Queer X Design

INTRODUCTION

Shortly after turning sixteen I was given the keys to my parents’ rusty, gray Chevy Astrovan. Ready to begin exploring my hometown of Austin, Texas, one of the first stops I made was the local gay bookstore, Lobo. There I bought a thin, rainbow-striped bumper sticker with the intention of immediately adhering it to the back of “my new car.” In my head such an action was a declaration—a public claiming of a piece of my identity I was still coming to terms with. But this potential for increased public visibility forced me to pause and reconsider. What if the sticker inflamed a fellow driver, causing an accident on the road? What if I got nasty looks or terrible catcalls? Was I prepared? This is how I came to be petrified in the midst of my teenage liberation—unsure of what I was doing or what the potential consequences might be. This existential crisis likely only lasted half a minute, but I remember time creeping to a halt with the weight of what seemed like a monumental decision. Snapping out of it, I spat on a paper towel and cleaned the grime off the van’s bumper. After peeling the long, slick backing off the sticker, I adhered it to the back bumper.

What I didn’t know, but I suppose intuitively believed, was that minor acts like putting a sticker on a car aggregate and have the capacity to shift lived worlds. A thin rainbow stripe on the back of my car was a relatively insignificant yet nevertheless public indication that the driver was an LGBTQ person or ally. Things weren’t as bad as I had feared, for as many times as I was the target of repulsed glares and shouts—likely due to my bad driving—I received twice as many friendly waves and honks from other LGBTQ folks and allies. Their bumpers sported rainbow stickers, too, and pink triangles, HRC logos, and a variety of queer-positive slogans.

In many respects I was quite privileged. I grew up in a liberal household and city, during a decade when lesbians, gays, bisexuals, transgender people, and queers were newly welcomed into popular culture—albeit, not with the same zeal or nuance in all cases. Pedro Zamora and Ellen DeGeneres were on television; I could rent Paris Is Burning from the “gay and lesbian” section of my local Blockbuster (and I did, many times); RuPaul had a talk show on VH1; mainstream bookstores carried a small clutch of lesbian and gay magazines (Out, The Advocate, Curve, and XY) and feminist and gay bookstores carried everything else; I found my first boyfriends in online chat rooms and message boards; and I could avail myself of LGBTQ youth services and counseling if I ever needed them. It seemed that each year more and more people in my own life and in national culture came out publicly, expanding my community by degrees. I didn’t yet understand the substantial importance of the decades of activism, struggle, and losses that preceded the good life I was able to live as a young, white, middle-class, gay kid in a fairly liberal Southern city in the 1990s.

Still—I remember reading about downtown gay bashings on a semi-regular basis; my mother and I watched in horror as the torture and murder of Matthew Shepard garnered national news coverage; and now, years later, I think of the transgender people who were murdered and whose lives and deaths were so stigmatized that their passing did not garner national sympathy or outrage. I never believed, despite the uptick in popular visibility, or the then-current claims to “lesbian chic,” that my friends or I were safe in this world. With visibility comes vulnerability; every new milestone of acceptance prompts virulent backlash and bigotry.

My biological extended family didn’t truly understand this aspect of LGBTQ life until my cousin, Christopher Loudon, was killed in combat operations in Iraq. In the days leading up to his funeral, word arrived that Fred Phelps and his Westboro Baptist Church congregation, long famous for their “God hates fags” protests, were planning to picket our family’s tragedy. On the day we all gathered at a local church in rural Pennsylvania, Phelps’s followers showed up, carrying signs that claimed the death of my cousin was evidence of God’s wrath visited upon a nation that too easily accepted LGBTQ people (“fags” was their term of art) into their fold. Phelps overstated the case—reality and sense often escaped him. My aunts and uncles didn’t understand, in the depths of their grief, how anyone could say such vile things. It pressed at the boundaries of my imagination, too, but my world had long included an awareness of people like Phelps. I found that in the midst of our collective mourning, I needed to do a fair amount of educating—and my family, a fair amount of listening.

