Copyright

Text copyright © 2019 by Andrew Campbell

Compilation copyright © 2019 by Andrew Campbell and Black Dog & Leventhal Publishers, an imprint of
Perseus Books, LLC, a subsidiary of Hachette Book Group, Inc.

Cover design by Katie Benezra

Cover photograph by Arizona Newsum and Derek Haas 35th Anniversary Rainbow Flag hand dyed and
sewn by Gilbert Baker, courtesy of Richard Ferrara The flag in this photograph is signed in the lower right
corner and is flag #6 in a series of 35 flags made in 2013 by Gilbert Baker for the 35th anniversary of the
creation of the Rainbow Flag.
One of the flags from this series was given to President Barak Obama in June 2016.
Another was added to the permanent collection of the London Design Museum in 2017.
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E3-20190320-JV-NF-ORI
 CONTENTS

Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Introduction

Pre-Liberation
FIRE!!
Florence Tempest Sheet Music Illustration
Lesbian Pulp Fiction
“Prove It on Me Blues” Advertisement
ONE Magazine
The Ladder
Undercover
Club My-O-My Advertisement
Mona’s 440 Club Napkin
Aflame
S.I.R. Pocket Lawyer
Nautical Star Tattoo
Phil Sparrow’s Tattoo Flash
Damron’s Address Book
Equality for Homosexuals Buttons
Bob Mizer’s Physique Pictorial and Subjective Character Analysis
José Sarria Album Cover and Campaign Posters

1970s
Tom Doerr’s Lambda Symbol
The Association of Black Gays
Labrys
Gay Is Good Button/Gay Is Angry Poster
Lavender Menace T-Shirt
Body Language
Gay Liberation Front Poster
Post Up
Mirage Magazine
Jewel’s Catch One Poster
Anita Bryant Sucks Oranges
Button Up
Lavender Rhinoceros
Fey-Way Studios
Pleasure Chest Logo
Come! Unity Press Posters
RFD Magazine Cover
Gilbert Baker Flag
The Evolution of Gilbert Baker’s Flag
Hal Fischer’s Gay Semiotics

1980s
Pink Triangle
Sylvester Album Cover
Kitchen Table Press Book Covers
The AIDS Quilt
No on Prop 64 Posters
ACT UP
Silence = Death Poster
Kissing Doesn’t Kill
National Coming Out Day Logo
Invitation from the Saint
Window Display Design
Leather Flag
Keith Haring’s Heritage of Pride Logo
Keith Haring’s Once Upon a Time Mural
Caper in the Castro
Samois Logo
Fidonet Logo
March on Washington Posters
Day Without Art Logo
BLK Magazine
On Our Backs Magazine

1990s
Out of the Closet Logo
The AIDS Is Not a Game Game Poster
Safe/Unsafe Poster Campaign
HRC Logo
The Ribbon Project
DPN Zine
REPOhistory Marker
The Watermelon Woman Poster
XY Magazine
Bisexual Flag
Transgender Flag
Dykes to Watch Out For
Funny Bones
Zine Scene
2(X)IST
Money Stamp
Joan Jett Blakk for President Button
Clit Club Uniform

21st Century
Ellen Logo
Grindr Logo
Gay.com Logo/GLAAD Logo
Sylvia Rivera Law Project Logo
Black Lives Matter
Gc2b Chest Binder
Demian DinéYazhi’ Prints
MOTHA Pronoun Showdown
California Restroom Signage
Gilbert Baker Typeface
Pride Flags
Against Equality Logo
Lesbian Avengers Logo
Queer Bomb Logo
NOH8
Pride Flag Emoji
Pride Train Takeover
Buck-Off

Acknowledgments
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 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.
 Jeanne Manford’s original sign was a precursor for the national organization now known as PFLAG.

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.
 Some early examples of PFLAG buttons.

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.
 PFLAG’s sly poster for its 1985 national convention.

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.

The current logo.

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 pink triangle, reclaimed and
resignified.

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.
A powerful Spanish-language version of the iconic Silence=Death design.
 Dandy Unicorn

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.
 One version of the Dykon Fagatron logo.

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.
Pre-Liberation
 PRE-LIBERATION

Homosexuality, and heterosexuality by extension, is a modern invention. The mutually constitutive terms
were coined in an 1868 letter sent by Karl-Maria Kertbeny, an Austrian-born Hungarian journalist, to Karl
Heinrich Ulrichs, a writer and sexual reform campaigner in Germany. Up until then, Ulrichs had referred
to men who had sex with other men as “urnings” or “uranians”—a term derived from the Greek goddess
Aphrodite Urania, formed from the testicles of the sky god Uranus. Ulrichs’s term suggested a third
gender, a purposeful melding of male and female energies, whose natural result was the development of
same-sex attraction. Although homosexual behavior has been documented in nearly every society—
modern and ancient—before Kertbeny coined the term “homosexual,” at least in Europe and in the United
States, men who had sex with other men were not known under strict identitarian terms, but rather for
their behavior as sodomites—those who engaged in non-procreative, penetrative sex. The term “lesbian”
was preceded by the term “tribade,” which derived from the Greek and Latin word for “rub,” erroneously
suggesting that lesbian sex was, by default, non-penetrative. Interestingly, the term “bisexual” predates
both “homosexual” and “uranian”—having been in use for at least a century by botanists.
This brief rehearsal of some of the key terms of proto-LGBTQ identities is necessary, because identities
are historical effects of social conditions, consolidated at specific moments in time. It may be odd—truly
queer—to think that a man who had sex with another man in the late nineteenth century was not gay, or
that a woman who loved another women in the nineteenth century was not a lesbian (as was the case with
Emily Dickinson and her [eventual] sister-in-law Susan Gilbert), but this is essentially the point. Claiming
such would be anachronistic—placing the more familiar terms of today onto the past. Although we use the
words “lesbian” or “gay” to name female-female and male-male desire today, and “transgender” to name a
variety of gendered and sexed identifications outside of the normative male/female, masculine/feminine
binaries, these were not terms in circulation in the years leading up to the uprisings at Gene Compton’s
Cafeteria (San Francisco), Cooper’s Do-nuts or the Black Cat (Los Angeles), and the Stonewall Inn (New
York)—the events that signaled a cultural shift toward the conditions of liberation.
Even without the familiar identifying terms of today, men who had sex with other men, women who
had sex with other women, and those who fell outside of normative gender and sex binaries were subject
to extreme social pressures and legal persecution and prosecution. Punishment for sodomy and the more
vague “crimes against nature” effectively criminalized homosexual activity—even though sodomy covered
a range of activities (such as oral sex) not exclusive to male-male or female-female sexual expression.
Dress code laws prohibited cross-dressing and other visible forms of transvestite appearance. These laws
were enforced selectively, and importantly did not apply to the many vaudeville performers who dressed
in the clothes of the opposite gender. Their transgressions were sanctioned because they were assumed
to be only temporary and for the purposes of entertainment. All of these restrictions were imposed
supposedly to uphold the moral standards of broadly defined and imagined city, state, and national
communities. That these communities were never assumed to include other LGBTQ people is evidence of
the second-class status of the LGBTQ community. Thus, some of the earliest evidence that we have of
LGBTQ life in the United States come in the form of arrest records, individuals arraigned under
repressive legal regimes.
As the philosopher Michel Foucault described in the indispensible first volume of his sprawling and
unfinished History of Sexuality series of books, such repressions actually occasioned the innovation and
sedimentation of sexual cultures. In response to police surveillance and oppression, the first organizations
dedicated to the causes of criminal justice reform and mutual support were established. Groups such as
Chicago’s Society for Human Rights or the Los Angeles–based Mattachine Society melded a broadly
liberal politics—Mattachine’s founder, Harry Hay, was a labor activist and an avowed Communist—with a
growing sense of urgency regarding the dismissal and perceived disposability of homosexual lives. Such
organizations, because they oftentimes had to operate in secret, developed rich visual codes, which
stealthily hid references to homophile political concerns and causes in the guise of benign symbols.
Mattachine’s name and primary symbol was that of the jester, a reference to Il Mattaccino—the jester
character from the Italian commedia dell’arte theatrical tradition, who often had the ability to speak truth
to the power of the king. Hay and the members of Mattachine thought of their role in similar terms; while
seemingly frivolous and the butt of many jokes, the jester could also be a surreptitious agent of social
change.
The pre-liberation period was a time of innovation in terms of the most common symbols of LGBTQ
communities. The astrological signs for Mars and Venus were imported from the natural sciences (most
especially the taxonomical writings of eighteenth-century Swiss naturalist Carl Linnaeus) where they
identified the effective sex of male and female plants, respectively. Although the history of the interlinked
Mars and Venus symbols is murky at best, the presence of astrological symbols in Bob Mizer’s “Subjective
Character Analysis,” for example, suggests that these were somewhat known symbols within homophile
communities. The pink triangle was a less common, but nevertheless present, signifier, as it had been the
symbol used by Nazis to identify and exterminate male homosexuals. Lesbians were branded with a black
triangle, the symbol for “asocial” men and women, a broad category that included prostitutes, those who
had sex with Jews, and thieves.
This latter point illuminates a common problem within LGBTQ histories, which is the relative
invisibility of lesbians in broad historical overviews of the period. Lesbians, like gay men, developed a
host of organizations and institutions during the pre-liberation period—and some exceptional individuals,
such as the blues singer Ma Rainey, were well known, even publicly promoted, for their purported love of
other women. Lesbians appeared in popular culture on the covers of pulp novels—with more masculine-
presenting women commonly framed as insidious corruptors of their (always assumed) more feminine-
presenting counterparts. Groups like Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon’s Daughters of Bilitis developed
noteworthy visual symbols—such as the “qui vive” logotype (French for “on alert”)—as they argued for
the decriminalization of their lives.
The 1950s also saw the establishment of the gay male motorcycle clubs—famously inspired by Marlon
Brando’s portrayal of a bike gang tough in the 1953 film The Wild One. The first of these groups, the
Satyrs Motorcycle Club (or MC) of Los Angeles, used the impish, mythological creature as their club
insignia—and it appeared on newsletters, flyers, banners, and patches (also known as club colors). To
escape the repressive regimes of urban centers—where the police and mafia controlled the conditions of
gay social life—the members of gay MCs rode out into the country for long holiday weekends where they
could socialize without interference. These clubs marked the beginnings of contemporary gay and lesbian
leather/BDSM communities and cultures.
In 1964 LIFE magazine ran a story entitled “Homosexuality in America.” It was a watershed piece of
journalism from the garrets of the mainstream press, and it did LGBTQ people no favors. Over the course
of several pages the author and photographer portrayed gay male social life (lesbians and transgender
folks were largely left by the wayside) as set within a dark and dangerous milieu, filled with men who
were either too effeminate (“sweater queens”) or too masculine (“leathermen”). Clark Polak, a homophile
activist living in Philadelphia, published Drum magazine in response. Drum’s first issue featured a story
written by P. Arody (likely a pseudonym for Polak), entitled “Heterosexuality in America,” satirically
lambasting the loose sexual mores of Hollywood stars and the average American heterosexual. Polak was
also involved in a sequence of annual pickets beginning on July 4, 1965, and ending in 1969, by local
homophile organizations such as the Mattachine Society and the Janus Society in front of Philadelphia’s
Independence Hall—the building then housing a symbol of American democracy, the cracked Liberty Bell.
Participants of these events called them “annual reminders,” and they were conceived to prompt
Philadelphia’s residents to remember that LGBTQ persons were consistently denied basic civil and human
rights. These “annual reminders” were the model for the popular political and performance form known
variously as the gay freedom/liberation march or gay pride parade.
In the period before the Stonewall uprisings, LGBTQ people experienced broad societal discrimination
and prejudice, which they met with innovation, imagination, and action.
 FIRE!!

Although it only existed for one issue, FIRE!!, a quarterly literary magazine dedicated to “younger negro
artists,” nevertheless had long-lasting and wide-ranging effects. The poetry, illustrations, and stories
within represented the collective efforts of seven giants of the Harlem Renaissance: Wallace Thurman,
Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Gwendolyn Bennett, Aaron Douglas, Richard Bruce Nugent, and
John Davis. Of these, Hughes and Nugent were gay. Thurman, whose uptown apartment served as an
informal salon for many of these luminaries of the Harlem Renaissance, featured murals painted by
Nugent, as did several other clubs around Harlem (some with apparently explicit homoerotic content).
Nugent contributed two items to FIRE!!, the first a pair of drawings, both depicting women whose
bodies are bracketed by lively geometric design. Appearing separated across several pages, these drawn
women nevertheless form an imaginary couple. Nugent’s other contribution was a prose poem entitled
“Smoke, Lilies, and Jade,” the first literary work written by an African American to openly discuss
homosexuality. Nugent did not publish the piece under his surname, fearing that the overt sexual politics
would reflect badly on his family. In this, and in other ways, gay and lesbian artists of the Harlem
Renaissance balanced a desire to be open about their sexuality, while also taking into account the broad
stigma such desires received.
 FLORENCE TEMPEST SHEET MUSIC ILLUSTRATION

Born Claire Lillian Ijames, the American vaudeville performer known as Florence Tempest impressed
audiences with her cross-dressing abilities while crooning the lyrics to songs such as “I Love the Ladies”
and “I Want a Boy to Love Me.” The former tells the story of a distracted college boy who gives up his
studies to chase women; while the latter was a more forlorn and pining tune. The songs at once celebrate
and lightly mock gender stereotypes. Before radio usurped vaudeville’s audiences, popular songs would
be released as sheet music, and cover illustrations did much to communicate a song’s content and
sentiments. In many of these sheet music covers, Tempest is dressed in boy drag, in dandified suits and
workmen’s clothes. Tempest’s cross-dressing presentation was an outgrowth of her earlier performances
with her biological sister (they worked together under the name Tempest and Sunshine). Sheet music
from these early performances show Tempest dressed in masculine clothing and her sister in more
feminine attire.
Tempest was hardly the only cross-dressing vaudeville performer. It is important to remark that such
theatrical cross-dressing did not necessarily align with incipient LGBTQ identities. Instead, cross-dressing
performances of Tempest’s kind were valued as a type of illusion, on par with other performance genres
such as magic or blackface, both of which were also ubiquitous on the vaudeville stage.
 LESBIAN PULP FICTION

Joining other popular genres such as mystery, romance, and western, lesbian pulp fiction was once
standard fare, available for purchase at bus stations and corner stores. The lurid covers of the novels
dramatized the common stigmas attached to mid-twentieth-century lesbian identities—featuring a butch,
more masculine-presenting woman guiding, leading, and even preying upon a more feminine-presenting
woman. While such compositions may seem comic or campy today, these women were visualized as both
true gender aberrations and titillating eye candy for an assumed male readership. But if these covers
appealed to men, the moral messaging inside the covers was aimed squarely at a female readership.
These novels often ended with the couple in dire straits—death was a common, and condemning, plot
device. As titillating as they were, the message was clear: disaster unquestioningly follows sexual
deviance, and no homosexual could reasonably expect a happy ending within their lifetime.
One novel that went on to become a classic of American fiction, and that defied many of the
conventions of lesbian pulp fiction, was Patricia Highsmith’s The Price of Salt (recently popularized as
Carol, in a film directed by Todd Haynes). Like many writers who sought to write about lesbian lives and
loves, Highsmith initially used a pseudonym—Claire Morgan. The book’s cover (left) depicts two women
inhabiting a space that is paradoxically domestic (notice the couch), dangerous, and otherworldly. A man
lurks in the distance, a former lover come to reclaim his partner. In terms of its plot The Price of Salt is
notable not only for its literary ambitions but for its refusal to succumb to an unhappy ending, as
Highsmith’s narrative ends on an ambiguous note. In 1983, the lesbian publishing house Naiad Press
offered to reprint Highsmith’s novel, stipulating a higher price if the author used her own name over the
pseudonym, an offer Highsmith refused. It wasn’t until the novel was retitled Carol (1990) that it finally
carried Highsmith’s byline.
 “PROVE IT ON ME BLUES” ADVERTISEMENT

Went out last night, had a great big fight

Everything seemed to go on wrong
I looked up, to my surprise
The gal I was with was gone.

So begins “Prove It on Me Blues,” one of Gertrude “Ma” Rainey’s most explicit songs about the
vicissitudes of lesbian love. The historian Jonathan Ned Katz called the sauntering tune an “assertive song
of lesbian self-affirmation and defiance,” and the accompanying print advertising campaign put out by
Paramount Records (a popular publisher of “race” records) confirms Katz’s assessment. In the ad Rainey
is shown twice, once in an illustrated headshot, and a second time dressed up in a smart three-piece suit
flirting with a pair of elegantly attired women. A police officer across the street swings his billy club, an
explicit acknowledgment of the potential threat of physical violence from law enforcement tasked with
administering moral or “vice” laws—laws that effectively criminalized homosexuality, as well as
transgender and gender non-binary people. In many instances people who dressed counter to gendered
expectations had to retain at least three items of gender-appropriate clothing. For women this was
somewhat feasible, as stockings, bras, and panties could be concealed under otherwise masculine
clothing, but for men dressing against normative gender conventions this proved to be more difficult. The
tricky politics of Rainey’s dress is reflected in a later verse of “Prove It on Me Blues”:

It’s true I wear a collar and a tie

Makes the wind blow all the while
Don’t you say I do it, ain’t nobody caught me
You sure got to prove it on me.
 ONE MAGAZINE

Devised as the voice of the newly incorporated homophile (homosexual) organization ONE, Inc., the first
issues of ONE magazine feature the jazzy, abstract designs of founding board member Joan Corbin (who
went by the pseudonym Eve Elloree). Even before designing the first issue of ONE, Corbin and her
partner were involved in the nascent LGBTQ movement as early subscribers to the first lesbian
publication, Vice Versa, while the two lived in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Corbin’s illustration work for ONE
featured geometric designs that frame the key social questions surrounding the place of homosexuals in
contemporary society: “You are a public enemy” reads one cover, and another asks “Are homosexuals
neurotic?” Corbin would first draw her designs, later transferring them to printing blocks, so they could
be used to print multiple copies of ONE.
A key function of publications like ONE is their ability to cohere reading publics, calling forth a
readership of like-minded individuals with similar interests. This was dangerous work: during the first
two years of the magazine’s life, for example, it was seized twice for violating obscenity laws (although
the editors were never convicted). Despite these setbacks, the magazine continued to be in production
until 1967. As one of the few overly pro-gay publications in existence during the 1950s, the magazine had
a broad impact on successive generations of LGBTQ activists and publishers.
 THE LADDER

“Qui Vive” (French for “on alert”) is the logoized motto of the Daughters of Bilitis—the first exclusively
lesbian organization in the United States. It appears on many of the early covers of the group’s magazine,
The Ladder, first published in 1956 (above). Initially the “Qui Vive” logo was devised as a wearable pin,
designed so that group members could identify one another in public without blowing their cover. During
a time when homosexuality was criminalized, privacy and discretion were dire necessities. Like ONE
magazine, the publication promoted a conservative take on gay politics and visibility. The editors (and
founders of the Daughters of Bilitis), Phyllis Lyon and Del Martin, advocated for women to wear feminine
dress—countering the butch/femme dynamic pervasive among lesbian communities at the time.
Assimilation was the coin of the realm, and The Ladder proved a useful tool in a bid for respectability.
The earliest covers of The Ladder (right) feature a silhouetted line of people all ambling toward a
skyward ladder. Indicative of the Daughters of Bilitis’s concern for public appearances, the couple on the
cover appear to be a normative heterosexual couple. Still, the play on words of the magazine’s title
combined with the cover imagery would have been resonant for a lesbian readership: it depicts people
climbing the ladder out of the well of loneliness (a reference to Radclyffe Hall’s signal novel, The Well of
Loneliness).
Phyllis Lyon with Del Martin, who is holding an early issue of The Ladder.
 UNDERCOVER

If you want to know about LGBTQ communities and their histories, read a magazine. In their
seriality and handily consumable format, magazines have been central to the public expression
and networking of various LGBTQ communities. Developed from every quarter of the LGBTQ
community, each periodical has its own mission and purpose, coalescing its own readership
around a set of shared concerns. A magazine’s cover can tell you a lot about what is contained
within. Although published well before the establishment of homophile political movements, the
editors of Bachelor, a short-lived publication aimed at bachelor men, often put provocative works
of art on their covers. If the magazine spoke of homosexuality, it was in highly controlled and
veiled, coded language. Later magazines such as DYKE hilariously sent up the typographic and
graphic design choices of LIFE, a mainstream magazine known for its photojournalism. An early
cover of Azalea—a magazine of “third world” womens’ writings (women of color)—images a
brown-red woman in profile with two linked Venus symbols as an earring.
 CLUB MY-O-MY ADVERTISEMENT

“The most interesting women are not women at all… they are accomplished female impersonators, tops in
entertainment.” So goes a bit of matchbook advertising copy distributed to patrons at New Orleans’s Club
My-O-My. The text is repeated in this advertisement, and accompanies an illustration of a young man,
looking forlornly at a wig he holds in his right hand. Pitched to both straight and gay audiences, the floor
shows at Club My-O-My reveled in both the glamour and the “exotic” nature of the performances (the
words “sparkling” and “unusual” appear at the top of this image, linguistically framing the depiction of
the female illusionist below). But even at its best, Club My-O-My, like many venues in New Orleans and
elsewhere in the United States, was racially exclusive in the years before desegregation, serving only
white patrons for most of its existence.
 MONA’S 440 CLUB NAPKIN

Modeled after drag clubs like the My-O-My, Mona’s 440 Club in San Francisco pioneered a different, yet
related, model. Both the waitstaff and entertainers (Gladys Bentley was a staple) wore male attire, and in
this way it was like the gendered reverse of Club My-O-My. While there were many semi-public places for
gay men to socialize, this was not necessarily true for lesbians, and Mona’s represented an early
prototype for the lesbian bar, spawning several others in San Francisco’s North Beach neighborhood. This
napkin, with its red, white, and blue depiction of an androgynous youth—short hair done up in a
masculine style—signaled the primary attribute of the club.
 AFLAME

What’s a queer to do in a gay bar? Laugh, drink, dance, socialize, and, before the establishment of
anti-smoking ordinances in major metropolitan areas, smoke. Matches were de rigueur, and bars
would make their own matchbooks to accommodate puffing patrons. They became de facto calling
cards and advertisements, with a bar’s logo reproduced on the matchbook cover. In this sense,
they could wind up traveling hundreds of miles from their initial location, spreading the gospel of
the existence of queer space. Some matchbooks even doubled as “trick cards,” dedicating blank
space on the exterior or interior for writing the name and number of a new potential lover. After
the closure of particular bars and clubs, matchbooks are one of the few remaining indicators of
where a bar existed, and during what years. In all their glorious variety matchbooks represent
one aspect of the design and material cultures of LGBTQ social lives.
 S.I.R. POCKET LAWYER

“On the advice of my attorney, I deny everything!!” This is the script the S.I.R. Pocket Lawyer
ventriloquizes for those who might be arrested under ubiquitous (supposedly “moral”) anti-vice laws. One
of the most popular and useful items produced by the Society for Individual Rights (founded 1964 in San
Francisco), the Pocket Lawyer outlined what an LGBTQ person might expect during the process of being
arrested (“Remember, the walls have ears”) and what one could do to protect oneself (“Be sure to get that
badge number”). S.I.R.’s booklet also featured recommendations for friendly attorneys and bail bondsmen
who had a track record of being discreet, lest one’s arrest be published in the local newspaper—a
common public humiliation of the time. Designed to fit easily within a pants pocket, this diminutive
booklet tells us a great deal about what it was like to be an LGBTQ person in the years before gay
liberation: namely, that one was a constant target of police harassment and brutality.

