Since coming out in 2007, an integral part of my blossoming queer identity was to educate myself about past and present struggles for LGBTQ+ equality. One of many avenues I sought in this self-education journey was The Advocate, a magazine that covered news, politics, and culture. Over time, the magazine got thinner and thinner. At some point, the publisher moved to having The Advocate as merely a leaflet delivered in a supposedly more popular periodical: OUT Magazine. OUT, as a magazine focusing on fashion and entertainment, was more popular and financially viable than The Advocate, mostly because it was basically 99% advertising. Eventually, they stopped even including The Advocate at all. When I called to complain that I wasn’t interested in OUT Magazine and only wanted to subscribe to The Advocate, their way of trying to coax me to convert to OUT Magazine was comping a year subscription to OUT. Even though I never read them (let’s be honest, there wasn’t much “reading” of OUT Magazine) and even though I did not renew my subscription after my free year ended, I, for some reason, held on to the magazines, perhaps for a future art project… Fast forward to 2015 when I moved to San Francisco to pursue an MFA degree at the San Francisco Art Institute. In my first semester I took an undergraduate black and white darkroom photography class as an elective. To get us acquainted with how the darkroom enlargers functioned, one of our first assignments was to make “collages” out of torn out magazine pages. These are considered “collages” because the images on both sides of the page merge together on the resulting darkroom print. I instinctively first tried to do this with pages from National Geographic magazines as I had a stack of them from family members and they are image-heavy publications, but alas, the pages were too thick. The Advocate and other news- and politics-leaning magazines were too text-heavy for what was meant to be a collage of imagery. So, I made these eight “collages” from ripped out pages from OUT Magazine. At last, OUT was finally useful to me. I never meant to exhibit these works as they were just experiments and simply just a means to getting familiar with darkroom equipment. However now (in 2023) I stumbled across them while I was looking for something else and I thought they were worth sharing, if only as a means of remembering the early days after coming out to my early days experimenting with film photography.
