral to each other, like variable dialects or codes, a deepened fluency and range of language is unlocked. “There is not one but many silences,”6 like the names that aren’t spoken that reveal others heard in a different register, like the words and images that aren’t seen that might signal secret knowledges and networks inscribed in their absence. What kinds of design methodologies might allow for this spectrum of variable voices, these fluid possibilities in creative expression and survival?

I was in Porto recently to work with Nina Paim, the publisher of Queer Typographies. We were spread out in Nina’s studio on Rua António José da Silva, with manuscript drafts, chapter titles, piles of books, markers, and index cards all over the tables, on the floor, and on the walls. It was such a productive week and we were putting in full days, getting to know each other and shaping this book-to-be! At one point Nina pulled up next to me and I took her through thousands of photos on my computer, sharing images I’d taken of queer publications and ephemera at different archives during the last year. The pics were organized in folders with titles like Come!Unity Press, Kitchen Table, Gay Sunshine, Homeboy, Hippie Dick, Queer Nation, and ACT UP LA. And then we got to The Ladder, the monthly publication of the Daughters of Bilitis (DOB), the first lesbian civil and political rights organization in the US. The first issue of The Ladder was a mimeographed 20-page booklet that appeared in October 1956, and it’s commonly known as the oldest nationally distributed lesbian publication in the US. The first run was 175 copies.

Along with the photos of The Ladder that I’d taken at the ONE Archives in Los Angeles, we looked at other publications that started circulating in the 1940s and 50s, like ONE Magazine and Mattachine Review. These were some of the earliest periodicals of the homophile movement in the US (pre-Stonewall, before it was known as gay liberation or LGBTQIA+ civil rights), including Vice Versa, a lesser-known typed creation by Edythe D. Eyde. Eyde’s pen name was Lisa Ben, a pseudonymous anagram of “lesbian” that she used to publish from June 1947 through February 1948. Vice Versa is so early on the queer publishing timeline that it’s sometimes referred to as the first lesbian periodical in the US, although its circulation was limited; it was distributed locally for free, mostly as a way for Eyde to expand her social circle in Los Angeles (listen to her tell her story in her own words).7 She began by mailing out carbon copies that she typed herself on her office typewriter at RKO Radio Pictures, where she worked as a secretary, and she encouraged the “gay gals” who read it to pass it on to friends when they were finished, rather than discard it. In a regular feature titled “Watchama-Column,” which appeared on the last page of each issue, she imagined and proposed queer futures to her readers. In the September 1947 issue, she wrote:

Perhaps even Vice Versa might be the forerunner of better magazines dedicated to the third sex, which in some future time might take their rightful place on the newsstands beside other publications, to be avail openly and without restriction to those who wish to read them.

Those restrictions were real. Until 1958, the Comstock Act of 1873 prohibited the circulation of obscene material through the US Mail, so publications like Vice Versa and The Ladder were automatically banned from the mail. To distribute these publications they had to be “illegible,” that is, distributed secretly, by hand, or mailed in plain, unmarked envelopes in order to protect those who were creating, distributing, and reading these publications, who were at great risk personally, professionally, and legally. Eventually, Lisa Ben “stopped distributing copies (of Vice Versa) through the mail early in its run, concerned about the potential dangers of being caught sending a lesbian publication in the mail.”8 Shortly after ONE Magazine began publishing in 1953, it became the target of a harassment campaign by the US Post Office Department (the predecessor of the United States Postal Service) and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), which declared it lewd, lascivious, and filthy, and therefore un-mailable. One Institute, the publisher of ONE Magazine, challenged the decision and ONE, Inc. v. Olesen was eventually heard by the United States Supreme Court, which reversed a lower court ruling that the publication was obscene, upholding the publisher’s First Amendment protections and therefore allowing it to be mailed. This was a landmark decision and the first Supreme Court ruling to deal with homosexuality; it radically changed the landscape for print material, queer publishing, and the visibility of gay and lesbian life pre-Stonewall.

A post on the ONE Archives website states that “in all of the issues of Vice Versa, Lisa Ben herself is never identified by name, pen or otherwise. . . . The need for secrecy was a significant concern for Ben, for the protection of herself and all of the other writers who contributed to the magazine.”9 Even after she stopped publishing Vice Versa, Eyde continued to use the pseudonym, and later published her writing in The Ladder as Lisa Ben. Gay and lesbian editors, writers, and designers operated under the logics of the permeable closet, even after the ONE, Inc. v. Olesen decision. With enormous risk and fear of exposure, readers, writers, and editors of these “openly secret” publications debated the idea of assimilation in their pages, and shared strategies for negotiating visibility in their private and public lives, advocating for more conservative approaches and prioritizing compliance and safety. There was pressure to conform and appear “normal” in relation to heteronormative expectations, and to shape the perception that “we are just like everyone else.” Like Eyde, for safety reasons, many people wrote and edited these publications using initials, pseudonyms, or total anonymity; these were common tactics for protecting one’s identity. In the second issue of The Ladder, the editors addressed the issue of subscribers’ safety directly with a piece titled “Your Name Is Safe!”

Already, with only one issue of The Ladder published, we have run up against the fear that names on our mailing list may fall into the wrong hands, or that by indicating interest in this magazine a person will automatically be labeled a homosexual.10

Even Phyllis Lyon, one of the founders of The Ladder, edited the first couple of issues under the pseudonym Ann Ferguson. Later, in the fourth issue, Lyon decided to use her real name, and “came out” to readers in a dramatic message.

ANN FERGUSON IS DEAD!

I confess. I killed Ann Forguson. Premeditatedly and with malice aforethought. We ran an article in the November issue of THE LADDER entitled “Your Name Is Safe.” Ann Ferguson wrote that article. Her words were true, her conclusions logical and documented—yet she was not practising what she preached.

Somehow it didn’t seem right.

She spent some time considering the situation. Then came to a conclusion. At the December public discussion meeting of the Daughters of Bilitis we got up—Ann Ferguson and I—and did away with Ann. Now there is only Phyllis Lyon.

Seriously, my pseudonym was taken in the first place without much thought. Somehow, it seemed the thing to do. But all it did was create problems. If you’re going to write under a pseudonym then you should go by that name in personal contacts. But everybody connected with the Daughters of Bilitis already knew me as Phyllis and the attempts to call me Ann confused everyone, including me.

I’m sure that I am not placing myself in any jeopardy by using my own name—and I’m only simplifying matters and practising what I preach.11

This process of carefully negotiating visibility by manipulating one’s name and appearance was a constant, unforgiving reality, and the logic of the permeable closet extended to the look and feel of these publications as well. Looking at the evolution of the design of both The Ladder and ONE Magazine into the 1960s, the visual techniques common to both could be characterized as compliant—a straightforward, normalized use of graphic design, typography, imagery, and language, especially on the front and back covers, which carried the most potential for exposure as the periodicals circulated. The design language of these magazines was fairly conventional for the time, making use of modern, “universal” typography, especially in ONE Magazine, which launched in January 1953 with a cover headline that read: “TO BE ACCUSED, IS TO BE GUILTY.” ONE Magazine was professionally typeset from the very start, with the lowercase “one” logo and all-uppercase headlines in the first few issues set in respectable Futura, designed by Paul Renner in 1927 and marketed by Bauer in Germany and in the US as “the typeface of today and tomorrow.”

At the same time, this withholding of anything that might attract unwanted attention, or be read as wayward or irregular, controversial, or even just homosexual at all, was countered by carefully encoded signals that were meant to pass through the compliant silence, and permeate the seemingly opaque boundaries of the closet, to reach their intended audience. For every instance of perfectly set Futura, a quirky hand-drawn illustration or hand-lettered message would surprise with unexpected energy and difference.

For those who were “on the lookout,” these clues were like an unspoken agreement, a secret knowledge that skillfully communicated gay and lesbian knowability and belonging within a broader strategy of concealment, like the line “a mystic bond of brotherhood makes all men one” that appeared on the very first page of ONE, Volume 1, Number 1.

Physique magazines operated under the same kinds of dual-coded, open secret logics, legible as homosexual material for those in the know, but at the same time passing opaquely as art, health, or sports-related material for those who weren’t, or, more importantly, for those who needed to feign ignorance. These signals served as powerful bonds from publisher to reader to reader and back to publisher again—a survival network of knowledge, safety, and trust that formed around the circulation of these publications, which were skillfully designed both to conceal and to reveal. Looking back at them now, they show us how legibility at every level—from community to person to publication to page—was being navigated under the immense pressures of fear, ignorance, entrapment, and hatred, and how gay and lesbian self-consciousness gradually came into existence in isolation, with limited resources and great risk.

One such signal was an emblem that appeared on the back cover of each issue of The Ladder. It was the logo for the Daughters of Bilitis, a graphic triangle containing a stylized “d b” above the phrase “QUI VIVE,” meaning “to be alert, to be vigilant.” Qui vive was an old French expression originating in the protection of guarded boundaries, used by sentinels to address approaching strangers. The sentinel would call out “Qui vive?”—“[Long] lives who?”—with the correct reply being, “Long live the king!” It was a way to test allegiance and the correct response enabled safe passage through the protected barrier. It’s this message to be “on the lookout” that was used to address the readers of The Ladder in several registers, both as an invitation (“who’s here? who may pass?”) and a warning (“watch out!”). There may have been an embodied or sexual dimension implied as well, when considering the protection of personal physical boundaries and who might be invited closer or warned to stay away.

While the general design strategies for The Ladder and ONE Magazine and other publications of the time were reserved in comparison to what was coming in the 1970s, they weren’t dull visually, and they sometimes took great risks. By the end of its first year, ONE Magazine had started displaying the tagline “The Homosexual Magazine” on its cover, although The Ladder wouldn’t add the phrase “A Lesbian Review” to its covers until a change in leadership later on, when the new editor Barbara Gittings introduced a more politically urgent tone. In the 1960s, the publication started to break away from its tradition of abstracting the identities of the women they depicted in illustrations and photographs, and began to feature identifiable names and likenesses. The first was Ger van B., a woman who wrote to The Ladder from Indonesia in June 1964 to describe her isolation (“Isolation in Indonesia”), and who was then photographed for the November cover to accompany her writing in the issue; an appeal to donate lesbian-related books to be sent to Ger was also included. In 1966, The Ladder featured Ernestine Eckstein on its June cover, along with an 8-page interview detailing her work as a Black lesbian activist, known for being the only woman who participated in an early gay rights demonstration at the White House in October 1965. Eckstein was born Ernestine Delois Eppenger, but used the pseudonym Eckstein in her activism, as protection.

In Epistemology of the Closet, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick wrote that “‘closetedness’ itself is a performance initiated as such by the speech act of a silence—not a particular silence, but a silence that accrues particularity by fits and starts, in relation to the discourse that surrounds and differentially constitutes it.”12 Sedgwick proposed the closet as a fluid structure of variable knowledges, a space where it’s possible to speak in different registers of silence, to be both in and out simultaneously. In these early homophile publications, the ways in which design, imagery, editorial content, authorship, privacy, consent, and safety were negotiated was never a fixed or stable condition, but a constantly re-drawn map along fluctuating axes between transparency and opacity, silence and speaking, knowing and not-knowing. In the “open secret” logic of the permeable closet, concealment was never just pure silence or simple opacity but a flickering performance of changing identities, variable registers, and a switching of codes, languages, and behaviors in order to protect, conceal, reveal, and locate community. These were urgent, wayward skills for maintaining agency and control under the matrix of domination, and they were strikingly apparent in these early gay and lesbian publications.

Sedgwick invoked the French philosopher Michel Foucault in her concept of relational silence as a framework for the closet. I think it’s helpful to go back to study the full thought, where Foucault wrote about silence as a non-binary state, rather than a fixed condition. It gives us a lot to work with as a kind of logic of the closet when considering how voice and legibility might work in queer design:

Silence itself—the things one declines to say, or is forbidden to name, the discretion that is required between different speakers—is less the absolute limit of discourse, the other side from which it is separated by a strict boundary, than an element that functions alongside the things said, with them and in relation to them within over-all strategies. There is no binary division to be made between what one says and what one does not say; we must try to determine the different ways of not saying such things, how those who can and those who cannot speak of them are distributed, which type of discourse is authorized, or which form of discretion is required in either case. There is not one but many silences, and they are an integral part of the strategies that underlie and permeate discourses.13

It’s this forum of “not one but many silences . . . that underlie and permeate discourses” that carries us deeper into the timeline. We’re back in Porto, and while I’m taking Nina through these photographs of The Ladder and ONE Magazine, discussing legibility and the logics of closet, she suddenly mentions Beatrice Warde.

“Didn’t she also write with a pseudonym?”

Warde died in 1969, three months after the Stonewall riots. Her obituary read: “Mrs Beatrice Warde, First Lady of Typography.”14 She was also referred to as “Queen of Type,” “High Priestess of the Classical Typographical Renaissance,” the “Leading Lady of Print,” and “Your Royal Uniqueness.”15 These femme-coded titles accumulated by Warde are worth examining, if not simply to understand her reputation as the most-cited typographic scholar in the western graphic design canon, but also to trace how gender itself was used (by her and others) to shape her reputation.

At the start of her career, Warde presented herself more ambiguously. Early on, in a letter to her mother, she wrote,

I have still to choose my pseudonym under which my Life Work will be done. Reputation made, etc… It won’t be a woman’s name anyway.16

Warde began writing as “Paul Beaujon” in 1926.

Nobody at that time had any idea that a woman could possibly know anything about printing, typography and such like. So the name Paul Beaujon was invented to conceal the personality of the actual writer.17

It was a name change and a play of gender that she performed in order to gain legitimacy in the British printing industry—to publish her scholarly research, and eventually to be hired by Monotype in 1927 as the editor of The Monotype Recorder (first as Beaujon, and then as Warde). Later, she was promoted to publicity manager at Monotype, a position she retained until 1960. Loraine Furter notes the remarkable parallels between Warde’s famous theory of “invisible type” and the cross-dressing disguise she was compelled to take on in order to disappear:

It is the position imposed on women in the whole history of typography. If she asks the designer to be invisible, one can’t help but notice the parallels to her early career, where she could only succeed by hiding her identity. Did Beatrice Ward ever really leave Paul Beaujon behind?18

Indeed, it wasn’t just the name. Warde created a persona for Paul Beaujon that included a visual appearance and a history. “Before presenting Beaujon to the printing industry, Warde tried out this identity with an article in an architecture journal, a sufficiently separate environment so that should she be uncomfortable with Beaujon’s presentation, she would be ‘out of sight’ of the printing industry.”19 Remarkably, this first test appearance of Paul Beaujon in Modern Building Construction included a photograph of Warde herself, depicting her as a New Woman in an image that appeared below her pseudonym,

ambiguously gendered or a mixture of feminine and masculine . . . Her gender-bending constituted a profound declaration of this figure’s transgressive nature and inherent modernity.20

Warde never combined the New Woman visual with the Paul Beaujon name again, beyond this initial test, at least not publicly, but the Beaujon character did evolve—into a mature French grandfather with a beard:

No other images of Beaujon have been found and it is likely that Warde perceived her modern image unsuited to the traditional nature of the industry. This decision may have led to the development of Beaujon’s backstory, supporting a masculine presentation. Created to build credibility, Warde developed a background for Beaujon, who was said to be a mature Frenchman, have a ‘long grey beard, four grandchildren, a great interest in antique furniture and a rather vague address in Montparnasse.’21

Warde shaped, tested, and adjusted her persona, likeness, and voice in order to advance through the patriarchal conditions of the British printing industry. Was this a “clarity of transmission” or a survival strategy? Warde’s ideas about legibility are complicated when set against the backdrop of her own actions and the ways in which she aligned her success along heteropatriarchy’s terms. Camille Circlude suggests that “it’s a safe bet that Beatrice Warde would also have dismissed today’s queer, camp, kitsch, and post-binary typographic aesthetics with a wave of the hand.”22

There’s much more to be discovered about Warde’s crafting of Paul Beaujon in Jessica Glaser’s recent research, which concludes that Warde’s expertise in public relations, and the promotion of her writing through her performance of gender and the adoption of multiple identities—rather than what she wrote—is how she established her position and status as the First Lady of Typography in a male-dominated industry.