The Pocket Lawyer prominently displays the logo of S.I.R.—featuring four arrows pointing inward
toward a single circle. The interface between the individual and larger society, with all its pressures, is
dramatized in this bit of graphic design. It also neatly illustrates S.I.R.’s mission to consolidate
information and services for its membership. But for the figurative societal arrows pointing inward, the
group’s activities manifested in the other direction as well. S.I.R.’s activities were not limited to legal aid,
as the organization was a driver of lesbian and gay social life, sponsoring dances, bowling leagues, and
political discussions. In 1966 S.I.R. opened the first gay and lesbian community center in the United
States, beginning a grassroots movement of institutions dedicated to serving the social, medical, and legal
needs of LGBTQ communities.
 NAUTICAL STAR TATTOO

In their signal study of the pre-liberation lesbian community in Buffalo, New York (Boots of Leather,
Slippers of Gold), the historian Elizabeth Lapovsky Kennedy and the activist Madeline D. Davis provide an
interesting detail about a local identifier used “among the tough bar lesbians,” describing it as “a star
tattoo on the top of the wrist, which was usually covered by a watch.” Kennedy and Davis continue, “This
was the first symbol of community identity that did not rely on butch-fem imagery.” Since that time the
star—sometimes described as a nautical star—has enjoyed a small resurgence as a marker of lesbian
identity. Although seemingly innocuous in its design, and small enough to be hidden under a wristwatch,
it was nevertheless known by law enforcement as a sign of an arrested person’s lesbian identity.
 PHIL SPARROW’S TATTOO FLASH

During the 1940s and 1950s the United States was undergoing something of a “tattoo renaissance,”
despite, or perhaps because of, tattooing’s outlaw associations. One of the most important figures during
this time was the polymath Samuel Steward, an erstwhile academic, (erotic) novelist, and tattoo artist.
Steward was an eager subject for Alfred Kinsey’s famous studies on human sexuality, a pen pal to
Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, and is known for keeping a detailed “stud file” of his sexual contacts.
As a tattooist, Steward went under the name Phil Sparrow and served Chicago’s population of ostensibly
straight sailors and bikers in gay parlance referred to as “rough trade.” Some of his acetate flash (pre-
designed tattoos) show a different side of his tattooing practice, as in this example, which depicts two
male figures embracing, their faces overlapping, armpit hair dangling down to a point. Its tenderness is in
stark opposition to the rough-and-tumble designs that Steward built his career on.
 DAMRON’S ADDRESS BOOK

When Bob Damron published his first “address book”—a basic listing of known gay venues in California
and across the United States, he was responding to a need among the gay community for a compendium
of places to socialize. Hal Call, then-president of the Mattachine Society (a national homophile
organization), funded the first few editions of the Damron guide—seeing it as a necessary component of
building and sustaining a vibrant gay social life. Damron had been a bar owner (of the Red Raven in
Hollywood, California) and found a second career as an alcohol distributor, making it possible for him to
travel the country and develop a network of local gay contacts. The earliest editions of “The Guide” were
small enough to fit in a pocket and contained only the addresses of the various bars, restaurants, and
theaters that graced its pages. The first guide (above) was published in 1965 and was designed to look
like a generic address book. Subsequent editions further embellished this initial design idea, before
eventually settling into a color-blocked standardized format in the 1970s and 1980s. Later versions of the
guide offered additional information, both in the form of commentary written by Damron, and an
initialized code: OC stood for “Older/More Mature Crowd” and RT for “Raunchy Types—Hustlers, Drags,
and other ‘Downtown’ Types,” for example. Although geolocational cruising apps such as Grindr have
done much in recent years to streamline cruising, Damron guides are still published today, making it
possible for someone to, in the words of Damron’s motto, “See America. Find a friend.”
 EQUALITY FOR HOMOSEXUALS BUTTONS

As an undergraduate at the University of Texas at Austin, Randolfe Hayden “Randy” Wicker was given a
copy of ONE magazine. While back in New York on break he enrolled as a member of the local chapter of
the Mattachine Society and soon thereafter founded his own homophile organization (opaquely named
“Wicker Research Studies”) that sought to connect gays and lesbians across Texas, Louisiana, and
Mississippi. After graduating, Wicker moved back to New York and spearheaded one of the first public
protests in LGBTQ history—a 1964 protest regarding the treatment of homosexuals by the U.S. military.
Five years later, when the Stonewall uprisings were happening in Greenwich Village, Wicker was working
at his button shop nearby. His location was strategically useful for printing and distributing movement
buttons, like the ones seen here.
While the phrases and symbols of the two buttons remain resonant (the equality sign lifted from civil
rights movement imagery), the color is what is most remarkable. According to the historian Vern L.
Bullough, who was at one point employed by Wicker to drive a Volkswagen van and distribute such
buttons nationwide, the lavender color of the button was a sticking point in an argument between Wicker
and fellow activist Frank Kameny (originator of the slogan “Gay Is Good”). Kameny thought the button’s
text should be black, and Wicker thought otherwise. Since Cole Porter’s 1929 song “I’m a Gigolo”
insinuated that the narrator had “just a dash” of lavender (and thus queerness) in his nature, Wicker’s
buttons proclaim their alliance with homophile identities both linguistically and formally.
 BOB MIZER’S PHYSIQUE PICTORIAL AND SUBJECTIVE CHARACTER ANALYSIS

Over the course of his fifty-year career as a “beefcake” photographer, Los Angeles–based Bob Mizer
photographed more than ten thousand male models, selling his prints through his magazine and catalog
Physique Pictorial. Begun in 1951, Physique Pictorial initially pitched itself, like other similar publications
(MANual, for example, or Fiseek), as a bodybuilding and wellness magazine. The pretense was flimsy, as
most beefcake magazines only narrowly evaded rigid laws against sending obscene materials through the
mail by photographing their models wearing nothing but thin posing straps. Physique Pictorial also
featured and sold the drawings of artists like Tom of Finland (the cover above is the first appearance of
the Finnish leather artist’s work in the magazine—a series of images dedicated to Scandinavian loggers).
A year after the 1962 MANual Enterprises v. Day Supreme Court decision ruled that nude male
photographs were not necessarily obscene, Mizer began to include cryptic symbols alongside the basic
stats of his models. He sent out two different legends for these symbols (some appropriated from common
astrological symbols) that were meant to describe a model’s personality and sexual traits. The clipped
astrological symbol for Mercury, for example, indicates a model is “Aggressive, Enthusiastic.” These
various symbols were drawn fused around a central circular core, describing manifold sexual
characteristics in as little space as possible. In another version of this chart (more selectively distributed
to his subscribers) Mizer uses more sexual descriptors. In this more explicit chart, the Mercury symbol
stands for: “Likes to be on top, doesn’t just lie there, is a ball.”
 JOSÉ SARRIA ALBUM COVER AND CAMPAIGN POSTER

José Sarria worked in the years following the end of World War II at San Francisco’s famed Black Cat bar
—a gathering place for bohemians, poets, gays, and hustlers. Sarria began as a cocktail waiter (the only
male to be given such a role) and, as a high tenor, was soon performing for patrons as the bar’s hostess.
He could handily hit a high C, and this allowed him, unlike many other queens working at the time, to sing
in his natural voice. Sarria performed campy parodies of operas like Carmen and Madame Butterfly, while
also eviscerating audiences with his silver-tongued wit. In 1964 Sarria proclaimed himself Empress José
Norton the First (Daughters of Bilitis founders Phyllis Lyon and Del Martin were dubbed duchesses),
beginning the court tradition in drag communities. On the cover of this album (pitched in publicity
materials as “America’s Newest Party-Fun Record!”), Sarria appears in a wedding gown, laughing as he
lifts the hem to reveal the tops of his stockings. Toned a brilliant red, the image contrasts with the small
black-and-white photograph of Sarria in more masculine clothes, reading a newspaper on a park bench.
Similar to some of the conventions used in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century sheet music
featuring cross-dressing performers, this smaller photograph cements Sarria’s drag virtuosity, while also
presenting the “authentic” version of the performer.
Sarria’s gifts for entertaining his community were equally matched by his political guile. A member of
the Society for Individual Rights (and the earlier League for Civil Education), Sarria ran for the San
Francisco Board of Supervisors in 1961. This political campaign poster (lower right), like many of the era,
presented the candidate as a professional (the suit, tie, and combed-back hair), while also acknowledging
his political aspirations. “Equality!” is written at the bottom of the poster as a kind of campaign slogan—
printed in a type that mimics a cursive handwriting, as though Sarria had signed the poster with the word
himself. To certain members of San Francisco’s electorate, the word itself would have been a tacit
acknowledgment of the candidate’s homosexuality. The presentation of Sarria the queen and Sarria the
candidate couldn’t be more different, and yet he was a trailblazer in both realms. Although he ultimately
lost, Sarria was the first openly gay person to run for citywide office in San Francisco, arguably laying the
foundation for Harvey Milk’s candidacy fifteen years later.
1970s
 1970s

The 1970s was the decade in which LGBTQ people loudly announced their arrival within the national
public sphere and demanded their liberation. To be homosexual, bisexual, or transgender during this time
was still, in many ways, to be an outlaw, and speaking out or living as an out LGBTQ person was to put
one’s life and livelihood in danger. “Coming out” rendered members of LGBTQ communities both newly
visible and vulnerable. Protests and uprisings, such as the impromptu rebellion in response to consistent
police harassment at the Stonewall Inn (a bar on Christopher Street in Greenwich Village, Manhattan) in
June of 1969, set the tone for insurgent LGBTQ people to call for an end to state-sanctioned violence,
incarceration, and wanton discrimination.
In the popular imagination the Stonewall uprising remains the event marking the beginning of gay
liberation. But the reality is much different. The Stonewall uprising was the last in a longer line of
protests, uprisings, and rebellions taking place in large U.S. cities. There were, for example, similar
outcries against discrimination and police brutality at Cooper’s Do-nuts in Los Angeles (1959), a full
decade before Stonewall. Transgender people, some of whom were sex workers, made a claim for their
political power at Gene Compton’s Cafeteria (San Francisco) in 1966, by throwing a cup of coffee in an
arresting officer’s face. In their 2005 documentary on the Compton’s Cafeteria uprising, Screaming
Queens, historians Susan Stryker and Victor Silverman interviewed witnesses and contributors to the
events of that warm August night, enriching our understanding of their complicated and courageous
decisions. A year and a half later, on New Year’s Eve, undercover police officers arrested revelers at Los
Angeles’s Black Cat Tavern; the traditional midnight kiss gave the police enough convenient cover to
arrest and incarcerate partygoers at random. Backlash to this event was swift and robust. In other words,
the Stonewall uprising was both the product of a constellation of political resistances as well as the
actions of a dedicated few for whom kowtowing to unjust and prejudicial laws was no longer a workable
reality.
Taking place on the yearly anniversary of the Stonewall uprisings, “Gay Freedom Day” or “Christopher
Street Day” rallies and parades emerged as one of the most potent political forms in LGBTQ history. At
first these were not identified primarily with “pride” but rather the conditions of “liberation”—both
personal and societal. It wasn’t until the end of the 1970s and 1980s that these political protests became
known colloquially as “gay pride parades.”
The “homophile” of the 1950s and 1960s was out, and “gay,” “lesbian,” and “homosexual” replaced the
word in common parlance. “Gay is good” was a mantra of the 1970s, joining similar destigmatizing
cultural sentiments such as “black is beautiful” in vogue among black activist groups such as the Black
Panthers. Although LGBTQ spaces continued to be woefully segregated—white people and people of color
often had separate clubs, bars, and restaurants—there is some indication of intersectional coalition
building. Huey P. Newton, one of the cofounders of the Black Panthers, wrote an open letter to women
and homosexuals, identifying them as similarly “oppressed groups” and further suggested to his
comrades that “we should try to unite with them in a revolutionary fashion.” In turn, some white and non-
black Gay Liberation Front members showed up to Black Panther rallies in solidarity, wearing armbands
with the acronym of their political organization. Although not sustained enough to effect a true coalitional
critique of oppression in the United States, these important early efforts arguably laid the groundwork for
future political work.
Despite these still dire situations, LGBTQ social institutions such as gay bars, taverns, magazines, and
political organizations grew like wildfire. Like the bars in the period before liberation, many gay and
lesbian spaces remained under the financial control of organized crime syndicates, who were only too
happy to sell alcohol to an underserved market. Despite this fact, bars and clubs were important spaces of
collective imagining, manifesting the utopian promise of a space where everyone could share in the
experience of being queer. These places also became the sites of community activation, as the poster
made for a community fund-raiser at Jewel’s Catch One relates.
As in the decades before, there was broad disagreement over how one should be a homosexual or a
trans person in public and within private life; some thought that assimilation offered the safest path and
suggested that access to opportunities and institutions wouldn’t significantly change unless the straight
world saw gay, lesbian, and trans people as “normal” in some way. For others it was society, not the
homosexual or trans person, that needed to change. Through activist forms such as civil disobedience and
protest, these anti-assimilationist contingents staked out positions that later generations would come to
reclaim as queer.
LGBTQ people began to emerge as a market. Shops such as the Pleasure Chest, although ostensibly
agnostic in their mission, centered the sex lives of LGBTQ people, distributing new and inventive toys that
continued to power the sexual revolution for decades. Although still many years from the target-
marketing efforts of large corporations, a small but robust cottage industry grew up around the needs of
LGBTQ people. Magazines and buttons, in particular, are good indexes as to the popular struggles of
LGBTQ people during the 1970s. Like ONE and The Ladder before them, magazines such as RFD and
Mirage cohered certain readerships—rural homosexuals and trans people, respectively. There are dozens
more, each fascinating in its own right. Unlike magazines, which built fairly coherent identities for the
sake of particular readerships, buttons offered the chance to display a wide variety of political and
personal affiliations on the cheap.
Many stalwart symbols and graphics—such as the lambda or the rainbow flag—were developed during
this decade, making it one of the most prolific and creative periods in LGBTQ design history. Most of the
designers and artists discussed in the following pages did not have prestigious careers or a lot of cash—
rather, they saw a political need and filled it in turn. Some of these innovations in graphic design and
visual culture were occasioned by violence or prejudice—such as the gutsy Lavender Menace t-shirts
created by the Radicalesbians, which at once reclaimed an epithet famously lobbed at lesbians by a
leader in the women’s liberation movement while also poking fun at the panic that undergirded such
fears. Still, the point was clear—lesbians would and could be a menace to the women’s liberation
movement if it didn’t live up to its promise of liberation for all women. Other innovations, such Gilbert
Baker’s rainbow flag, were exercises in self-definition, a refusal to be overdetermined by the oppression
of the era.
Tom Doerr’s original lambda drawing, and accompanying explanatory text.
 TOM DOERR’S LAMBDA SYMBOL

A founding member of the Gay Activists Alliance, graphic artist Tom Doerr designated the lambda as the
group’s symbol—taking its meanings from chemistry, where the Greek letter signifies “a complete
exchange of energy.” Appearing on all GAA apparel and press materials, Doerr’s lambda quickly spread
beyond the confines of the GAA and became the first widespread symbol of gay liberation. It emblazoned
flags, banners, posters, t-shirts, and other logo designs; the lambda was truly ubiquitous. Although Doerr
initially designed the lambda to be gold, it was commonly reproduced in lavender.
The choice of the lambda was not without controversy—the GAA considered logo proposals depicting
the head of an eagle or a fighting cock. Some felt that the lambda was not expressive enough, or that its
political associations with gay people were not obvious. Despite these concerns, the lambda has remained
a steadfast, if now less visible, symbol of gay liberation movements. Today many university gay and
lesbian student associations as well as social-affinity groups use the lambda in their names and designs.
Perhaps they feel the same way Doerr did about his design, that “in the struggle against oppression a
cultural bond develops, suffused with human energies. The lambda now affirms the liberation of all gay
people.”
 THE ASSOCIATION OF BLACK GAYS

The lambda has been deployed in numerous ways across LGBTQ design from liberation onward.
Sometimes, as in the logo for the Association of Black Gays in Los Angeles, the lambda is combined with
other meaningful symbols, such as a clenched fist (a symbol originating with black power movements and
later appropriated by the gay rights movement.) The Association of Black Gays used the lambda-fist as a
visual identifier for their particular group, and it appeared on posters, newsletters, flyers, and official
group communiques. The clenched fist in ABG’s logo wields the lambda, as though it were a shield or a
flag—indicating that this group has effectively claimed the symbol as their own. The flyer at the right
advertises the group so that more members might join. It lays out its mission in plain terms (“to improve
the situation of black gays in Los Angeles”) and indicates a growing political power (“We’ve met with
Mayor Bradley, have organized against bars that discriminate”). The last line of flyer’s body text (“And
we’re friendly”) is a cheeky reminder that coalitions are built through social bonds—friends become
family, comrades in a struggle for liberation from intersecting opressions.
The labrys appears on the back of a t-shirt made to promote Labyris Books, the first women’s bookstore to open in New York
City.
 LABRYS

In their book Lesbian Peoples: Material for a Dictionary, Monique Wittig and Sande Zeig give a succinct
definition of the labrys, sometimes spelled “labyris,” citing it as a “name for the double-headed axe of the
ancient amazons and to the representation of this arm as the emblem of amazon empires.” According to
ancient Greek literature and art, the Amazons were a war-loving, matriarchal people; and, as folklorist
and historian Adrienne Mayor points out, recent archaeological finds have confirmed the existence of
hundreds of female warriors on the Scythian steppes (long thought to be the geographic environs of the
Amazons). Such findings support what feminist historians have long claimed, which is that matriarchal
societies existed in the ancient world alongside their better-known patriarchal counterparts.
The labrys was reclaimed by feminists in the 1970s as a symbol of radical lesbian feminism. It
famously appeared on the cover of Mary Daly’s Gyn/Ecology: The Metaethics of Radical Feminism, and in
one evocative passage she imagines one being smelted from the gathered tools of patriarchal oppression.
Daly read the axe’s double edge as a metaphor for the “A-mazing Female Mind,” which must be attuned to
the many impediments to women’s liberation. A consistent symbol of radical lesbian feminism, the labrys
has appeared on t-shirts, buttons, jewelry, and more. A labrys is a tool—sometimes a weapon—but it does
nothing without the hand that carries it. As such it is a fitting symbol for political and social action.
 GAY IS GOOD BUTTON/GAY IS ANGRY POSTER

These two items, one with the slogan “Gay Is Good” and the other exclaiming “Gay Is Angry,” represent a
perennial divide in the realm of LGBTQ politics, between assimilationist and self-affirming politics on the
one hand and anti-assimilationist (and often also anti-capitalist) politics on the other.
The button was likely produced by Randy Wicker, but its phraseology was coined by astronomer Frank
Kameny, who was fired from his federal job under Eisenhower’s Executive Order 10450 (which stipulated,
in part, that anyone found out to be homosexual could be fired from federal employment). Kameny’s
encomium on self-love stands in relation to other political affirmations of the time—especially the “Black
Is Beautiful” slogan of the black power movement. Both “Gay Is Good” and “Black Is Beautiful” remind a
speaker that societal stigma can be sloughed off and potentially replaced with positive valuation and love.
Introduced as a key talking point of incipient gay liberation movements, “Gay Is Good” levels its claim in
the realm of the moral—as many LGBTQ people were told by their families and religions that they were
not good, even, in some cases, evil.
“Gay Is Angry” responds directly to the accrued effects of these stigmas and reminds LGBTQ people of
the revolutionary power of rage. The calendar graphic, which is credited to “Juan Carlos y Nestor,”
depicts a giant clock/bomb rising out of the detritus of urban living. Butterflies—a common symbol of
transformation—flap around the fuse. Juan Carlos y Nestor’s message is literally timeless (the clock has
no hands), suggesting that any time is a good time for gay rage.
 LAVENDER MENACE T-SHIRT

The phrase “lavender menace” was initially coined by Betty Friedan, cofounder and president of the
National Organization for Women, to describe the perceived threat of lesbians within the women’s
liberation movement. In response, the writer and activist Rita Mae Brown (standing in the foreground of
the photograph above) along with Artemis Brown, Karla Jay, and others identifying themselves as the
Radicalesbians, dip-dyed a clutch of t-shirts lavender and silkscreened Friedan’s pejorative put-down
boldly across the chest. The Radicalesbians wore these shirts when they stopped the proceedings of
NOW’s Second Congress to Unite Women and handed out their manifesto “The Woman-Identified
Woman,” which centered the struggles of lesbian feminists. “What is a lesbian?” the manifesto
rhetorically asks, answering in return, “A lesbian is the rage of all women condensed to the point of
explosion.” Their appropriation of the hostility and fear with which some within the women’s movement
regarded them was what we might now call a queer move, seeking to reveal and ultimately change the
inclusivity of an organization that purported to speak and work on behalf of all women. With humor and
nerve the Radicalesbians founded a strain of lesbian feminist thought that irrevocably changed the
conversation around the intersections of sex and gender within the women’s liberation movement.
 BODY LANGUAGE

