Category: ultragay

I am back in Brazil for the first time in 25 years or so, and it is still a delight. São Paulo is a very different vibe from Rio de Janeiro — it’s the NYC/LA conflict of South America — but it’s all still warmth and magic to me, with a dash of economic disparity and culture shock.

My last trip was an extended holiday vacation, while this was a week of work-related type nerdery surrounding the DiaTipo conference. I led a workshop on marketing type foundries and fonts, and gave the final keynote. (Hopefully there will be a recording to share eventually.)

One teeeeeeny little bit of tension about the event is that is held at a Presbyterian university — in a country that continues to struggle with religious conservatism — and the truly terrific team organizing the conference are mostly very queer. They have unfortunately had to struggle a bit with their host, and I think the my proposed talk may have ruffled a few feathers. (Maybe it was the slides showing just the titles of gay magazines, maybe it was general openness about the queerness of my life and my work.) I’m lucky that I am at a place in my life and career that I can get away with openness like that, but I hope the organizers’ desire to include me didn’t cause more stress for them.

So, as a show of appreciation for this wonderful, energetic team of you g people who stood by me, I just want to say that I am impressed with them, and I deeply grateful for their hospitality, and I just hope my example offers a little bit of courage to keep on keepin’ on.

One of the ongoing goals of the Hot Type Club is to find out more about who designed all these classic gay mags, and how they went about it. It’s tough to find out much detail about how magazines were produced — the gritty details of production tasks and working methods — since it’s not something the general public seem to care much about, I suppose. Or at least the process seems so unremarkable when it’s happening, and it’s only in retrospect that practical details look more like a valuable piece of history.

Continue reading “Rick Fiala and Christopher Street”

It took many years of patience, luck, and persistence (and more than one ill-advised outrageous price), but I have managed to collect just about every issue of Bob Mizer’s Physique Pictorial. (Vol. 2 no. 1, I know you’re out there somewhere, but I probably can’t afford you anymore.)

Mizer is best known for his photography and filmmaking, but less so for the design and typography of Physique Pictorial. In fact, the magazine always had a fairly crude, almost punk approach to its layout. Text and labels were often set with a typewriter, and you can see the evidence of its cost-and-paste production methods, from the first issue in 1951 all the way through to Mizer’s last in 1990. Even though his last couple of issues feature cover titles made with crude digital fonts, the magazine’s layout was very much an analog process.

When looking at the entire run of Physique Pictorial, it’s clear that Mizer was pretty economical in his use of materials. That’s not to say that the magazine looked cheap. In fact, I’ve always been quite fond of the immediacy of the type and layouts, and Mizer’s emphasis on the photography and illustrations. Over the years, though, Mizer used a handful of pieces of artwork for the cover masthead over and over again. Whether he did it for thrift or for variety in the covers, the same few title treatments appear periodically throughout the entire 40-or-so years of the magazine’s run. Knowing that the magazine was assembled by hand, the reuse of these art elements suggest that Mizer kept the artwork on hand for decades, applying it as he saw fit.

Continue reading “Pictorial Paste-ups”

This is a cute ad, but more relevant is that it’s an openly gay-themed ad from a type shop, the only one I’ve come across so far. Once in a while I’ve seen typesetter credits in a colophon. Occasionally, there’ll be small, plain in-trade ads for printers. I assume in both those cases they would involve businesses untroubled by the association with gay content. But good for Boro Typographers of (I deduce) Philadelphia, PA! (That’s where Drum was published.)

During the second half of the twentieth century, the United States moved toward greater social acceptance of LGBT people, due to the cumulative efforts of numerous groups engaged in social and political activism. One of the many challenges facing any attempt to bring together a community of gay people was the difficulty of producing and distributing any books or periodicals with overtly gay content, which was under threat of various methods of censorship. However, even as legal hurdles fell away, social censure remained an ongoing challenge to gay communities and the publications targeted to them. 

During that same period, the graphic arts industry experienced its own rapid evolution, as the development of ever faster and cheaper means of typesetting and printing made a greater variety of typographic choices available with fewer barriers to their use and reproduction. Typewriters, phototypesetting systems, rub-down type, and eventually desktop publishing software provided an increasing number of ways to easily prepare text for layout and reproduction, with less and less formal training required to do so. 

Continue reading “Hot type in the cold type era”