While I was in Montreal last September to see friends and colleagues, talk about gay porn typography, and get a couple of new tattoos, I was asked to have a quick chat:
MAL this past January, when I quickly took a photo during the pup session of this cute dude standing in the middle of the crowd. I didn’t really think about it much afterwards until a couple of months later when I realized my favorite gentleman had been the one to catch my eye, even before we ever met.
Pink Mince #13 — XOXO — grew into a year-long photo project, but it started as a just a day back in September 2016 when I visited Berlin for Folsom Europe and wanted to have my camera on hand to take some snaps and keep me from feeling too fidgety. I wasn’t expecting to see so many people I’d know over the years, or for one day’s photography to turn into a year of making new friends and documenting the leather subculture.
It may not come as a surprise that a lot of my job at this point is yapping about fonts. This talk took place on November 7, 2017 in the Koret Auditorium at the San Francisco Public Library as part of Type@Cooper West‘s Letterform Lecture Series. This recording was made possible by a generous sponsorship from Adobe Typekit.
Paradise Garage should be listed and protected as a site of cultural relevance, but that won’t be the case unfortunately. Along with The Loft and several other NYC underground* clubs established in the early-mid 70s, Paradise Garage was a safe space for LGBT, women, and POC to socialize, dance, and express themselves when there was no other safe clubs, especially following the then-recent events at Stonewall, as well as womens’ and POC liberation movements. I’ll continue to reiterate that if not for queers, women, and people of color establishing underground dance clubs, (electronic) dance music would not be what it is today. I highly recommend peeping this Resident Advisor article and the documentary Maestro.
*-It should be noted that club-wise, the term “underground” in the 70s was synonymous with the term “safe space”. Underground dance music was and is meant to be safe space music.