I relay these anecdotes to point out the ways that LGBTQ life and politics regularly suffuse both the everyday and the extraordinary, just as the histories of LGBTQ communities are littered with mundane and outrageous acts. And for as much as we understand these histories, or think we understand them, there is still much more to uncover and learn. One of the aspects of LGBTQ histories that has yet to receive sustained attention is the profound importance of design in the social and political livelihoods of LGBTQ people.

The history of the ally group PFLAG (Parents, Families, and Friends of Lesbians and Gays) is an instructive example. When Queens schoolteacher Jeanne Manford marched with her gay son, Morty, in the 1972 Christopher Street Liberation March in New York, she couldn’t have known that her simple, handwritten sign reading “PARENTS of Gays: UNITE in SUPPORT for our CHILDREN” would essentially establish one of the most visible and important LGBTQ ally groups in the United States. Written in bold block letters on an attention-grabbing orange poster board, Manford’s text possessed an educator’s design intelligence—the capitalized words offering a truncated and expedient message to those standing on the sidelines of the march. Three years after the Stonewall uprisings, Manford’s altruistic and visible support of her child speaks beautifully to the intertwined legacies of LGBTQ-identified and non-LGBTQ-identified people acting in concert in coalitional struggles.

Manford’s sign worked. And because of the outpouring of support she received from both LGBTQ people as well as parents and families, she and her husband cofounded Parents FLAG, which eventually became the national organization known as PFLAG. Over the decades of its existence, PFLAG has provided grassroots local and national support to a variety of LGBTQ causes—including anti-discrimination legislative initiatives, the development of educational materials aimed at destigmatizing and supporting LGBTQ people, and the rallying of sympathetic faith communities to larger LGBTQ causes. PFLAG’s designs changed apace with the organization. Buttons from the organization’s first decade sometimes rendered PFLAG’s initialism literally as a waving flag—a clever, visual punning. Years later a poster designed for the organization’s 1985 national convention dramatized the pearl-clutching protestations of their target demographic with visual wit and sophistication. Riffing off the form of a gridlocked suburban neighborhood, the poster moves its viewer from stigmatization to acceptance. One house in the neighborhood features a pink triangular roof, indicating the presence of LGBTQ life inside. The other houses contain question marks—visually manifesting the question rendered in large, pink, capitalized letters nearby: “What will the neighbors say?” But the question marks also signify in another way, questioning what an LGBTQ family member might overlook—that other households, too, might be dealing with the same thing.

In 2004 PFLAG debuted its current logo, comprised of an interlinked red heart and orange triangle placed atop a yellow starburst. The heart represents the love of families and friends, and the triangle has long been recognized as a symbol of LGBTQ communities. The starburst, in the words of the organization, “represents the power of this united front to move equality forward.” Using the associative language of symbolic representation, PFLAG, and many of the groups discussed in this book, use design to leverage visual cues that signal their commitments to a set of shared principles and values. This is not unique to LGBTQ communities and organizations—in fact, it could be argued that anti-LGBTQ groups do the same thing (those heinous Westboro Baptist Church placards were every bit as designed as Manford’s), but this book considers the signs, symbols, banners, graphic art, and logos that power LGBTQ communities in their ongoing struggles and celebrations. In short, these are examples of designs that are largely made for us, by us. Paying attention to the intricacies of their histories can, in the words of queer architectural and design scholar Aaron Betsky, “amaze us, scare us, or delight us, but certainly open us to new worlds within our daily existence.”

A few distinct tensions mark national LGBTQ histories and emerge as key features in LGBTQ design. The first and perhaps most important of these is the ambivalent relationship between seeking broad societal acceptance and finding innate value in homosexuality’s outlaw history. For some, such as bisexual activist Lani Ka’ahumanu, there is a bright line between these two approaches. “Remember,” Ka’ahumanu warns us, “assimilation is a lie, it is spiritual erasure.” Her statement can be read as an excoriation of the values of assimilation—whereby one plays down one’s differences to fit in with a larger social group—but it can also be taken as a call to innately value difference. Not everyone in LGBTQ communities feels the same as Ka’ahumanu. Some are vocal about simply wanting to lead a “normal” life (whatever that may mean), with all the trappings that would come with such a desire. Indeed, this tension exists graphically, too, in the difference between the unabashed flamboyance of Gilbert Baker’s rainbow pride flag and the focus group–tested logo of the Human Rights Campaign—who, in working closely with design firm Stone Yamashita Partners, made LGBTQ concerns palatable to a broad swathe of the U.S. electorate.

