Not sure when I first saw this photo, but it was probably online in the early 2010s. So that’s maybe 25 years after it was taken. I wasn’t aware of its history, who wore the jacket, or anything at all about its context. I wasn’t paying attention. When I finally understood what I was seeing—a photograph of a jacket worn by the artist David Wojnarowicz at an ACT UP action at the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in Rockville, MD on October 11, 1988—the message clicked into place./

“IF I DIE OF AIDS - FORGET BURIAL - JUST DROP MY BODY ON THE STEPS OF THE F.D.A.”

In the photo, the message is clearly visible on the artist’s back. I’ve seen it identified as a black leather jacket, but zooming in, it’s more of a dark grey or black denim, a jeans jacket. The white letters are so bright they seem to pop off the fabric. They might be iron-on, or stickers. Under the letters, centered on the back of the jacket, is a pink triangle, exactly like the pink triangle at the center of the SILENCE = DEATH poster that was first posted all over the streets of NYC the year before (1987), just as ACT UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power) was forming. The apex points up, both recalling and in defiance of the Nazi pink triangle used to mark people identified as homosexual men or trans women during the Holocaust, apex oriented down. The photograph was taken by Bill Dobbs, an activist lawyer in ACT UP who participated in the “SEIZE CONTROL OF THE FDA” action, ACT UP’s first national protest and seen by many as the start of the nationwide AIDS movement. The action focused specifically on timing and access to drugs; one of the messages on signs used at the action said “TIME ISN’T THE ONLY THING THE FDA IS KILLING.” ACT UP’s demands included shortening the drug approval process, discontinuing placebo trials, free access to medication, and insurance company accountability. The action was effective; one year later, some of these demands were realized.

I’ve been looking at the famous photo of Wojnarowicz for years, thinking about its significance—as documentation, as performance, as a work of art that no longer exists (the jacket was never seen again), and the photograph itself as a powerful media artifact that survives and circulates now, in place of the jacket and the body on which it was worn. Wearing the jacket was an act of protest, a graphic work of art, a kind of publishing, and a plea for care by a political subject struggling against state negligence. The plain, bold, all-cap sans serif letterforms were meant to grab attention, shouting the message out in public, much like the AIDS Memorial Quilt panel sewn by student activist Duane Kearns Puryear later that year. Discrimination, bias, dismissal, neglect, hatred, and shame were prevalent and fueled the crisis during the late 1980s and early 1990s. HIV/AIDS activism pushed back against silence and neglect using an easy-to-understand “amplified” typographic voice to convey the urgency.

Wojnarowicz found out he was HIV positive earlier that year, so he was fighting for his own life as well as those around him. Everyone was on an expedited life-and-death timeline, and his prescient message spoke to this urgency. His instruction (a demand, really), about the profound neglect that would eventually lead to his own death, was worn on the same body it referenced. FORGET BURIAL, JUST DROP MY BODY. Wojnarowicz died from HIV/AIDS four years later, on July 22, 1992.

Can the jacket be explored as a typographic work? Not really; it feels almost ridiculous to refer to it this way. But also—yes, absolutely. I think about how language is used in the most powerful acts of protest and liberation and I see this photograph. I see how a message was shaped, crafted, designed—yes, visually, precisely—at a moment when the performance of language in public space was one of the best ways to move collectively towards change. The FDA protest was a massive action that depended on amplified displays of typography, design, lettering, and writing; the design of graphic material at this ACT UP action and others like it went on to influence and inspire entire generations of activism. I’m not sure how we cannot see the jacket as a typographic work, embedded within a context of design and intention, an incredible collective moment of urgent artifact-making. Jack Lowery provides a comprehensive history of the art and design of this time in It Was Vulgar and It Was Beautiful: How AIDS Activists Used Art to Fight a Pandemic (2022), with several pages devoted to the FDA action.

I’m trying to be careful not to fetishize the photograph. As a missing object, the jacket lends itself to a kind of mythologizing, and there’s really no need for that. I want to hold onto all of these ideas through the framing of the action itself, rather than zooming in too closely on David’s jacket. So I start looking for other perspectives, other views from that day, other images that might show Wojnarowicz there, to break out of the spell of this singular image. Surely there had to have been other moments in the documentation of this event when it was visible.

It’s silly to think about YouTube as a place to go searching for typography. There’s so much about the environment of that platform that isn’t stable; resolution issues alone make it a terrible space for examining letterforms and written language. Traditionally, we learn that type needs to be reproduced perfectly, with legibility and precision as the highest priorities. There’s an entire history of type specimens that parallels a history of fine printing as well, as master printers used the demands of typographic reproduction to demonstrate their capabilities. These demands perpetuate values of exceptionalism that shape many print-based disciplines, like design, fine art printmaking, literature, advertising, even journalism—arenas where clarity and precision are the baseline for excellence.