Gender was not her only tactic; Warde also constructed different personas to create her success, whether as an aged French printing historian, as a charismatic American expatriate in London, an artist’s muse and model, or through the multiple characters—consciously clothed and carefully curated— that she assumed for her public engagements. Through her experience in public relations, Warde knew how to construct and convey her multiple identities to her audiences using all available media, including writing, publishing, photography—and other forms of image-making—public speaking, and radio broadcasting, leading her to declare ‘I am a communicator.’23

I really want to consider this revelation about Warde’s legacy in relation to Monotype, her employer of 30 years, and the company’s growing legacy since, as the behemoth of the type industry. Monotype was valued at $825 million at the time of its acquisition by HGGC, a private equity firm, in 2019. Today, the company releases sophisticated marketing materials that shape the global market for thousands of type designers and typographers, with tools and acquisition strategies that attempt to reduce the diversity of the field into a single vision for profit. Their 2025 Monotype Trend Report is fascinating to consider against the trajectory of Warde’s public relations experiments of the 20st century; it displays the evolution of a perverse logics of success that perfectly mirrors the values of neoliberalism today: extraction, exploitation, and expansion, packaged in feel-good benevolence. There’s much more to be said about this, perhaps in a different post.

Eventually, Warde came out and continued to write as “Beatrice Warde” for the rest of her career, carefully building her persona and branding her expertise with the femme-coded distinction that has since defined her. And like Phyllis Lyon’s killing of Ann Ferguson within the pages of The Ladder, Warde later made a public acknowledgement of Beaujon (without totally killing him off). In the introduction to her 1955 book of essays, The Crystal Goblet: Sixteen Essays on Typography, she wrote that there was a “grieving over the disappearance from title-pages of the name of Paul Beaujon,” and that he hadn’t “committed suicide” in order to “free B.W.” to do her work at Monotype, but that he would return years later to continue to his research at the British Museum. She was leaving her options open.

I struggle to consider Warde’s dictum of “printing should be invisible”—or any other idealization or universalization of design—without first acknowledging the variable personas, languages, codes, and modes of communication used by LGBTQIA+, disabled, immigrant, people of color, and others who are systematically criminalized and targeted under domination. For those who are encouraged to go unnoticed or otherwise shaped, neglected, or erased within the surveillant structures of heteropatriarchy, neutrality is never an option. This changes the terms of design for all of us. The techniques necessary for operating—designing, editing, authoring, publishing, promoting, living—under oppression might include refusal, variability, confrontation, fluidity, modulation, simultaneity, and encoding; they enable us to question the given terms of visibility and to re-think safety and survival; to know that invisibility, silence, secrecy, and transparency are never just one-sided limits; and that the closet is never fully sealed. Thinking through the criss-crossing multi-dimensional realities of “transmission of thought” and “spreading the word” in early queer publishing, more often than not, the axes of Warde’s invisibility/opacity and silence/signal models fold up into each other and disintegrate, giving way to a real plurality of legibilities that’s necessary for survival. Within some forms of visibility, a kind of clarity would emerge from ambiguity. Within some registers of silence, a kind of knowing would emerge from not-knowing. Later on, in the fierce explosion of queer and trans publishing that was to come in the 1970s and 80s, these types of hybrid tactics really flourished, and newer, less familiar, and more joyful approaches to design, language, and typography stretched legibility into even more varied dimensions.

Paris Is Burning (1990), the notorious documentary by Jennie Livingston centered on ballroom culture in New York City in the mid- to late 1980s, is organized into 28 “chapters.” Each one is framed by a typographic moment—title cards containing individual words, names, or short phrases, plus one scrolling list. The film opens with the first of these titles, establishing the scene with “a statement of time and place:” NEW YORK 1987.1 The white letterforms are set in all-caps, in the early 20th century American typeface Franklin Gothic Heavy, centered on a black background. The words appear on the screen for about two seconds, before cutting to the NYC skyline and establishing shots of city street life. About a minute into the film, a voice begins the narration, talking about growing up as a gay Black man, while the camera takes us to Harlem. At a minute and a half, we get to the actual title of the film—Paris Is Burning (set in a different style from all of the other titles in the film: italicized, serif, red)—as Pepper LaBeija, mother of the House of LaBeija, arrives at the Imperial Elks Lodge, walking onto the floor for the first of the film’s many ballroom scenes.

After that, 27 more typographic moments appear throughout the 76-minute film, each title card announcing a keyword (MOPPING, MOTHER, BALL, VOGUING), a competition category (EXECUTIVE REALNESS, TOWN AND COUNTRY, BUTCH QUEEN FIRST TIME IN DRAGS AT A BALL), or a name (VENUS XTRAVAGANZA, OCTAVIA SAINT LAURENT, DORIAN COREY). Each card appears on the screen in the same typographic style. Even though the entire film is structured around these distinct moments of written language, the narrative flows in and around them from one section to the next. The words interrupt the filmed story in order to label what we’re seeing and hearing, sometimes even mid-sentence. They operate less like chapter titles and more like visual cues that alert the viewer to what’s important—here’s what’s being said or here’s who’s speaking—supporting the film in the same way a heading or caption or footnote might be used in a book. They tell us to take note. They occur all the way until the very end of the film, with the last one, PIG LATIN, placed in the middle of a 14-second filmed clip that itself appears in the middle of the closing credits.

These titles function like on-screen annotations and have become one of the visual signatures of Paris Is Burning. Even though Livingston, the director of the film, is never seen on screen, these title cards speak in her voice; that is, they speak in a voice of white, all-seeing authority to interpret, translate, and explain what’s been filmed for the benefit of a majority white audience. Interviewing Livingston in 2020, a journalist told her that “I think the reason this movie speaks across generations and cultures is you break it down in such an elementary fashion: by vocabulary words.”

These vocabulary words are the formal markers of the narrative, inscribed onto the screen by the director—imposed over the action and speech of the film’s subjects, who are almost all queer, trans, and gender-nonconforming people of color. The collection of spelled-out words serves as an interpretive aid for a very wide, mainstream audience (the film was originally distributed by Miramax, a Hollywood production and distribution company with enormous reach). The title cards “break it down” and “spell it all out,” creating multiple ways to read the film, primarily as a text to be read—a literal list of words—but more significantly as a device that establishes a very specific imperial outsider looking in logic in relation to its Black and Latinx subjects. Certain keywords and names are named, while others—like the ballroom category “BUTCH WOMEN”—were cut, in effect creating a “controlled vocabulary” of terms that help to construct the reality of the film through this particular director’s lens.2 That our “read” of the film has been shaped by Livingston’s outsider whiteness is a sharp critique that was famously made by bell hooks in “Is Paris Burning?” (1992):

“Jennie Livingston approaches her subject matter as an outsider looking in. Since her presence as white woman/lesbian filmmaker is ‘absent’ from Paris Is Burning, it is easy for viewers to imagine that they are watching an ethnographic film documenting the life of black gay ‘natives’ and not recognize that they are watching a work shaped and formed from a perspective and standpoint specific to Livingston. By cinematically masking this reality (we hear her ask questions but never see her) Livingston does not oppose the way hegemonic whiteness ‘represents’ blackness, but rather assumes an imperial overseeing position that is in no way progressive or counterhegemonic.”

Franklin Gothic was designed in 1902 by Morris Fuller Benton, who also designed News Gothic (1908) and Century Schoolbook (1919); these and other Benton typefaces (as well as those designed by his father, Linn Boyd Benton) are part of the American tradition of large, complete families of type in multiple widths and weights that endure because of their ease of use, legibility, and accessibility. In deciding to structure the film with these uniformly styled, easy-to-read “flash cards” set in Franklin Gothic Heavy all-caps, the director frames the colonizing gaze with written language that performs an “elementary,” school-like function to support the outsider looking in imperial view. The controlled vocabulary interrupts the action to help with the read of the film and make it more legible; the film’s names and terms are literally “spelled out” in black-and-white. The stark appearance of the cards was designed to be didactic, unambiguous, explanatory, a form of instruction. They clearly frame, caption, and label the view.

Critically reading Paris Is Burning alongside hooks’ “Is Paris Burning?” (as well as Judith Butler’s “Gender Is Burning” (1993)) is a necessity if we want to analyze the film and understand its cultural significance. Additionally, another way to read the film is to examine it as an archival artifact, as the footage in Paris Is Burning records a precarious time and place in queer history that otherwise wasn’t well documented. In this sense, the film is precious. I’ve been doing a “close read” of the historical material that appears on screen in order to find other ways of being, reading, and seeing that might be revealed in particular passages and clips. In this close reading, the role of the title cards became more apparent to me, as did the concept of “reading” itself and the care involved in providing a good “read.”

Indeed, one of the Paris Is Burning title cards is for the word READING. It appears in the latter half of the film, in-between SHADE and VOGUING. READING names a form of spontaneously spoken insult that’s been popular in queer and trans culture for decades, especially in the Black and Latinx drag and ballroom spaces depicted in the film (and later popularized in RuPaul’s Drag Race as the “Reading Challenge”). What exactly “reading” means in the context of Paris Is Burning is brilliantly explained in a sequence featuring Dorian Corey, a trans woman performer who plays a kind of cultural critic and queer historian role as she’s interviewed throughout the film, intercut with shots of Venus Xtravaganza and others performing “reading”:

[Corey, in dressing room] “Shade comes from reading. Reading came first. Reading is the real art form of insult.

[Venus Xtravaganza, outside] “Now you want to talk about reading? Let’s talk about reading.”

[Title card] READING

[Venus reading Pedro . . . ]

[Corey] “You get in a smart crack, and everyone laughs, and kikis, because you found a flaw and exaggerated it, then you’ve got a good read going. . . If it’s happening between the gay world and the straight world, it’s not really a read, it’s more of an insult, a vicious slur fight. But it’s how they develop a sense of how to read. They may call you a faggot or a drag queen, you’ll find something to call them. But then when you are all of the same thing, then you have to go to the fine point, in other words, I’m a Black queen and you’re a Black queen then we can’t call each other Black queens, that’s not a read, that’s just a fact. So then we talk about your ridiculous shape, your saggy face, your tacky clothes. Then reading became a developed form where it became shade. Shade is I don’t tell you you’re ugly, but I don’t have to tell you, because you know you’re ugly. And that’s shade.”

Just as Corey finishes with this extended definition of reading and shade, the film cuts to a ballroom competition and we see two and then three performers walking the floor and dancing. A new voice begins describing VOGUING:

“Voguing is the same thing as taking two knives and cutting each other up but through a dance form.”

[Title card] VOGUING

It’s an incredible cinematic sequence where the narration, filmed footage, and title cards are cut together to trace a powerful connection from SHADE to READING (“shade comes from reading”), then back to SHADE (“and that’s shade”), and then to VOGUING, which is described as a kind of physical manifestation of reading and shade (“cutting each other up”) on the ballroom floor. Here, I started to see how Paris Is Burning, while centered on ballroom culture, is also about the deeper kinds of nurturing and care that were necessary for survival in these spaces. The rituals portrayed in the film, even those characterized by competition and insult, like casting shade and reading, were part of what it meant to survive in these Black and Latinx queer, trans, and gender-nonconforming spaces in New York City in the 1980s. How reading and other forms of interpersonal dialogue, conversation, and communication were portrayed in the historical footage shows how orality and spoken language in general served as relational glue in maintaining those survival networks on the street and in the ballroom. This was especially the case then, as HIV/AIDS, poverty, racism, transphobia, and homophobia were at crisis levels, routinely and systematically silencing queer and trans life. These survival networks take different forms, but are always at work under the matrix of domination.

The notion of mutuality and care is right there in the origins of reading and shade, which is sketched out and expanded upon by C. Namwali Serpell in a remarkable text, “Notes on Shade” (Post45, Issue 5: Formalism Unbound, Part 2, 01.15.21). Early on in the piece, Serpell traces a Black history of shade and pins its origins to the concept of signifying from Henry Louis Gates, Jr.:

“3. The black roots of shade lie in signifying, crowned by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. as ‘the black trope of tropes, the figure for black rhetorical figures.’ This may seem a highly textual endeavor but it is in fact a live, oral practice in the sources Gates quotes, which define it as: ‘a highly motivated rhetorical act, aimed at figurative, ritual insult’; ‘making fun of another’s appearance, relatives, or situation’; and ‘communicating (often an obscene or ridiculing message) by indirection.’"

Serpell goes on, by the end of their notes, to portray the “figurative, ritual insult” of shade and reading as an act of care, a sharp, relational disclosure (and exposure) that reveals a tender kind of close attention:

“57. The tenderness of shade is not about sweetness but about mutual vulnerability. You’re made tender; you’ve been tendered a ‘cutting,’ ‘scathing,’ ‘excoriating’ read — a sharp-edged disclosure. Yet, you’re also being tended to by being closely attended to. When you snatch someone’s wig, you expose them, you humble them, you peel back the surfaces you know they have taken care to layer, precisely because you yourself engage in the same glamorous self-protection.”

This kind of mutual vulnerability recorded by Livingston in Paris Is Burning and deepened by Serpell in their study of shade is illuminating, and points to the shared, oral commonality that’s cultivated (and necessary) in so many kinds of queer and trans spaces, especially during crisis. Tenderness and “close attending” certainly characterize other queer rituals too, including textual ones, like queer acts of reading and writing and the powerful idea of “spreading the word” in community via survival networks. I think of queer and trans publishing during this same time in the late 1980s and early 1990s, and the kinds of care shown for the reader in the writing, design, and distribution of these DIY publications—zines, newsletters, club fliers, stickers, buttons—which had very specific audiences (typically other queer, trans, and gender-nonconforming folks with shared interests, communities, or values) and purposes (to inform, to connect, to organize). For example, “Idle Sheet” was a community newsletter printed and distributed in 1986–88 right there in the ballroom scene, created by Marcel Christian Princess LaBeija, featuring poetry, gossip, illustrations, and information for folks to peruse while waiting around, “idling” time before or after the ballroom events. Shots of Marcel’s Idle Sheets appear in the Paris Is Burning extended outtakes released by Criterion in 2019.

Compare these DIY materials with the clarity of the title cards in Paris Is Burning. In the distribution of these urgent artifacts, knowledge was communicated across the network through the messaging and design of the printed materials themselves, which frequently involved a non-conventional read, a hybrid legibility that would be recognized by some, but not all. The creators of these zines, fliers, and newsletters seemed to be crafting a different kind of reading experience, one that shaped language into an intimate, slower, and more considered agreement between the authors and the very specific readers who would recognize and appreciate the care involved in being addressed and “closely attended to.” In queer and trans zine publishing of the 1980s and 90s, the agreements were specifically between those involved in producing the zines and those reading them, who were usually of the same extended community or sometimes even the same people. Safety and trust were paramount in the shared experience of tender writing, making, circulating, and reading. This was way before there was a popular “market” for DIY zines like we see today in zine fests and art book fairs; they were less legible then, to those outside of the survival networks in which they circulated. The crafting of legibility to create a safe space for exposure and disclosure in the form of a printed publication strengthened those survival networks by enabling a shared commonality through the careful circulation of queer knowledge contained within them.

Queer publishing is possible because of the agreements that are already there between queer kin, materialized in the design of the thing itself—the understanding described by Corey as when you are all of the same thing. It’s not necessarily a take-down, as we hear it in Paris Is Burning, but it can be an “undoing” of legibility based on a fundamental agreement between everyone involved. The dynamic black-and-white typography and hand-lettering of these zines—cut up, overlaid, textured language—is a part of the sharing in “survival by sharing,” signaling difference and non-conformity to others in order to build trust. These are queer typographies because the language emerges from a space of mutual vulnerability, closely attending, making, writing, and reading along known survival networks; in the examples shown here, the agreements form around the writing, design, circulation, and reading of printed pages in community.