The t-shirt began as a simple undergarment—something that factory workers and servicemen
could wear underneath more rugged outerwear. Even today the t-shirt retains some of these
working-class affiliations. Marlon Brando’s rugged appearance in A Streetcar Named Desire
(1951) fueled the t-shirt’s popularization—marking it as a symbol of masculine coolness. Soon,
entrepreneurial companies began to screen-print designs and logos on plain white tees—
effectively using their broad bodily real estate to promote any number of interests and political
viewpoints. It is no wonder, then, that many of the most creative visual designs of LGBTQ
movements appear on t-shirts. Groups such as Queer Nation and ACT UP and makers like Joey
Terrill used the t-shirt to play with the stigmatization and the reclaiming of identities. Terrill’s
shirt, in particular, is an interesting case: initially handmade, the shirts were produced for a small
group of Terrill’s familiars for the 1976 Christopher Street West parade in Los Angeles. Men wore
shirts emblazoned with the word “maricón” and women “malflora”—each a slur in Spanish. On
the back of the tee, written in block letters, are the words “role model,” countering the anti-gay
rhetoric of Florida songstress and orange juice spokesmodel Anita Bryant and earnestly
suggesting that LGBTQ chicano/a people could serve as political role models for the rest of the
nation.
Today t-shirts remain an important medium for conveying a broad range of affiliations with
political struggles to associations with particular brands and corporate interests. Some shirts, like
the feminist bookstore Labyris Books’s “The Future is Female” shirt have been remade in recent
years to signal political optimism in the face of rampant gender discrimination. Others, such as
Dean Sameshima’s “RESEARCH: A Cocksucker’s Guide to Freedom vol. 1” gather the logotypes of
a range of LGBTQ books and magazines, effectively serving as an ad hoc archive of queer culture.
Both Sameshima and Roy Martinez are artists for whom making t-shirts is an integral part of
financially supporting and conceptually furthering their respective artistic practices. Martinez
(who makes clothing under the name Lambe Culo—“lick ass” in Spanish) taps academic theory in
shirts displaying phrases such as “Visibility Is a Trap” (a phrase originally written about prison
architecture by the theorist Michel Foucault), and “Feeling Brown, Feeling Down” (the title of an
article about depression and communities of color by the late performance studies scholar José
Esteban Muñoz).
 GAY LIBERATION FRONT POSTER

“Let Go,” implores this poster produced by the Gay Liberation Front, an activist organization formed in
the immediate aftermath of the Stonewall uprisings. It communicates as much about emergent gay
liberation politics as it does a broader psychedelic culture that nurtured it in part. A mandala hovers,
halo-like, around a group of joyful protesters. Fists are raised, laughs are shared; this is political action as
a social scene—a complaint levied in the language of a good time. Much is known about the source
photograph for this poster, which was taken by Peter Hujar, a participant in New York’s vibrant downtown
art scene. Hujar’s lover, Jim Fouratt, was a founding member of GLF and appears here in striped pants.
But this poster, designed by Su Negrin and featuring a mandala drawn by Suzanne Bevier (she
appears at the far right in Hujar’s photograph), resituates Hujar’s image. Negrin, the co-publisher of
Times Change Press (which produced this poster), was involved in the women’s liberation movement as
well as a variety of leftist causes. The poster’s colorway, lavender and red, makes an implicit connection
between an incipient gay liberation movement and other leftist social protest movements. Bevier’s
invective to “let go” is thus a call to let go of the oppressive social restrictions that preclude the full
political participation of LGBTQ people. Negrin’s control over the means of production, as well as the
content of the messaging, meant that she could bring together in a single poster her various efforts
among sometimes disparate activist communities.
 POST UP

Posters, like t-shirts, are notable for their public address; but unlike t-shirts, which demand the
presence of a body, a poster remains up for as long as the public, or the owners of the surface
onto which a poster is affixed, allows. The most effective posters combine strong graphic
representation with highly edited and potent text, creating an evocative play of word and image.
The poster for the 1979 “3rd World Conference” entreats its viewer with a question taken from a
contemporaneous Blackberri song: “America, when will the ignorance end?” In successive
multicolored and silhouetted profiles the poster’s designers relay the racial diversity of LGBTQ
communities, suggesting that everyone has a stake in anti-racism work. A very different kind of
message was emblazoned on flyers and posters made only a few months before, in response to the
White Night riots that immediately followed the light sentencing of Dan White, who murdered San
Francisco’s mayor George Moscone and openly gay supervisor Harvey Milk. A burning police car
—one of the most intense visual symbols of protest—is accompanied by the unrepentant
declaration: “No apologies!”
 MIRAGE MAGAZINE

Angela K. Douglas, who grew up in Oklahoma, Florida, California, Hawaii, and Japan, founded the
Transexual Action Organization, the first transgender rights organization, less than a year after trans
women participated in the Stonewall uprisings. Mirage, with Douglas as editor, began publication four
years later and was a clearinghouse for trans politics, visibilities, and affinities. A summary biography of
Douglas appears in the magazine’s fourth issue and points to both the joy and the precariousness of being
an out trans person in the years immediately before and following gay liberation: “Angela’s interests
include foreign languages, UFOlogy, esoteric philosophies, boating, and jazz. She’s been arrested several
times and has been in both men’s and women’s jails…”
One of the members of TAO, Suzun David, about whom little is known, was responsible for many of the
graphics in Mirage and the earlier Moonshadow newsletter (which Douglas also edited). In David’s
psychedelic illustrations trans women are presented as cyclopic robots and aliens, nearly melting into
their surroundings. While often modeled on real people, taken together David’s drawings suggest a trans-
futurist vision for the world. These visuals highlighted one of the more unconventional emphases of
Mirage, which updated its membership on “ESP, UFOs, and the occult” on a regular basis. “We must all
let the Space People know,” wrote Douglas in an early issue, “we are willing to work with them and they
are most welcome to live with us”—effectively extending a hand of civility and care in a world that too
often did not do the same for trans people.
 JEWEL’S CATCH ONE POSTER

When Jewel Thais-Williams purchased the Diana Bar in 1973, it might have been hard to imagine the
potential glory of the place. Most of the regular patrons she inherited in the transition left—it was rare for
a queer woman of color to tend bar, much less own one. But a growing mélange of customers soon took
their place and made Jewel’s Catch One a second home; they arrived weekly and on major holidays (such
as Thanksgiving) when returning home to family might not be a welcome prospect. Gay bars and dance
clubs are places that promise a particular kind of freedom for their patrons—loud music, full-body
connection, and the abandonment of repressive social mores that structure queer daily life outside. Over
its forty year lifespan (1973–2015), Thais-Williams’s club came to be a near-spiritual gathering place for
LGBTQ people of color and their allies alike, hosting legendary Halloween costume contests, concerts by
the likes of disco divas Sylvester and Donna Summer, and charity events like the one promoted on this
poster.
The Association of Black Gays, whose logo was a black fist grasping a lambda, was especially
concerned with the case of Ernest Marshall, an adult male arrested in 1975 for sodomy and oral
copulation. Both were illegal at the time, effectively criminalizing gay men’s sexual lives—although they
were hardly the only people to engage in such activities. In this letter-pressed poster, spare yet
scintillating, the Association of Black Gays invites their community to “get down and party”—and to find
some reason, amidst the pain of legal and familial persecution, to come together.
 Anita Bryant appears in this bombastic protest display at the
1977 San Francisco Gay Day Parade, alongside the likes of
Joseph Stalin, Adolf Hitler, the KKK, and Idi Amin.

ANITA BRYANT SUCKS ORANGES

Pageant queen and popular singer Anita Bryant was the driving force behind one of the twentieth
century’s most visible and contentious anti-LGBTQ campaigns. A brand ambassador for the Florida Citrus
Commission, Bryant used her public platform to oppose an anti-discrimination law passed in Dade County
(Miami, Florida) protecting lesbians and gay men from workplace harassment and discrimination. Her
organization to repeal the law, Save Our Children, Inc., stoked the fears of Miami residents by falsely
claiming that homosexual teachers were trying to recruit and molest their children. LGBTQ people
responded in kind—with outrage and a broad, comprehensive campaign of their own that included
buttons, t-shirts, albums, and protest banners. Tried-and-true tactics such as boycotts of Florida orange
juice and spectacular protests (during one notable “zap,” Bryant was pied in the face) were successful at
drawing attention to the celebrity’s exclusionary politics—in stark contrast to her sunny public persona.
This button (right) brilliantly distills the acrimony and stakes of the fight. In using the button’s round
format as a stand-in for the product that Bryant represented—Florida oranges—the designer(s) attach an
“acidity” to the singer and her politics. This button, and many others like it, sought to change public
perception of Bryant’s crusade; unfortunately, it was Bryant who was ultimately successful in repealing
the Dade County ordinance. Her victory inspired similar legislative efforts in other states. In California,
the Briggs Initiative/Proposition 6 would have barred lesbians and gay men from teaching in public
schools, but voters ultimately defeated the referendum.
Part of the anti-Bryant campaign included cheeky re-orientations of orange-related imagery. Here orange juice is refashioned
as “Lesbian Concentrate” for this record of songs and poems.
 BUTTON UP

A button is a message pinned on the body, appealing to anyone passing by. The first mass-
produced political buttons date to the end of the nineteenth century and were commonly used to
rally support for political/presidential campaigns. Since then, the medium of the button has been
deployed by activists on behalf of innumerable political and social causes. LGBTQ rights
movements have been no different—often taking advantage of the physically restricted real estate
of a button to snappily address supporters and critics. The buttons reproduced here represent
only a small sampling of the thousands of buttons created by LGBTQ people, covering a vast
affective range from the pluckily humorous to the deadly serious. Because of their small format,
many people collected buttons, aggregating them on vests, hats, and jackets. When they are
installed on the body, you can effectively “read” a person’s political and sexual interests; and in
this way, sometimes buttons speak on behalf of the person who wears them.
 LAVENDER RHINOCEROS

Some symbols last for decades and others only for a short time. The lavender rhinoceros, designed by
Daniel Thaxton and Bernard “Bernie” Toale, is an example of the latter. Initially debuted in 1974, the
lavender rhinoceros existed locally in Boston, Massachusetts, for only a few years. Intended as a symbol
of the strength and fortitude of LGBTQ communities, the rhinoceros in retrospect seems like a queer
choice. As Toale related, “The rhino is a much maligned and misunderstood animal and, in actuality, a
gentle creature.” To make this point clear, the designers added a small red heart, a common symbol for
affection and love. The rhino’s personality characteristics—gentle, but tough when provoked or angered—
seemed to speak to the position of LGBTQ people. At the time that Thaxton and Toale proposed it as a
symbol of the new gay liberation movement, there was not widespread agreement on what the primary
symbols of the movement should be. The initial campaign was largely disseminated through the dedicated
advertising spaces of Boston’s subway system. But increasing advertising costs prevented the designers
of the lavender rhino from continuing to distribute it in this venue—and so the symbol went by the
wayside, usurped in popularity by other symbols, such as the lambda. Thaxton and Toale’s symbol did
have a limited effect, though, as it inspired the moniker of Denver, Colorado’s first LGBTQ magazine, The
Rhinoceros.
 FEY-WAY STUDIOS

Although performance artist and photographer Robert Opel is probably best remembered for streaking
the 1974 Academy Awards (the show’s cohost David Niven snidely remarked, “Fascinating to think that
probably the only laugh that man will ever get in his life is by stripping off and showing his
shortcomings.”), his influence on LGBTQ communities in San Francisco was arguably much more
consequential. A constant irritant in the political aspirations of gay activists who sought to seamlessly
assimilate into society (Opel was denied the opportunity to walk in the San Francisco Gay Freedom Day
Parade in his “Mr. Penis” costume), Opel was also fiercely supportive of artists dedicated to the
unflinching representation of homoerotic desire.
In 1978 Opel established Fey-Way Studios, an art gallery dedicated to homoerotic art. He located it in
San Francisco’s South of Market neighborhood, a hotbed of speculative development and a flourishing
leather/BDSM scene. The gallery hosted the first U.S. exhibition of Tom of Finland’s work and became a
gathering place for West Coast LGBTQ and leather artists. This business card, printed on holographic
stock, conveys something of the eccentric strangeness of Fey-Way: loud, brazenly gay, and optically
unapologetic. Unfortunately, Fey-Way Studios did not survive into the 1980s; Opel was murdered one July
night in 1979 while minding the gallery. The community that Opel built around Fey-Way was deeply
shocked by this sudden turn of events, and nothing like it has ever replaced it.
 PLEASURE CHEST LOGO

Here’s how a New York Times article from 1972 describes the Pleasure Chest, a fledgling New York City
sex shop: “Open every day except Sunday, [the store] consists of two small rooms. The front room
includes a display of waterbeds, flashing lights and erotic art, while the back room contains the artificial
sex organs, love potions, candles, jewelry, leather products, ‘bondage’ devices and other gadgets.”
Cresting the wave of “the new morality” (the pornographic feature-length film Deep Throat had recently
received wide and public theatrical release), Duane Colglazier and Bill Rifkin’s entrepreneurial venture
sought to normalize and streamline the experience of buying sex toys and pornography. To signal this,
they invested in a well-lit West Village storefront, instead of solely relying on catalog sales, thus bringing
the sex toy trade onto Main Street.
Once Rifkin and Colglazier, both of whom were formerly employed in the financial sector and both of
whom were gay, transformed their entrepreneurial venture into a full-fledged sex store (the Pleasure
Chest began by selling only waterbeds), their marketing and advertising campaigns began to center a
specifically gay clientele. Although not exclusive to gay men and lesbians, early Pleasure Chest catalogs
openly courted a gay male clientele with their homoerotic framings (toys and gear were sold via drawings
of imaginary men, using their Pleasure Chest products with creative verve). Although not its first logo, the
Pleasure Chest’s current logo is a visually punning piece of graphic design. Its manifold legs suggest
movement, while also tastefully depicting mutual oral sex, or 69ing. The body(s) in the logo are gender
ambiguous, allowing a customer to project their own sexual desires onto the design. Still in business, the
Pleasure Chest was a key institution in the historical broadening of U.S. sexual mores.
 COME! UNITY PRESS POSTERS

Gay liberation was one of many political concerns addressed by the designers and printers of New York’s
Come! Unity Press. Organized as an “urban intentional community,” the members of the cooperative print
shop republished philosophical, political, and poetic tracts (by the likes of Thomas Paine, Friedrich
Hölderlin, and Bertolt Brecht) as well as posters addressing a variety of activist causes, including but not
limited to the American Indian Movement, Latin American indigenous and leftist political groups, and
prison abolition organizations. Founded on a “pay-what-you-wish” model, the Come! Unity collective
constantly struggled with financing their radically inclusive operation. Their output was equally
heterogeneous—as they variously printed newsletters and magazines addressing anarchist feminist
thought and gay science fiction, for example.
 These two posters, created shortly after the public murder of out San Francisco city supervisor Harvey
Milk, expressed the mournful rage that enveloped gay and lesbian communities across the United States.
Published in English and Spanish (an unambiguous signal of Come! Unity’s inclusion of Spanish-speaking
LGBTQ populations), the poster seems to answer the violence visited upon Milk. “If U shoot me down,”
reads one particularly powerful passage, “there will be someone else out/out there in the het. world/yes
that’s rite/U can’t shove us into the closet.” The labrys, or double-headed axe, appears between the
statements of the poster’s chopped monologue, and again in red, layered over the entire sheet—an
upraised fist housed within it.
Cover of the Summer 1975 issue featuring a field of pansies, a then-
common derogatory term for gay men.
 RFD MAGAZINE COVER

A self-described “Country Journal for Gay Men Everywhere,” RFD released its first issue on the autumnal
equinox of 1974. It no doubt took inspiration from the publications coming out of lesbian-separatist back-
to-the-land movements—which established intentional communities in the midwest and northwest,
throughout the early 1970s. Quarterly periodicals such as Country Women, begun by Ruth and Jean
Mountaingrove, functioned as de facto guides to self-sustenance—mixing politics, activism, and pragmatic
survival tips.
Like its lesbian-separatist counterparts, RFD stressed co-harmonious living and consuming the
resources of the land sparingly. Although the editorial collective changed with each issue (another
similarity between the two periodicals), RFD consistently contained almanac information, songs,
resources, do-it-yourself projects, and advice on raising plants and animals within a rural setting. The first
issue was sent out with a packet of seeds stapled to its cover. The magazine shifted in 1979, after Harry
Hay (founder of the early homophile organization the Mattachine Society) called for a secular “spiritual
conference” among “gay brothers” in a “desert sanctuary near Tucson.” Thus began the Radical Faeries—
a countercultural movement that sought to offer an alternative to the trappings of urban gay life and the
increasingly homogenized masculine appearance of many gay men (referred to, tellingly, as “the clone”
look). Afterward, RFD became much more closely aligned with Radical Faerie philosophy and events,
dropping some of the almanac-like content that defined the magazine’s first years.
A reader might rightly ask what RFD stands for. While usually referred to as “Rural Fairy Digest,” in
fact, the editorial collective of each issue proposed their own acronymic extension, including:
Raspberries, Fresh and Delicious; Raving Flamers’ Diary; Rhododendron Forsythia Daffodils; Really
Feeling Divine; Rabbits, Faggots, and Dragonflies; Roaring Fresh Decisions; Rightfully Feeling Delirious;
Relevant? Funny? Dumb!; Rhyming For Daze.
 GILBERT BAKER FLAG

An enduring symbol of celebration and pride, Gilbert Baker’s rainbow flag is, above all, a
reflection of the diversity and heterogeneity of LGBTQ communities.
Gilbert Baker, who sometimes performed in drag as “Busty Ross,” used his outrageous,
handmade costumes as activist tools—from his early performances as “Miss Liberty” dancing in a
dress made from an American flag to his last appearance at an anti-Trump rally wearing a
handmade concentration camp uniform with an inverted pink triangle and gold bar, recalling the
humiliations and the brutality inflicted on Jews and homosexuals during the Nazi regime in
Germany. In many ways the rainbow pride flag is an outgrowth of this activist spirit.
In 1978 Baker was asked by San Francisco city supervisor Harvey Milk to design a new flag
for the upcoming Gay Freedom Day celebrations. Milk believed that the pink triangle that was in
somewhat common use at the time was too denigrating and that a different symbol should replace
it. The design that Baker conceived has very few peers in the history of LGBTQ design.
Originally, Baker composed his flag with eight colors, and each had symbolic meaning: hot
pink—sex; red—life; orange—healing; yellow—sunlight; green—nature; turquoise—magic/art;
indigo—serenity; and violet—spirit. The first two rainbow flags, each well over thirty feet long,
were hand-dyed and stitched at San Francisco’s Gay Community Center. With a team of around
thirty volunteers to help, two, in particular, merit mention as major contributors to the success of
the rainbow flag: seamster James McNamara and tie-dye artist Faerie Argyle Rainbow (now
known as Lynn Segerblom). Segerblom engineered the dyeing of the fabric, and images of the
first pride flags display colors with sensuous, mottled depth. When time came to rinse the fabric,
the three collaborators went to a nearby laundromat, breaking the rules by washing newly dyed
fabric. Baker and McNamara then sewed the flag in tandem, effectively using four hands to push
the large bolts of the organically dyed cotton through the sewing machine.
During San Francisco’s 1978 Gay Freedom Day festivities Segerblom, Baker, and a bevy of
volunteers raised the first gay pride flags. James McNamara stood nearby, taking pictures of the
event. The flags succinctly embodied the theme of the day: “Come out with joy, speak out for
justice.” But Baker’s flags did not fly in front of San Francisco’s City Hall—a major civic space and
common gathering place after the parade—rather, they were flown nearby in United Nations
Plaza. In his biography Baker indicated that he and his collaborators wanted to send the message
that gay rights was a global and not only a local or national concern.
One common misconception is that both flags that Baker made were essentially the same. One
of Baker’s flags featured the eight colored stripes running across its length. But the other
featured an additional blue canton on the hoist (pole side of the flag), like the American flag.
Instead of fifty evenly spaced stars, Baker’s flag incorporated several small circles of stars, each
lovingly tie-dyed by Segerblom. One errant, queer star appears in the middle of the flag’s
turquoise stripe, and has rarely, if ever, been discussed as an important component of the flag’s
design.
Months later, the mayor of San Francisco, George Moscone, along with supervisor Harvey
Milk, who had helped to commission Baker’s rainbow flag, were shot by fellow supervisor Dan
White. The event galvanized LGBTQ communities in San Francisco and abroad—as White
attempted to claim depression, and a recent change in diet to Twinkies, as the reason for his
crime. The jury eventually convicted White but of manslaughter rather than murder (which would
have carried a much greater penalty).
In response to the Moscone and Milk murders, the Pride Parade Committee decided to endorse
and display Baker’s flag all along the next year’s parade route. Unrelated, but during this
tumultuous time, Baker pitched his flag to the Paramount Flag Company for mass production, but
hot pink proved impossible to procure as a mass-produced fabric. The Pride Parade Committee’s
desire to split the colors evenly along both sides of the street posed a problem for a seven-striped
flag, and so Baker dropped another color, turquoise, as a concession to symmetry. The result was
the six-striped flag most commonly used today.
For the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Stonewall uprising, Baker was tapped by pride
organizations in Key West, Florida, to create a mile-and-a-quarter-long rainbow flag. Dramatic
aerial images of the flag make it seem as though Key West’s roads have suddenly been painted
with vibrant rainbow hues. After the parade, the flag was cut up and made into smaller rainbow
flags that were then sent out to pride celebrations across the world.
In 2012 Baker suffered a major stroke and lost some physical function on his left side. Through
painful physical therapy he eventually had to teach himself how to sew again. Four years later he
sewed a group of hand-dyed flags, featuring the original eight colors once again—returning sex
and serenity to the powerful symbolics of the rainbow flag. (One of these flags graces this book’s
cover.) Baker gave one of these flags to President Barack Obama, who displayed it for a time in
the White House.
This is the dynamic historical line that Baker’s flag traces—from the daily indignities of a
homophobic culture to the self-making efforts of queer communities. From mourning, anger, and
rage to pride.
 Baker’s flag is now ubiquitous; it hangs in LGBTQ community spaces and appears in popular
culture alike. In the summer of 2018, actress and director Lena Waithe wore a gown with a
rainbow cape to the (by definition) fashionable Met Gala—an unambiguous sign of the star’s
identification with LGBTQ communities. Waithe’s positioning of the flag as a high-fashion
superhero’s cape speaks to the aspirations of those who identify strongly with the flag. The
rainbow flag is, by virtue of its bold colorway, difficult to hide or subdue. A room can be dim, and
even then, the flag is legible. It demands attention and takes up a great deal of visual space. It is,
in a word, itself; and its history reveals that change, far from being anathema to it, is part of its
very DNA.
Thirty-fifth anniversary Rainbow Flag hand dyed and sewn by Gilbert Baker.
 Baker’s six-striped flag, the one most commonly seen today,

THE EVOLUTION OF GILBERT BAKER’S FLAG

Because of its central place in the pantheon of LGBTQ design, the flag and its colors have been variously
adored, critiqued, and co-opted. Working with the ad agency Tierney, Philadelphia’s Office of LGBT Affairs
proposed adding two additional stripes, one black and the other brown, to Baker’s rainbow flag. The city’s
LGBTQ affairs office had been tasked with addressing a rash of racial violence happening within
Philadelphia’s gay bars and clubs. For some, this was an unwelcome addition—as many believed it
compromised Baker’s design (but as the previous entry has shown, the flag has been anything but stable
over the years). For others the flag’s new design was a signal of the growing recognition of the
interrelated struggles of racial and sexual minorities.
Recently, the graphic designer Daniel Quasar suggested that the rainbow flag ought to change to
reflect a more intersectional representation of LGBTQ communities. Xyr design (Quasar uses xe/xem/xyr
pronouns) adds black and brown stripes, which, like the Philadelphia flag, reflect the ongoing struggles of
LGBTQ people of color, as well as light pink, light blue, and white—the colors of the transgender flag.
Adding these colors as a chevron on the flag’s hoist, Quasar’s design suggests that more work needs to be
done on these interrelated fronts if we are going to truly advance the cause of all LGBTQ people.