Many of these tensions over assimilation play out in the arena of language. LGBTQ people have constantly defined and redefined the words and terms used to describe their desires, gender identities, and political interests. Over the period covered in this book LGBTQ people have called themselves homophiles, homosexuals, gays, lesbians, faggots, dykes, trannies, queers, genderfuck, transgender, and so much more. Such identitarian terms are historical, emerging at particular times and falling away after years of use. Speak of “homophiles” and one hearkens back to a time when men and women spearheaded pre-liberation political organizations such as the Mattachine Society. Saying the word “queer” recalls the activist moment immediately following the start of the HIV/AIDS pandemic. Queer Nation, one of the most prolific and vociferous organizations during this time, reclaimed “queer” from its popular usage of denigrating and devaluing the lives of LGBTQ people, and developed the telling slogan and political chant: “We’re here! We’re queer! Get used to it!” The same is also true of visual symbols. What was once a symbol of the vilest intolerance—for example, the pink triangle as used by the Nazis to mark homosexual men during the Holocaust—was actively reclaimed and resignified as a badge of empowerment and solidarity. What more convenient foundation for such political alliances than a shared experience of oppression?

The second tension regards who, exactly, is the imagined audience for LGBTQ design. Some items in this book, like the “gay money” stamps created throughout the 1970s, eighties, and nineties, are forthright in their address of a broadly conceived national community. The idea was that money stamped with phrases like “Gay $” and “Dyke Dollars” could make visible the purchase power of LGBTQ people. Gay money could come from the local convenience store or supermarket; anyone could have gay dollars in their wallet or purse. In striking contrast to gay money’s public address, Bob Mizer’s “Subjective Character Analysis”—an ideographic code that identified the sexual characteristics and behaviors of his many hunky male models—was meant to be circulated only among a relatively small coterie of like-minded individuals. Flags, like Monica Helms’s transgender flag, do both at once: affirming the experiences of trans individuals while also announcing their presence within larger LGBTQ and straight communities. In their materiality, composition, typography, iterability, and language, LGBTQ designers identify and aim their messages at particular audiences.

Many of the designs in this book demonstrate a third tension, which is that LGBTQ livelihoods are marked by both struggle and celebration; agitation and compromise. If the civil rights movement of the mid-twentieth century taught us anything, it is that the terms of liberation must be demanded and taken; for they are not generally given freely by those in positions of power. As one of the historical influences on the gay liberation movement (along with the near-contemporaneous women’s liberation movement), U.S. civil rights movements of the 1950s and 1960s offered a template for imagining and seizing a different life. The equals sign, the upraised fist—these are common motifs in LGBTQ design derived directly from the civil rights graphics that came before. The equals sign, for example, is central to the “Silence = Death” logotype developed by a small group of graphic designers and artists in the early years of the AIDS pandemic. As one of the most dire and devastating events in LGBTQ history, the AIDS pandemic (which is still ongoing, despite the development and distribution of more and more new pharmaceuticals) is no cause for celebration, but rather for action. The stirring designs of the Silence = Death Collective and the various art and design groups allied with ACT UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power) rage against government inaction, pharmaceutical opportunism, and public apathy. Performative activist strategies such as “die-ins” and ceremonial scatterings of ashes in places of political power accompany the seemingly more inert graphics developed by these groups. But these signs and graphics must be imagined in motion—in the upraised hands of protestors, covering their torsos and heads as they show up for themselves and their communities. But not everything is doom and gloom. In the midst of the AIDS pandemic, C. M. Ralph, who was witness to the devastation of HIV/AIDS in San Francisco, developed the first queer video game—Caper in the Castro—as a kind of love letter to her communities. Filled with in-jokes and intrigue, Ralph’s game provided lightness in a time of great darkness, a celebration when there seemed to be little to celebrate. It remains, for me, one of the most remarkable designs of the period for this reason alone.