Back to the title cards in Paris Is Burning. Are they queer typography? At first, I thought so, mainly because of the iconic status of the film in queer history, and because the director is lesbian. The typography was obviously an important factor in the design of the film and has become a part of its identity as an LGBTQIA+ work of art—so maybe. But also, in reading the film more closely, I’ve come to see how the design of these “flash cards” helped to frame and position the Black and Latinx queer, trans, and gender-nonconforming subjects of the film as being outside of the film’s agreements. The agreements are revealed instead to be between the director, the producers, and the mainstream audience. The flash cards don’t construct a queer dialogue “in community;” rather, as typographic dividers, they work to label, construct, and instruct, and extend a legible “read” of the film to the audience as it circulates outside the space of the Harlem ballroom, outside queer and trans spaces, to be “read” in the white, patriarchal worlds of Harvey Weinstein, Miramax, and the Hollywood industry. The typographic voice spoken by these title cards was inscribed onto the screen for the audience’s benefit, giving the spectator access and positioning them as an outsider looking into another world—”not of the same thing”—like the absent director. The clear typographic voice of Paris Is Burning exposes the spectator’s inability to properly read the time and space of ballroom culture. In other words, the typography does exactly what it was designed to do—it labels and makes legible the most vulnerable voices and stories of the film for the purpose of entertainment.

This point about where the agreements are in “reading” Paris Is Burning was further deepened when I learned that the 13 cast members were offered minimal compensation for their participation in the project. Together, they divided and shared $55,000, offered by the producers only after they sold the film to Miramax for $275,000. The film went on to gross $4 million. Left out of the more official agreements—the crafting of formal contracts and negotiations with industry executives—the subjects of the film were unable to participate in shaping, structuring, or circulating their own voices, let alone the film’s profits or success.

“. . . all but two of the movie’s surviving principals—Willi Ninja and Dorian Corey—hired lawyers to try to cash in on the film’s success. The largest claim came from Paris DuPree, who sought $40 million for unauthorized and fraudulent use of her services. Though she is never named on camera and appears for less than three of the movie’s 76 minutes, her 1986 ball, called Paris Is Burning, provided the title for the film and is extensively featured in it. But like all of the others, she had signed a release, and her lawyer dropped the matter.” (Paris Has Burned, The New York Times, April 18, 1993)

Almost all of the cast members have since died, including Venus Xtravaganza, who was murdered before Paris Is Burning was even completed, announced at the end of the film in a blunt addendum. Her murder has never been solved.

Paris Is Burning continues to inspire newer generations of young people who desperately want to connect with queer ancestry. Even with its deeply complicated 35-year history, the film endures as a precious queer artifact, allowing us to witness and listen to these voices again and again. It provides profound evidence of queer, trans, and gender-nonconforming life, boldly and quite literally spelling out the names of Black and Latinx legends on the screen, like typographic pride flags that fly through time and space. The typography of Paris Is Burning is a crucial part of the film’s power, helping to keep those names alive and visible, even if it’s clear that the film was never intended to be a survival network for those who are named, spoken, and labeled in the film.

I’ve learned so much from the design of this film. “Spelling it all out”—proudly naming names to be read through time and space—is a powerful way to endure, pay tribute, and inscribe knowledge and life in the things we make. But creating objects to be read—by whom?—requires a deep understanding of the agreements that give power to our urgent artifacts and how they are received and circulated into the future, and how they impact others. Who is being attended to? Who and what are being made legible? At what cost?

“Spelling it all out” is crucial right now, as we see our own US federal government working to undo the grammar of queer, trans, and gender-nonconforming life on a daily basis. This is happening in all kinds of ways, including the cruel manipulation of language that erases decades of progress and visibility in an instant, as scripts are deployed to crawl across .gov websites, tagging and deleting banned vocabulary words and removing letters from acronyms. As I’m writing this (2/20/25), I’ve learned that the National Park Service, under the direction of the Trump administration, has removed the webpage for Marsha P. Johnson from the official website of the Stonewall National Monument. In its place, this message is displayed: “Page In Progress. This page is currently being worked on. Please check back later.” I assume it will either return with words like “transgender” scrubbed out, or just not return at all.

This comes just one week after the word “transgender” and the letters “T” and “Q” were removed from “LGBTQ” on the website for the Stonewall monument. At the same time, the US State Department announced that it will no longer offer the gender marker “X” as an option on passports for non-binary, intersex, or gender-nonconforming citizens. Evidence of queer, trans, and gender-nonconforming life is being erased from many other federal websites, archives, databases, documents, and policies, in real time. These manipulations occur without agreement—rather, they operate so painfully because of the cruel conditions of disagreement, denial, and erasure that they create. No one should ever be left out of how they choose to be named (or unnamed), spoken about (or silenced), or labeled (or not). No one should ever be left out of the crafting, creation, and circulation of their own stories, or deciding how to be “read,” or not. Agreements are currently under attack. Targeting the most vulnerable through the erasure of history and language is a predictable part of fascism’s playbook; removing the most vulnerable from the timeline makes it easier for fascists to deny that they ever existed, and then to deny future existence. I’m so scared for our ancestors, and for all queer kin right now, especially queer, trans, and gender-nonconforming people of color. As we prepare to become future ancestors, we bring with us and speak to future kin with the precious artifacts that we collect, make, publish, and preserve, as evidence of life lived—a 35-year-old film, a monument, a bio, a link, a photograph, a flag, a name. Our data must be preserved; the names named, the words spelled out. “Fascists, authoritarians, dictators of all stripes destroy archives— books, museums, databases, &c—because those things provide windows onto a plurality of other ways we might organize the world. And so preserving, defending, and spreading that knowledge harms those regimes.”3

As this governmental crisis continues to rage, I wanted to share these words from my friend Sal Randolph, whose wisdom has always helped me, now and in the past. Sal writes that

“Care is a form of attention that is necessarily steady and responsive. Care brings your focus to a sphere of direct responsibility. Caring for something—tending a garden, raising a child, writing a book—requires us to hold it in mind. It cultivates a particular form of creativity, of trial and attempt and recovery from failure.”

I needed this reminder right now, that caring for myself, my work, and those around me is crucial in this particular moment of shock and disorientation.

As some of you may know, I’m working on a book about queer typographies these days, and I’ve been using this online space to test out some ideas. I’m out at a writing residency right now at Salmon Creek Farm, and I’ve had some time and space to dig down into a particular history that intrigues me: the rainbow flag. I’ve written some words about it, and even though this piece is a bit longer, I still think of it as a sketch. I wanted to share it with you now. It touches on some things that have been happening in the news recently, but also connects to the larger arcs and trajectories of liberation through queer time and space. Let me know what you think.

In solidarity,

Paul

A flag marks the spot, claims a territory. Flagging could be this: flying or waving a flag to send a signal. Some time ago, raising a piece of fabric was the most direct way to communicate across a landscape. It’s a visual statement addressing those who approach, and it says: this is the place. These people are here. This is what we stand for, and this is our message to you as you approach. A flag can signal that you’ve arrived (or that you should leave), or that you’re about to cross a boundary. A welcome, a warning.

Raising a flag immediately creates a landscape: as markers, flags make space legible. As symbolic icons, flags condense complex stories into singular images that make whole cultures and politics visible. They accumulate multiple histories, containing vast worlds.

In its physical manifestation, a flag is positioned in relation to human sight: elevated. Raise it up on a pole, fly it above a building, or hang it from a facade, like a banner. Of course we can do other things with flags too, like wrap a coffin, line a street, paint it on a plane, or burn it. In each case it works to mark a spot, or a thing, or an action, with a specific set of values that comes along with the world that it signifies.

I’m thinking about the flag as a legible image—a logo—but in the classic Greek definition of logo as “word, expression, utterance.” The logic of a flag is this: it’s a world-word that carries textual meaning in its visual legibility. Is a flag a text? Certainly it’s a glyph, a pictograph, a kind of typography. A legible image that signifies a world, working like a word or a phrase to contain meaning.

A flag is typically fixed in place, but like a poster, it can circulate too—on the body, in physical space, on digital networks. Flags can be stickers, emoji, avatars, a flash of color. The Palestinian flag emoji 🇵🇸 is used on social media to signal “Free Palestine,” as is the watermelon emoji 🍉, to show support for liberation without using the actual flag—a color-coded play on legibility for those who recognize the colors red, green, black, and white. This kind of flagging can happen on the body as well, using a flag in a coded way to signal a particular message to a select community. Flagging might involve wearing certain articles of clothing or accessories in specific colors and positioning them in different ways to send coded messages; flags make legible, enabling an accurate “read” for those in the know. In 1890s London, it’s said that Oscar Wilde would sometimes encourage friends to wear a green carnation, and when asked what it meant, replied:

“Nothing whatsoever, but that is just what nobody will guess.”

The story of Wilde’s green carnation and how it was to be read is compelling, even if unsubstantiated. Later in the 1970s, gay people would clip keys to belt loops or tuck them into pockets on a chain to indicate sexual preference, in a kind of binary code system: if worn on the left, the keys would signify “top,” or “bottom” if worn on the right. I remember something similar about single earrings worn by men. In a practice actually known as flagging (or the “hanky code”), a bandana in a specific color could be worn on the body, wrapped around the arm or tucked into a back pocket on the right or left, signifying different sexual positions, preferences, or kinks, when the code was known. Flagging as personal communication can be a powerful way to create a landscape of meaning at the scale of the individual body, signaling preferences, desires, or solidarity. The artist Hal Fischer documented some of these practices and more in Gay Semiotics (1977). Simple acts of typing or displays of world-words on the body can communicate across survival networks to spread the word, increase visibility, and code the read, especially when it’s working against the established order of things.

World-words are challenging to use when the subjects themselves are being surveilled, read, and regulated under the matrix of domination, especially when the signifier identifies vulnerable at-risk communities who aren’t organized around geography or nation states. What are the borders and boundaries of an affinity flag, like the LGBTQ+ rainbow flag or the transgender flag or the Black Lives Matter flag? I’m thinking about the US State Department’s order on January 20, 2025 that a “one flag policy” would be implemented for US government buildings and embassies globally. In declaring the US flag as the only allowable flag, the policy essentially bans all identity and affinity flags that may have flown over US buildings in the past. The policy eliminates complexity by imposing a uniform geo-political read onto the landscape, as stated in the order:

“The flag of the United States of America united all Americans under the universal principles of justice, liberty, and democracy. These values, which are the bedrock of our great country, are shared by all American citizens, past and present.”

The policy enforces a “country first” agenda by regulating and prioritizing nation-state domination and empire over all else. A policy like this one banishes important symbols of identity and community from the most visible, symbolic, and powerful places, flattening the landscape and further marginalizing those who have been struggling for rights and liberation for centuries, by disassociating them from these seats of power and denying them visibility in the commons.

In spite of the most recent ban, the LGBTQ+ rainbow flag continues to evolve, change, and mutate across time and space. Today, the 6-color striped rainbow flag is ubiquitous, but not fixed—there are endless variations and mutations as additional stripes, emblems, and symbols have been added, modified, and merged through the years. And an entire library of newer flags continues to grow, representing the wide plurality of queer subgroups and communities. Collectively, all of these different rainbow flags are a vast, entangled system of world-words that carry multiple histories and no single fixed state or read; they mutate and transform.

There are various stories about the origins of the core 6-color rainbow flag, but no definitive narrative about how it came to be. Most accounts credit the flag’s designer as Gilbert Baker (1951–2017). At the Museum of Modern Art in New York, which added “Rainbow Flag” to its collection in 2015, Baker is listed as the sole artist, and fabrication is attributed to Lynn Segerblom and James McNamara. But in this elaborate oral history by the LGBTQ History Project, Segerblom (who in the 1970s was an “Angels of Light” dancer and went by Faerie Argyle Rainbow) and others (August Bernadicou, Adrian Brooks, Bethany the Princess of Argyle, Dan Nicoletta, John Serrian, Lee Mentley, and Paul Langlotz; McNamara died in 1999) tell a much more detailed and complicated story about its creation. They describe the making of the flag as a communal effort for the June 1978 San Francisco Gay and Lesbian Freedom Day Parade, organized by a Pride Foundation committee with San Francisco Supervisor Harvey Milk, including a decorating sub-committee (co-chaired by Segerblom and Baker) that presented the idea of rainbow flags. In this oral history, they credit Segerblom, not Baker, as the originator:

“While deliberating the decorations for that year, Lynn said she suggested her favorite symbol, the rainbow, to brighten up the gray San Francisco Civic Center where the Pride celebrations would culminate. . . . She came to 330 Grove one day with some friends, Jonathan and Robert, and said that she thought we should make rainbow flags for Gay Day to brighten up City Hall and Civic Center because it's all gray and cold in June in San Francisco.” (Bernadicou and Mentley)

It should also be noted that the discriminatory “California Proposition 6: Ban on Lesbian and Gay Teachers Initiative” was coming up for vote on the state ballot just a few months later, which may have given a sense of urgency and a need for collective visibility, unity, and coordination to that particular Gay Freedom Day. According to the group, Segerblom and the committee proposed 18 smaller flags to line the reflecting pool at the San Francisco Civic Center, and two larger 30’ x 60’ flags at the Market Street end of the pool. There was a team of “well over 30 people” who hand-dyed the fabric on the roof of 330 Grove and assembled and sewed the flags collectively. And in their account, they crucially describe how Gilbert Baker went on to wrongly take sole credit for the flag as it became a cultural icon, claiming that he wrote Segerblom and others, as well as the overall collective effort, out of the story.

Baker died in 2017, leaving his official version of the flag’s creation in his memoir Rainbow Warrior (2019), which The Gilbert Baker Foundation excerpts in a section on their website titled “Rainbow Flag: Origin Story.” This account makes no mention of Segerblom, McNamara, Freedom Day, or the large communal effort to make the flags for the event. Instead, the Foundation presents the idea of the rainbow flag as solely Baker’s, having been revealed to him in a series of revelatory moments after a breakup and while tripping on LSD:

“This was our new revolution: a tribal, individualistic, and collective vision. It deserved a new symbol . . . we rode the mirrored ball on glittering LSD and love power. Dance fused us, magical and cleansing. We were all in a swirl of color and light. It was like a rainbow. A rainbow. That’s the moment when I knew exactly what kind of flag I would make.”

Baker characterizes the new revolution’s vision as being tribal, individualistic, and collective all at once. He repeats these again in that same account:

“After the orgy of bunting and hoopla surrounding the Bicentennial, I thought of flags in a new light. I discovered the depth of their power, their transcendent, transformational quality. I thought of the emotional connection they hold. I thought how most flags represented a place. They were primarily nationalistic, territorial, iconic propaganda—all things we questioned in the ’70s. Gay people were tribal, individualistic, a global collective that was expressing itself in art and politics. We needed a flag to fly everywhere.”

These deeper, intentional messages may or may not have actually informed the rainbow flag’s creation, but they matter today; they’re a part of the flag’s accumulative legacy and meaning and continue to inform its evolution as a design artifact that travels through queer time and space. Rainbow flags weren’t new in 1978, and we don’t know if the creators were aware of any precedents, but the International Cooperative Alliance flag (1925), the proposal for the Armenian flag by Martiros Saryan (1919), the World Peace Flag (1913), and the Brotherhood Flag (1938) are all important to note as part of a deeper history and ancestral context for the design of this icon. Rainbow Gatherings were also an important part of counterculture in the 1970s, and may have contributed to the general idea of the rainbow as a symbol of joy. In each of these cases the rainbow messaging is consistent, signaling values like communal peace and unity.

Tribal, individualistic, a global collective. In his memoir, Baker repeats these words to describe “gay people” and the “new revolution” during the 1970s. Are these the qualities that informed the original LGBTQ+ rainbow flag? By Segerblom’s account, they were making bright, colorful decorations for a parade, not a new symbol for a global collective. Baker writes that gay people were individualistic, but the rainbow is collective in its very definition: a gathering of different colors and light into a single formation. Baker’s use of the word tribal introduces unnecessary colonial associations. A rainbow is meant to signify diversity and a spectrum of possibilities, but Baker’s characterization seems to flatten: one flag for the global collective to fly everywhere.