So what would it mean to go looking for typography in a place that isn’t suited, maybe even hostile towards those same values? YouTube might not be great for examining type, but it’s a treasure chest of liberated language. I’m not talking about the comments and the ways social media platforms can be a breeding ground for hate speech and violence, because that’s also a part of what it is. But the content itself. More than 14 billion video files have been posted to YouTube, making it a remarkable site of potentiality and one of the most satisfying archives ever created.

Instead of zooming, I’ll scrub.

I’m scrubbing through a video titled ACT UP & ACT NOW Seize Control Of The FDA, posted to a channel maintained by user SuchIsLifeVideos. I don’t know anything about this user, but the half-hour video documentary of the ACT UP action at the FDA conveys the chaotic energy of the unfolding event. I’d read that Wojnarowicz traveled to Maryland with an ACT UP affinity group, and that each group was responsible for their own themes and messages. David’s group carried hand-cut signs that were shaped to look like tombstones, with messages like “FDA KILLED ME” and “1987–1988 NEVER HAD A CHANCE,” so I look for the tombstones. There they are. At 25:17 I see David walking backwards as firefighters carry a ladder, maybe to get protesters down from atop the building’s awning, where they hung banners. I hear them shout “you’re killing us” over and over. The video is very blurry and feels like a copy of a copy, but I’m going frame by frame, and I see him suddenly turn, with his back going by in a flash. The message isn’t legible, but I make out the word “AIDS.” I feel something new here. Now it’s David Wojnarowicz the protestor, one of many, moving with the group, a molecule in the cloud of ACT UP energy and collective action. The jacket played a small but significant role; in the video, the activity of the sub-groups moving around the site feels cacophonous, like a multi-staged theater, with simultaneous scenes playing out all at once. I’m stunned that the jacket, which looms large in my memory as a still image on the queer timeline, feels so small now, in action. Here it is on YouTube, illegible, luminous.

Later, after posting a link to the video online, someone responds that they see David appearing to remember to roll over so that his back would be visible, at 21:20. I’d missed this in my initial viewing. This was one of the moments when the group was laying on the ground in a die-in, each protestor holding a tombstone at their head. This action was about bodies, death, and dying, all on display on the very FDA steps that the jacket references. I go to the timestamp; in the bottom-left corner of the frame I can barely make out David’s face as he briefly turns his body over from front to back. I catch a glimpse of the soft fuzz of the white letters, which I only recognize because I know they’re there. Then, he gets up.

To scrub is to search, to clean; scrubbing is movement back and forth on the timeline, and I imagine a kind of literal cleansing action, scrubbing each frame of video with a small brush. In the search to uncover clarity, evidence, clues, truth, we briefly suspend the narrative, slowing down to the scale of the frame-by-frame, the grain, the frozen blur of movement taken out of flow. In the slowing down we exchange one form of precision for another, pausing the normative conventions of historical narrative in order to catch other kinds of relationships, barely perceptible, invisible: there he is, a tall man in shadow, viewed by others in public space, a head turning, a body on the ground, a ladder goes by, a jacket altered by an artist, white letterforms barely visible in the chaos.

Scrubbing is a kind of reading. It’s a close reading, a precise, closer view that reveals other relationships, between the visible and the unseen, the legible and the unreadable. I’m scrubbing the archive, looking, searching, cleaning. Here it is, I found it. The letterforms on David’s jacket are both totally understood (completely readable) and impossible to know. How can they be both? In the legibility, in the close reading, we see someone struggling with his own mortality, a body making a desperate attempt to be seen, acknowledged, to be read clearly on the timeline, in public space. To be read by his peers, by the media, by the state. And then, the impossible truth, as the reader is exposed: You will survive me. I will die from this disease (I am dying) and you will have to deal with it.

Unsaid, but understood.

David wished for this kind of marking, a public dumping of bodies, the gross act of depositing the dead on the doorsteps of those responsible. A year before his death, David published this passage in his memoir Close to the Knives (1991). It continues where the jacket left off:

“I imagine what it would be like if friends had a demonstration each time a lover or a friend or a stranger died of AIDS. I imagine 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 d.c. 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. It would be comforting to see those friends, neighbors, lovers and strangers mark time and place and history in such a public way.”

