This image shows a collage I made in August 2015. Like much of the art I’ve made in the last year, I have lost track of the physical object; it’s probably half crushed under my bed. I have very little attachment to the objects I make. For me, the process of art making is what’s significant–my own engagement with the materials and with the message as it develops through the process of composing.

The main objects in this collage come from a 1993 catalog of gay adult film actors, which I found in the Strand Bookstore’s discount book bin. It’s an artifact of gay sexual culture from a time that’s past, representing, for me a generation of gay ancestors, many of whom have also passed. The background image shows a color advertisement for a now-defunct phone sex hotline, overlaid with a cutout page of adult bookstore listings, which I treated with oil in order to make semi-transparent. The cartoon body builder comes from a 1991 children’s math workbook. Like the porn actor catalog, the math workbook is an ephemeral object, meant to be used and thrown away when you grow out of it. Within the body builder’s barbells are hidden images of an infant from a children’s development photo book. This hidden infant is the subject, Adam, referred to in the main image text.

Composing this collage allowed me to engage with my connection to past generations of gay men. As a minority group, we don’t pass our knowledge down through direct kinship. We don’t learn our values of loving and cultural relation through straightforward teaching or inheritance, much of our knowledge is kept in secret and passed clandestinely. The adult bookstores listed on this page provide a snapshot of the networks of spaces where these men could meet, sometimes the only spaces. The technologies of gay sexuality and community-building have changed in the 20 plus years since these objects circulated. It’s throwaway ephemera, but it bespeaks a hidden history I respect.

-Andrew