In fact, there were two. What is known today as Baker’s iconic rainbow flag was part of a pair of larger flags made for the Freedom Day Parade. The other one, according to their oral history, was “a revisioning of the American flag with rainbow stripes. This rainbow flag became known as Lynn’s Flag and the New American Rainbow Flag.” Conceived by Segerblom, this other rainbow flag was never seen again, and I can only find a couple of photos where it’s clearly visible. It has rainbow stripes like the other one, but the order of the colors was flipped—purple on top and pink on the bottom. A blue canton contained a field of white stars, similar to the US flag, but with the stars arranged in circles. And then, there’s this remarkable detail: in one photograph, a lone, queer star is visible on the aqua blue stripe. Lynn described it like this:

“I sewed a lamé star into the stripe. I had lamé left over from my Angels of Light costume. On one side of the aqua blue stripe, there's a star that's silver lamé. When you flip the flag over, and you look at the other side, it's gold lamé. I just wanted a touch of magic, a touch of glitter, a little bit of Angels of Light. One or two of the photographs by James McNamara shows the star stitched on there. That was just like an afterthought.”

Regardless of how the flags were actually conceived and made, we somehow lost Lynn’s starred flag along the way. Not only was it never seen again after the parade, but the fact that it existed at all is mostly unknown. We lost the collective spirit of the making of the flags, replaced with Baker’s widely celebrated narrative of the single iconic flag. We lost the “afterthought” of the queer star straying out of—or into—the field on its own, and the upside-down re-ordering of the colors. When asked if the two flags were meant to complement each other, Lynn replied:

“Yes. Oh, yes. They're a pair. That's why I didn't want them to look exactly the same. You have a pair of eyebrows, but they're each different.”

As a pair, the two flags were a hybrid mix of symbols, pattern, and color, more like an odd system of loosely flowing design elements than the crisp, singular icon that we know today. From a post on ACT UP NY’s Instagram account: “The two original rainbow flags also had opposite orientations, abandoning the idea of a proper top or bottom to the flag because ‘We are a versatile people,’ in the words of James McNamara.”

I really mourn Lynn’s flag as the missing companion to the original rainbow flag. I miss the intuitive power of the afterthought, and the urgent making of this world-word pair that evoked a larger, more poetic image of collectivity. If there was ever something queer about the rainbow flag, it was there in the duo of flags that briefly made a queer landscape legible at San Francisco’s Civic Center on June 25, 1978—a less rigidly ordered upside-down world of stripes and stars holding space for the errant, wayward figure who wanders away (or approaches?) the collective field. We really need this missing flag today, at least in spirit.

Baker worked at Paramount Flag Company at the time, which sold a 7-stripe version of the rainbow flag after the parade (the pink stripe was eliminated because the color was unavailable). In 1979, the aqua and indigo stripes were merged into a single blue stripe. Through Baker’s promotion, the singular 6-color rainbow flag that we know today entered the public domain and went on to spread globally, not just as a flag but as an endlessly mutable design motif. This is powerful branding; the rainbow is now instantly recognizable globally as part of an LGBTQ+ design vocabulary, “flowed” into an unlimited array of shapes, letterforms, logos, and patterns as a way to signify pride, without necessarily using the actual flag. This works well when conditions require the visual display of queer-coded material to be less legible, especially in contexts where homosexuality is illegal. For the Spring 2000 cover of Homan, a magazine that advocated for the rights of Iranian LGBTQ+ people living abroad (1991–2002), a graphic shape filled with a rainbow gradient was used to contain a love poem by Persian poet Hushang Ebtehaj, written in Farsi, floating over two masculine figures viewed from behind, laying down and holding hands. It’s a powerful design that presents queer-coded material without the instant recognition of faces or flags (although the logo is striking in its clarity: a silhouette of Iran within a red triangle (in earlier issues it was pink), with linked “male” and “female” symbols within).

In the west, as LGBTQ+ rights were more formally recognized in the early 2000s, an expanding neoliberal market quickly responded by capitalizing on a more “acceptable” consumer audience. Rainbow capitalism accelerated with gay marriage and the right to serve in the military legalized in the US and throughout the west in the 2010s. Selling the stylistic idea of LGBTQ+ pride—as an aesthetic to be applied to consumer goods—became extremely profitable, and the rainbow design motif was an easy way to apply “diversity branding” to products. What was once seen as an idea that emerged from counterculture “in a swirl of color and light” was now being used by banks, oil conglomerates, weapons manufacturers, retail giants, computer software companies, and every other Forbes 500 company to sponsor annual pride events, bring product campaigns to market, and promote brand strategies to “pinkwash” their offers and maximize profits. What was being sold? Certainly not liberation, hope, or any kind of collective vision. Rainbow capitalism was about corporate expansion and the bottom line. One result was that these other values have now been fed back into the meaning of the rainbow flag itself, complicating its rich history and meanings with negative “corporate pride” associations, for many.

In an effort to more fully represent the LGBTQ+ community, young designers have modified the rainbow flag through the years by adding new stripes and other designs. As part of the Philadelphia Mayor’s Office of LGBT Affairs, Amber Hikes led the effort to create an 8-color flag for Philadelphia Pride in 2017, with the addition of black and brown stripes to represent marginalized people of color. Shortly after, designer Daniel Quasar started a Kickstarter campaign and successfully raised over $25,000 for the production of a new 11-color Progress flag. Quasar’s design includes a chevron emblem with stripes representing transgender and non-binary people, marginalized people of color, and those living with AIDS, overlaid onto the original 6-color flag. Quasar continues to promote the design on pins, stickers, tote bags, shirts, and notebooks and sells them on an e-commerce website (progress.gay). Unlike the original rainbow flag and many other affinity flags, the Progress flag is not in the public domain. Quasar includes a detailed “terms of use” page on progress.gay that protects the flag’s use with a Creative Commons license (BY-NC-SA), to “make sure that it is used properly, that it still supports the message of the flag, and supports the creator of the work.” These new “more inclusive” flags with additional stripes work well in awareness campaigns, to signal allyship, and for merchandising. They seem to communicate more generalized messages of diversity, alignment, and pride, rather than identification with any single community.

As soon as I began my search for queer typographies I encountered Gilbert, a font created just after Baker’s death by the corporate advertising agency Ogilvy, part of the WPP Group global agency network. Gilbert is “a typography project that celebrates the life of artist, LGBTQ activist and Rainbow Flag creator Gilbert Baker,” according to the font’s dedicated Instagram account. The typeface comes in a standard form as well as a color version, with transparent rainbow flag colors embedded in the letterforms, and was used by software companies Fontself and Adobe to promote a new SVG “color font” technology when it launched in 2018. The Gilbert font received a lot of attention, and although the website that originally hosted the free typeface (typewithpride.com) has since expired, the font is still available for free download at Adobe Fonts. When it was released, Ogilvy Creative Director Chris Rowson was quoted as saying that “the rounded, fluid forms of the letters are a tribute to the design styles and colors of the 1970’s, when the Sony Walkman was popular and Baker created the Rainbow Flag.” I thought it was odd that the Walkman was mentioned, since it’s such a specific reference but isn’t associated with queer history in any way. I glanced at the original 1979 Sony Walkman logotype and suddenly understood why he (perhaps mistakenly?) mentioned it—the font appears to be a retracing of the Walkman letterforms, with slight modifications.

Why? Who knows. Somehow, Gilbert Baker ended up with a corporate typeface named after him, designed by a giant corporate agency, perhaps as a tech PR event, derived from a famous corporate consumer brand, and only available now from the largest design software corporation in the world, with assets of $30 billion. At least it’s free! Was the Gilbert font part of a big silicon valley pinkwashing publicity stunt? I’m not sure what to make of any of this, except that it is certainly not queer typography; it feels out of touch with the values typically associated with the original rainbow flag, and more like the product of corporate pride posturing, firmly embedded in capital, market play, and neoliberal “feel good” performativity.

I’m still looking for queer typographies, and I feel like I find it again and again in the intersecting acts, stories, mutations, and trajectories of meaning and language that shapeshift through queer time and space. Queer typographies take so many different forms; mutability, contamination, fluidity, and transformation are at the heart of it. It’s remarkable to consider the depth of meaning that’s accumulated in and around the LGBTQ+ rainbow flag as an evolving world-word during the last 50 years, at once a single glyph without a fixed form and an endless flow of formations, large enough to carry the meaning of multiple cultures, economies, and histories. Today, as I write this at the start of a new US government administration, rainbow capitalism may officially be over, or at least on hold, as DEI initiatives are being declared illegal, HIV funding is being slashed, and transgender rights are under severe attack. Removing queer world-words from view only deepens these oppressions by creating permissive conditions for cruelty that further push queer and trans people to the margins, and worse.

The US government’s most recent “one flag policy” is only one small part of those permissive conditions of hatred and cruelty, joining a long history of iconic words and symbols weaponized within larger, coordinated efforts to impose oppressive order on vulnerable populations. In terms of queer life, 64 countries currently criminalize private, consensual, same-sex sexual activity. The rainbow flag’s power to signal LGBTQ+ support can lead to arrest, imprisonment, or worse in many of these places. On September 22, 2017, several people were arrested and imprisoned for “inciting homosexuality” by flying LGBTQ+ rainbow flags at a concert in Cairo, Egypt. The group performing that night was Lebanese band Mashrou’ Leila, whose lead singer Hammed Sinno is openly gay. Soon after, the BBC reported that several men were arrested, and “a woman suspected of raising a rainbow flag at the concert has also been charged with ‘promoting sexual deviancy’ and ‘habitual debauchery.’” That woman was Sarah Hegazi (1989–2020), an Egyptian socialist, writer, and lesbian activist who was imprisoned and tortured by the Abdel Fattah el-Sisi regime for flying the LGBTQ+ rainbow flag at the concert.**

Tragically, Hegazi did not survive. She was released in January 2018 and eventually sought asylum in Canada, but continued to struggle and suffer from depression and PTSD. She died on June 14, 2020, confirmed as a suicide. She left this note:

“To my siblings—I tried to survive and I failed, forgive me. To my friends – the experience was harsh and I am too weak to resist it, forgive me. To the world—you were cruel to a great extent, but I forgive.”

Hegazi’s terrible story is forever embedded in the ongoing struggle for queer liberation and should be more widely known, a painful reminder that joyful displays of pride are themselves brave acts of resistance. The courage to display one’s pride by waving a flag is still powerful enough to threaten the most oppressive of regimes, as relevant now as it was in 2017 when Hegazi displayed her joy in Cairo. Today, I’m thinking about how the transgender flag, designed by Monica Helms in 1999, continues to take on new layers of meaning and power, as transgender rights are suddenly being attacked and removed in an effort to deny the existence of trans life in the US. I think about how this particular flag will be flown, worn, waved, and signaled to future queer kin in the coming days and months, as trans life will persist.

In 1988, the gay Cuban-American artist Félix Gonzáles-Torres painted Forbidden Colors, four 20 in. x 16 in. monochrome canvases in white, green, red, and black—the colors of the Palestinian flag—in order to draw attention to the fact that the display of the Palestinian flag was prohibited in Israeli-occupied Palestinian territories, as well as other forms of oppression, including the discrimination of people with HIV/AIDS. In a statement that accompanies the artwork, he wrote:

“. . . This work is about my exclusion from the circle of power where social and cultural values are elaborated and about my rejection of the imposed and established order. It is a fact people are discriminated against for being HIV positive. It is a fact the majority of the Nazi industrialists retained their wealth after war. It is a fact the night belongs to Michelob and Coke is real. It is a fact the color of your skin matters. It is a fact Crazy Eddie’s prices are insane. It is a fact that four colors red, black, green and white placed next to each other in any form are strictly forbidden by the Israeli army in the occupied Palestinian territories. This color combination can cause an arrest, a beating, a curfew, a shooting, or a news photograph. Yet it is a fact that these forbidden colors, presented as a solitary act of consciousness here in SoHo, will not precipitate a similar reaction. . . .”

Forbidden Colors was a “rejection of the imposed and established order” by Gonzáles-Torres, a simple act of literal flagging, in that the display of these particular colors served as a call for solidarity by conjuring, imagining, realizing, visualizing, and speaking the world-word of the oppressed, without actually depicting the flag in question. Gonzáles-Torres used code to evoke a missing, banned message of survival during crisis, displayed at The New Museum (and elsewhere since) to point towards those who are wayward, errant, and illegible, elsewhere but also here; here and there, for those for whom flying a flag is not possible. It was an act of making legible that which could not be seen—that which was not allowed in sight—by amplifying those specific visual ingredients that would speak to some, but not others:

“. . . From the first moment of encounter, the four colour canvases in this room will ‘speak’ to everyone. Some will define them as an exercise in color theory, or some sort of abstraction. Some as four boring rectangular canvases hanging on the wall. Now that you’ve read this text, I hope for a different message.

For all the PWAs.” (Gonzáles-Torres)

This act of navigating legibility through coded, liberatory messages in public shows me how Forbidden Colors is in fact queer typography. How can four monochrome canvases be typography? I can hear myself questioning this, as I’m sure others will. I know, I know. And yet I’m uninterested in the formal definitions, which don’t help us here; rather, what I wish us to see are the coded acts of flagging—signifying, meaning—that make landscapes legible during crisis, across queer time and space. Whether it be an actual space like the San Francisco’s Civic Center in 1978, or non-geographical spaces shared by those who are most vulnerable, conjured within an art gallery in 1988 (or in 2025), we need to keep looking for (and making) the iconic symbols, signs, fields of color, hankies, flags, stickers, and letterforms that shape emancipatory language. Queer typographies are always urgent, always in formation, always necessary, always right now. Queer typographies are as powerful now, and in the future, as they ever were.

*Many thanks to Mo Asebiomo for the title, which they suggested here at Salmon Creek Farm in Albion, California, where this piece was written : )

**Grateful here for Andy Campbell, who first told me about Sarah Hegazi during a conversation we had about rainbow flags and other queer icons and symbols, back in October 2024, in Los Angeles.

Not sure when I first saw this photo, but it was probably online in the early 2010s. So that’s maybe 25 years after it was taken. I wasn’t aware of its history, who wore the jacket, or anything at all about its context. I wasn’t paying attention. When I finally understood what I was seeing—a photograph of a jacket worn by the artist David Wojnarowicz at an ACT UP action at the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in Rockville, MD on October 11, 1988—the message clicked into place.

“IF I DIE OF AIDS - FORGET BURIAL - JUST DROP MY BODY ON THE STEPS OF THE F.D.A.”

In the photo, the message is clearly visible on the artist’s back. I’ve seen it identified as a black leather jacket, but zooming in, it’s more of a dark grey or black denim, a jeans jacket. The white letters are so bright they seem to pop off the fabric. They might be iron-on, or stickers. Under the letters, centered on the back of the jacket, is a pink triangle, exactly like the pink triangle at the center of the SILENCE = DEATH poster that was first posted all over the streets of NYC the year before (1987), just as ACT UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power) was forming. The apex points up, both recalling and in defiance of the Nazi pink triangle used to mark people identified as homosexual men or trans women during the Holocaust, apex oriented down. The photograph was taken by Bill Dobbs, an activist lawyer in ACT UP who participated in the “SEIZE CONTROL OF THE FDA” action, ACT UP’s first national protest and seen by many as the start of the nationwide AIDS movement. The action focused specifically on timing and access to drugs; one of the messages on signs used at the action said “TIME ISN’T THE ONLY THING THE FDA IS KILLING.” ACT UP’s demands included shortening the drug approval process, discontinuing placebo trials, free access to medication, and insurance company accountability. The action was effective; one year later, some of these demands were realized.