It’s an unthinkable act, to drop a body anywhere. Not as unthinkable as knowingly letting a body die from neglect. As a reader who is alive to read his messages, I participate in the exposure, and I am implicated, even now, far off in time and space. That’s the shocking clarity here, stated in the instructions, on display.

I mentioned John Cage’s Empty Words (1974) in my last post, and it triggered a memory. Many years ago I attended a performance of Empty Words put on by the John Cage Trust at Bard College. It was a special all-night event, and we were encouraged to bring bedding and sleep-appropriate clothing, so we could fall asleep listening to a 12-hour recording of Cage performing the work, which draws from the journals of Henry David Thoreau. A special macrobiotic menu of soup, rice, vegetables, and tea specified by Cage was served during a series of intermissions spread out through the night, and the performance was timed to conclude at dawn.

The work is a recording of Cage speaking, gradually stripping away meaning and syntax from Thoreau’s writing, until there’s nothing left but letters and sounds (the written version can be accessed here, published by Wesleyan University Press in 1981, and a page from the book appears below). Even though the event was very much a listening experience—the sound of Cage’s voice reading non-syntactical language—I’ve been thinking about it again in relation to queer typography. Is Empty Words queer? What do experiments in queer language and legibility look, sound, and feel like? Where does queer design and typography come from? Is it possible to liberate meaning and politics from language, while also shaping it? I guess this was Cage’s fantasy with Empty Words.

He describes the language as “demilitarized” in this interview clip, referring to the pleasurable loss of control that Empty Words proposes. As an experiment in indeterminacy and the shaping of non-normative language, Empty Words is certainly queer. I remember drifting in and out of a dream state that night, listening for hours as Cage’s voice evolved into strange, illegible fragments and guttural sounds, with a live overlay of real snoring coming from all around me in the large space where we’d made our beds. As an embodied experience, this was something that actively worked against many of the ways that language controls, orders, and assigns meaning.

Despite Cage’s claim about the demilitarization of language into liberated nonsense, I think Empty Words might be especially political—not less so. After all, there are politics in the sound of a voice, certain presumptions about the body that the voice belongs to, who it addresses, the source material, the conditions under which the work was created, performed, published, etc. There’s also the design of the published work on the page, and how it references certain typographic histories, design standards, and expectations (a square page, a grid, a monospace typeface, lots of white space). All of this creates a politics, of course—the politics of art-making, of design, of reading, of performance, of listening and attendance, of attunement. There’s no escaping it.

I love that Cage frames this work as a response to the militarized nature of language. Language is the controlled ordering of the world, the inescapable condition of control that we deal with on a daily basis in ordinary communication. I’m inspired by the piece because I can imagine how “empty words” might be a destination to move towards, a place of queer, poetic potentiality, where language is liberated and totally “disarmed.” I’m curious though—what happens when we use empty words as a starting point, instead? and go the other way? All the way to precise communication and control. What’s to be done with militarized language?

All language is armed, I suspect, even Cage’s. Communication has been weaponized for as long as states have existed, to control and regulate populations. Yes, with propaganda, but even just common statements like “I do” or “you’re guilty” have the power to determine all kinds of agreements, relations, and economies, depending on when and where they’re spoken, and to whom they are uttered. In addition to the power of particular statements, there are also structural politics that are just inherent to language itself, constantly evolving to maintain the matrix of domination and its militarized logics of success—namely heteropatriarchy, white supremacy, settler colonialism, and capitalism—by ordering knowledge within the highly regulated boundaries of gender, racial, and class structures. Almost half of all languages use the same gender binary to conceptually organize the world. Design is a part of this; it’s difficult to imagine how the visual shape of language, and the design of reading experiences, might somehow operate separately from these oppressive forces.

I’m interested in how language can be visually armed to give us the power to utter, address, and attune in ways that counter these logics of success. Spending time with various liberation movements of the past and present, we can find examples of language that have been “loaded up” and shaped with a surplus of meaning, above and beyond conventional standards of “good” typography and design. Intersectional movements deploy language across a spectrum of design legibilities to address, organize, and take action as a matter of survival. Language is shaped, reclaimed, weaponized, disguised, coded, drawn, set, amplified, and circulated—to spread the word. The deployment of liberated language can happen efficiently but unevenly, as those counterpublics who need it the most are addressed with coded messages that aren’t meant to be discerned by everyone. This is the realm of queer typography.