Daniel Quasar’s LGBTQ flag,

Flag of Philadelphia’s Office of LGBT Affairs, which includes a black and a
brown stripe.
 HAL FISCHER’S GAY SEMIOTICS

Inspired by the mostly gay male denizens of the Castro neighborhood in San Francisco, and his reading of
structuralist theory, erstwhile photography critic Hal Fischer began to take pictures of friends and tricks
dressed up with the quintessential signifiers of gay male dress. Over a sequence of four photographs
Fischer laid out the meanings of particular items such as a ring of keys hung from a belt loop, earrings,
and colored handkerchiefs. These hankies were part of a sexual signifying system known colloquially as
“the hanky code,” which corresponded particular colors with particular sexual activities. Red, for
example, represented the desire to fist (that is, to insert a fist anally) or be fisted, depending which side of
the body the hanky was worn on. But Fischer, who sometimes frames his work within the long tradition of
Jewish humor, cleverly undercuts the seriousness of the meanings of the hanky code by feinting toward
the hanky’s everyday use: “Red handkerchiefs are also employed in the treatment of nasal discharge and
in some cases may have no significance in regard to sexual contact.”
Working in dialogue with a group of photographers circulating around NFS Press (founded by
conceptually oriented photographers Donna-Lee Phillips and Lew Thomas), Fischer expanded rapidly
from these four photographs, adding an essay on gay semiotics (or the study of language and its
meanings), and photographs of archetypal media images of gay men, leather vestments and gear, and
popular forms of gay streetwear. With all the seriousness of an anthropologist doing fieldwork, Fischer’s
photographs are accompanied by a paragraph of text, or in some cases simple labels, that both edify and
eviscerate the idea that one can fully “read” the appearance of gay men.
1980s
 1980s

The emergence of what is now referred to as the human immunodefficiency virus (HIV) and its attendant
acquired immune deficiency syndrome (AIDS) is perhaps the single most important event of the 1980s,
and perhaps the twentieth century more broadly. Initially and colloquially referred to as “gay cancer”—as
many of the earliest deaths were of gay men—and then in the mainstream press as gay-related immune
deficiency (GRID)—HIV/AIDS decimated gay communities and anodized already existing homophobic
beliefs about the perceived sexual promiscuity, and thus moral depravity, of gay men. While
epidemiologists and journalists argued over HIV’s origins, men and women (both LGBTQ and straight—
the virus remains unprejudiced) were dying by the thousands. The United States government—and in
particular the Reagan administration—was largely unresponsive to the crisis. To get a sense of how
incomprehensible this silence was, think about how quickly news travels today regarding any new
potentially deadly epidemiological or health threat. Famously, Reagan did not publicly mention the virus
until 1985, four years after it was identified in the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Morbidity
and Mortality Weekly. Recent audio unearthed from Reagan administration era press conferences reveals
that the situation was as bad as many HIV/AIDS activists assumed: the president’s proxy, press secretary
Larry Speakes, treated HIV/AIDS as a joke—hectoring journalists who asked about the virus by deflecting
and insinuating that they themselves must be gay. Religious officials, such as the Catholic cardinal John
O’Connor, spread misinformation about the virus and publicly came out against safer-sex practices that
involved the use of condoms. (His solution, perhaps predictably, was abstinence.)
In the face of a lackadaisical and homophobic government, and an overly cautious medical
establishment, groups such as the Gay Men’s Health Crisis (GMHC) were created to raise money and
establish institutions for AIDS research and community healthcare. Out of GMHC emerged activist groups
such as the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (or ACT UP), which pressured local, state, and national
governments, religious institutions, and multinational corporations to do something about the (now
global) pandemic. Part of raising awareness among LGBTQ communities and in larger civic and national
communities involved the creation of striking visual campaigns, which by turns educated and excoriated
those in power for their inaction. Many of the graphics created in response to the AIDS pandemic were
developed by collectives of people—an enactment of the coalitional politics of AIDS activist groups. The
Silence = Death Collective’s eponymous “Silence = Death” campaign is perhaps the most famous of
these, and matches Baker’s rainbow flag in prominence as a profoundly influential example of LGBTQ
design. The AIDS Quilt—begun by activist Cleve Jones under the aegis of the Names Project—was another
popular and visible forum for people to craft their memorials to the dead.
One of the primary directives of groups like ACT UP was to reorient the language of pity and
victimization often applied from the outside to those who lived and died from HIV/AIDS. The singer,
songwriter, and author Michael Callen in collaboration with his doctor, Joesph Sonnabend, and Richard
Berkowitz, coined the term “person/people living with AIDS” (PWAs) as a corrective to the popular
framing of PWAs as “victims,” or otherwise without agency. One famous poster from the era, created by
the collective Gran Fury, simply read “All people with AIDS are innocent,” in marked distinction to the
language of condemnation popularly applied to those living with HIV/AIDS. Such graphic and linguistic
reframings aided in the destigmatization of the ebullient and rich lives of those who were seropositive.
The AIDS pandemic changed everything: LGBTQ institutions, sexual cultures, mainstream
understandings of LGBTQ people, and more. “Queer” was introduced as a term to be reclaimed from the
trash heap of denigrating language, once used to dismiss the lives and concerns of LGBTQ people.
Activist groups such as Queer Nation staked their claim on such uncompromising linguistic acts of
assignation, challenging other LGBTQ people to acknowledge and own their radical heritage.
At the same time, cultural production continued apace: records were recorded, magazines produced
and distributed, parties thrown, books published, murals painted, and new symbols created. LGBTQ
activism centered the HIV/AIDS pandemic, but was not strictly limited to its concerns. The efforts of
Barbara Smith, Audre Lorde, and Cherríe Moraga, all queer women of color, for example, changed
publishing and the vision for what was then called “third world” women’s writings. Part of their efforts
were enacted via their publishing house, Kitchen Table Press, and the striking covers of the books they
published. In music, the vivacious performer Sylvester melded glam, funk, and nascent Hi-NRG and
Afrofuturist aesthetics to create vibrant political performances that centered the lives, loves, and
experiences of LGBTQ people of color.
In New York, the artist Keith Haring developed powerful and populist symbols for an array of LGBTQ
organizations. Haring’s work crosses realms of fine and popular art and design, and in this book two
examples of his work are included: a logo for the organization Heritage of Pride and a mural completed in
the bathroom of the LGBTQ community center. Taken together they reveal that LGBTQ artists and
designers honed their messages for different constituencies. The friendly Heritage of Pride logo, akin to
the kinds of images Haring made for his Pop Shop in New York, exists in striking contrast to the sexual
explicitness of his mural for youth who might need support in destigmatizing their own desires. This
reveals one of the central tensions of this book, which is the toggling between design intended for a
broadly defined public and design intended for a select community, with specific needs, desires, and
cultural contexts.
Finally, the 1980s witnessed the popularization of computers and the Internet, and their attendant
hydra-headed anarchic and experimental cultures. The Internet’s introduction not only changed the
parameters of design production—for the first time, designers were working with software instead of
analog tools—but of the dissemination of design, and the establishment of networked, virtual Internet
publics. Pioneers in countercultural production such as Tom Jennings essentially shepherded a new kind
of queer object, made out of a new material: computational code. Some, like C. M. Ralph, took software
and repurposed it for alternative ends—making the first queer computer game.
In this respect, LGBTQ designers, whether engaged in creating graphics for one of the twentieth
century’s most dire calamities or for seemingly trivial diversions from overwhelming real-world problems,
manifested the truly queer desire to find community and safety in one another.
 PINK TRIANGLE

Paragraph 175—part of the German criminal code from 1871 until 1994—stipulated that homosexual acts
between men (in addition to bestiality and child abuse) were crimes punishable with imprisonment and a
“prompt loss of civil rights.” When Adolf Hitler rose to power in the 1930s, he intensified the persecution
of gay men, lesbians, and transvestites (transgender was not yet a term of art) as part of a larger bid to
purify the German homeland from cultural, racial, and sexual “others.” During the course of the Nazi
regime approximately 100,000 men were arrested for homosexuality, and a number of these were sent to
prisons and concentration camps. Homosexual male prisoners were forced to wear pink triangles on their
prison uniforms, no doubt with the idea that such a flamboyant shape would be an inescapable badge of
shame. Lesbians were given a black triangle, which was the symbol for “asocial” or “work-shy” prisoners.
The pink and black triangles are direct embodiments of genocidal hatred—vile and contemptible symbols
of Nazi policies toward homosexuals.
When some in early gay liberation movements began to use the pink triangle as an identifying symbol,
there were people (including Harvey Milk) who were uncomfortable with its traumatic associations. It
wasn’t really until the Silence = Death Collective’s iconic design debuted that the pink triangle was
solidified as a sign of queer resistance and empowerment (see here). Some political groups, such as
Boston’s Black and Pink, founded in the mid-2000s, use the pink triangle in their visual branding as a
tacit acknowledgment of the symbol’s historical connection to incarceration and hatred, while also
tapping into its empowering potential. Black and Pink, whose work toward “the abolition of the prison-
industrial complex is rooted in the experience of currently and formerly incarcerated people,” uses the
pink triangle as an ad hoc jail cell, drawing a visual connection between the criminalization of queer and
trans people across history. Two hands hold the central pink bars, sometimes a letter resting between
them—a representation of one of Black and Pink’s most successful programs, which is to put people in the
“free world” in touch with LGBTQ prisoners.
 SYLVESTER ALBUM COVER

A musical force and a queer performance icon, Sylvester was shaped equally by his early forays into
nightlife (as a member of the streetwise party crew known as the Disquotays) and experimental theater
(as a participant in the queer troupe Cockettes), becoming an innovator in musical style.
Sylvester James, Jr., grew up in the Pentecostal church and was sexually abused within that
community. A short time later he was ejected from his family household for being gay, and was homeless
before his sixteenth birthday (a not uncommon fate for LGBTQ youth). Despite, or perhaps because of,
these trials, Sylvester cultivated a practiced fabulosity—a state that cultural critic madison moore
identifies, in part, as “dangerous, political, confrontational, [and] risky,” for its associations with “queer,
trans, and transfeminine people of color and other marginalized groups.”
This record cover, one of two Sylvester albums illustrated by Mike Amerika, is a dazzling example of
Sylvester’s visual fabulosity, melding his gender-bending presentation with Afrofuturist aesthetics—a
literary, philosophical, and visual movement combining black and pan-African imagery and sounds with
science fiction tropes. Here Sylvester languorously holds his cigarette aloft—his eyes and earpiece
suggesting a cyborg entity. Bangles bling in the lower left corner. In his performances and popular visual
representations Sylvester challenged his audiences to rethink the terms of how certain identities could be
visually expressed.
 KITCHEN TABLE PRESS BOOK COVERS

A 1986 catalog for Kitchen Table Press describes their work as “both cultural and political, connected to
the struggles for freedom of all of our peoples.” The brainchild of writers and black/brown feminists
Barbara Smith, Audre Lorde, and Cherríe Moraga, Kitchen Table Press was committed not only to
producing books by women of color, but to reaching an audience that matched their authors’
demographics, essentially building a publishing and distribution model that centered women of color. The
kitchen table, then, is symbolic of the grassroots collaborations between women from different
backgrounds, gathering together in the feminized space of the kitchen.
Two of the press’s most popular volumes are included here; their iconic and graphic cover designs
influenced the visual style of what was then referred to as “third world” publishing for years to come.
Designed by Diane Souza, the cover of Audre Lorde’s “biomythography” Zami: A New Spelling of My
Name depicts a woman split between opposing worlds—one populated with lush vegetation and the other
with rectilinear skyscrapers. She looks out at a reader, a hand hovering over a distant mountain range.
Artist Johnetta Tinker illustrated the woman featured on the cover of Cherríe Moraga and Gloria
Anzaldúa’s signal collection of writings by brown and black women. She is the eponymous bridge for
those seeking safe passage and a connection with the past.
 THE AIDS QUILT

The art historian Julia Bryan Wilson has pointed out that the AIDS Quilt is “the largest ongoing
community arts project in the world,” and yet, it “continues to be vexed by logistical issues and
ideological conflicts over its legacy and its ongoing purpose.” Many see it as an effective
memorial to those claimed by the pandemic, and its critics see a soft politics of remembrance,
where a more insistent activist message might be more effective at creating political and cultural
change. Regardless of one’s associations or assessment, the AIDS Quilt remains one of the most
impressive, coordinated artistic efforts in LGBTQ history. The quilt takes what is normally
considered feminized labor and transforms it into public spectacle. Given this public function, a
quilt’s associations with warmth, or the personal and cultural narratives that often accompany
them, are essential to the AIDS Quilt’s memorial function.
The quilt’s origins can be traced to a 1985 memorial vigil led by San Francisco–based activist
Cleve Jones, a close confidant of the politician Harvey Milk. For the vigil, Jones, who describes
himself as an “angry, arrogant son of a bitch,” had participants write the name of a loved one who
had died from AIDS onto white posterboard. These names were then carried through the streets
of San Francisco, and eventually taped to the wall of the government building housing the
Department of Health and Human Services—visually congealing everyone’s disparate losses into a
single mass. Jones writes of that moment: “Standing in the drizzle, watching as the posters
absorbed the rain and fluttered down to the pavement, I said to myself, It looks like a quilt. As I
said the word quilt, I was flooded with memories of home and family and the warmth of a quilt
when it was cold on a winter night.”
To manifest his vision, Jones enlisted the help of Gilbert Baker and Ron Cordova (as technical
directors) and myriad volunteers, both expressly acknowledged and unacknowledged in Jones’s
writings of the quilt’s story. It was during these early years that the structure of the quilt was
cemented—each individual panel of the quilt would be rectangular, measuring three feet by six
feet; and these panels would then be sewn together into large, twelve-by-twelve-foot square
blocks that could be folded up and stored when not on public display. The quilts were to be folded
with what the volunteer Jack Caster named a “lotus fold”—wherein the corners of each square
block would be folded into the center, and the process repeated until a small bundle was made.
This gave the quilt, particularly its folding and unfolding, a performative and ceremonial
dimension as it was de-installed from public display.
After showings in 1987 and 1992, the AIDS Quilt was given its most dramatic display in 1996—
where it stretched from the Capitol building to the Washington Monument. A contemporaneous
New York Times article covering the display conveyed its solemnity, beginning: “A carpet of grief
covered the nation’s front yard this weekend.” Visitors to the quilt could locate their loved ones
via enlisted volunteers who could give the coordinates for each individual memorialized in the
quilt. In this respect the quilt not only made visible the enormity of the losses from the AIDS
pandemic, but served a quieter, individualized function for those who wished to commune with
particular friends and loved ones.
Because the parameters of the quilt are set, the most astonishing thing, from a design
perspective, about the quilt is how it allows for individual expression within constraint. Some
panels are dedicated to scores of names and others to only a single one. Some panels memorialize
public figures claimed by the pandemic—such as Rock Hudson or Sylvester; but most are devoted
to more anonymous figures—brothers, sisters, lovers, children, parents, and friends. Some are
truly quilted—stitched by hand or machine sewn; others are appliquéd, glued, and/or collaged.
Humor infuses many panels, secret in-jokes or material flamboyances conveying something of the
personality of the person being memorialized. Other panels are more solemn and spare. For the
people who have made a panel, the experience is an unforgettable one—each design decision an
important indicator of something related to the remembered person.
Memory is at once fugitive and felt, escaping any notion of true fidelity. Despite these
structural losses, we can sometimes approach the enormity of the intermingled grief and desire to
revivify those closest to us. In this respect the AIDS Quilt is an approximation—massive in scale—
of the terrible legacy and ongoing losses of AIDS. Some have visceral, bodily memories of walking
among the blocks in 1996, in the symbolic heart of our national community—on the “nation’s front
yard.” But regardless of whether one was present for that display, or any of the thousands of local
or national presentations of the quilt, one can imagine walking among the blocks, overwhelmed
by the affective dimensions of the pandemic and the individual narratives and relationships
charted using only a needle, some thread, and a bit of cloth.
 NO ON PROP 64 POSTERS

Perhaps no politician has been so obsessed with AIDS as Lyndon LaRouche, who, in 1986, proposed an
initiative for California voters that would have listed AIDS as a communicable disease. LaRouche’s
initiative was informed by specious science (he believed that one could contract HIV through mosquitos
and in the air), and had disastrous and anti-democratic implications; AIDS activists worried that if the
initiative passed it would lead to mandatory testing and quarantine in concentration camps. The
anonymous maker(s) of these posters and the political organization that distributed them (Central Coast
Citizens Against LaRouche) dramatize this prospect with grim effectiveness. The twisting barbed wire
creates a continuous pattern across the two posters—allowing for multiple posters to be posted in
succession to remain unified by the barbed-wire fencing.
 One of the paired posters depicts a brown man, shirtless and branded with the pink triangle, a
historical symbol of oppression under Nazi Germany. The text “I didn’t think my vote counted” relates the
consequences of political apathy. The second poster images the vast open—yet still enclosed—space of the
quarantine camp. No people are present (have they all perished?), as the yellow and orange colors
suggest a sunset of civility. “Never Again”—a phrase often attached to the Holocaust of World War II, is
evocatively positioned to draw political parallels between then and now. Ultimately, campaigns like this
were extinguished as the LaRouche initiative was roundly, and thankfully, defeated.
 ACT UP

Wall Street was the site of ACT UP’s (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power’s) first protest
demonstration on March 24, 1987. The location had been chosen deliberately: Wall Street
represented the heart of the financial interests of U.S.-based multinational corporations, such as
the pharmaceutical manufacturer Burroughs-Wellcome, which repurposed an already-extant
cancer drug known as azidothymidine (AZT) and tested it as a potential antiretroviral therapy for
those living with HIV/AIDS. When introduced to an HIV/AIDS market, AZT was an expensive drug,
costing about $10,000 for a year’s worth of treatment. Activists in ACT UP agitated for the
accessibility of drugs like AZT, and for the Food and Drug Administration to expand and speed up
clinical and experimental drug trials that could potentially extend the life of a person living with
HIV/AIDS, sometimes by a year or more.
For their first protest, ACT UP made a set of demands, which were collated and distributed on
fliers:
1. Immediate release by the federal Food and Drug Administration of drugs that might help
save our lives. These drugs include: Ribavirin (ICN Pharmaceuticals); Ampligen (HMR
Research Co.); Glucan (Tulane University School of Medicine); DTC (Merieux); DDC
(Hoffman-LaRoche); AS 101 (National Patent Development Corp.); MTP-PE (Ciba-Geigy); AL
721 (Praxis Pharmaceuticals).
2. Immediate abolishment of cruel double-blind studies wherein some get the new drugs and
some don’t.
3. Immediate release of these drugs to everyone with AIDS or ARC.
4. Immediate availability of these drugs at affordable prices. Curb your greed!
5. Immediate massive public education to stop the spread of AIDS.
6. Immediate policy to prohibit discrimination in AIDS treatment, insurance, employment,
housing.
7. Immediate establishment of a coordinated, comprehensive, and compassionate national
policy on AIDS.
During the protest, members of ACT UP debuted the now iconic “Silence = Death” design,
hung an effigy of FDA commissioner Frank Young, and practiced nonviolent civil disobedience,
sitting in the street and stopping the flow of downtown Manhattan traffic. In the end seventeen
protestors were arrested, and the FDA soon announced that they would be speeding up future
drug trials of AIDS medications.
ACT UP understood this action by the FDA to be a direct result of their protest, and soon the
group was planning other protests at sites of national and local importance—such as the White
House and New York’s Memorial Sloan Kettering hospital. The group staged dramatic “die-ins”
where members would lie down in front of institutions such as government buildings and
churches, each holding their own tombstone at their head. To get around the protesters, people
going to work or attending church had to step over the bodies of the dead. ACT UP also held
“kiss-ins,” wherein members of the group would make out in front of the halls of power, forcefully
calling attention to the various reactions to publicly expressed queer desire. For the protesters,
kissing was an explicit acknowledgment of the pleasures of life—a powerful and public rebuke of
the common understandings of AIDS as only, or simply, a dour death sentence.
Although initially founded in New York, chapters of ACT UP were soon launched in dozens of
national and international locales. ACT UP spawned a number of break-off groups devoted to
developing television documentaries (DIVA-TV) and, in the case of the items on the following
pages, visual materials (Gran Fury). One early example of the former was the video Doctors, Liars
and Women: AIDS Activists Say No to Cosmo (directed by artist and activist Jean Carlomusto),
which was produced in response to an article published in Cosmopolitan playing down women’s
risk of contracting HIV. It was the first activist demonstration put on by ACT UP’s Women’s
Caucus, focusing on health concerns particular to women. This coalitional aspect of ACT UP’s
mission meant that, in the words of art historian Douglas Crimp, “Gay men and lesbians joined the
struggle first and are still on its front lines.”
In his 1991 memoir Close to the Knives, artist and member of ACT UP David Wojnarowicz
speculated on the most effective way to bring the pandemic to the nation’s attention. He
wondered “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 DC 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.” This passage
inspired the first “ashes actions” put on by ACT UP in 1992—wherein members would carry the
ashes of loved ones through the streets of Washington, D.C., and “in an act of grief, and rage and
love” deposit them on the lawn of the White House. The first ashes action was documented by
James Wentzy for his video series AIDS Community Television. It remains one of the most
profound protest actions ever performed in the United States.
ACT UP’s uncompromising public obstreperousness and artistic creativity are two of its
greatest contributions to LGBTQ and U.S. histories. Arguably, many of the advances in the care,
treatment, and discourse around HIV/AIDS would not be what they are today without the work of
ACT UP and other AIDS activists. (While ACT UP was the most visible, it was hardly the only
group dedicated to eradicating HIV/AIDS and the cultural stigmas attached to those who lived
with the virus.) Nor is ACT UP a thing of the past, a group only to be discussed in relation to the
1980s and the 1990s; many chapters of ACT UP are still active today and continue to raise
political consciousness about the state of the ongoing pandemic. The organization’s message “Act
up! Fight back! Fight AIDS!” continues to be an unfortunately necessary and clarion exclamation.
 SILENCE = DEATH POSTER