I’ve been looking at the famous photo of Wojnarowicz for years, thinking about its significance—as documentation, as performance, as a work of art that no longer exists (the jacket was never seen again), and the photograph itself as a powerful media artifact that survives and circulates now, in place of the jacket and the body on which it was worn. Wearing the jacket was an act of protest, a graphic work of art, a kind of publishing, and a plea for care by a political subject struggling against state negligence. The plain, bold, all-cap sans serif letterforms were meant to grab attention, shouting the message out in public, much like the AIDS Memorial Quilt panel sewn by student activist Duane Kearns Puryear later that year. Discrimination, bias, dismissal, neglect, hatred, and shame were prevalent and fueled the crisis during the late 1980s and early 1990s. HIV/AIDS activism pushed back against silence and neglect using an easy-to-understand “amplified” typographic voice to convey the urgency.

Wojnarowicz found out he was HIV positive earlier that year, so he was fighting for his own life as well as those around him. Everyone was on an expedited life-and-death timeline, and his prescient message spoke to this urgency. His instruction (a demand, really), about the profound neglect that would eventually lead to his own death, was worn on the same body it referenced. FORGET BURIAL, JUST DROP MY BODY. Wojnarowicz died from HIV/AIDS four years later, on July 22, 1992.

Can the jacket be explored as a typographic work? Not really; it feels almost ridiculous to refer to it this way. But also—yes, absolutely. I think about how language is used in the most powerful acts of protest and liberation and I see this photograph. I see how a message was shaped, crafted, designed—yes, visually, precisely—at a moment when the performance of language in public space was one of the best ways to move collectively towards change. The FDA protest was a massive action that depended on amplified displays of typography, design, lettering, and writing; the design of graphic material at this ACT UP action and others like it went on to influence and inspire entire generations of activism. I’m not sure how we cannot see the jacket as a typographic work, embedded within a context of design and intention, an incredible collective moment of urgent artifact-making. Jack Lowery provides a comprehensive history of the art and design of this time in It Was Vulgar and It Was Beautiful: How AIDS Activists Used Art to Fight a Pandemic (2022), with several pages devoted to the FDA action.

I’m trying to be careful not to fetishize the photograph. As a missing object, the jacket lends itself to a kind of mythologizing, and there’s really no need for that. I want to hold onto all of these ideas through the framing of the action itself, rather than zooming in too closely on David’s jacket. So I start looking for other perspectives, other views from that day, other images that might show Wojnarowicz there, to break out of the spell of this singular image. Surely there had to have been other moments in the documentation of this event when it was visible.

It’s silly to think about YouTube as a place to go searching for typography. There’s so much about the environment of that platform that isn’t stable; resolution issues alone make it a terrible space for examining letterforms and written language. Traditionally, we learn that type needs to be reproduced perfectly, with legibility and precision as the highest priorities. There’s an entire history of type specimens that parallels a history of fine printing as well, as master printers used the demands of typographic reproduction to demonstrate their capabilities. These demands perpetuate values of exceptionalism that shape many print-based disciplines, like design, fine art printmaking, literature, advertising, even journalism—arenas where clarity and precision are the baseline for excellence.

So what would it mean to go looking for typography in a place that isn’t suited, maybe even hostile towards those same values? YouTube might not be great for examining type, but it’s a treasure chest of liberated language. I’m not talking about the comments and the ways social media platforms can be a breeding ground for hate speech and violence, because that’s also a part of what it is. But the content itself. More than 14 billion video files have been posted to YouTube, making it a remarkable site of potentiality and one of the most satisfying archives ever created.

Instead of zooming, I’ll scrub.

I’m scrubbing through a video titled ACT UP & ACT NOW Seize Control Of The FDA, posted to a channel maintained by user SuchIsLifeVideos. I don’t know anything about this user, but the half-hour video documentary of the ACT UP action at the FDA conveys the chaotic energy of the unfolding event. I’d read that Wojnarowicz traveled to Maryland with an ACT UP affinity group, and that each group was responsible for their own themes and messages. David’s group carried hand-cut signs that were shaped to look like tombstones, with messages like “FDA KILLED ME” and “1987–1988 NEVER HAD A CHANCE,” so I look for the tombstones. There they are. At 25:17 I see David walking backwards as firefighters carry a ladder, maybe to get protesters down from atop the building’s awning, where they hung banners. I hear them shout “you’re killing us” over and over. The video is very blurry and feels like a copy of a copy, but I’m going frame by frame, and I see him suddenly turn, with his back going by in a flash. The message isn’t legible, but I make out the word “AIDS.” I feel something new here. Now it’s David Wojnarowicz the protestor, one of many, moving with the group, a molecule in the cloud of ACT UP energy and collective action. The jacket played a small but significant role; in the video, the activity of the sub-groups moving around the site feels cacophonous, like a multi-staged theater, with simultaneous scenes playing out all at once. I’m stunned that the jacket, which looms large in my memory as a still image on the queer timeline, feels so small now, in action. Here it is on YouTube, illegible, luminous.

Later, after posting a link to the video online, someone responds that they see David appearing to remember to roll over so that his back would be visible, at 21:20. I’d missed this in my initial viewing. This was one of the moments when the group was laying on the ground in a die-in, each protestor holding a tombstone at their head. This action was about bodies, death, and dying, all on display on the very FDA steps that the jacket references. I go to the timestamp; in the bottom-left corner of the frame I can barely make out David’s face as he briefly turns his body over from front to back. I catch a glimpse of the soft fuzz of the white letters, which I only recognize because I know they’re there. Then, he gets up.

To scrub is to search, to clean; scrubbing is movement back and forth on the timeline, and I imagine a kind of literal cleansing action, scrubbing each frame of video with a small brush. In the search to uncover clarity, evidence, clues, truth, we briefly suspend the narrative, slowing down to the scale of the frame-by-frame, the grain, the frozen blur of movement taken out of flow. In the slowing down we exchange one form of precision for another, pausing the normative conventions of historical narrative in order to catch other kinds of relationships, barely perceptible, invisible: there he is, a tall man in shadow, viewed by others in public space, a head turning, a body on the ground, a ladder goes by, a jacket altered by an artist, white letterforms barely visible in the chaos.

Scrubbing is a kind of reading. It’s a close reading, a precise, closer view that reveals other relationships, between the visible and the unseen, the legible and the unreadable. I’m scrubbing the archive, looking, searching, cleaning. Here it is, I found it. The letterforms on David’s jacket are both totally understood (completely readable) and impossible to know. How can they be both? In the legibility, in the close reading, we see someone struggling with his own mortality, a body making a desperate attempt to be seen, acknowledged, to be read clearly on the timeline, in public space. To be read by his peers, by the media, by the state. And then, the impossible truth, as the reader is exposed: You will survive me. I will die from this disease (I am dying) and you will have to deal with it.

Unsaid, but understood.

David wished for this kind of marking, a public dumping of bodies, the gross act of depositing the dead on the doorsteps of those responsible. A year before his death, David published this passage in his memoir Close to the Knives (1991). It continues where the jacket left off:

“I imagine what it would be like if friends had a demonstration each time a lover or a friend or a stranger died of AIDS. I imagine what it would be like if, each time a lover, friend or stranger died of this disease, their friends, lovers or neighbors would take the dead body and drive with it in a car a hundred miles an hour to washington d.c. and blast through the gates of the white house and come to a screeching halt before the entrance and dump their lifeless form on the front steps. It would be comforting to see those friends, neighbors, lovers and strangers mark time and place and history in such a public way.”

It’s an unthinkable act, to drop a body anywhere. Not as unthinkable as knowingly letting a body die from neglect. As a reader who is alive to read his messages, I participate in the exposure, and I am implicated, even now, far off in time and space. That’s the shocking clarity here, stated in the instructions, on display.

The type spells it out; the body holds the message.

When David died in 1992, ACT UP held its first political funeral, marching through the East Village with a banner boldly announcing that David Wojnarowicz “DIED OF AIDS DUE TO GOVERNMENT NEGLECT.” Like his jacket, the funerary banner uses direct language to point and implicate. David’s conditional “IF I DIE OF AIDS” was transformed in public space into the memorialized “DIED OF AIDS,” a terrible narrative that declares its own tragic ending. The jacket and the funerary banner use the individual body to draw attention to collective action, accountability, and responsibility, and the language spells it out. The impossible message of David’s jacket eventually became a reality; inspired by his writing in Close to the Knives, ACT UP began doing “ashes actions,” and David’s ashes were eventually scattered on the White House lawn in 1996.

To read David’s language displayed on his back is to become entangled in the political warfare of necropolitics. 37 years out, the reader is still implicated, still alive, still responsible for the collective failure to prevent these deaths. The film Wojnarowicz: F**k You F*ggot F**ker (Chris McKim, dir., 2020) contains a clip of a newscaster reporting on the ACT UP action at the FDA. While others face us with their signs, David stands with his back to the camera, just to the right of the reporter, and the message is clearly visible, now from a different angle. For the first time, I notice that the line “AIDS - FORGET” is indented to the right, the only line that isn’t justified left. Why? I go back to the Dobbs photograph and visually slide the line to the left to see that the apex of the pink triangle would have been covered up, hidden behind the top of the “F” in FORGET. In designing the message, however crudely, however urgently, it was the legibility of the triangle that David prioritized over typographic convention. Somehow, the story is here too, even in the indent: don’t let forgetting get in the way.

This image depicts the media space of the TV broadcast, and we see David’s back adjusted to face the camera like a sign. His body is a billboard projecting language out onto the networks, ready to be found by future television screens, archives, documentary films, iPhones. I stop the clip, scrub back and forth, grab the image, and post it. This trajectory of the message on the jacket happens again and again, an elaborate performance of typographic movement and circulation, pushing designed letterforms and a surplus of meaning out onto multiple timelines. It’s still happening, as you read the message now. David had to have been aware of this power. These were the media-savvy tactics of ACT UP, designed to mirror the basic principles of public relations, viral marketing, and advertising, applied to bodies in crisis. Today, I am alive. I am a reader who survived the HIV/AIDS crisis. I’m accountable, claiming my responsibility for understanding what happened, for not forgetting, for scrubbing. What was ACT UP? Who was David? Why did he die? I sense the danger of letting go, of giving up, of by-passing the labor of all of this for the ease of a simple story on Wikipedia. Even easier: no story at all. But I refuse.

I mentioned John Cage’s Empty Words (1974) in my last post, and it triggered a memory. Many years ago I attended a performance of Empty Words put on by the John Cage Trust at Bard College. It was a special all-night event, and we were encouraged to bring bedding and sleep-appropriate clothing, so we could fall asleep listening to a 12-hour recording of Cage performing the work, which draws from the journals of Henry David Thoreau. A special macrobiotic menu of soup, rice, vegetables, and tea specified by Cage was served during a series of intermissions spread out through the night, and the performance was timed to conclude at dawn.

The work is a recording of Cage speaking, gradually stripping away meaning and syntax from Thoreau’s writing, until there’s nothing left but letters and sounds (the written version can be accessed here, published by Wesleyan University Press in 1981, and a page from the book appears below). Even though the event was very much a listening experience—the sound of Cage’s voice reading non-syntactical language—I’ve been thinking about it again in relation to queer typography. Is Empty Words queer? What do experiments in queer language and legibility look, sound, and feel like? Where does queer design and typography come from? Is it possible to liberate meaning and politics from language, while also shaping it? I guess this was Cage’s fantasy with Empty Words.

He describes the language as “demilitarized” in this interview clip, referring to the pleasurable loss of control that Empty Words proposes. As an experiment in indeterminacy and the shaping of non-normative language, Empty Words is certainly queer. I remember drifting in and out of a dream state that night, listening for hours as Cage’s voice evolved into strange, illegible fragments and guttural sounds, with a live overlay of real snoring coming from all around me in the large space where we’d made our beds. As an embodied experience, this was something that actively worked against many of the ways that language controls, orders, and assigns meaning.

Despite Cage’s claim about the demilitarization of language into liberated nonsense, I think Empty Words might be especially political—not less so. After all, there are politics in the sound of a voice, certain presumptions about the body that the voice belongs to, who it addresses, the source material, the conditions under which the work was created, performed, published, etc. There’s also the design of the published work on the page, and how it references certain typographic histories, design standards, and expectations (a square page, a grid, a monospace typeface, lots of white space). All of this creates a politics, of course—the politics of art-making, of design, of reading, of performance, of listening and attendance, of attunement. There’s no escaping it.

I love that Cage frames this work as a response to the militarized nature of language. Language is the controlled ordering of the world, the inescapable condition of control that we deal with on a daily basis in ordinary communication. I’m inspired by the piece because I can imagine how “empty words” might be a destination to move towards, a place of queer, poetic potentiality, where language is liberated and totally “disarmed.” I’m curious though—what happens when we use empty words as a starting point, instead? and go the other way? All the way to precise communication and control. What’s to be done with militarized language?

All language is armed, I suspect, even Cage’s. Communication has been weaponized for as long as states have existed, to control and regulate populations. Yes, with propaganda, but even just common statements like “I do” or “you’re guilty” have the power to determine all kinds of agreements, relations, and economies, depending on when and where they’re spoken, and to whom they are uttered. In addition to the power of particular statements, there are also structural politics that are just inherent to language itself, constantly evolving to maintain the matrix of domination and its militarized logics of success—namely heteropatriarchy, white supremacy, settler colonialism, and capitalism—by ordering knowledge within the highly regulated boundaries of gender, racial, and class structures. Almost half of all languages use the same gender binary to conceptually organize the world. Design is a part of this; it’s difficult to imagine how the visual shape of language, and the design of reading experiences, might somehow operate separately from these oppressive forces.

I’m interested in how language can be visually armed to give us the power to utter, address, and attune in ways that counter these logics of success. Spending time with various liberation movements of the past and present, we can find examples of language that have been “loaded up” and shaped with a surplus of meaning, above and beyond conventional standards of “good” typography and design. Intersectional movements deploy language across a spectrum of design legibilities to address, organize, and take action as a matter of survival. Language is shaped, reclaimed, weaponized, disguised, coded, drawn, set, amplified, and circulated—to spread the word. The deployment of liberated language can happen efficiently but unevenly, as those counterpublics who need it the most are addressed with coded messages that aren’t meant to be discerned by everyone. This is the realm of queer typography.

I’ve been looking for evidence of armed and loaded language in various queer contexts, to see how meaning is written, visualized, and read during crisis, and what I’ve found is striking. There’s a spread in the printed zine “WE WILL NOT PROTECT YOU” by Pink Tank (2004) that I encountered within Avram Finkelstein’s papers at NYU that mimics the visual and written language of the Declaration of Independence in order to declare a new kind of freedom. By addressing the reader as “We the Radical Queers of the United States” in a reverse italic blackletter typeface, the anonymous authors claim and redefine the militarized language of “We the People” and all of the violence and assumptions embedded within the legacy documents of state control and empire building. Pink Tank mutates and subverts the meaning of the Declaration of Independence by claiming its power over language and design for itself, with incredible intention and specificity. The design cannot be separated from its message and political context. This is what I’m calling queer typographies—visual approaches to liberated language. These approaches make use of typefaces, letterforms, lettering, typing, drawing, stylistic references, symbols, and other meaningful expressions to emancipate language and spread the word.

Earlier, in the years just after Stonewall, an approach by the NYC-based group “Third World Gay Revolution” (T.W.G.R.) made use of typographic hybridity in order to signal difference. TWGR was a group of Black and Latinx gay and lesbian people that formed in 1970 to address racism and oppression within the gay movement. They held weekly meetings on West 23 St in Chelsea, and in the design of their announcements and texts, published in local newspapers and flyers, they used a dramatic mix of typefaces, sizes, and styles for their headlines and messages. For the back cover of the Dec-Jan 1970 issue of Come Out!, they drew each letterform as its own entity, vibrating collectively with energetic lines and adorned with faces, flames, ears, and squiggles. Whether set or hand-drawn, this kind of mixing of typographic styles slowed down the read and reduced traditional legibility, while at the same time raising a very distinctive flag that came to be recognized; it seemed to say: we are different, we are varied, we do not conform.