Today, my everyday world is indelibly marked by LGBTQ design. Banners of the rainbow flag are placed at intervals along the University of Southern California’s main thoroughfare during the month of June; ten feet from my office door is a newly minted gender-neutral restroom—a white triangle on a blue circle marking that anyone is welcome; and on top of my bookshelf rests a cardboard sign that I carried in the 2011 QueerBomb! march and rally. Some symbols I have a particularly personal relationship with—such as Dandy Unicorn, the gender-ambivalent figurehead/mascot of The Gay Place, and the weekly LGBTQ section of the Austin Chronicle, an alternative news weekly. During graduate school I worked for The Gay Place, then under the editorship of Kate X Messer. She commissioned choreographer and designer Lindsey Taylor to design a unicorn mascot for The Gay Place. Magical and unique, the unicorn that Taylor created spoke to the values of difference and empowerment so endemic to LGBTQ histories. Soon, Messer and I became Dandy Unicorn—using the persona to comment on people’s Facebook walls and organizing contingents in the local pride parade under the sign of our mascot.

I took these lessons of Dandy Unicorn to heart after moving to Houston. Realizing that there were many gay bars, but no queer spaces that welcomed gender nonconforming and trans revelers, a small group of friends (myself included) started a queer dance party called Dykon Fagatron. Held monthly, the party featured DJ sets and live performances. Before throwing our first event, Ana Elise Johnson—one of Dykon Fagatron’s primary collaborators—created what would be the logo of the party. Realizing that one of the barriers to welcoming genderqueer revelers into an exclusively gay space was the presence of gender-neutral restrooms, the logo Johnson developed ultimately also hung on the doors of the venue’s restrooms. Taking the concept of the pan-gendered restroom to its absurd and playful extreme, Johnson’s design included both male and female pictographs, as well as iconography related to disability, dissent, and monstrosity. It was a ridiculous graphic, meant to poke fun at the gendered separation of spaces; and a signal to all that no matter how you identified, this party was for you. The success of the party proved the intelligence of Johnson’s design—just as the conversations between regular bar patrons and Dykon Fagatron partygoers proved the utter variety of LGBTQ experience.

What Dandy Unicorn and the Dykon Fagatron logo crystallize for me is the fact that design has the capacity to change some of the terms of everyday life, no matter how slight. But for LGBTQ design to move forward, we must be aware of its past. The poet, publisher, and activist Audre Lorde makes this point beautifully, in one of her essays in the compendium Sister Outsider: “But there are no new ideas waiting in the wings to save us as women, as human. There are only old and forgotten ones, new combinations, extrapolations and recognitions from within ourselves—along with the renewed courage to try them out.”

LGBTQ design is about audacity, trying things out, and sometimes failing. Because LGBTQ people have historically been denied positions of political and economic power—or even basic protections from those who would threaten our lives and livelihoods—many of the designs discussed in this book share, by dint of circumstance, similar origin stories: namely, courageous individuals and small groups working together to visualize and imagine new political horizons. There is an honesty and earnestness in this task. But for too long these designers’ and activists’ contributions have gone uncollected and untold. I hope that in some small way this book changes that. I have gathered here examples of LGBTQ design from the pre-liberation period to now, giving form to the manifest complexities, contradictions, and innovations of LGBTQ communities. The designs contained in this book have been culled from a variety of archives, public institutions, and private organizations—some are being published for the first time.

One thing is certain: from the homophile movements of the 1950s to the growing concerns of contemporary LGBTQ movements in tackling intersectional oppressions, the depth and breadth of the U.S. LGBTQ experience is deep and vast. In assembling this astonishing collection of LGBTQ design, I take a cue from the poet Essex Hemphill, who wrote, “I need the ass-splitting truth to be told, so I will have something pure to emulate, a reason to remain loyal.” Consider this a first, and not a final, attempt to tell some of these stories.