Silence = Death: this simple equation reflected and substantiated the grief and pain of thousands of
people whose lives were irrevocably changed during the first years of the AIDS pandemic. It wasn’t until
1985, when more than five thousand people had already died from the opportunistic infections that
accompany the virus (HIV) and its condition (AIDS), that the then-president Ronald Reagan uttered the
word “AIDS” in public. We now know things were even worse; as early as 1982 the Reagan
administration’s press representative rebuffed journalists who pursued an official response to the
pandemic as “fairies.” The situation was dire.
Created by a group of six men calling themselves the Silence = Death Collective, this path-breaking
design has now been taken up by generations of LGBTQ and AIDS activists. The collective members—
Avram Finkelstein, Charles Kreloff, Jorge Socarrás, Brian Howard, Chris Lione, and Oliver Johnston—had
connections to the art and design worlds, and were intimately familiar with the pandemic that was laying
waste to their communities of friends, family, and lovers. Together they created one of the most
significant examples of graphic design in the twentieth century, and, perhaps even more importantly,
became a support group for one another in the process.
In terms of design, their innovation was to appropriate the pink triangle, a symbol used to identify
homosexuals in Nazi concentration camps, and to flip it so that it stood on its base—conveying the
strength of an otherwise stigmatized social position. To this they added a simple equation, rendered in
sans serif capital letters. The result is a graphic shout; an equation whose math is always wounding. With
this design the members of the Silence = Death Collective fulfilled their intention to “turn anger, fear,
[and] grief into action.”
 KISSING DOESN’T KILL

The items on these pages represent the visual and emotional range of ACT UP–affiliated graphics.
For example, Gran Fury’s “Kissing Doesn’t Kill: Greed and Indifference Do”—designed to first
appear on Chicago-area public transportation—is quietly informative, dispelling popular myths
about the transmission of HIV, while also sending up contemporaneous United Colors of Benetton
advertisements. Other posters and graphics evince a powerful rage, calling attention to those
deemed culpable. Like the “Silence = Death” design, these posters and signs tend to feature a
single graphic in coordination with a condensed textual message. Some, like the “AIDS Crisis Is
Not Over” by Little Elvis serve as an early reminder that advances in medicine or policy are not
tantamount to the eradication of HIV/AIDS or its social stigmas.
 NATIONAL COMING OUT DAY LOGO

Organized in 1988 on the anniversary of the 1987 March on Washington for Lesbian and Gay Rights,
National Coming Out Day was the brainchild of a number of activists living near Washington, D.C. Among
these were Jean O’Leary, head of the National Gay Rights Activists, and Rob Eichberg, who founded The
Experience, a community-based workshop that helped gay and lesbian people “come out” to their families
and friends. Since the establishment of gay liberation movement groups, coming out had been a popular
political tactic to personalize the issues that faced LGBTQ people. The hope was that if enough people
came out to their family and friends that this would lead to a sea change in the way that gays and lesbians
were treated both at home and in culture at large.
By designating a day in which coming out could be celebrated, O’Leary and Eichberg hoped to provide
national support for those struggling to live openly among friends and family. Part of that campaign
included designing a logo that communicated, with clarity, this process. Although only in use for the first
years of the event, this logo rendered the initialism NCOD in purple and pink geometric shapes—each
element pointing from left to right, and thus implying a forward motion. The “O” is filled with a pink
triangle and the final “D” looks like the tip of a pointed arrow. The logo was printed on buttons, flyers,
stickers, cards, and t-shirts. Its embrace of geometric simplicity bespeaks a concurrent interest in
postmodern design and architecture to playfully reevaluate design orthodoxy. Nearly as soon as the logo
was developed, it was supplanted by an illustration made by Keith Haring of a figure dancing its way out
of a closet. While Haring’s design is remarkable for its own reasons, it has, by now, completely eclipsed
the organization’s original design, which possesses a clever and underrecognized design intelligence.
 INVITATION FROM THE SAINT

Located in a purpose-built dome and featuring millions of dollars worth of lighting and audio equipment,
The Saint nightclub set a remarkable new standard for New York nightlife when it opened in 1980. Bruce
Mailman, who also owned the nearby New St. Mark’s Baths (and was a producer of off-Broadway theater
such as Al Carmines’s 1973 musical The Faggot), repurposed a former theater for his new nightclub. The
Saint was as much defined by its technical wizardry as its exclusivity—a limited number of memberships
were sold in the dance club’s first year, and women and people of color were a rarity until the club’s final
years. It was party by design; the main circular dance floor offered no quarter—as it had no corners—for
shrinking violets. The club’s architecture, designed by Charles Terrell, emphasized the soaring height of
the perforated metal dome, which on the weekends when the club was open served as a canvas for the
hundreds of stage and special effects lights, including a juiced-up, rotating Spitz Space System projector,
the kind often used by planetariums.
This invitation from the club’s first year anthropomorphizes some of The Saint’s sensorial and
architectural conceits. A monumental nude male figure is set against an early morning sky (The Saint’s
parties didn’t start until eleven p.m. and often didn’t end until the morning)—stars still visible in the
predawn glow. Rainbows shoot out like lasers from the man’s eyes, dark searchlights from his fingertips.
He places his left hand over his heart, which emanates an otherworldly glow. It is as if he has swallowed
the club whole, internalizing its constellated pleasures.
Talent flocked to the club—Sylvester, Grace Jones, and Linda Clifford joined DJs such as Jim Burgess,
Robbie Leslie, Nao Nakamura, and Sharon White in the raucous revelry. Susan Tomkin, a former
employee at the nightclub, summarizes the mission and atmosphere succinctly, saying, “We felt gay
people were entitled to have a fabulous place to go to and dance, and be themselves and part of a
community.”
 WINDOW DISPLAY DESIGN

Sited at the intersection of commerce and public art, window displays are often a neglected form of
popular design. The design firm Matson Jones Custom Display was the corporatized identity of the artistic
duo Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns—once lovers, and important figures in the development of
modern avant-garde art. Together they designed windows for upscale clients such as Tiffany & Co. and
Bonwit Teller (for whom Andy Warhol also completed window displays) that merged the everyday with
surrealist visual cues. Such pop-surrealism was also on display in the window designs of Simon Doonan
and Mundo Meza, who raided Los Angeles–area prop houses to hilarious and sometimes disturbing effect.
The window featured here (left) was created in 1988 when the Reagans were leaving the White House. It
references various aspects of the Nancy years including her obsession with astrology and her extravagant
china purchases.
Across the country in New York, artist Greer Lankton designed a series of dolls (many based on real
people) that populated the window displays of the East Village boutique Einstein’s, operated by her
husband (above). Splendid, weird, and finely crafted, Lankton’s window displays earned the artist a cult
following, and now, years later, her contributions to that heady artistic scene are only beginning to be
understood and valued.
 LEATHER FLAG

Tony DeBlase, the creator of the leather pride flag, spent his days working in Chicago’s Field Museum of
Natural History. Taking on the pseudonym “Fledermaus” (German for “bat”), DeBlase spent his
nonworking hours publishing, educating, and organizing in Chicago’s vibrant leather/BDSM communities.
As editor and publisher of magazines like DungeonMaster and Drummer, DeBlase emphasized that
sexiness is always supported by safety and technique when engaging in sadomasochism. Along with the
longtime photographer, entrepreneur, and activist Chuck Renslow, DeBlase was a founding member of the
Leather Archives and Museum, now located in a former Jewish synagogue in Chicago’s Rogers Park
neighborhood.
DeBlase’s flag design was unveiled at the 1989 International Mr. Leather competition, and unlike
Gilbert Baker, who gave an interpretation of his flag’s colorway, DeBlase coyly left the design for the
viewer to decipher. The colors black and blue certainly have material resonance with the common dress of
leather/BDSM—black leather and blue denim. The central white stripe is more wily; oftentimes white is
interpreted as signaling “purity” in flag design—but this has never been a significant ideal in
leather/BDSM communities. The red heart is clearer, being a common symbol for love.
The Leather Pride flag designed by Tony DeBlase in 1989. On the design,
DeBlase wrote, “I do not expect this design to be the final form.… I will
leave it to the viewer to interpret the colors and symbols.”
 KEITH HARING’S HERITAGE OF PRIDE LOGO

Made up of members of the recently disbanded, in 1983, Christopher Street Liberation Day Committee—
the group responsible for the annual gay liberation day parades in New York—Heritage of Pride
represented a break from previous gay and lesbian activist organizations. Unlike the coalitional efforts of
the previous Christopher Street Liberation Day Committee, Heritage of Pride was a membership
organization, and an incorporated nonprofit. The scholar Myrl Beam has recently discussed this process
as the “nonprofitization” of the gay social movements; one in which direct unsanctioned protest actions
are replaced with the coordinated efforts between gay activist communities and governmental
organizations. Haring’s logo—comprised of two pairs of dancing figures, each pair with interlinked Venus
and Mars symbols for heads, respectively—arguably presents a fun and unthreatening image of gay and
lesbian people for public consumption.
 KEITH HARING’S ONCE UPON A TIME MURAL

If Haring’s Heritage of Pride logo deemphasized the sexuality of LGBTQ people, the same cannot be said
of the men’s bathroom mural he painted for New York’s Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual & Transgender Community
Center (commonly referred to as simply “The Center”). Painted less than a year before he died from AIDS,
the mural dynamically renders an orgiastic array of bodies in a variety of sexual activity. Entitled “Once
Upon a Time,” the mural represents sexual recreation in a space sometimes used as a cruising ground.
The title is promiscuous in its meaning—suggesting both a hearkening back to pre-AIDS sexual expression
and a potential new beginning in the present. The mural is therefore an acknowledgment and a tacit
encouragement of the sexual mores of gay men—even during the HIV/AIDS pandemic. Tongues touch, and
men emerge out of the tips of penises—playfully recounting fantastical, impossible sexual escapades.
Recently, Haring’s mural was restored, and today it continues to inspire and support the sexual lives of
LGBTQ people.
 As Tracker McDyke you must enter and sometimes break into spaces in
the Castro. Here an opened drawer reveals a political bumper sticker for a
quasi-fictional candidate, Landon LaDouche, a satirical take on Lyndon
LaRouche, author of anti-gay legislation.
 CAPER IN THE CASTRO

When C. M. Ralph and her partner moved from conservative Orange County to the liberal oasis of San
Francisco, she thought she was arriving in a gay utopia. Soon, though, the real world came crashing in, as
many of her friends and confidantes began to die of AIDS. As Ralph relayed to me, “it was a very dark
time in our lives.” In the midst of her grief and anger, she tasked herself with learning HyperCard; and
while tooling around with the capacities of that database and user interface software, she created what
would be the first LGBTQ video game, Caper in the Castro.
The game’s story is simple: you are Tracker McDyke, the famous lesbian private eye, trying to solve
the recent kidnapping of Tessy LaFemme, noted local drag queen. Exploratory in nature, Caper in the
Castro rewards player curiosity with in-community jokes and broader reflections of a corrupt and
homophobic political system (at one point you raid the offices of Dullagan Straightman, finding a bumper
sticker for Landon LaDouche’s presidential campaign in a desk drawer). To solve the mystery you walk
along the Castro collecting clues—and in true hard-boiled fashion, the crime is even worse than imagined.
One of the most touching aspects of the game makes itself apparent from the outset: when booting up
the game a note from Ralph pops up, requesting that a player donate to an “AIDS related charity of your
choice, for whatever amount you feel is appropriate.” Calling her software “CharityWare,” C. M. Ralph
ingeniously turns devastation into support and renewal.
 SAMOIS LOGO

Samois, the first lesbian S/M organization (1978–1983), played an important role in defining the political
and social dimensions of lesbian leather/BDSM practice. Samois was an outgrowth of a women’s
discussion group attached to the Society of Janus (a mixed-gender, mixed-sexuality support and education
group founded by San Franciscans Cynthia Slater and Larry Olsen). Key founders of Samois such as Gayle
Rubin and Patrick Califia, along with members of later, similarly oriented organizations such as the
Lesbian Sex Mafia in New York, were major contributors to a queer and feminist sex-positive philosophy
and practice. Califia, for example, wrote a widely read sex advice column for The Advocate, and Rubin’s
academic writings have shaped queer and feminist academic discourse around sex for more than a
generation.
The Samois logo, which appears on the masthead of several early newsletters, communicates their ties
to lesbian feminism graphically—creating from the tools of sadomasochism (rope and handcuffs) two
contiguous Venus symbols (a common graphic rendering for lesbians). Samois’s approach was both
politically aware and wryly humorous. As part of their statement of purpose, Samois directly addressed
their relationship to feminist thought and practice: “We believe that S/M can and should be consistent
with the principles of feminism. As feminists, we oppose all forms of social hierarchy based on gender. As
radical perverts, we oppose all social hierarchies based on sexual preference.” Not everyone in feminist
communities felt the same, and Samois and its members weathered intense and unfair scrutiny in
defending their lives and ideals.
 FIDONET LOGO

A self-described “fag anarcho nerd troublemaker/activist,” Tom Jennings (who was also the editor of
queer zine Homocore) began to work on the idea for what would eventually be known as Fidonet in late
1983. Initially conceived of as a bulletin board program where users could post publicly, eventually the
program was expanded to also include the exchange of private messages—a “store-and-forward computer
mail system,” in the words of Jennings. Although run in “a profoundly casual manner” in terms of
software design, Fidonet paved the way for many Internet technologies in use today—from forums to
emails and direct messaging. The basic concept was that the software network could hold a certain
number of “nodes,” attached to particular users, who could then send messages to one another. Jennings,
who lived in San Francisco, was node number one.
The Fidonet logo was designed by node number two, John Madil, who worked at the time at a
Computerland in Baltimore, Maryland. Madil made the image of a dog holding a floppy disk in its mouth
using the American Standard Code for Information Interchange (or ASCII) coding system. Although not
central in extant histories of Jenning’s software, Madil’s dog prototypes the relationship between visual
imagery and early Internet technologies—where cute mascots stood in for much more complicated code.
The metaphorical dog with a stereotypical name, Fido, stands in for the primary function of the software,
which is to retrieve and deliver messages—like any dog in a public park.
 MARCH ON WASHINGTON POSTERS

There have been three large national protest marches in Washington, D.C., for LGBTQ rights. Inspired by
the 1963 March on Washington (the event at which Martin Luther King Jr. gave his iconic “I Have a
Dream” speech), the first LGBTQ march took place in the summer of 1979, on the tenth anniversary of the
Stonewall uprisings. Early organizational efforts were supported by Harvey Milk and a constellated array
of regional and localized LGBTQ groups across the United States. Organizers developed a five-part
platform asking for a comprehensive lesbian and gay rights bill, an end to discrimination based on sexual
orientation at the federal level, a repeal of all anti-gay laws, the abolition of discrimination against lesbian
and gay mothers and fathers in custody cases, and a set of protective measures for LGBTQ youth.
This first march set the bar for the following two marches, in 1987 and 1993, respectively, with
organizers estimating nearly one million people in attendance at the 1993 march. These posters are from
the first and second national marches. Both use pink and black as the sole colors—calling attention to
popular graphic representations of queerness. In the 1979 poster the nation’s Capitol building is
composed of rows of tiny pairs of Mars and Venus symbols, a visual reformatting of a national polity. The
1987 poster appropriates a line spoken by Glinda the Good Witch in The Wizard of Oz (1939)—a double
entendre naming the process of coming out as a personal and national political act. A large pink triangle
dominates the design, with the silhouetted forms of people at a protest march below. The visual design of
the poster at once signals an intensification of the design strategies used in the earlier 1979 poster and
acknowledges the recent reclamation of the pink triangle as a viable symbol in the continuing gay
liberation struggle.
 DAY WITHOUT ART LOGO

In 1989, on the second annual World AIDS Day (sponsored by the World Health Organization), Visual
AIDS, an HIV/AIDS advocacy organization that names art as their “weapon of choice,” introduced the
concept of a day of “action and mourning” called A Day Without Art. Eventually, more than 800 arts
organizations participated with their own programs, events, actions, and rituals. Usually artworks on
display in these spaces are shrouded from public view with dropcloths, or gallery lighting is dimmed,
depicting the enormous loss of visual artists in the HIV/AIDS pandemic. The first Day Without Art was
promoted with a poster that featured Visual AIDS’s name in a bold, sans serif font, cracking and breaking
apart. For the second year Visual AIDS introduced the logo reproduced here, a square with an “X” inside
of it—rendered in graphic brushstrokes. Evincing a literal connection to the activity of art-making (the
square canvas, the brushy lines), the Day Without Art logo, just like the event itself, centers artistic
activity in its somber black-and-white design. It is a design that renders a paradox, how to visualize the
invisible, or the hidden.

Since the first Day Without Art in 1989, the program has continued to grow. Sound and video works
have been distributed by Visual AIDS to accompany museum and gallery presentations of a Day Without
Art. One example is the audio work created by Robert Farber, entitled Every Ten Minutes. As the title
indicates, the work is comprised of a bell that sounds every ten minutes, an aural manifestation of the
statistic at the time that one person died of AIDS every ten minutes. Farber’s work was shown at many
museums and galleries in the early 1990s as a striking meditation on presence, visuality, and absence in
the midst of the HIV/AIDS pandemic.
 BLK MAGAZINE

When graphic designer Alan Bell arrived in Los Angeles, he had already been the editor of Gaysweek
(1977–1979), a weekly newspaper for New York’s gay and lesbian communities. Sensing the need for an
all-black sex venue, Bell founded Black Jacks, the longest-running, monthly, all-black safer sex party. BLK
(“Where the news is colored on purpose”) was an outgrowth of a small newsletter Bell circulated among
Black Jacks attendees, conveying recent news and information about the HIV/AIDS pandemic. Over the
course of forty-one issues, BLK went from newsprint to full glossy, gathering community events (“BLK
Board”), letters to the editor (“BLK Mail”), news, and classifieds (“BLK Market”) by and for black gays
and lesbians in Los Angeles. Articles ranged from an obituary for the disco diva Sylvester to tongue-in-
cheek exposés: which black celebrities were circumcised (Jimi Hendrix—uncircumcised; Sammy Davis—
circumcised). Each issue featured a portrait photograph of a black queer celebrity or political personality
(Audre Lorde and Perry Watkins are two notable examples), with BLK’s large, sans serif logotype, often
printed in a bright, contrasting color.
 One of the early hallmarks of BLK was the appropriation of cartoons taken from JET and Ebony
magazines—for which Bell and others would write sexually suggestive captions. In a cartoon showing a
man talking to a bartender, BLK’s caption reads: “I’ve got ten inches, a big house, a big car and lots of
money, but he’d still rather have L.L. Cool J.” Bell’s publishing company, BLK Inc., produced an
astonishing array of magazines targeted toward LGBTQ black demographics, including periodicals that
focused on poetry (Kuumba), personals and classifieds (B-Max and B-Men), and erotic stories and
photography (Blackfire for men, Black Lace for women), just to name a few.
 ON OUR BACKS MAGAZINE

“Yes, finally a sex magazine for lesbians!” begins a letter to On Our Backs’s initial readers. Founded by
Myrna Elana and Debi Sundahl, and edited by Susie Bright, On Our Backs came rip-roaring into 1985,
what the editors proclaimed as “the year of the lustful lesbian.” Armed with a wicked sense of humor and
a bevy of dyke babes, the magazine made fun of the genre of the porn magazine while also conforming to
it. For example, the first issue of On Our Backs features a centerfold devised by Honey Lee Cottrell (On
Our Backs’s staff photographer), as well as an accompanying “Dagger Data Sheet” listing Cottrell’s stats,
ambitions (“live in another country for 15 years”), turn-ons (“my pocket pepper mill”), and turn-offs (“the
refrigerator with rotten food in it”). A year later Cottrell wrote about her submission in the pages of On
Our Backs, describing how the feature had allowed her to explore and come to terms with some of the
more derisive language (“bulldagger”) and stereotypes used to represent lesbians in popular media.
Ultimately, Bright and the On Our Backs contributors created a sex-positive forum for lesbians at a
time when discussions of sex, especially pornographic representations of sex, were under intense scrutiny
within feminist communities. Indeed, the magazine’s title was a riff on Off Our Backs, a contemporaneous
feminist publication that carried an anti-pornography view of feminist sexual politics. The covers of On
Our Backs are brazen in their depiction of lesbian sexuality. In style, content, and political positioning (not
to mention sexual positioning), On Our Backs truly lived up to its masthead: “Entertainment for the
Adventurous Lesbian.”
1990s
 1990s