The rhythm and variation of T.W.G.R.’s letterforms, combined with illustrations of weapons (a grenade, a doubled femme holding a rifle), and decorative icons used as border treatments (arrows, stars, circles, and other shapes), was a kind of transformation of traditional design elements into something else. Their visual non-conformity proposed a real clarity of message (intersectional liberation) through a hybridity of design tactics—in itself, a feat of legibility that transcends much of what conventionally good graphic design proselytizes: precision, control, and uniformity. In reading through the members’ names signed below one of their published texts—Ana, Barbara, Carlos, C.C., Dale, Doug, Felipe, Frenchie, Hiram, Jean, Juan, Kip, Nestor, Tonnaey, Very, Yolanda—I’m moved by how this group deployed their collective power into the future, reaching us today. Nat Pyper builds upon these beautiful transmissions with their own type design work, A Queer Year of Love Letters (2024).

Meanwhile, while T.W.G.R. was organizing and Cage was experimenting, the pink triangle was starting to be deployed as a symbol for gay liberation. This was happening internationally as gay, trans, Black, immigrant, feminist, and anti-war movements motivated by Stonewall became more activated, and communicating quickly was a crucial way to maintain survival networks. Easy-to-use typographic glyphs were helpful for identifying new groups and causes, and became a kind of shorthand for communicating communal safety and trust. The pink triangle was reclaimed from its Nazi origins as a symbol of gay oppression, while the lambda (Greek letter “λ“) was borrowed from chemistry to represent “action,” first used by the Gay Activists Alliance in NYC in the early 1970s.

This was also the moment when traditional “female” and “male” symbols were being used to create new visual ideas from old forms. The origins of these symbols as biological markers can be traced back to the 18th century, when the symbols for Venus and Mars were first used to designate the sex of flowers, with the cross and circle of Venus representing a woman’s hand-mirror, and the arrow and cross of Mars representing a man’s shield and arrow. These symbols recall deeply embedded stereotypes that have reinforced the gender binary over millennia, except they were now being freely doubled, overlayed, linked, or otherwise combined to create new representations for gay men, lesbian women, and homosexuality in general. Sometimes other elements were added, like the peace symbol or the raised fist, or letterforms, like the “G” in the logo for the Gay Liberation Front.

When the transgender activist group Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries (S.T.A.R.) formed shortly after the NYU sit-in at Weinstein Hall on Sept 25, 1970 (led by Sylvia Rivera and Marsha P. Johnson and originally calling themselves Street Transvestites for Gay Power), they distributed a flier that was printed with a hand-drawn symbol in the lower left corner that combined and doubled the Venus and Mars symbols. This signaled a real attempt to represent transgender identity in some kind of visual way; I need to do more research, but this may have been a first. When I found a physical copy of the flier at the One Archives in Los Angeles in 2024, filed among the papers of the Gay Activists Alliance, this particular copy was marked with another symbol that was hand-drawn in red ink in the lower right corner: a single circle that combined the arrow and cross in one move. Later, in the winter 1972 issue of Come Out!, published by the Gay Liberation Front, Silvia Rivera authored a short declaration of transgender liberation (“Transvestites—your half sisters and half brothers of the Revolution”), illustrated with hand lettering and that same trans symbol, this time multiplied and linked three times to form a new symbol that points in all directions. It’s a deeply meaningful move that mutates and builds upon known designs into something different, broadcasting a new kind of plurality and power.

Maybe it’s odd to juxtapose the queerness of Cage’s singularly-authored work in “demilitarized language” with the hardcore queer typography and symbols collectively being used in gay liberation at that same moment. But I think there’s real value in exploring how experiments in shaping liberatory language tried to challenge the militarized language of oppression, even if they approached from radically diverging directions. At the same time that Cage proposed the liberation of meaning and a move towards artistic embodiment and pleasure, gay liberation fighters were building a kind of armed and loaded queer vocabulary to liberate society—typography, design, and symbolic glyphs grounded in previous meanings but attempting to go beyond the confines of history. The triangle, lambda, S.T.A.R. symbols, and T.W.G.R. typography contained a surplus of meanings and associations that were meant to signal and bring about collective action. This new queer vocabulary had a power that spoke to its intended audience with fullness, specificity, and intent. In the face of militarized oppression—the fight for basic rights, life and death survival, and liberation—these symbols were armed and loaded, ready to fight. And they worked so well because they were able to mutate through time and space. They could be adapted and changed endlessly, to suit an enormous range of contexts.

This idea of mutation is crucial when thinking about queer approaches to design and typography. Making typographic moves in order to change, shift, and signal difference across time and space is one of the powers of liberated language, and it continues today. This is remarkably evident in the work of the contemporary Belgian type collective Bye Bye Binary and their powerful experiments in non-binary typography, and how they actively change the French language by designing new glyphs that mutate, alter, and transform the gendered endings of words.

I had a chance to meet up with the BBB collective in Brussels recently and was given a complete tour of their work. This group of about 20 members (half of them are type designers, but others are graphic designers, writers, educators, and philosophers) indexes their own work here, as well as the work of other type designers who create non-binary fonts. Many of their fonts are freely available for anyone to download and use.

During my visit, Camille Circlude, one of the founding members of Bye Bye Binary and author of La Typographie post-binaire (2023), beautifully demonstrated exactly how their fonts work. It’s about changing the way we type in order to adjust, adapt, and make language do more. Again, it’s about a surplus of meaning, or perhaps in this case the extension of meaning into other realms. In Camille’s demo, instead of typing “amoureux” (lover—feminine) or “amoureuse” (lover—masculine), they typed “a-m-o-u-r-e-u” and then two periods “. .” and the new glyph “x•s•e” appeared, completing the new, non-binary version of the word: “amoureuxse.” The x•s•e glyph is a ligature that “falls” below the baseline of the word, its descent signaling a wayward difference, a shift, a break. It’s a queer act of typing that produces change, mutation, and difference. In other fonts that they design, the x•s•e ligature might rise above, or combine in other ways; each one is different. Like the hand-drawn symbol on S.T.A.R.’s flier, it uses the existing, inherited “armed language” (in this case the built-in gender binary of the French language) to mutate into something new; it’s a combination of coded forces that’s activated by the user/author who is empowered to create these designs in the act of writing/typing itself.

Bye Bye Binary’s work is radical and transformative; it changes language and speaks to the future. I see direct and irrefutable connections between the early queer typographies of the gay and trans liberation movements of the 1970s, 80s, and early 90s and their work today. These connections are a trajectory of intention and meaning that moves with great energy and urgency across time and space to connect authorship (language) »» to action (design) »» to publishing (circulation) »» to survival (liberation). These queer typographies emerge from liberated language because liberated language spreads most urgently under crisis conditions when survival networks are needed. And as we think about what it means to become future ancestors, we must consider our future kin. How shall we communicate? What messages are we sending to them in the future? These other legibilities—queer acts of reading, writing, typing, drawing, and speaking sent into the future by Cage, S.T.A.R., T.W.G.R., Pink Tank, Bye Bye Binary and many others—show us how.

They show us that the future of typography is queer.

PS
I’ll write about the mutated, doubled letterforms of “HAPPY QUEERS DAY” on the cover of this issue of Gay Post (1974) in a later post!

I want to keep thinking and writing about the SURVIVORS printout, as a way to explore and understand it more deeply. Specifically, there was a page that stood out from all of the others, for a reason that goes beyond the obvious emotional content of the author’s message.

This is message #22757, dated 08/12/87 at 12:13:08, Subj: KEYBOARD PROBLEM. Its author isn’t identified, nor is their gender, age, or any other traits; they wrote the post to share their experience of caring for two people: one who was ill with HIV/AIDS, and that person’s partner and primary caregiver. What’s striking though is that the author begins the post with an apology about their keyboard.

Firs+ of all, I wan+ +o apologize for +he “+” represen+ing a cer+ain le++er; +ha+ key on my compu+er is broken.

What an incredible example of queer typography!

I see it this way for a few reasons that go beyond the obvious context at hand. And that context should be noted: I found this page within the largest LGBTQIA+ archive in the world, and the post was written in 1987, during the height of the HIV/AIDS crisis. The original author’s brief message provides insight into the urgent care and support that was happening as communities were struggling with illness, negligence, and death. Without question, it’s a queer story and the printout enables us to locate this author in the otherwise sparse and confusing timeline(s) of queer history.

It’s the author’s opening line that brings this page of writing into another realm, as they apologize for the “keyboard problem” identified in the subject line. The letter “T” on their keyboard doesn’t work, so they’ve decided to substitute “+” for “T” in order to get their message across, and this is remarkable. Faced with a malfunction that creates a constraint, the “+” is a simple typographic hack. They decided to use one keystroke as a substitute for another (broken) one; more accurately, it’s a code, or a cipher, that functions as a workaround. The reader easily understands how to decode the message because it only involves one letter and the forms are similar: the “+” looks like a lowercase “T.”

In fact, the author could have used any other letter or symbol, and the message would still be readable. They could have even left out all of the Ts entirely. At what point does language completely break down? Any one of these solutions, including the “+” substitution, introduces friction and s l o w s down the reading experience. The slower experience asks more from the reader—more consideration, more time, more patience—and this is echoed in the content of the message itself, which is about dealing “wi+h AIDS in our own way,” about the terror of facing death alone, and about the value of standing by for unconditional support.

John Cage experimented with the removal and eventual breakdown (liberation?) of language in 1974 with Empty Words, a book and spoken performance that gradually eliminated sentences, phrases, words, and syllables from Thoreau’s journals, until the language was “demilitarized.” Could a move like the “+” substitution in the KEYBOARD PROBLEM post be considered “demilitarized” in any way? If we consider queer acts of typing that move away from perfect legibility towards a more poetic place—less regulated, towards “other legibilities”—then yes, I think so.

The decision by the author to substitute a plus/positive sign for the broken T takes this simple substitution into a more poetic dimension because this is also the symbol that’s added to the letters “HIV” in order to designate someone’s seropositive status (HIV+). The “+” indicates that the HIV virus is detectable in the body (a presence, a surplus). There’s also this: that the HIV virus attaches itself to T cells and causes them to die, and the decreasing T cell count is what eventually leads to an autoimmune crisis in the body (AIDS), and death. In the KEYBOARD PROBLEM post, it’s the author’s letter T that is broken, replaced by the positive sign. The author of the post, faced with a keyboard crisis, made the creative decision to hack their tool with a modified alphabet, which introduces friction to the reading experience. The result is compromised, not perfect, but absolutely readable. The post contains 104 “+” positive signs that read as if a filter has been overlaid on top of the language; the text has something more, it takes on a new “texture,” but it’s still legible. The author negotiates between the tool, the language, and the forum (its audience and network of readers), to produce a new kind of slower typing/writing. I see this as a queer act of typing/writing, which requires a new kind of slower, queer read—for the reader, there’s no avoiding it.

Is the queer read imposed here a broken one? Is the transformed text an actual problem for the reader? I would argue that by queerly typing the text in this way, the author has instead created a surplus. There is an abundance of love and care that is expressed in the KEYBOARD PROBLEM post on multiple levels, and this abundance is clearly legible. As a reader, I understand their modification in order to get this message across as a surplus of meaning and language, not a problem or a lack.

And the actual font is irrelevant! It’s all about the typing. The hack can transfer to any computer user on the network, and can be output by any printer. It doesn’t depend on any specific technology or platform. The abundance is transferable, flexible, and easily adaptable.

Was the author thinking about T cells and seropositive status when they made the substitution? Were they being clever? I doubt it, but that’s totally irrelevant. The surplus is there now, as it was then, when this message was read on all of the screens of the readers of the SURVIVORS forum, and when it was printed out. It’s these ideas—

• a focus on context;

• the hacking of language;

• the creation of meaningful codes;

• modified alphabets;

• other legibilities;

• care for the reader;

• accessibility;

• transferability;

• new acts of typing, writing, and reading;

• a surplus of texture, friction, meaning, and language—

that I’m starting to look for as I sketch out this book on queer typography. I’m grateful to have found this remarkable example, which opens a door to so much more.

But I’m even more grateful for these ancestors: the anonymous author of KEYBOARD PROBLEM, and David Charnow, who printed the SURVIVORS posts in 1990, just one month before his death from AIDS-related illnesses. Their decisions warp queer time and enable us to become entangled in the archive, in their lives across time and space, and to reposition our own bodies in relation to queer histories and futures. There was no way for them to know what would happen next, in their expressions of care, in their simple acts of typing and printing, in the total uncertainty of that moment. “The question of the archive is thus in the end not whether it succeeds in preserving the past from oblivion but how the past that eventually emerges from it can potentially produce a revelatory historical consciousness of our present.”1

On Tuesday, August 27, 2024, I left my house and rode my bicycle to the end of Congress Avenue, in Providence, RI. I crossed Elmwood Avenue at the Walgreens, rode through Reservoir Triangle past the spot where a statue of Christopher Columbus stood for 120 years (it was removed and relocated in 2020 but the base remains), and continued onto Reservoir Avenue as it rises up and crosses over the final stretch of the northbound Amtrak Northeast Corridor line before it arrives at Providence Station.

In-between the train tracks and a Popeye’s Chicken is a turn-off into the entrance of a new Tesla service and distribution center. It opened earlier this year. I cross the Tesla parking lot, enter the adjacent parking lot of Dr. Jorge Alvarez High School, and ride over to a small opening in the chainlink fence that serves as the entrance to Mashapaug Park. Right before me is a view of Mashapaug Pond, the largest freshwater pond in Providence. A path stretches to my left and to my right. Another path leads down the hill to the pond. From my house, it took about 7 minutes to get here.

This place—the pond, the park, the Tesla center, and the high school—is the former site of the Gorham Manufacturing Company, at one time the largest maker of silverware in the world. It operated here from 1890 until 1986, and employed up to 1,000 workers. It manufactured countless household items, precious objects, artworks, and the statue of Columbus that was removed just a few hundred feet away. The firm was bought by Textron in 1967, before it was dissolved in 1986. Now, there’s no visible trace of Gorham. The 30 factory buildings that once stood on the site are gone.

I look at my phone, and read today’s headlines. Kamala Harris says she would appoint a Republican to cabinet if elected president. Wisconsin and Illinois health officials report three deaths from West Nile virus. Special relationship at risk if UK bans arms sales to Israel, says Trump adviser. Weather Now: Much Cooler and Less Humid Today. 4 swimmers rescued from rip current at East Beach.

From where I’m standing the landscape around me looks undisturbed, but it’s been totally engineered into its present condition. Gorham poisoned the surrounding area with industrial toxins throughout its history. Everything that I can see—landscaped earth, trees, fields, pathways, vegetation—has been grown and constructed during the last 20 years as part of an enormous remediation process (documented by the RI Department of Environmental Management here). Despite clean-up efforts, pollutants still persist in this place, in the outdoor air, the soil, inside the High School, and in the pond. The contaminants are from chemicals used by Gorham to clean metal and machine parts. They seeped into the land and entered the groundwater. These are human carcinogens that remain in the ground and eventually evaporate as dangerous gasses when exposed to air.

West Elmwood

Gorham’s contamination is just part of the violence of this place. For decades, the neighborhood of West Elmwood stood across the pond from Gorham, bounded by the railroad tracks, the Cranston city line, and the shoreline. This had been a significant Narragansett settlement for centuries, eventually transforming into one of the first neighborhoods in Providence where people of color owned homes. In 1962 the City of Providence totally destroyed West Elmwood, displacing 567 families, almost all people of color, in the name of urban renewal. “The Providence Redevelopment Agency bulldozed West Elmwood to construct the Huntington Expressway Industrial Park. Studies describing unhealthy and unsafe living conditions in this portion of West Elmwood were used to justify the city’s action.” The loss of history, homeownership, family relationships, kinship, and neighborhood culture was profound.

Today, the 117-acre industrial park includes tenants like Amazon, Brown University, Lowe’s, Providence Water, Restaurant City, Prime Storage, and PBS. The literal bulldozing of West Elmwood, resulting in a tremendous increase in impervious ground cover throughout this area (asphalt, concrete), now causes rainwater to mix with road salt, fertilizer, car fluids, and other pollutants, flowing directly into the Pawtuxet River Watershed. The contaminated runoff enters three interconnected ponds that border the industrial park, flowing from Tongue Pond to Spectacle Pond to Mashapaug Pond. From there, the water feeds directly into nearby Roger Williams Park, and eventually drains into Narragansett Bay, which leads to the Atlantic Ocean. Excess algae growth, lead, and compounds like dioxins and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons are present, making it unsafe to eat the fish, to swim, or to come into contact with the water or soil.

These are some of the basic facts of Mashapaug Pond and the surrounding area, easily found online. It’s a recent story, given the long trajectory of this place, from its geological formation, to the Narragansett, Wampanoag, and other tribal inhabitants who originally defined this area, to the settlers who occupied the land, to now. How do we read a site? This basic information about the colonial transformation, the violent displacement and dispossession, and the industrial contamination and subsequent re-engineering of this place is illegible by sight alone. Other legibilities are present here, and they require different kinds of work.

Another question might be: how can we feel a place? Sensing, research, listening, reflection, patience, repetition.

I’ve been visiting this place again and again and again, trying to feel it, make sense of its material, and sense other legibilities. I’m taking an embodied inventory, a material accounting of the agents who (will) co-exist(ed) here. These characters aren’t the only players in the ongoing story of this place but they are the ones revealed to me lately. Every time I look, I find more. Each of these characters is simultaneously a ruin and a monument, rising and falling. Each one is both present and not present, visible and not.

This site, like all sites, brings multiple agents—monuments, ruins, timelines, spaces, relations, characters—together into a place. All at once, this place is formed by a remarkable publication about West Elmwood by Lucy Asako Boltz; the human and non-human workers at Amazon Delivery Center DRI1; the asphalt; the Amtrak and MBTA commuters who travel through this place each day; the Tesla workers and vehicles; the students and staff of Alvarez High School; this 304-page status report by EA Engineering summarizing the most recent monitoring of toxic contaminants at the High School; and the rabbits and hawks and insects and algae and cats who make Mashapaug Park their home.

Tactical Grey

One of these agents is the back of the new Tesla service center, covered in “Tactical Grey” paint, facing Mashapaug Park. Tactical Grey is the standard interior color of the Tesla Cybertruck. Visually, Tactical Grey is a mid-range average color, but it’s not neutral. Facing the pond, it’s a sharp reminder; it recalls the history of silver and other metals that were processed at this site for much of the 20th century, as well as the color of lithium—the alkali metal that’s extracted today in the US, Argentina, Chile, Australia, Canada, and Bolivia, for Tesla’s electric vehicle batteries.

Present or not, seen or not, these agents form multiple realities. This site is a survival network of entangled agents—beings and relationships, living and non-living, toxic and non-toxic—that persist across time and space through their specific intra-actions. Ancestors, agents, players, and possibilities.

Who and what gets to persist?

Plume

The Plume continues to spread, urgently, quietly, invisibly, under the parking lot between Tesla and the High School.

Dr. Jorge Alvarez High School opened in 2006, before remediation efforts were complete. It sits within the former footprint of the Gorham buildings, on contaminated soil, as does the Tesla service center. The High School mainly serves immigrant families from Cambodia, Ghana, Vietnam, and the Dominican Republic in the Reservoir Triangle area, with a diverse first-gen student population that’s 90% bilingual.

Underneath the asphalt of the shared parking lot is a large contaminated groundwater Plume. The Plume is a billowing area of poison material in slow, continuous movement, its energy flowing below the surface. It reaches, stretches, blooms. It spreads and shows, out of sight. Despite many years of remediation, elevated traces of toxic materials like trichloroethylene (TCE) and tetrachloroethene (PERC) continue to be detected in the air inside the High School, most recently in the Library, the Kitchen, and in Classroom 116. This is a seeping, a spreading, a gassing, toxic, alive and flowing.

5:43PM: a MBTA commuter train speeds by.

This place, all of it—this parking lot, the buildings, the Pawtuxet watershed, the beings who live and work here—is a ruin in reverse, a collection of timelines that can be played backward or forward into what passes for a future, like a tape in a player.1 The ruin reveals itself relationally. The ruin reveals itself in all directions, rising and falling. Playing back to a time before the High School, before the Plume, before West Elmwood, before Gorham, before Columbus. Before monuments. West Elmwood appears to be gone but that’s only one (visible) reality; another is that the trauma and violence of the elimination of West Elmwood persists in the continuous, endless flow of poison that pulses through the city’s waterways, as well as the inherited pain and dispossession that continues to impact all of its ancestors.

Gorham appears to be gone but that’s only one (visible) reality; another is that Gorham is here, and will always be here, a never-ending monument and ruin, deep within the transformed site and in this movement and energy of the Plume, the effects of the Plume and Tactical Grey, these other characters that continue to spread and poison.

Altogether, this place—with its earth and water and this cast of characters—rises and falls into ruin, towards an enormous spectrum of histories and futures. Going beyond what passes for a future on the surface of right now, beyond the surface of the visible. This inventory of a ruin in reverse, rising into ruin, beyond what passes for a future, forms a loose sketch for an embodied experience, one that I try to access again and again and again. It’s a need, a desire, a possibility. As a ruin in reverse, as an embodied experience, here at this place, one might sense these other timelines in all of these intra-actions: after the Plume exhausts and expends itself, after the High School is closed and demolished, after the pond is drained and transformed into something else.

Slag Pile

The Slag Pile sat (sits) on the shore of Mashapaug Pond until it was removed in July 2006. It can’t be defined in legible, precise terms; it’s an approximation in time and space. Even its presence—whether or not it had been totally, properly removed—was contested in a letter from “Concerned Citizens of the Reservoir Triangle and South Providence” to Textron on November 14, 2006. The Concerned Citizens identified Gorham Building V as the site of Secondary Copper Smelting, discharged directly into Mashapaug Cove through two 6-inch waste lines. The enormity of the Slag Pile cannot be overestimated; it held (holds) everything that cannot be contained in the intricacies of these beautiful products produced by Gorham, including lead, dioxins, and furans. There should be no surprise that the by-product of these precious artifacts that are purchased, collected, circulated, auctioned, and stored, is this: excessive spreading haunting toxicity. It should come as no surprise that the by-products of capitalism always include an excess of trauma, ever-lasting burdens, and impossible debt.

Dodder

Large areas of knotweed grow around Mashapaug Park, all along the train tracks behind the Amazon Delivery Center, in the area that was once West Elmwood. In some places the knotweed is a host to patches of Cuscuta (Dodder), a parasitic plant that doesn’t produce chlorophyll. After germinating, it looks for healthy plants nearby by sensing light reflectivity on green leaves. It grows towards the host plant, attaches itself, wraps its tendrils around it, and feeds on the host’s nutrients. Other names for dodder are strangle tare, strangleweed, scaldweed, beggarweed, lady’s laces, fireweed, wizard’s net, devil’s guts, devil’s hair, devil’s ringlet, goldthread, hailweed, hairweed, hellbine, love vine, pull-down, angel hair, and witch’s hair.

There are tents and other makeshift dwellings nestled here within the vegetation along the tracks, and I’ve noticed the tents in other places around Mashapaug Pond as well. People are using this space differently, independently sharing the site with other beings living and working here now, and other beings who will work and live here in the future. Many of the Amazon associates who show up each day at Amazon in Huntington Expressway Industrial Park are immigrants who are employed by Wutabon, Inc., a “delivery service partner” contracted to Amazon, purporting to “reimagine social services.” There are different kinds of survival here, different legibilities of support, of recognition, of being.

Towards a queer embodiment of place

We need to better embody multiple, simultaneous times and spaces in order to know how to persist, and how to care for each other, while much of our queer history and much of contemporary life in capitalism works to take away the possibility of survival. Time can be queer here, at the rising ruins and its inventory of debts.

I share this embodied experience of broken, queer timelines with others who want to reach across time and space, searching for multiple truths; this is the possibility of survival. By each other I mean: others living and others already dead, and others not yet alive. I’m searching for places where time can be loosened because my own timeline, the one I inherited, is broken. When I feel myself falling outside of linear time, I try to embody queerness as it was, as it is now, as it will be; all possible ways of being. This is a queer feeling, a queer sensing, of always reaching—for something that’s not quite ready, not fully visible, not fully present. I’m looking for places where I can sense other timelines, where I can dig deeply, where I can more fully reach for these monuments and ruins that form places. I want to understand the less apparent, entangled relations that make a place like Mashapaug Pond, which is my home. I want to access the never-ending transformation of a place like Mashapaug Pond through these survival networks of entangled agents and relations.

Once accessed, I want to animate these characters by letting them act on my body, and in my heart. They might be players in an opera or a play or a dance. They might be present and potent and visible like that. There might be a way to collapse different time scales together into one place, like the scale of Tactical Grey, the scale of Dodder, the scale of the Plume, the scale of the Pawtuxet Watershed, and the scale of the violent histories of Columbus and the City of Providence and Brown University that surround us and are embedded in this place. All of these monuments and ruins that travel back and forth, rising and falling, ever-lasting, persistent: they’re here. These are multiple truths, all possible histories and futures, here in this place that we (will) call(ed) home.

A paper printout of internet material is such a strange mix of conditions. Because of its hybrid media status—first as digital material that circulated online, and then on physical paper—a printout possesses digital and analog qualities simultaneously. A paper printout of at risk internet material is different from other kinds of printing because it points directly to the act of printing itself as a moment of decision-making and survival. Printouts don’t involve print professionals (in the traditional sense); they happen because someone close to the digital material makes a decision to “be safe” or “make a backup.” When they “print it out” with materials and equipment at hand, the internet material enters a new dimension. It takes on a more stable condition, where it can be safely moved, stored, shared. The greatest affordance of a printout moment is that it gives the material a greater chance of survival across time and space.

I just had a deeply moving week in California visiting two precious examples of early-internet (pre-web) paper printouts that continue to persist for decades. These are printouts related to specific moments in queer history that would have been lost, had the decision to print them out not been made. I learned about these documents online, and suspected they might have a particularly emotional charge or aura about them in person, given their special contexts. I wanted a chance to encounter their material trajectory through time, and to examine them closely as physical evidence of queer life. I wasn’t prepared! These experiences were extraordinary. I’ll write about one of them here, and the other in a subsequent post.

At the ONE National Gay and Lesbian Archives at USC in Los Angeles I examined an artifact labeled “David Charnow Upper Westsider papers, 1987-1990,” also known as the SURVIVORS printout. Inside a cardboard box are 12 folders containing more than a thousand loose sheets of letter-sized computer paper printouts. The story of the SURVIVORS printout was beautifully documented and analyzed in this text by Kathryn Brewster and Bo Ruberg in 2020, which is where I first learned about it. The authors identify several important themes within the content, and of the printout itself as a media artifact, which I won’t repeat here; rather, I’ll focus on my own experience of the printout in more affective and embodied terms—“queer material in queer hands,” as stated by Ben Power elsewhere1—and how the SURVIVORS printout is a stunning example of “survival by sharing.”

The SURVIVORS printout documents an early online message board for people with HIV/AIDS that was a section of The Backroom, a gay digital bulletin board service (BBS). SURVIVORS was created by David Charnow (1942–1990) in 1987, while he was completing his Ph.D. at Columbia University. Charnow learned that he was HIV positive just as he started SURVIVORS, and documented his struggles in his own posts, signed with his handle =UPPER WESTSIDER= (in the future I’ll write about this handle as a powerful example of queer typography). His posts were numerous and mixed in with writing from others who came to the message board to search for and offer information, guidance, and support. Charnow ran SURVIVORS as a queer survival network until July 1990, when he passed away from AIDS-related illnesses. He made a complete printout of all of the posts one month before he died. The SURVIVORS printout was donated to the ONE Archives by Susan Charnow Richards in 2000, according to the finding aid. There’s a copy of the printout at The Center in NYC as well.

After spending seven hours with the printout, I left the archive and just kind of broke down in the car. The emotional weight of the experience was extreme; it was a lot to process and I’m going to return to Los Angeles to spend more time with it. The content itself is deeply moving and powerful in ways that would be expected (interconnected stories about illness, dying, loss), but I think I was responding to something else as well. It had to do with the ephemerality of the artifact itself (loose papers, folders, a box), its minimal presence, its barely-there materiality—all of this in contrast with the enormity of the world contained in the box. I was hit with a sharp awareness of time that I sensed as a loss in my own body. It was about being in proximity with this box, and it had to do with my own being and my own survival.

It was a realization that each of the posts contained in the SURVIVORS printout was a direct conduit to someone, all of these lives engaged and entangled with each other over a digital network that no longer exists, and that the authors’ actions at the keyboard—making these posts—is all that remains. This is what persists: the box with a thousand sheets of paper, documenting their queer acts of typing, which I was able to access only as a direct result of Charnow’s decision to print, and my access to this archive. I felt connected to him and his decision, entangled through this fragile trajectory of papers ending up in this box at the ONE Archives. Within the hybrid digital/analog condition of the SURVIVORS printout as a media archeology, I found something else—a more emotionally fraught hybrid condition of being and existence, of being both there and not there. Handling the evidence with my own hands was a full, connected experience that I felt deeply in my body, as it positioned me directly in front of major gaps in the timeline: the loss of lives and histories stopped short, neglected, forgotten, of course, but also—the loss of my own experience of that crisis. I was alive throughout the HIV/AIDS crisis but “unconscious in the street,” frightened, alone, and turning away from it as part of my own survival. I’m reckoning with that now.

Marika Cifor writes that “archives offer the possibility of survival,” in describing an encounter with a single human hair in an archive during their own research, likely belonging to Victoria Schneider, a trans woman, sex worker, and activist.2 Such an encounter “closes some of the distance between objects and the lives they represent, bringing together bodies to build identities, stories, and futures for themselves, while maintaining space for possibility and keeping subjects in time differently.”3 Cifor writes that the stakes of such an embrace are high, and that the central question for archives is “how the past that emerges from them ‘can potentially produce a revelatory historical conscious of the present’ that is so desperately needed.”4

Describing such an encounter as an embrace resonates with me; my embrace in the ONE Archives (did I embrace the SURVIVORS, or did they embrace me?) was personal, intimate, and embodied. My entanglement has everything to do with my own timeline: I was born in 1968 and alive at the time of the SURVIVORS discussion group, and my own survival during the past 34 years. My connection to Charnow and all of the participants in the SURVIVORS discussion group as queer ancestors grounds me in the present, and guides me forward in time, towards the commitments I need to make, to grow through their stories, to share more, to create new evidence, to create openings for future entanglements. Am I doing enough? Survival networks are everywhere today, in the ruins of bombed neighborhoods, in queer manifestos of survival posted on Instagram, in stories written here on Substack, on Telegram and Discord servers. I’m overwhelmed with the possibilities for queer archive work, while being painfully aware of how challenging it is (and at times questionable, ethically) to make queer material more (or less) visible, more (or less) legible. I’m committed to the work, but I suspect it’s never-ending and mainly, mostly, an unfulfilled task.

This return to the printout makes me think hard about Library of the Printed Web, a publishing and curatorial project that I began in 2012, ending somewhat abruptly when it was acquired by MoMA Library in 2017. Outside of the aesthetic allure of the project, I failed to understand the political qualities of the printed web at the time, and the urgency of at risk internet printouts (I explored at risk printouts a bit with a few later projects, like Thank you for your interest in this subject (2017) and Steve, Harvey and Matt, (2018)). I was so focused on documenting artistic appropriation, publishing, and printing practices in the early years of the 21st century that I neglected to see how printing out the internet was actually a much older practice, one that can have enormous implications for how we understand the interconnected politics and cultures of the early internet, queer history, and movements towards liberation.