At the end of the 1980s, U.S. legislative politics devolved into a culture war. Politicians such as U.S.
senator from North Carolina Jesse Helms pulled focus away from widespread and growing economic
inequality by outrageously grandstanding about gay, lesbian, and queer artists receiving federal support
in the form of grants from the National Endowment for the Arts. Performance artists like Ron Athey, Holly
Hughes, and Tim Miller were particularly targeted, and nongovernmental political groups such as the
American Family Association were dogged in their attempts to publicly shame and destroy the lives and
careers of LGBTQ artists, and LGBTQ people more generally. “The right wing,” wrote the anthropologist
Carol Vance, “is deeply committed to symbolic politics, both in using symbols to mobilize public sentiment
and in understanding that, because images do stand in for and motivate social change, the arena of
representation is a real ground for struggle.”
LGBTQ design was certainly part of this contested ground, at both the community and national level.
For example, the transgender and bisexual flags were created during this decade, giving symbolic voice
to two of the most marginalized communities within and outside of broader lesbian and gay communities.
Simple in their execution and heartfelt in their meaning, these two flags remind us that when political
strife is at a fever pitch, the power of design to visualize the presence of LGBTQ people can be
fundamentally transformative.
In popular culture, lesbian and gay people were represented in greater numbers on the national stage.
Television sitcoms and dramas such as The Golden Girls, Northern Exposure, Grace Under Fire, and The
Simpsons dedicated special episodes to exploring lesbian and gay themes and characters. Other shows
featured prominent gay characters, such as Rickie Vasquez (Wilson Cruz) on My So-Called Life, or Ellen
Morgan (Ellen DeGeneres) on Ellen. DeGeneres’s coming out—which happened nearly simultaneously on
her sitcom and in her public life as a celebrity—was a watershed moment. In independent film the first
narrative feature to be directed by a queer woman of color, The Watermelon Woman, helped to set the bar
for an emerging “new queer cinema”—to use the phraseology coined by queer film historian B. Ruby
Rich.
But not everyone was equally represented in this newfound mainstream visibility. Carrie Moyer and
Sue Schaffner created the agitprop public art duo Dyke Action Machine! (DAM!), in part to draw attention
to the absence of lesbians and radical lesbian politics in public life. Moyer identified culture jamming as a
primary strategy for “reclaim[ing] public and virtual spaces from the encroachment of corporate
sponsorship.” “In addition,” wrote Moyer, “DAM! injects images of people—dykes—who are never
represented within the visual culture that surrounds us each time we step outside or turn on our
television sets.” Bands and musical artists such as Pansy Division, Fagbash, Tribe 8, Glen Meadmore, and
Girls in the Nose defined new genres of punk, often critiquing mainstream and subcultural
understandings of LGBTQ people and issues.
One of the groups driving the conversation around LGBTQ people in the mainstream was the Human
Rights Campaign Fund, which, in the middle of the decade, rebranded itself with a new logo and dropped
the “fund” from their name. The HRC’s efforts to lobby around the cause of gay marriage—or marriage
equality—helped to define the policy agendas of LGBTQ rights organizations during the decade and after.
A truly progressive politics remained elusive at the national level. After all, it was President Bill Clinton, a
Democrat, who signed the Defense of Marriage Act into law, stipulating that marriage was to be defined
as a union between one man and one woman. This and other policies falsely articulated by Democratic
lawmakers as “tolerant” (especially in relation to the openly homophobic policies of Republican
lawmakers), such as the military policy of enforced closeting colloquially known as “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell”
(another Clinton accomplishment), meant, effectively, that LGBTQ people were left in a lurch by both
Republicans and Democrats alike.
While national gay and lesbian political groups such as the HRC set their sights on gay marriage, they
pushed aside an array of concerns including housing, healthcare, and basic protections for trans people in
the name of political expediency. The story of Brandon Teena (later dramatized in a feature-length
documentary and narrative feature film) is a well-known example of the horrors visited upon trans people
(and is hardly the only case). Teena, a trans man born and raised in Nebraska, was brutally raped and
murdered by two men. His murder shed new and important light on the vulnerability and persistence of
trans communities; a glaring lacuna for national gay and lesbian rights organizations. In response to
these silences, trans people continued to create their own organizations that could advocate on their
behalf.
For the first time there was broad acceptance of gay and lesbian people as consumers, and corporate
practices of target marketing operated on the presumption that gay and lesbian people, understood as
DINKs (double-income, no kids), had the expendable capital to invest in luxury goods. Conspicuous
consumption defined some of these understandings of the gay market. The Japanese car brand Subaru,
for example, marketed their all-wheel-drive vehicles to lesbians with coy advertisements that used double
entendre (“It’s not a choice. It’s the way we’re built”), and the high-end underwear brand 2(X)IST
marketed almost solely to gay men. As the millennium approached, this made those who claimed a stake
in queerness’s often oppositional relationship to capitalism uneasy. “We’re a movement, not a market”
was a common chant at queer events such as the New York Dyke March.
HIV/AIDS continued to lay waste to LGBTQ communities both nationally and globally—and ever new
activist tactics were developed to meet the ongoing pandemic. Local efforts, such as the safer sex posters
developed by Robert Birch for the student body of Pierce College in Los Angeles, stand alongside national
efforts like the red ribbon project developed by the Visual AIDS Artists’ Caucus. In encouraging
celebrities and everyday people to wear red ribbons it was hoped that a general consciousness could be
raised concerning the scale of the pandemic. Other strategies were less benign: the pokey graphics and
writings that appeared in the aptly named zine Diseased Pariah News were openly critical of the efficacy
of “soft” activist tactics like the red ribbon or the ubiquitous and treacly teddy bears. Instead the writers
and editors of DPN stressed the precariousness and vitality of a seropositive life, producing some of the
most caustic and dynamic graphics of the decade.
The growing acceptance and domestication of the Internet as a new presence in daily life meant that it
was suddenly possible to connect geographically disparate people and communities—reducing some of
the isolation felt by LGBTQ people across the United States. Message boards, BBSs, and chat rooms
expanded the social and sexual lives of some LGBTQ folks—instantiating affinity groups like the Digital
Queers, whose slogan “We’re Here, We’re Queer, and We’ve Got Email” was a play on the in-the-streets
Queer Nation battle cry. As the year 2000 came and went, the prominence of the Internet’s influence on
LGBTQ design only continued to grow.
 OUT OF THE CLOSET LOGO

When the first Out of the Closet thrift store opened in Los Angeles’s Atwater Village, it was under the
guise of helping to fund educational initiatives and financially support a local AIDS hospice. Although not
original in its model (the Project Ahead Shop in Long Beach predated Out of the Closet and had a similar
mission), the thrift store—a project of the AIDS Healthcare Foundation—distinguished itself by its
magenta-and-teal exterior coloring and its cartoonish, punning logo. Hinging on the double meaning of
“closet”—as both the place where one stores clothes and the metaphorical space from which an LGBTQ
person enters public life (“coming out of the closet”)—the thrift store’s logo reinforces this linguistic play.
An empty hanger dangles from the counter of the “O” of the word “closet” (a counter is a space partially
or fully enclosed by a letterform), demonstrating the punning at the center of the thrift store’s overall
design.
Marc Neighbor, who managed the first Out of the Closet store and was an antiques dealer, remarked in
a Los Angeles Times article about the store’s opening that “having a storefront with this name takes away
from that shame. And really, the shame of anything you’re afraid of.” Today there are nearly twenty Out of
the Closet stores, each continuing to financially contribute to the well-being of people living with
HIV/AIDS. The stores also offer free rapid HIV testing and can put curious shoppers in touch with
HIV/AIDS health resources at a moment’s notice.
 THE AIDS IS NOT A GAME GAME POSTER

The graphic work of Robert Birch, both under his own name and the pseudonym Cardiac Arrest, has not
yet been understood in histories of AIDS graphics. While at Pierce College in California, Birch developed
an astonishing array of safer sex materials—targeted to his collegiate context. Some campaigns, for
example, were formatted as multiple-choice exams or crossword puzzles. This poster dramatizes the
vicissitudes of life in the age of AIDS—where a “player” is always only one move away from potentially
contracting HIV. With humor and acuity Birch represents puberty as a swamp, teenage years as a maze,
and adult life as a highway with twisting hairpin turns. In the center of the game board is the “Vale of
HIV,” where societal and family rejection interlocks with opportunistic infections, leading ultimately to
death. Birch’s representation of this process is uncompromisingly gimlet-eyed.
It was for this reason, perhaps, that (according to a contemporaneous Los Angeles Times article)
Birch’s poster riled school and community members. Birch clapped back with a press release aimed at his
critics. In unambiguous language he undercut any “pearl-clutching” protestations to his work, writing,
“my compatriots in the AIDS community have approved of the flyer because, unlike government-
generated materials, it does not sugar-coat reality,” concluding with, “The virus is the enemy—not truth.”
If the truth was uncomfortable for some, so be it.
 SAFE/UNSAFE POSTER CAMPAIGN

The terms of safe/r sex are explicitly reformatted in these posters, created by an anonymous San
Francisco activist collective known variously as Boy with Arms Akimbo and Girl with Arms Akimbo. Using
a simple line drawing of a boy or girl with hands on their hips (arms akimbo) as their identifying logo, the
collective’s “Safe/Unsafe” poster campaign was timed to coincide with the sixth International AIDS
Conference, which took place that year in San Francisco. In the lead-up to the event there was concern
among AIDS activists about whether or not they were truly welcome at a conference mostly attended by
pharmaceutical companies, government epidemiologists, and clinical trial investigators. In one panel
Peter Staley, a member of ACT UP, invited his fellow activists up to the stage and led a chant that clarified
their demands: “Three hundred thousand dead from AIDS, where is George [Bush]?” (The president was
not present at the conference; he was attending a campaign fund-raiser for the virulently homophobic
North Carolina senator, Jesse Helms, instead.)
A similar point is made via the strong graphic designs of Boy/Girl with Arms Akimbo. Instead of
focusing on the relative risks of different kinds of sex (such as sex with or without a condom), they point
to the political and structural harms caused by conservative policies and (in)actions. Labeling funding
cuts and travel bans on people entering the United States with HIV as inherently “unsafe,” Boy/Girl with
Arms Akimbo called out President George H. W. Bush for the hypocrisy of his rhetoric—which famously
called for a “kinder, and gentler nation.” Importantly this critique is always paired with evocative images
of bodies in amorous linkage—always labeled “safe”—suggesting that communities can care for each
other in ways that the national government and corporate world consistently failed to do.
 HRC LOGO

How does an organization choose a logo—a designed symbol that represents its values and
virtues? The case of the Human Rights Campaign Fund (now known by the shortened Human
Rights Campaign, or the HRC initialism) is instructive in this regard, offering insights as to how
an organization visually “rebrands” itself.
When Steve Endean began his political career, he was an undergraduate student of political
science at the University of Minnesota. While still enrolled, Endean founded the Minnesota
Committee for Gay Rights, and in time he became a state lobbyist for gay and lesbian causes. As
was typical for many gay and lesbian people involved directly in state and national politics,
Endean impeded the inclusion of any legislative agenda that included rights or protections for
transgender individuals, with the belief that such legislative efforts would be blocked from the
get-go. Instead, he put his focus on supporting candidates who could rally to gay and lesbian
causes; and eventually he became the director of the Gay Rights National Lobby. Shortly
thereafter he began another organization—the Human Rights Campaign Fund—a political action
committee that essentially fund-raised for gay- and lesbian-friendly candidates. Endean’s goal was
simple, and is perhaps best summed up as pushing gay and lesbian rights into the mainstream of
national politics (uncoincidentally, the phrase “into the mainstream” would be the title of
Endean’s 1991 memoir).
The first HRCF logo took the form of an illustrated torch—akin to the one held aloft by the
Statue of Liberty. As a symbol of freedom, the torch spoke elegantly to popular notions of
progress, a light in darkness. The second component of the HRCF’s logo was the typographic
rendering of its name. On letterhead and official documents the organization’s name was split in
two, “Human Rights” in a type that recalled handwriting, and “Campaign Fund” in a Jansonesque
typeface, the kind found on edifices of national buildings and monuments. The disparity between
the two typefaces could be read as shorthand for the lifespan of progressive political change,
starting at the grassroots (handwriting) and moving to the institutional level (Janson).
In the mid-1990s the HRCF sought to expand its advocacy work beyond simply funding
political campaigns and thus needed to rebrand itself. In this effort it enlisted the help of
designers Robert Stone and Keith Yamashita. The design brief that Stone Yamashita Partners
prepared for the leadership of the HRCF is fascinating in its breadth and variety.
This is fairly typical of corporate and large nonprofit design processes. The designer or firm
works with its client (here the HRCF) to identify the primary values they hope a future design will
communicate. In this case, Stone Yamashita identified “Equality, political strength, and an
intelligent approach to change” as the core values of the HRCF. Given this information, Stone
Yamashita proposed eleven designs that were to be evaluated on five criteria: the design’s
capacity to communicate the values of the organization clearly, its similarities and differences
from peer nonprofit organizations, its uniqueness and memorability, its strength to inspire
organizational growth and change, and finally what the design firm dubbed the “t-shirt factor.”
The first four of the proposed eleven designs built upon the HRCF’s already extant torch
iconography. Stone Yamashita presented two ideations of the symbol, one realistic and the other
abstract. Although they identified that the more realistic torch logo would have appeal “inside the
beltway,” the design firm suggested that the abstract logo would ultimately be more memorable.
The next three designs centered on the equals sign. The first of these is composed of a yellow
equals sign inside a royal blue square. Although this design was not the top choice for the focus
groups tasked with evaluating the new potential HRCF logos, it nevertheless carried the day with
HRCF’s leadership, who found it (rightly so) to be the most compelling design. Another design in
this category took the same idea but played with a two-color inversion, rendering the equals sign
as two contiguous bars, differentiated only by their color. The third design proposed the equals
sign as a crossbar for the capital letter “H”—foregrounding the connection between notions of
humanity and equality.
Photographic images were incorporated into the next three designs, whose purpose was to
literally “put a human face to the cause,” and therefore personalize the struggle for gay and
lesbian rights, “showing that gays and lesbians are part of everyone’s community and family.”
Variously rendered as a line of square photos, or a rectangular repeating block presenting in
conjunction with a simple type lock up of the name, these designs lacked the kind of legibility
present in Stone Yamashita’s other design suggestions. They would ultimately be difficult to
reproduce on a t-shirt or at various sizes.
The final design proposed by Stone Yamashita took the idea of the open hand as a literal
symbol of the HRCF’s outreach efforts. The idea was that the hand image could be used in
coordination with a typographic rendering of the HRCF’s initials or a single, heavy-block “H.” The
designers proposed that this was not only “undeniably hip” but offered maximum flexibility and
effect.
Eventually the HRCF chose the blue-and-yellow equality block—and in the process dropped
the “fund” from its name, shortening its initialism to HRC. After its debut, the HRC logo quickly
became a ubiquitous presence on roads; for even though Stone Yamashita was initially concerned
with the “t-shirt factor,” the new logo made for a great and easily legible bumper sticker.
In the 2010s, as the fight for gay marriage was coming to a head, the HRC changed the
colorway of its logo to pink and red, colors traditionally associated with love—another ingenious
visual move to center seemingly shared human values. Whether the HRC will change its logo
again remains to be seen, but for the current moment the blue square containing the yellow
equals sign has become synonymous with the organization. In other words, design has done its
job.

2
3
 4

Images 1 and 2 show an original attempt at rebranding of

the HRCF in the tradition of its original logo. Images 3 and 4
show a more abstract treatment of the torch imagery.
5
6
 7

Image 5 shows the proposal for what would eventually become HRC’s
new logo, while images 6 and 7 show variations on the equals sign
approach.

8
 9

10

Images 8 and 9 show two variations

of the photo-driven logo and image
10 shows the open-hand and
typographic treatment.
The now iconic equality block logo of the HRC.
 THE RIBBON PROJECT

Inspired by the custom of tying a yellow ribbon around a tree to welcome a convict or service member
back home, the members of the Visual AIDS Artists’ Caucus devised a red ribbon (whose color variously
stands for blood, passion, anger, and love) to be a symbol of the ongoing HIV/AIDS pandemic. After the
red ribbon debuted publicly at the 1991 Tony Awards, demand outpaced production, and caucus members
would hold “ribbon bees”—meetings where attendees would cut and fold ribbons by the thousands for
international distribution. The political aims of the ribbon project are made most clear in the group’s
three-point statement on the copyright of the ribbon:
1. Remain anonymous as individuals and to credit the Visual AIDS Artists’ Caucus as a whole in the
creation of the Red Ribbon Project, and not to list any individual as the “creator” of the Red Ribbon
Project.
2. Keep the image copyright free, so that no individual or organization would profit from the use of the
red ribbon.
3. Use the red ribbon as a consciousness-raising symbol, not as a commercial or trademark tool.
This last point is perhaps the most important, as caucus members positioned their design as an overtly
political tool, not to be co-opted for corporate needs or ends. While this has not always been the case, the
red ribbon remains one of the most visibly recognizable symbols of the ongoing AIDS pandemic, reaching
far beyond LGBTQ communities in the United States.
In the years since the AIDS ribbon’s public release, it has been worn and depicted countless times.
LGBTQ and non-LGBTQ celebrities and politicians such as Elizabeth Taylor, Ellen DeGeneres, and the late
Princess Diana wore the ribbon to public-facing events, raising awareness and consciousness about the
pandemic. Some AIDS activists have worried that wearing a ribbon, while visually impactful, does not
meet the financial and programmatic needs of people living with AIDS—and because of this, the ribbon
gives an empty kind of support. These views are balanced out by the many people (both living with AIDS
and not) who find solidarity in the symbol, as they adorn t-shirts and banners for the many AIDS charity
events around the country. Included here is one of many examples of the ribbon’s appearance in LGBTQ
material and visual cultures.
 DPN ZINE

Caustic and wickedly funny, Diseased Pariah News typified the truth-telling speech that queer theorist
Michel Foucault dubbed “parrhesia,” named after an ancient Greek term meaning to “speak everything
freely.” Working against popular media tropes that saw people living with AIDS as either broken, pitiable
victims or courageous, blameless heroes, the Diseased Pariah News cofounders, Beowulf Thorne (né Jack
Henry Foster) and Tom Shearer, cut through such confining narratives to offer a vision of the HIV/AIDS
pandemic that deeply acknowledged that things were, in fact, not okay. Dotted with T-cell count updates,
personal ads that foregrounded Thorne’s “danger penis,” and the zine’s ever-present mascot, a
saccharine Disneyesque oncomouse (a type of rodent bred to spontaneously develop cancer for medical
research), Diseased Pariah News gave life when there seemed to be nothing but death.
This graphic appeared both as the cover to the first issue and as a standalone postcard and t-shirt
design. Conceptualized by Thorne and photographed by Shearer, the graphic epitomizes the talents of
DPN’s founders, as it combines the pizzazz of mainstream product advertising with a potent message
aimed at the highest halls of power.
At DPN biting sarcasm was the coin of the realm. For example, the zine’s health column was called
“Get Fat! Don’t Die!” But even a good diet could not prevent the death of the zine’s founders. Shearer
died shortly after the second issue of DPN was released, and all duties fell to Thorne, who passed before
the last issue was published. Thorne was remembered in true DPN style with an article entitled “Dang!
Our Founder and Guiding Light Died!”
 REPOHISTORY MARKER

Queer Spaces: Places of Struggle, Places of Strength was a radical mapping project created by the artist
collective known as REPOhistory, who sought to illuminate the “untold stories of those whose history has
been marginalized because of their class, race, gender or sexuality.” Taking the form of temporary
historical markers in the shape of pink triangles, REPOhistory identified nine sites around Lower
Manhattan with particular significance to the histories of LGBTQ people. Some, like the marker for the
first ACT UP demonstration (Broadway and Wall Street) or Julius’ Bar (159 West 10th Street), celebrate
the key organizations and legal victories of LGBTQ history. Others, such as the marker reproduced here,
dedicated to self-identified drag queen and Street Transvestite Action Revolutionary Marsha “Pay It No
Mind” Johnson, describe the dire situation faced by many trans people throughout the twentieth and well
into the twenty-first century. In effect, Johnson’s marker serves as a memorial to her life and death, which
was at first ruled a suicide by New York City police, but was then reclassified thanks to the agitation by
LGBTQ activists. It remains the case today that trans women of color are at the highest risk of life-
threatening violence, making this memorial relevant and, sadly, necessary.
 THE WATERMELON WOMAN POSTER

When Cheryl Dunye’s The Watermelon Woman was released in 1996, it was in the context of a flurry of
LGBTQ independent films. As the first feature-length film directed by a self-identified black lesbian, film
history is a central concern in Dunye’s jocular movie. The narrative follows Cheryl (played by Dunye) as
she uncovers the life and legacy of a black lesbian actress named Fae Richards, known for her
appearances in the “race films” of the early twentieth century simply under the racialized moniker “The
Watermelon Woman.” Even though the film is shot in a documentary style, Richards is essentially
invented by Dunye, conjuring those whose stories have been largely lost due to a historically segregated
and homophobic film industry. Dunye worked with the artist, and member of the activist collective Fierce
Pussy, Zoe Leonard to create a fake archive of photographs and documents relating to Richards’s life,
blurring the boundaries between reality and fiction.
This poster represents this collapse between documentary and fiction with great acuity. Dunye’s face
is represented against a saturated red background. She wears a kerchief wrapped around her head, a
reference to a common costume element for the characters available to black women in Hollywood films—
as antebellum slaves or post-emancipation servants. Such limited roles for black actresses were not
uncommon, and the film’s title reinforces the existence and persistence of stereotypes in its reference to
one of the more insidious visual signifiers of blackness. Dunye’s film, like the poster, stages a
confrontation between a racist and homophobic past and present, instantiated by a group of people
wishing to change the conditions for LGBTQ actors, writers, directors, and producers of color.
 XY MAGAZINE

“You don’t know how much XY has changed my life. I’m no longer ashamed of who I am; I’m gay and
proud.” So begins a letter from a sixteen-year-old boy to the editor of XY magazine. Uncompromising in
its support for gay youth, XY magazine nurtured and catered to an at-risk youth population with very few
public, positive role models. Photographers like Steven Underhill (whose work was visually similar to the
beefcake photographs taken by Bruce Weber for the “straight” fashion campaigns of Abercrombie & Fitch
then in vogue) contributed to the magazine, as did comic artists Abby Denson and Joe Phillips. Helmed by
editor Peter Ian Cummings, the magazine addressed both the mental and erotic health of its young
readers.
If the visual style of the magazine referenced wider fashion and youth cultures, the magazine’s logo
identified the periodical as a comprehensive guide for the specific audience of young, gay men. The
magazine’s name references the chromosomal makeup of the human male, while the letters “A” and “Z”
appear in the crossings of the letters—suggesting that everything from “A to Z” could be found within its
covers. After a brief hiatus XY magazine recently relaunched in 2016—hopefully inspiring a new
generation of gay kids to feel empowered in their identities.
 BISEXUAL FLAG

In his book Good Flag, Bad Flag vexillologist Ted Kaye lays out five principles of flag design: keep it
simple, use meaningful symbolism, limit to two to three basic colors, no lettering or seals, and be
distinctive or be related. On all counts Michael Page’s design for a bisexual pride flag succeeds. Modeled
off the already extant “biangles”—two overlapping pink and blue triangles, lavender in the overlap—
Page’s design takes this simple, yet ingenious design idea and clarifies it in the form of a flag. According
to Page the magenta stripe represents those attracted to people of the same sex, and the royal blue
represents those attracted to people of a different sex. The lavender in the middle represents bisexuality.
Here’s Page: “The key to understanding the symbolism in the Bi Pride Flag is to know that the purple
pixels of color blend unnoticeably into both the pink and blue, just as in the ‘real world’ where most bi
people blend unnoticeably into both the gay/lesbian and straight communities.” Often referred to as “bi
invisibility,” the tendency to minimize or ignore the identities of bisexual people—within straight, lesbian,
and gay communities alike—results in what Page describes as “blending in unnoticeably” into those
various communities. In this way Page’s flag is deeply meaningful and serves as a reminder to
acknowledge and include the contributions of bisexual members of broader LGBTQ communities. In
recent years the term “pansexual” has become more prevalent, and the pansexual flag (see here),
designed in 2010 by Tumblr user justjasper, features a similar design to Page’s bisexual flag—substituting
the lavender central band with yellow, representing attraction to folks who identify as androgynous,
genderfluid, or non-binary.
 TRANSGENDER FLAG

A cofounder of the Transgender American Veterans Association, Monica Helms created the transgender
pride flag in 1999, debuting it at a pride celebration in Phoenix, Arizona, in 2000. Since then the flag has
been widely embraced, and its distinctive colorway—light blue, pink, and white—has now become
synonymous with transgender causes. According to Helms these colors are representative of the gender
roles we often assign children at birth, aligning pink with girls and light blue with boys. The white stripe
is meant to signify the great heterogeneity of transgender experiences—from those who are transitioning,
to intersex and/or gender nonconforming people. Like Michael Page’s bisexual flag before it, Helms’s flag
is designed as a form of social awareness. According to Helms, “the pattern is such that no matter which
way you fly it, it is always correct, signifying us finding correctness in our lives.” In other words it is a
flag with an affirming and therapeutic message; a signal that each trans individual’s experience is as valid
as it is unique. In 2014 Helms donated her original flag to the Smithsonian National Museum of American
History, an important milestone from the halls of national patrimony that transgender people’s lives,
loves, and political activism have a place in the larger history of the United States.
 DYKES TO WATCH OUT FOR

Cartoonist and graphic novelist Alison Bechdel began drawing Dykes to Watch Out For in 1983. The long-
running serial comic strip, which detailed the everyday lives and interactions of a group of lesbians and
their familiars, ran in a range of LGBTQ publications such as Gay Community News, Hot Wire, and
Common Lesbian Lives, among others. As her comic grew in popularity Bechdel began to self-publish the
strip in larger anthologies. In the beginning, though, Bechdel participated in a small but vibrant scene of
feminist and LGBTQ cartoonists, most of whom published in alternative weeklies and underground
“comix” anthologies. Like Armistead Maupin’s Tales of the City novels, Dykes to Watch Out For is an
ongoing and highly addictive serialization of queer life. Bechdel’s characters process political happenings
and chart their own changing relationships to one another—inviting the reader into a vast extended
chosen family.

In 1986, many of Bechdel’s one-off strips were gathered into a collection—the first of many Dykes to
Watch Out For books. Indicative of Bechdel’s humor and playfulness, between strips the cartoonist gives a
primer of lesbian types in the form of a rhyming, parochial ABC book: “U is for Una, with charts
astrological/V is for Violet, with passions pedagogical.” Also included in that first collection was the strip
that would popularize what has come to be known as “the Bechdel test” (despite the cartoonist crediting
the concept to her friend Liz Wallace), which stipulates a movie is worth watching only if it involves two
female characters who talk to each other about something else besides a male love interest. Bechdel
stopped regularly producing Dykes to Watch Out For in 2008, two years after her graphic memoir Fun
Home was released to great acclaim. But every now and then, Mo and the gang reappear, and the story
continues…
 FUNNY BONES

Although Alison Bechdel may be the best known of LGBTQ comics producers, she is certainly not
the only one. Diane DiMassa’s Hothead Paisan and Howard Cruse’s Wendel presented an affective
spectrum of LGBTQ characterizations—from the dynamite-tempered central character of
DiMassa’s comic to the sunny optimism of Cruse’s title character. Cruse has been instrumental as
both an artist and editor, gathering together the first anthologies of comics made by or about
LGBTQ people. Some of the cartoonists Cruse included in his collections did not identify as gay or
lesbian, such as Roberta Gregory, but drew narratives that incorporated LGBTQ people. In this
way Cruse and the other editors of Gay Comix called for all cartoonists to consider LGBTQ people
as a part of larger social and fictive worlds.
 ZINE SCENE

One of the hallmarks of a zine is that it is self-published and self-made, often using cheap
reproductive technologies such as photocopiers. In alignment with their DIY methods of
construction, LGBTQ zines have also tended to tackle the lives, thoughts, feelings, and opinions of
those well outside of the mainstream of LGBTQ politics. This is especially apparent in the zines
produced around the homocore (sometimes called queercore) scene emergent in Toronto and San
Francisco at the tail end of the 1980s and early 1990s. Punk pugilism and anarchic freedom
characterize the text, design, and musical cultures of publications such as J.D.s and Homocore.
“We’re mutants,” wrote Homocore’s editor, Tom Jennings, in his manifesto entitled “What the
Fuck is Homocore?” kicking off that zine’s inaugural issue, “if we try new things, things that are
honest and human, like making our own cultures, preferably lots of them, all with room for each
others’.”
 2(X)IST

The brand 2(X)IST represents an interesting case study in the history of LGBTQ design. Founded in the
early 1990s by Gregory Sovell, the brand distinguished itself among its competitors by target marketing
to a specifically gay male consumer. This was an innovative and generally untested strategy in the 1990s.
Famously, Subaru made headlines by marketing its cars directly to lesbians with double entendres and
Easter eggs such as license plates reading XENA LVR. Sovell, who had previously worked for Calvin Klein
(the dominant force in the male underwear fashion market due to their provocative ads featuring Mark
Wahlberg), developed an ad campaign that amplified the successes of his former employer. In print and
public advertisements, Sovell pitched 2(X)IST (pronounced “to exist”) to a male homoerotic gaze—
offering up nearly nude male models in sexually inviting poses. The campaign worked, and soon 2(X)IST
was a ubiquitous presence in shops catering to gay men.
Sovell’s company was bought by the Morét Group in 1995, and in 2005 he left the company he
founded to begin another underwear brand—C-IN2. While many companies have studied Sovell’s
successes at marketing to a specifically middle-class/affluent gay white male consumer, there is a case to
be made that target marketing aids in the assimilation of stigmatized or politicized groups into a
mainstream. Some welcome this, and others push against it. In this regard the name of the underwear
brand seems a wan and glib repetition of the goals of LGBTQ liberation politics, now reformatted as a
simple directive for consumers: to exist.
 MONEY STAMP

During the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s dollar bills stamped with the words “gay money,” some with pink
triangles, appeared in circulation in major U.S. cities. The result of the uncoordinated efforts of
individuals in communities across the country, this ostensibly illegal activity was meant to prove a larger
point: namely, to make visible the purchasing power of LGBTQ people. It also served as a metaphor for
social stigma—as anyone who touched gay money would be associated with its circulation.
Frank Kellas, who for a short time owned the Gold Coast, a leather bar in Chicago, was partly
responsible for a particularly notable instance of this agitprop tactic. Upset at the failure of a local anti-
discrimination ordinance, Kellas along with Marge Summit (who owned the His n’ Hers bar) decided to
create a rubber stamp to demonstrate the economic heft of LGBTQ communities. They created about
seventy stamps with the words “Gay $,” and passed them out to local gay and lesbian business owners,
who stamped the bills in their tills before depositing them in banks or circulating them among their
customers. The practice worked, in part—although Kellas and Summit received a “cease and desist” letter
from Anton Valukas, the U.S. attorney for the Northern District of Illinois, for defacing legal currency.
Summit laid out the purpose of her and Kellas’s campaign in a Chicago Tribune article, saying, “We feel if
there’s enough ‘Gay $’ in everybody’s wallet they’re going to start thinking about it. The idea is to get
people to understand that all we’re asking for is what they already have—the right to work and the right
to live.”
 JOAN JETT BLAKK FOR PRESIDENT BUTTON

Alternatives to the binaristic two-party political system have been a mainstay of American politics since
its founding, but perhaps no third-party foray has been so fabulous as the candidacy of Terence Smith’s
drag persona, Joan Jett Blakk, who ran for president under the aegis of the Queer Nation Party in 1992. In
her self-described “camp-pain” (as in “putting in the camp, taking out the pain, honey”), Blakk drew
attention to the queer lives and issues being ignored by both political parties.
As part of her platform she swore to rename the White House the Lavender House and to get “Dykes
on Bikes” to patrol the U.S. border. Such policy positions were at once sincere and satirical—critiquing
political systems and imagining them otherwise. This button functions similarly, by visually rendering
Blakk in the familiar pose of the famous wartime poster of Uncle Sam pointing at a viewer, exclaiming “I
want YOU for U.S. Army.” Instead of the allegorical patriarch’s top hat, Blakk wears a Nefertiti-inspired
chapeau with a giant “Q” emblazoned on the front, necklaces and bracelets dangling from her neck and
wrists. She points with her expertly manicured hands out to a viewer and up to the sky, entreating, “I
want you, honey! Lick Bush in ’92!” and thus bringing a drag queen’s humor to an overly serious political
process. Another contemporaneous image of Blakk represents the candidate in Black Panther gear—
sunglasses and a ’fro—holding a Nerf gun aloft, the phrase “by any means necessary” running along the
bottom. Unfortunately, Blakk did not win her presidential bid in 1992, or in 1996, when she ran under the
authority of her own Blakk Pantsuit Party. After her 1992 loss she moved from Chicago to San Francisco
and continued to work on behalf of her communities, joining the experimental theater troupe Pomo Afro
Homos.
 CLIT CLUB UNIFORM

Described by one of its cofounders, the artist Julie Tolentino (to whom this jumpsuit belongs), as, “a
convergence, a party, an identity, a homebase, a performance, a club gathering—a lifeblood,” the Clit Club
was a sex-positive queer/lesbian club night sited in a variety of locations across New York City between
1990 and 2002. Tolentino and Jocelyn Taylor, the other Clit Club cofounder, were both members of House
of Color, an ACT UP affinity group and video collective that addressed the dearth of media images of
LGBTQ people of color. Taylor and Tolentino’s efforts in Clit Club could be seen as an extension of their
activist work—creating not only images but a space for people of color and queer-identified people in a
landscape of bars that catered mostly to white gay men.
Don Boyle, who was a tattoo artist and served as Clit Club’s doorman for the better part of a decade,
created the party’s official logo—a topless, dark-haired sailor woman, whose breasts point up toward the
sky. But Tolentino’s jumpsuit takes a different tack, cleverly resituating the logo of a popular soda brand,
and thereby subverting its “all-American” brand image. Like other weekly or monthly parties such as
Tattooed Love Child or Club Fuck! (in Los Angeles), the Clit Club became a meeting place for queer folks
of all kinds and an example of the fertile cross-pollinations of art, love, and life.
21st Century
 21st CENTURY

The first two decades of the twenty-first century have witnessed both great defeats and wins for LGBTQ
individuals and communities. From prominent legal battles to the “transgender tipping point,” LGBTQ
people have never been so visible and vulnerable within the national consciousness.
On the one hand, existing state sodomy laws were declared unconstitutional (Lawrence v. Texas) in
2003, and gay marriage was legalized in all fifty states (Obergefell v. Hodges) in 2015. These victories
were the result of decades of concerted political effort by a range of LGBTQ organizations who sacrificed
both blood and treasure in pursuit of a liberal, rights-granting agenda. Fueling fights such as these were
disappointing setbacks, such as when California voters passed Proposition 8, which made gay marriage
illegal and left a host of already-married couples in new limbo.
The debates over the political efficacy of gay marriage as a signal fight in LGBTQ politics split
conservative, centrist, and progressive arms of LGBTQ communities. For some, gay marriage signaled
that LGBTQ people were welcomed into the mainstream of U.S. civic life; and for others, the fight for
marriage diverted attention away from more pressing issues—such as immigration, housing justice,
prison reform, and violence visited upon transgender, gender nonconforming, and brown and black
people. Intersectional politics—a derivation of the term proposed by legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw to
name the intersectional oppressions of the justice system—has reinvigorated dialogue about the policies
and priorities of LGBTQ political groups.
Like Ellen DeGeneres in 1997, the trans actress Laverne Cox appeared on the cover of Time magazine,
seventeen years later, signaling a new national visibility for trans people. The cover proclaimed Cox as on
the avant-garde of a “trans tipping point,” a periodization that often inflames impassioned discussion as
to whether this transgender visibility will be a long-lasting shift in the tenor of LGBTQ politics or simply
another flash-in-the-pan, like the “lesbian chic” of the 1990s. Susan Stryker, a scholar in trans history and
theory, established the first transgender studies program, sited within the University of Arizona’s
Institute for LGBT Studies, signaling a growing acceptance within gender, women’s, and sexuality studies
for programs dedicated to the study of trans histories and lives. Although in circulation in the years
before the American Dialect Society declared it the word of the year in 2015, the singular “they/them”
has become a standard pronoun for transgender and gender non-binary people.
Unlike they had been in previous decades, LGBTQ people were now the producers and stars of their
own stories—television shows like Noah’s Arc, The L Word, Looking, Transparent, and RuPaul’s Drag
Race revealed that LGBTQ stories could adhere to and break generic conventions. But LGBTQ lives are
not just fabulous, fun, or dramatic; documentaries such as Before You Know It (directed by PJ Raval,
released in 2013) revealed aspects of LGBTQ life, such as aging and retirement, that were often outside
the purview of mainstream conversations.
But with mainstream acceptance emerges a particular set of pitfalls—for example, the corporatization
of long-standing LGBTQ symbols. Pride parades all over the country, no longer ragtag marches, regularly
feature large contingents of employees and customers of multinational tech companies, marching under
the banners of rainbow-ized logos. For some the ability to be out at work is a signal achievement of the
LGBTQ movement, and for others it signals a “pinkwashing” or “rainbow-washing” of corporate
malfeasance. Groups like Against Equality and Queerbomb! have successfully leveled cogent critiques of
mainstream gay politics, undergirded by a deep dissatisfaction with the corporate marketing of LGBTQ
lives. As the queer theorist José Esteban Muñoz relates, queerness is a horizon of possibility, never fully
realized and always shifting. When conspicuous consumption is paired with gay pride, it threatens to
sediment radical queer critiques of capitalism, neoliberalism, and white supremacy.
One of the organizations that has achieved particular success in relation to this set of political
demands is Black Lives Matter, which formed in response to the 2012 death of Trayvon Martin at the
hands of another resident in a small suburb of Orlando, Florida. Two of the three originators of the (now
global) movement identify as queer, and Black Lives Matter has consistently focused on centering black
trans and queer lives—demanding that any deep societal change must come from an understanding of
intersectional oppressions. Their logo—which conveys the strength of the group’s convictions—will no
doubt be one of the defining designs of the early twenty-first century.
Similar demands are made by a variety of LGBTQ artists and designers, including the indigenous poet,
artist, and graphic designer Demian DinéYazhi’ and artist/founder of the Museum of Transgender Hirstory
and Art (MOTHA) Chris E. Vargas. In both cases the artists have sought new and ever evolving languages
to name and honor the histories they need and desire. Such projects are bound up in a political optimism
—even when rendering particularly withering critiques of governmental or movement politics—which is
primarily a politics of imagination.
New mobile technologies have radically resituated the sexual lives of LGBTQ communities, most
especially gay men. Cruising, once an activity reserved for bars, public parks, and sex clubs, is now
mediated by geolocational apps like Grindr and Scruff. The effect on heterosexual dating and sexual life is
also remarkable, as apps like Tinder were inspired, in large part, by the success of gay dating apps. Many
men have an ambivalent relationship with these technologies, which facilitate the best and worst
tendencies of their user bases.
This book enters the conversation at a time when LGBTQ histories are being newly assessed and re-
presented for LGBTQ and mainstream audiences alike. For example, new versions of Gilbert Baker’s
rainbow flag have been proposed—ones that include new colored stripes representing transgender and
brown/black people. While some critics scoff at these efforts, or dismiss them on the grounds of “bad
design,” it is worth remembering that LGBTQ design histories (at least as sketched out here) suggest that
the emendation, shoring, repurposing, and contestation of previous designs is a crucial part of a queer
design ethos. Change is the constant, and our heterogeneous communities move in myriad directions at
once—this has always been true. To capture, or even claim to capture, this unruly and beautiful array is to
purposely court a kind of failure. The best we can do is acknowledge and honor these contradictions as
the ground from which a transformative politics might continue to be built.
 ELLEN LOGO

When Ellen DeGeneres declared on the cover of Time magazine, “Yep, I’m gay,” it was an unambiguous
signal that LGBTQ struggles had breached the mainstream. At the time DeGeneres was the lead in her
own sitcom and had been a successful stand-up comedian for years before that. But this revelation of the
comedian’s lesbian identity was tempered by the fact that shortly after she came out, her sitcom was
cancelled.
DeGeneres’s next foray into network television didn’t occur until 2003, when NBC placed her at the
helm of her own daytime talk show. Since then, the Ellen DeGeneres Show—usually shortened to the
simpler Ellen—has logged more than 2,500 episodes.
The typeface used for the show’s logo is a permutation of Helvetica (originally called Neue Haas
Grotesk), a widely used Swiss typeface designed in the mid-twentieth century and vaunted for its clean,
unfussy lines. Every design decision has a political dimension, and the choice to use Helvetica as the
defining type for DeGeneres’s show speaks to the program’s ambitions to reach a broad audience,
inclusive of but not exclusively comprised of LGBTQ people. The use of light blue is perhaps speaking to
gender and sexuality with poised restraint—not unlike DeGeneres’s dry and charismatic comic sensibility.
 GRINDR LOGO

When Grindr debuted in the Apple app store in 2009, it was not clear at the time how significantly it
would change gay male sexual sociality. A little over three years later four million users had created
profiles on the app, making it the most-used platform for gay male online cruising and dating. Grindr’s
innovation was to combine online dating websites, in which users created profiles and searched for other
potential users to date, with the geolocational map functions of a phone. In essence you could not only
see other people’s profiles, but could tell how far away you were from them at any given time.
It’s interesting to examine Grindr’s logo design, a masklike face, sometimes rendered with grooves of
a gear rimming the chin, in light of the app’s statement of inclusiveness. Grindr’s founder, Joel Simkhai,
discussed the origin of his app’s logo in an online interview, saying, “We looked at this notion of meeting
people and the idea is very much a basic human need to relax and to socialize. I went back to primitive
tribal arts in Africa and Polynesia. One of the things I saw was these primal masks. It brings us back to
basics, primal needs. Socialization is the basis of humanity.” Simkhai’s purpose in creating the Grindr
logo to represent the inherent human need for socialization across sexual divides may be admirable, but
referencing ideas of “primitive” or “primal” cultures when describing gay male sexual life might only
serve to reiterate dominant cultural divides.
 The website domain Gay.com, which
was donated to the Los Angeles
LGBT Center in 2017, now redirects
to the Center’s blog LGBT News
Now.