An even earlier example of a liberatory printout—perhaps the first one—is the Community Memory printout at the archive of the Computer History Museum, in Fremont, California. I was able to visit that one, too, and I’ll write about it in my next post.

“An ethics of entanglement entails possibilities and obligations for reworking the material effects of the past and the future. As the quantum eraser experiment shows, it is not the case that the past (a past that is given) can be changed (contrary to what some physicists have said), or that the effects of past actions can be fully mended, but rather that the ‘past’ is always already open to change. There can never be complete redemption, but spacetimematter can be productively reconfigured, as im/possibilities are reworked. Reconfigurings don’t erase marks on bodies—the sedimenting material effects of these very reconfigurings—memories/re-member-ings—are written into the flesh of the world. Our debt to those who are already dead and those not yet born cannot be disentangled from who we are. What if we were to recognise that differentiating is a material act that is not about radical separation, but on the contrary, about making connections and commitments?”

—Karen Barad, “Quantum Entanglements and Hauntological Relations of Inheritance: Dis/continuities, SpaceTime Enfoldings, and Justice-to-Come,” final paragraph

I’m already feeling the pain of the archive. I’m realizing that I always have been. Barad offers a way to navigate through it, I think.

Peering, unveiling

I’ve been doing research into Henry Gerber, born in Germany in 1892. I wasn’t familiar with him until recently, when I applied for an artist’s residency with the Institute for Public Architecture on Governors Island. To prepare my application, I googled “Governors Island” and “gay history,” and this National Park Service webpage, “LGBT History on Governors Island,” came up as one of the only results. Gerber is recognized as an early gay-rights activist, having founded the very first gay organization in the US in 1924: the Society for Human Rights. After being arrested for publishing and distributing the Society’s newsletter (the first of its kind), and losing his job with the US Postal Service, he enlisted in the US Army and was stationed on Governors Island from 1925 until 1942.

Also on that NPS page:

“Peering into the little known corners of Governors Island history can unveil surprising things … 

… Gerber was subject to beatings, blackmail, and other forms of harassment because of his homosexuality. In February 1942, Gerber’s quarters, on Governors Island, were searched by G-2, the Army’s investigative unit, which found no evidence of illegal behavior. Although nothing was found, he was held in Castle Williams, the guardhouse, for weeks after the search.”

Here is an account of gay violence—“beatings, blackmail, and other forms of harassment”—at the very place where I’ll soon be living. The pain is already located there, even before I arrive.

So now it’s part of my story, too.

This webpage is the only “official” queer history of Governor’s Island that I can find—written by the National Park Service in 2015.1 Their account reinforces the ongoing marginalization of queer history, using the language of shame and invisibility to introduce Gerber’s narrative as residing in the little known corners of history that we can peer into to find surprising things, which must be unveiled if they are to be known. The language is Othering, presenting queer history as a recently discovered novelty, entertaining even, to a mainstream audience.

In contrast, a detailed history of the US military’s longtime presence and activities on Governors Island—the perpetrator of the violence upon Gerber’s life and others—is readily found, having been deeply researched, documented, and presented repeatedly (and positively) as the known, visible, proud history of Governors Island.

What if Governors Island was always already queer?

I just found out that I was accepted to the IPA residency, so now I’m getting ready to live and work with this material on Governors Island for 11 weeks this fall. In August, I’ll visit the ONE Archives at USC in Los Angeles, which has a very small collection of Henry Gerber papers, to see what else I can find.

Double erasure

After establishing the Society for Human Rights in Chicago in 1924, Gerber published two issues of the Society’s newsletter, Friendship and Freedom. It’s the very first gay publication in US history, yet no copies are known to exist. We only have a single photograph, which shows the cover of the first issue. It’s both there and not there.

The photo was originally published in a Magnus Hirschfeld article about homosexuality in Germany in 1927 (in this book), and then reproduced in 1978 in the book Gay American History: Lesbians and Gay Men in the U.S.A., a massive account of queer history by Jonathan Katz (pictured above). After the second issue of Friendship and Freedom was mailed to members, the wife of one of the organizers went to the police to report them, and Gerber and two others were arrested, briefly jailed, and put on trial. The judge ruled that Friendship and Freedom was lewd and obscene and illegal to mail (because of the Comstock Act of 1873). Gerber paid a hefty fine, and lost his job with the postal service.

“Our debt to those who are already dead and those not yet born cannot be disentangled from who we are.” (Barad)

One of the other men arrested and jailed was the Rev. John T. Graves, a Black pastor in Chicago who was the first and only president of the Society for Human Rights. As the leader of the very first gay organization in US history, 45 years before Stonewall, we should know more about Graves, but sadly there is nothing. His name is only ever found as an attachment to Gerber’s scant story. He’s a footnote to a footnote, an even deeper erasure, lost within an already blurry and frustrating “little known corner” of queer history. Erasure upon/within erasure. Graves’s signature and address appear on the charter for the legal incorporation of their non-profit, and he’s briefly mentioned in one of Gerber’s accounts of the Society, but Graves—a Black man who played a key role in queer history—remains practically unknown today.

Our debt—what is owed to Gerber, but even more so to Graves—is considerable. As queer ancestors who struggled for liberation but were unable to leave us much, I feel myself becoming deeply entangled with the im/possibilities of their stories. As little as there is. I’m searching for ways to make connections and commitments.

“… the ‘past’ is always already open to change.” (Barad)

I’m now searching for anything at all that might be related to Rev. John T. Graves, and I did find one thing. Here it is:

It’s a PDF of a 1923 Chicago city directory, and in the church listings, there is a “Rev. John T. Graves, pastor” listed under St. John’s Evangelist Church, at 4857 S. Dearborn. The time and the place line up, so it’s possible that this might be where Graves preached. I’ll continue to search for details about his life. If that church still exists, it’s no longer at that address.

So much is missing, so much owed.

The very first gay publication is missing.

The brief history of the Society for Human Rights, cut short when its organizers were arrested in 1925, is barely there.

Whatever the G-2 unit was looking for in Gerber’s residence on Governors Island: “nothing was found.”

Rev. John T. Graves is missing, as is his own place in queer history.

What was the relationship between Gerber and Graves? I’ll visit the ONE Archives looking for some clues, in Gerber’s voice, in his correspondence, in his papers (“0.2 linear feet. 1 archive carton”). Graves, so far, has no voice in this story.

A webpage,

a charter,

a photograph of a newsletter,

a city directory.

Spacetimematter can be productively refigured, as im/possibilities are reworked. These scraps are painfully frustrating, but they are something, present with us now, and part of a past that’s always already open to change. There might be more waiting for us. These scraps might give us ways to occupy and shape our story as a continuous flow through a troubling spacetimematter, rather than as differences and separations. They might give us ways to rework and refigure some of that pain that’s always already waiting for us.

I’ll probably quote Karen Barad in every one of these posts. I’m reading their book Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning right now, and listening and re-listening to their dense, calming talks on YouTube. The snippet above is from “Troubling Time/s and Ecologies of Nothingness: Re-turning, Re-membering, and Facing the Incalculable,” which was first sent to me by my friend Jeremy Geragotelis, who shares with me a deeply felt compulsion to trouble time. With this text, Jeremy introduced me to Barad’s ideas, and I haven’t been the same since.

Barad is a quantum physicist and feminist scholar who writes about “all possible histories,” and the imagining of infinite possibilities for living and dying, “to turn over and over again the soil that gets encrusted on loosening the ghosts that have been forgotten” (from the talk version of the essay above). Embedded in the thickness of Barad’s “time being becoming” is my own wish for a new methodology for working with queer histories/futures, to embed and enfold moments into each other as a way to refuse chrononormativity, to bypass the “linear construction of time that serves the workings of racialized capitalism, imperialism, and colonialism” (Barad).

Which moments to examine? What to make of/from them?

My father recently shared with me a short piece that he wrote about his childhood home on the island of Lesvos, Greece. The text documents his memories of the village of Agia Paraskevi in the 1950s, and it was published in a newsletter that’s edited and distributed to a diasporic community that left the island in waves of migration throughout the 20th century. His original text appears in Greek of course, but I wanted to see what Google Translate would make of it, and it’s kind of remarkable.

He titled his piece “Agia Paraskevi 1950–1960,” but it got cut off when he made a copy for me, with only the word Agia appearing entirely, which means saint or holy in Greek (the village is named for Saint Friday). The rest of the title was sliced in half and illegible, but Google auto-completed it and re-titled the piece “Holy preparation of him.” This is some kind of failure/gift and I’ll take it, this language now traveling through so many layers of mediation, from a Google doc to email to the printed publication to my father’s copy to Google’s translation algorithms, and finally the JPG that I am now posting here to Substack’s servers. This is—and isn’t—about accuracy, and the many possible truths that might be revealed through a close examination, through the intermediary agents, the tools we use to inscribe, to measure, to translate, to communicate, to remember. It can all be considered.

Another failure here, in the actual printed publication, is the misspelling of his name, which appears in Latin letterforms. The third “l” in “Soulellis” is missing and our family name appears as Soulelis. The “elis” or “ellis” ending on family names is typical to Lesvos; both are common (for example, Geragotelis—Jeremy’s family is also from the island). Perhaps the missing “l” is another kind of mediated gift, pointing towards the fluid nature of language and identity when considering place. I like that it refuses fixity; the name is somewhat preserved, but different. It presents something else to consider.

I’m interested in the intermingling of the personal and the political when wandering around archives. I feel this profoundly when I enter queer archives or go about queering archives, sensing my own timeline entangled with something else, much larger, but not always accessible, and never complete. Again and again, trying to locate myself in a queer timeline produces strange sensations for me, sometimes satisfying (oh look, there I am), but often painful (I can’t find myself).

I recently started gathering all of the photographs my family took on our trips to Lesvos earlier in life, pulling them from our photo albums. The first trip was in June 1971, when I was three years old; this was also my mother’s first trip to Greece after marrying my father in 1965, and my father’s first return to the village since leaving in 1961. It was significant in so many ways.

What we have now, as evidence, are ten Polaroid images taken on that trip (four appear in this post). It’s an intimate archive unique to my family, but I’m searching for more, for other kind of entangled meanings that might be found here, beyond the personal. Strategies that I might take with me. I’ve only just started to see them.

This morning, I decided to scan the ten Polaroids with my phone, but I couldn’t avoid the glare. Rather than look for a flatbed scanner, I downloaded Google’s Photoscan app, which uses a unique process to create scans without any glare. You scan each photo 5 times—once in its entirety, and then 4 additional times, each centered on a large circle that the app positions at each of the 4 corners of the image. The software then seamlessly stitches the images together. The results are extremely satisfying, producing the clean JPGs here in this post, if also somewhat unsettling, with a kind of bright, digital-ish sheen applied to what is otherwise a 53-year-old object. I’m not sure if it gives them new life, or deadens them.

One aspect of Polaroids that I love is that each one is a unique object that was present at the original scene (not just a recording of the light; rather, the material substrate itself was there). These Polaroids are different now; I’m fascinated by their sudden shift in appearance, in a new digital state, with all of the failures and gifts that they’ll accumulate, still to be discovered.

Time brings changes, changes create memories, as Google translated the first line of my father’s text, and I’m curious how we might take these very specific material artifacts, the objects and all that they inherit across time, across all of the different apparatuses that produce them, changing along the way, and open them up to the thickness of time in them, unfolding from them. Could this strategy be used to re-shape past events?

Traditional archival strategies might focus on precision and fixity in the construction of accurate timelines, with the intent to fix images like these into a single point, or a series of points; to determine their place in time, and to write the narrative. But what if we were to trouble those archival strategies (or even trouble the archivists themselves, or the entire archive itself for that matter), and “spread” or smear these artifacts out over a larger, interpretive time/space? Can we open up a specific point and expand it out, connect it, entangle it—even touch it?

I remember a few blurry things from that trip, like the stray cats in the village, and a feeling of being seen by the village women who would come to visit the house. I also remember how strange I thought it was that my grandfather would sleep outside on the roof when we were there. It seemed radical to my three-year-old self. I think I grew up thinking that he preferred to be out there, in some kind of rebellious way, and I’m sure this contributed to how I grew to think of him. But now I see that it was probably more about the circumstance of our visit; the house was tiny and crowded. My parents and I slept in the one room upstairs, and my grandmother was sleeping in the one room downstairs. My grandfather chose the roof.

I forgot about this photograph, until now. This is the one photo, from the ten that I scanned this morning, where the glare wasn’t eliminated; another kind of failure, visible in the upper right corner. I tried to re-scan it and the failure was repeated, so there’s something about this particular scene that refuses to be flattened out. But also, in the lower left corner—something else that I know I’ve never noticed before. It appears to be a hand. Is it? It looks like a hand extending into the scene from just outside the frame, like it’s reaching for my sleeping grandfather. It may or may not be a hand.

It could be a distortion, something else entirely, but in considering it, something’s been opened, and I can’t un-see it.

“What does it mean to confront the nothingness, to touch its fullness? This is a question that cannot be answered in the abstract, not once and for all, but must be asked over and over again with one’s body.” (Barad, “Troubling Time/s”). I find myself physically extending my own hand towards the screen right now, in front of this photo, foolishly trying to replicate the pose, testing it out to see if it could be a hand. It looks entirely plausible; in fact, my own hand looks remarkably like the one that I think I see. It took me 53 years to notice it. Barad writes that “touching oneself involves touching Others. The renormalized self is a collectivity, not an individual, in an undoing not only of self/other but human/nonhuman.”

This is how I’m starting this work, in a very literal sense: loosening my own queer timeline, before I turn towards others, trying to open it up where I can, stretching, reaching, touching, re-turning. I need new strategies, new methodologies, for entanglement. Oh look, there I am.

It feels so good to be writing again. I mean, I never stopped writing, but doing it publicly like this feels different now, especially post-twitter (and post-blogging, post everything).

A long time ago, years before I started teaching, I needed to take a break from client work, and declared it a sabbatical. I left the clients behind, left the country, and tried to turn more fully towards my own needs. The word sabbatical comes from sabbat, to rest. I started blogging on soulellis.com as I traveled and did my first-ever residency, and wrote “in public” almost daily, before I had the language to name these ideas, like publishing as an artistic practice or making public. I wasn’t even calling myself an artist at the time, but that sabbatical 13 years ago became a definitive moment to try it out—could I dare make things on my own, for myself? It was a brief, blissful pause from the transactional grind of commercial work, accommodation, and compromise. Along the way I found out that attending to one’s own needs can be a beautiful way to be open, to see all around, and to connect deeply with others.

Now, I see this coming year away from teaching—an actual academic sabbatical—as more of a re-set than a rest. It’s a return to work. Attending to my needs, my work, my practice, which I’ve missed terribly, especially in these last three years while I was consumed with more communal work, helping to organize Queer.Archive.Work and heading up the department of graphic design at RISD.

I’m framing this new place, this blog-ish “carrier bag assemblage” of posts, with the imperfect title survival by sharing. It’s a borrowed three-word phrase that I return to again and again to describe a kind of methodology, inspired by and situated in relation to ongoing, non-linear trajectories of publishing practices. These are interconnected figures, fragments, images, and stories that communicate across time and space through gestures of radical generosity and tenderness; I’m sure I’ll write about them in future posts. I use the phrase “survival by sharing” to approach my own never-ending desire to establish real contact with these queer ancestors, searching for others, before us, embedded within us, who lit up their own networks of community-making and publics-forming. I use “survival by sharing” as a way to confront rupture and conjure the reparative energy that’s needed when working and moving through queer archives. And so this is how I’m hoping to spend the coming year: making work that’s inspired by entanglement, time travel, embeddedness, superposition, and other quantum ideas, exploring archival justice, queer typography and design, radical publishing, and image-making. I’m not sure what form any of this will take, and I’ll probably just try things out here as I go. My hope is that this blog might be a much-needed risky space for experiments, growth, and connection, maybe sometimes inconsistent, never predictable, hopefully always authentic. Thanks for the company.

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