GAY.COM LOGO/GLAAD LOGO

These examples of the evolving gay.com and Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD) logos
exemplify design’s ability to speak to the changing concerns and identities of corporations and
organizations alike. Launched in 1996, gay.com focused on creating an online forum for gay personal ads
—serving to connect LGBTQ people to other similarly minded individuals. This goal is unambiguously
communicated in the company’s first logo: a rectilinear design evoking three interlinked people. After the
company was bought by PlanetOut (a direct competitor) in 2001, the company relaunched its site in 2008
with a new, simpler logo—a two-color, sans serif logotype. Along with a new visual identity, the site
featured a new chat service, no longer based in the Java programming language.
The trajectory of GLAAD’s logo (founded in 1985) is similar, if more successful. Initially, the
organization’s logo featured a lavender lambda-like design, made from the two A’s in their acronym.
Bespeaking the tendency of 1980s design to use slick and dynamic letterforms, this logo was given up at
some point in the late 1990s and a new logo, designed by Enterprise IG, took its place. This new logo,
featuring two separate circles melding into a singular form, stood for “change with a recognition of the
critical role of process,” according to Joan M. Garry, then executive director of the organization. The logo
changed a third time in 2010, when the vaunted New York design firm Lippincott donated their services
to reimagining the brand identity of the nonprofit. Working from the keyword “amplification,” the current
GLAAD logo features a ribbon-like design, evoking a voice speaking out. As the volume gets louder, the
hue of the logo gets more saturated, suggesting that the organization’s message only intensifies as it
moves outward.
 SYLVIA RIVERA LAW PROJECT LOGO

Named after the famed transgender activist, the Sylvia Rivera Law Project (founded by transgender legal
scholar and civil rights activist Dean Spade) has been helping low-income, people navigate the U.S. legal
system and a wide variety of public services and programs. Founded in 2002, the year Sylvia Rivera died,
the organization has continued to center the communities that Rivera fought so hard to make visible.
Using a halved design of the combined Mars and Venus symbols (a common signifier of trans identities),
the collectively based legal organization visually suggests that their work must be coordinated with the
people they aim to serve (as the more hand-drawn logo reproduced at right indicates).
While the gay and lesbian movements of the 1950s and 1960s focused on repressive legal regimes that
unabashedly targeted their livelihoods and made significant gains, transgender people have historically
been left in the dust in mainstream gay and lesbian politics. In a talk she gave at the Gay and Lesbian
Community Services Center in New York City, Rivera spoke frankly of the sex work that many transgender
individuals resorted to because it was “the only alternative that we ha[d] to survive because the laws d[id]
not give us the right to go and get a job the way we feel comfortable.” She continued, “I do not want to go
to work looking like a man when I know I am not a man.” Fighting for legal, economic, and racial justice,
the Sylvia Rivera Law Project’s mission seeks to correct the historical omission of trans people’s lives
from mainstream gay and lesbian political movements. The transgender Venus/Mars symbol pointing
downward suggests that it is within this mission that any true change might be grounded.
 BLACK LIVES MATTER

One of the most important and visible civil rights movements of our time was begun by a trio of black
women—Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors, and Opal Tometi—two of whom self-identify as queer. The
movement began with Garza’s Facebook response to the acquittal of Trayvon Martin’s killer: “Black
people. I love you. I love us. Our lives matter.” Cullors responded with the hashtag #BlackLivesMatter.
Soon thereafter the organizers enlisted the Oakland-based creative studio Design Action Collective to
create a logo. One of the people who worked on the project, Josh Warren-White, described the challenge
in an interview with Fast Company: “Being easily replicable was the main goal since we know within
movements people don’t have budgets to do professional printers—they’re hand painting logos, and the
level of skill to replicate a logo by hand varies. We wanted to make something that people could pick up
and use in myriad ways.”
Warren-White and the other designers at Design Action Collective created a graphic with two
interrelated components. The best known of these components is the phrase “Black Lives Matter”
rendered in sans serif capital letters in an alternating black and highlighter-yellow colorway. Readers of
this book might recall a similar textual strategy used by the members of the Silence = Death Collective.
The other component is not as familiar (but is no less remarkable), consisting of a rendering of a black
person wearing a hoodie (which Martin was wearing when he was murdered), shouting and holding a
dandelion in their fist. The weed sheds its seeds in the blowing wind. It is an image of intersectional
movement building, an act of protest and regeneration in the face of systemic police violence against
black people. It is incumbent upon LGBTQ people of all racial and ethnic identifications, who have
historically protested police brutality within their communities, to join black communities in affirming the
significance and mattering of black lives.
 GC2B CHEST BINDER

For some trans people chest binders can help minimize the prominence or appearance of breasts, and for
many years the only binders available were designed for non-trans men as medical compression
garments. This meant that for people with breasts, chest binding was at the very least a painful and
uncomfortable prospect. Gc2b’s binders are not only designed by a transgender person, Marli J.
Washington, but with a transgender customer in mind. Washington, who is based in Baltimore, Maryland,
created a special patent for their invention, which according to many customer accounts achieves the
same effects as compression binders without the pain.
Washington centers the heterogeneity of transgender communities in both the range of fleshy colors
that the gc2b chest binder comes in, as well in the brand’s forward-thinking advertising campaigns, which
feature models of all shapes, colors, and gendered presentations. Like gay and lesbian communities
before them, transgender communities are designing products to meet the particular needs of trans
people. Although gc2b was the first to offer a chest binder designed by and for trans people, there are
now more companies that offer similar products—revealing just how great the need is for this kind of
garment within trans and gender nonconforming communities.
 DEMIAN DINÉYAZHI’ PRINTS

A Portland-based transdisciplinary artist and poet, Demian DinéYazhi’ creates works and graphics that
center indigenous life and politics. These two prints, one depicting the nineteenth-century Zuni lhamana,
We’Wha, and the other reflecting on the Diné teachings of hózhó—a complex system of beliefs
incorporating wellness in thoughts, actions, and speech—feature DinéYazhi’s signature visual style,
melding poetic words gathered from popular culture with striking colorways. We’Wha is a historical
figure who has yet to receive broader attention within larger LGBTQ histories. Designated a “lhamana”—
a Zuni term for male-bodied people who perform social and cultural roles assigned to females and serve
as mediators within the community—We’Wha was an ambassador to those wishing to learn about Zuni
arts and ways of life. Trained in pottery and weaving, they were also the first Zuni to meet with a sitting
U.S. president, Grover Cleveland. While some would designate We’Wha as a two-spirit person—a pan-
indigenous term adopted in 1990 to replace the anthropological and often denigrating term “berdache”—
this would not have been the term used within Zuni communities during the time We’Wha lived. Here
DinéYazhi’ pairs an image of We’Wha with a lyric from “Terrible Angels,” a song by the band CocoRosie.
A similar tactic is used in There’s No Place Like Hózhó, which pairs a famous line spoken by Dorothy
Gale in the queer filmic ur-text, The Wizard of Oz with the Diné idea of hózhó. The scholar Vincent Werito
writes that “while the essence of the meaning of hózhó could be interpreted as a fixed or constant idea to
imply a state of peace and harmony, it can also be interpreted and understood as an ever-changing,
evolving, and transformative idea.”
 MOTHA PRONOUN SHOWDOWN

The American Dialect Society chose the singular “they” as their word of the year in 2015, signaling that
grassroots efforts to make the English language more accommodating to transgender and gender
nonconforming people had gained significant traction among linguists and activists alike. Like feminist
movements before, transgender movements have placed focus on the social function of everyday
language—suggesting that a simple reorientation of basic components of language could build and
support a more inclusive world. They/them pronouns are far from the first attempt at building grassroots
support for gender-neutral pronouns: ze/zir, hir, and other gender-neutral pronouns have been proposed
at various points in transgender history.
This poster, created by Chris E. Vargas for their Museum of Transgender Hirstory and Art (MOTHA), is
one of the clearest examples of the currently nomadic and erstwhile organization’s insistence “on an
expansive and unstable definition of transgender, one that is able to encompass all trans, non-binary, and
gender non-conformed art and artists.” Circulating as both a poster and a digital graphic, the list of
different renderings of “history”—formatted from A to Z—values not just human but animal and ecological
concerns as well. At the center, placed between “history” and “herstory” (between binaristic
understandings of gender), and rendered in slightly larger type, is the word “hirstory,” MOTHA’s own
chosen descriptor. Between “aestory” and “zirstory” is where we might find “ourstory.”
 CALIFORNIA RESTROOM SIGNAGE

In the spring of 2017, all single-user restrooms in the state of California were legally required to change
their signage to identify them as “all gender” bathrooms. Unlike gender-specific restrooms with
pictograms indicating they are male- or female-exclusive spaces, the new all-gender restrooms utilize a
familiar symbol in LGBTQ design history: the triangle. This time, the triangle’s empty interior is meant to
indicate inclusiveness—not just for men and women, but for trans and gender non-binary people alike.
The accompanying signage—both in braille and print—legislated by the state can read “All-Gender
Restroom,” “Unisex Restroom,” or the simple yet effective “Restroom.” Other approved signage, like the
one at right, combines common symbols for males, females, and transgender people (via the Mars, Venus,
and combined Mars/Venus design).
A slew of discriminatory legislation and resultant legal challenges have come before U.S. courts over
the past decade—each attempting to limn out the rights of transgender and gender nonconforming people
to use the bathroom of their choosing. These legislative and judicial cases have come to be known
colloquially as “bathroom bills” and, akin to the campaigns concerning whether gays and lesbians could
serve in the armed forces decades before, many campaigns waged against the rights of transgender and
gender nonconforming people have turned on moral panic and fear. One notable bathroom bill television
campaign in Houston suggested that allowing transgender people to use the bathroom of their choice was
tantamount to inviting sexual predators to prey upon young children in restrooms. Sadly, such tactics
have worked on voting populations, leaving it to state and national legislators to introduce meaningful
reform. The hope is that this state bill, supported by civil rights groups such as California NOW, Equality
California, and the Transgender Law Center, will pave the way for future transgender and gender
nonconforming bathroom laws in other states and in the nation at large.
 GILBERT BAKER TYPEFACE

Occasioned by the death of Gilbert Baker—the designer and one of the creative forces behind the rainbow
flag—NewFest, NYC Pride, Ogilvy & Mather, and Fontself teamed up to create a memorial typeface
inspired by Baker’s signal design achievement. The result is “Gilbert,” a font family made for use at public
scale—on wheat-pasted posters and protest banners. Although it comes in a black-and-white version, the
eight colors of Baker’s original rainbow flag make this unique among color fonts and typefaces. A curvy,
sans serif tour de force, the font’s playfulness stems, in part, from its deployment of semi-transparent
color, which when used in combination generates a seemingly endless possibility of rainbow hues.
Importantly, Gilbert is free and under Creative Commons license is available for sharing and
adaptation, making the font friendly to many potential uses. For example, the font is animated on the
@typewithpride Instagram account, with each letter of the alphabet standing for a key personality, event,
or concept in LGBTQ history (“D” is for Donny the Punk; “F” is for fluidity). Almost two years after its
debut, many artists, designers, and organizations have adopted the font—and we should expect those
numbers to grow as LGBTQ people across the nation can now type with pride.
Gilbert Baker Pride Flag

Traditional Gay Pride Flag

Philadelphia Pride Flag

 Progress Pride Flag

Bisexual Flag

PRIDE FLAGS

Since Gilbert Baker and his collaborators debuted the rainbow flag, dozens of flags representing different
communities have been designed and taken up in earnest. A cynical interpretation of this process would
be skeptical at the ever more atomic segmentation of LGBTQ communities; but I would argue that such
identifications are important not only for the people who invest in them as a lived reality, but for those of
us who do not—as oftentimes these categories help to raise awareness about the truly dazzling
heterogeneity of our communities. Monica Helms, the originator of the transgender pride flag, sometimes
uses the metaphor of national and state flags to talk about the relationship between Baker’s pride flag
and all the other flags developed by more specific LGBTQ communities. One doesn’t necessarily
invalidate the other—rather, each of the many flags on these pages has been crafted with particular
audiences in mind. Each has its own history; follows its own design logic; and has a particular
relationship with the community it intends to represent. For example, intersex individuals are often
situated under the umbrella of transgender identities, but their struggles and political imperatives might
be different than the broader transgender community’s. The intersex flag—a wonderfully graphic purple
circle on a bright yellow ground, designed by Intersex Human Rights Australia—indicates that intersex
communities are finding value in networking and identifying with one another as intersex. This is
something to be celebrated and supported. In the coming years we should expect more, not fewer, flags,
as they are ultimately evidence that we are continuing to find one another, to hone, define, and value our
experiences within the long arc of LGBTQ history, imagining collective and individual futures.
Lesbian Pride Flag

Polyamory Flag

Intersex Flag

Pansexual Pride
 Asexual Flag

Transgender Flag

Genderfluid/Genderflexible Flag

Genderqueer Flag
 Polysexual Flag

Femme / Lipstick Lesbian Flag

Leather Pride Flag

Bear Brotherhood Flag

 Aromantic Flag

Agender Flag

Non-Binary Flag

Rubber Pride Flag

 Pony Flag

Straight Ally Flag

 AGAINST EQUALITY LOGO

A collective of artists and writers, Against Equality generated thoughtful critiques of mainstream gay and
lesbian politics, questioning the centrality of the concept of “equality” in rights-gaining rhetoric. This
point is made visually in the group’s appropriation of the HRC’s logo, whose equality sign has been
changed to a greater-than symbol—a mathematical symbol indicating unequal sides of an equation.
During a time when gay marriage dominated national political discussions of LGBTQ people, the
Against Equality collective was questioning what marriage, as a series of privileges granted to those
sanctioned as worthy by the nation or state, was doing to help curb other, more dire problems, such as
the high death and incarceration rates among queer and trans communities (especially in regard to
suicide); international military campaigns that furthered patriarchal and imperialist goals; as well as
increased policing around queer sex in public spaces. One of the group’s cofounders, Yasmin Nair, puts
this critique succinctly when she writes that “the history of gay marriage is now used to overwrite all of
queer history as if the gay entrance into that institution were a leap into modernity, as if marriage is all
that queers have ever aspired to, as if everything we have wrought and seen and known were all towards
this one goal.” As we have seen in this book, gay marriage was preceded for decades by concerns about
egregious and violent policing and social and cultural stigmatization. Against Equality is simply
continuing the line of activist thought and action at the root of LGBTQ political movements.
 LESBIAN AVENGERS LOGO

Like the “Gay is Good” button and the “Gay Is Angry” poster earlier in the book (see here), this and the
Queer Bomb design on the facing page suggest the ways in which LGBTQ identities continue to be tied to
struggle and anti-assimilationist politics. Designed by artist Carrie Moyer, the Lesbian Avengers logo uses
the cartoonish image of a bomb as a signal of queerness’s disruptive potential. In another riff of this logo,
Moyer rings the bomb with the phrase “bomb is a rose is a bomb is a rose is a bomb is a rose is a,”
implying a never-ending equivocation. The text is a sly call out to Gertrude Stein’s famous line, “A rose is
a rose is a rose,” which is often interpreted as a statement of identity, even though the intent and
emphasis of the line shifted across Stein’s remarkable career (Stein would later write, “I made poetry and
what did I do I caressed completely caressed and addressed a noun”). Moyer replaces Stein’s tautology
with metaphor; the roles reverse and the bomb becomes a kind of gift or token and the rose a call to
explosive action. This humor was characteristic of the Lesbian Avengers’ visual output, much of it
designed by Moyer—evident in the group’s unofficial motto: “We recruit.”
 QUEER BOMB LOGO

QueerBomb! also uses the bomb as a visual metaphor for conflict and agitation. The group was founded
by a group of self-identified LGBTQ people in Austin, Texas, in 2010. Its formation was a direct response
to the politics of respectability practiced by the city’s long-running pride organizations. Held on the eve of
the city’s pride celebrations, QueerBomb! branded itself an upstart alternative to the city’s pride events,
commencing with a rally and ending with a march in the streets of downtown Austin. The group’s logo
puts the “queer” in LGBTQ at the center of an exploding bomb—a visualization of the political power of
queer people working together.
 NOH8

Like the 1970s protests of Anita Bryant’s Save Our Children campaign, and those combating Lyndon
LaRouche’s amendment nearly a decade later, the NOH8 campaign was instigated by a piece of
discriminatory legislation, a California ballot proposition known colloquially as “Prop 8,” banning same-
sex marriage. Although eventually overturned in 2010, two years after the majority of Californians voted
in favor of it, the proposition became the ideological center of national debates concerning gay marriage.
Shortly after Prop 8 passed, photographer Adam Bouska and his partner, Jeff Parshley, began to take
photos of LGBTQ people and their allies with duct tape over their mouths. The message was clear—
discriminatory laws silence the voices, lives, and experiences of LGBTQ people. Bouska posed his subjects
against a bright, monochromatic white background, and temporarily tattooed “NOH8” on their cheeks—
giving a visual homogeneity to the campaign. The “H8” in the campaign’s title is doubly meaningful—both
as a popular rendering of the word “hate” in Internet or “leet” language, and also as a critical rebranding
of the California proposition number. Bouska’s photographs circulated primarily through social media,
giving a visual identity to a variety of campaigns seeking to overturn this and other anti-gay marriage
propositions. Celebrities and tens of thousands of everyday people participated in the campaign, which
remains an example of visual protest in the era of social media.
 PRIDE FLAG EMOJI

First created by Shigetaka Kurita in 1999, the initial group of 176 twelve-by-twelve-pixel emoji remained
largely insular to the world of Japanese telecommunications until Unicode translated them for an
international market a little over a decade later. Since then the growth and expansion of emoji has been
consistent. Discussions for a rainbow flag emoji began in earnest after the U.S. Supreme Court’s
Obergefell v. Hodges decision required all states to grant same-sex marriage licenses.
Added to the Emoji 4.0 update in 2016, the rainbow pride flag emoji joined other LGBTQ-themed emoji
such as same-sex couples (added in 2012) and families with children and same-sex parents (added 2015).
A subcommittee of the Unicode Consortium—a group of corporate representatives (Apple, Huawei,
Google, and Facebook are all full voting members) responsible for maintaining industry standards
regarding the encoding of the world’s writing systems—develops and vets proposals for new emoji. The
criteria for new emoji stipulate that proposed emoji must be popular, visually distinct, and somewhat
open-ended and probably unintended regarding potential usage (think of the various ways the eggplant
and peach emoji are used).
Currently there is a proposal written by a global group of authors to create a transgender pride flag
emoji.
 PRIDE TRAIN TAKEOVER

One of the tribulations of getting around New York City’s subways is the ubiquitous MTA service
advisories—publicly posted signs informing commuters of delays, cessations of service, and, sometimes,
re-routings of their daily commute. Taking an object that usually invokes annoyance and distress and
transforming it into a public reassurance for LGBTQ people is a queer move to be sure. When President
Trump failed to acknowledge June as Pride Month in 2017 (the acknowledgment is by now a fairly
boilerplate expectation of those sitting in the White House), Thomas Shim and his collaborators Jack
Welles and Ezequiel Consoli designed a suite of six posters in the style of MTA service advisories,
unequivocally declaring the month of June a holiday and stipulating “no bigotry, hatred, and prejudice at
this station.”
In their parodies of MTA service advisories (there are now twelve in total) Shim and his growing roster
of collaborators have included wry references to RuPaul’s Drag Race, The Lion King, and meme culture.
The rainbow is used as a header for the posters (a clear symbol that they are not put out by the MTA), and
the six train lines “affected” by the faux service advisories (1, F, R, 6, A, 7) together represent the six
colors of Gilbert Baker’s abridged rainbow pride flag. Since the Pride Train campaign’s debut, Shim, who
at the time worked as a global creative director at the advertising agency Y&R New York, expanded the
scope of the project to include guerilla MTA notices that address racism—drawing commuters’ attention
to hate crimes that took place in particular subway stations—and, most recently, voting rights. The
groups’ interventions are documented on their Instagram account (@PrideTrain) and will hopefully be a
perennial presence in New York’s pride celebrations, encouraging revelers and rioters alike on their daily
commute.
 BUCK-OFF

Buck Angel, a trans-masculine sex worker and porn star, developed his own sex toy in coordination with
Perfect Fit Brand in 2016. Hilariously named Buck-Off, the toy is a sleeve masturbator made specifically
for trans men. Small enough to fit in the palm of your hand, and made of Perfect Fit’s proprietary SilaSkin
material, Buck Angel’s toy is an example of design centering the needs of trans bodies. As Angel
discussed in an interview with the Huffington Post: “The toys that [have] existed on the market were
made for cisgender people. Trans men have different genitals which means they have different needs.”
As this book’s final object, the Buck Off sleeve highlights some of the hallmarks of LGBTQ design. It is
first and foremost designed by and for a segment of the LGBTQ community. Secondly, the toy centers the
body and its pleasures, for which LGBTQ people have been historically marked as cultural and societal
“others.” And finally, the toy puts the terms and politics of liberation (here both personal and sexual) in
the palm of one’s hand. The toy suggests that everyone should have access to a satisfying and consensual
erotic life. More pleasure… more life… more design.
 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I’d like to thank all the archivists at institutions large and small who daily steward the material remains of
the myriad LGBTQ communities and individuals represented in this book. Archivists at places like ONE
National Gay and Lesbian Archives, the Lesbian Herstory Archives, the GLBT Historical Society, the June
L. Mazer Lesbian Archives, and many other institutions that might not be specifically dedicated to LGBTQ
folks and communities but who nevertheless seek to preserve and make available and accessible the stuff
of our many overlapping and separate histories. Most especially I’d like to thank Loni Shibuyama, whose
extensive knowledge and good humor during the research and image-gathering phases of this book were
vital to its manifestation. Joseph Hawkins, Michael Oliveira, Bud Thomas, and Cooper Moll at ONE
Archives provided guidance, context, and sometimes much-needed assurance in this book’s assembly. The
following trusted advisors gave insights that shaped this project in countless ways: Sarah Luna, Alexis
Salas, Chelsea Weathers, Theodore Kerr, Kate X Messer, Jo Labow, Kay Turner, Jonesy, Beth Schindler, Lex
Vaughn, Lucas Hilderbrand, Jennifer Tyburczy, Melissa Threadgill, Jessica Brier, Beth Payne, Anna Elise
Johnson, Haven Lin-Kirk, Sherin Guirguis, Christopher Mangum-James, Hannah Grossman, David Frantz,
Dan Paz, Rachel Hess, Char Skidmore, Ivan Lozano, and Amelia Jones. I have Ann Reynolds and Ann
Cvetkovich to thank for introducing me to archival work and its generative possibilities. Graduate and
undergraduate students at USC whose interests in queer visual culture are a constant wellspring of
energy and inspiration—a reminder that there is always more, and that this work is ongoing—all played a
key part in thinking about which objects to include and what kinds of audiences I might imagine for this
book. Really, my imagined audience is you, and I hope you find the book valuable, a jumping-off point or a
foil for your own work. Thanks goes, too, to all the artists, designers, illustrators, activists, and groups
that have given permission for us to reproduce your designs. I hope you are buoyed, like I am, at the
great chain of LGBTQ designers who came before, and those who, no doubt, will be inspired anew by your
efforts! You have made queer culture… we’re all just living in it.
This book would not have happened had I not received that first email from Becky Koh. You treated
this book with the utmost care and attention (even named it—an inspired intervention!) and attended to
its development. Thank you for the trust you placed in me to do this work, and the support you gave from
start to finish. It is not something I will soon forget, and I hope this is not the last time we work together.
And to the team at Black Dog and Leventhal—Rachel DeCesario, Katie Benezra, Betsy Hulsebosch, and
Kara Thornton—at every step you showed an enthusiasm for the possibilities of this project, working with
truly astonishing purpose and drive. This has been a life-changing experience for me; how do I even begin
to say thank you for something so enormous?
To my family—natal and queer, beloved and adored; you remind me of the ways in which home and
love are verbs. Cathy, Tom, Daniel, thank you for your support, listening ears, and excitement as this book
has come together. To Rachel, Char, Ari, Thea, and all the members of my extended queer family
(especially Claudette, Charlie, Lily, and Laura). And to Jay, you know what you did… and I still mean every
word of the promise I made with you in Mexico City.
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 ART AND PHOTOGRAPHY CREDITS

ONE Archives at the USC Libraries: here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here (all), here, here (left
and right), here, here (top), here, here, here, here (top and bottom), here, here, here, here, here, here,
here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here (left and right), here, here, here,
here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here

Jeanne Manford Papers, Manuscripts and Archives Division, The New York Public Library: here

Copyright © PFLAG National, All Rights Reserved: here, here

Manuscripts and Archives Division, The New York Public Library: here, here, here, here, here, here, here,
here

Courtesy of Lindsey Taylor: here

Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives & Rare Book Library, Emory University: here, here

Copyright © Morgan Gwenwald: here (bottom)

Art by Irare Sabasu, courtesy Lesbian Herstory Archives: here

Copyright © Liza Cowan: here, here, here

Infograx via Getty Images: here

Courtesy of the Leather Archives & Museum: here, here

Bob Mizer Foundation: here, here

GLBT Historical Society: here (bottom), here, here, here, here, here

Wisconsin Historical Society: here

Courtesy Lesbian Herstory Archives: here

Copyright © Joey Terrill: here, here

Photographs by Simon Lee: here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here

Courtesy of Dean Sameshima: here

Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library: here

Courtesy of Judy Dlugacz / Art Direction by Kate Winter, 1976: here, here

Courtesy of Pleasure Chest: here

Photograph by Arizona Newsum and Derek Haas, courtesy of Richard Ferrara: here

Copyright © Hal Fischer: here, here, here, here

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