I’ve been looking for evidence of armed and loaded language in various queer contexts, to see how meaning is written, visualized, and read during crisis, and what I’ve found is striking. There’s a spread in the printed zine “WE WILL NOT PROTECT YOU” by Pink Tank (2004) that I encountered within Avram Finkelstein’s papers at NYU that mimics the visual and written language of the Declaration of Independence in order to declare a new kind of freedom. By addressing the reader as “We the Radical Queers of the United States” in a reverse italic blackletter typeface, the anonymous authors claim and redefine the militarized language of “We the People” and all of the violence and assumptions embedded within the legacy documents of state control and empire building. Pink Tank mutates and subverts the meaning of the Declaration of Independence by claiming its power over language and design for itself, with incredible intention and specificity. The design cannot be separated from its message and political context. This is what I’m calling queer typographies—visual approaches to liberated language. These approaches make use of typefaces, letterforms, lettering, typing, drawing, stylistic references, symbols, and other meaningful expressions to emancipate language and spread the word.

Earlier, in the years just after Stonewall, an approach by the NYC-based group “Third World Gay Revolution” (T.W.G.R.) made use of typographic hybridity in order to signal difference. TWGR was a group of Black and Latinx gay and lesbian people that formed in 1970 to address racism and oppression within the gay movement. They held weekly meetings on West 23 St in Chelsea, and in the design of their announcements and texts, published in local newspapers and flyers, they used a dramatic mix of typefaces, sizes, and styles for their headlines and messages. For the back cover of the Dec-Jan 1970 issue of Come Out!, they drew each letterform as its own entity, vibrating collectively with energetic lines and adorned with faces, flames, ears, and squiggles. Whether set or hand-drawn, this kind of mixing of typographic styles slowed down the read and reduced traditional legibility, while at the same time raising a very distinctive flag that came to be recognized; it seemed to say: we are different, we are varied, we do not conform.

The rhythm and variation of T.W.G.R.’s letterforms, combined with illustrations of weapons (a grenade, a doubled femme holding a rifle), and decorative icons used as border treatments (arrows, stars, circles, and other shapes), was a kind of transformation of traditional design elements into something else. Their visual non-conformity proposed a real clarity of message (intersectional liberation) through a hybridity of design tactics—in itself, a feat of legibility that transcends much of what conventionally good graphic design proselytizes: precision, control, and uniformity. In reading through the members’ names signed below one of their published texts—Ana, Barbara, Carlos, C.C., Dale, Doug, Felipe, Frenchie, Hiram, Jean, Juan, Kip, Nestor, Tonnaey, Very, Yolanda—I’m moved by how this group deployed their collective power into the future, reaching us today. Nat Pyper builds upon these beautiful transmissions with their own type design work, A Queer Year of Love Letters (2024).

Meanwhile, while T.W.G.R. was organizing and Cage was experimenting, the pink triangle was starting to be deployed as a symbol for gay liberation. This was happening internationally as gay, trans, Black, immigrant, feminist, and anti-war movements motivated by Stonewall became more activated, and communicating quickly was a crucial way to maintain survival networks. Easy-to-use typographic glyphs were helpful for identifying new groups and causes, and became a kind of shorthand for communicating communal safety and trust. The pink triangle was reclaimed from its Nazi origins as a symbol of gay oppression, while the lambda (Greek letter “λ“) was borrowed from chemistry to represent “action,” first used by the Gay Activists Alliance in NYC in the early 1970s.

This was also the moment when traditional “female” and “male” symbols were being used to create new visual ideas from old forms. The origins of these symbols as biological markers can be traced back to the 18th century, when the symbols for Venus and Mars were first used to designate the sex of flowers, with the cross and circle of Venus representing a woman’s hand-mirror, and the arrow and cross of Mars representing a man’s shield and arrow. These symbols recall deeply embedded stereotypes that have reinforced the gender binary over millennia, except they were now being freely doubled, overlayed, linked, or otherwise combined to create new representations for gay men, lesbian women, and homosexuality in general. Sometimes other elements were added, like the peace symbol or the raised fist, or letterforms, like the “G” in the logo for the Gay Liberation Front.

When the transgender activist group Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries (S.T.A.R.) formed shortly after the NYU sit-in at Weinstein Hall on Sept 25, 1970 (led by Sylvia Rivera and Marsha P. Johnson and originally calling themselves Street Transvestites for Gay Power), they distributed a flier that was printed with a hand-drawn symbol in the lower left corner that combined and doubled the Venus and Mars symbols. This signaled a real attempt to represent transgender identity in some kind of visual way; I need to do more research, but this may have been a first. When I found a physical copy of the flier at the One Archives in Los Angeles in 2024, filed among the papers of the Gay Activists Alliance, this particular copy was marked with another symbol that was hand-drawn in red ink in the lower right corner: a single circle that combined the arrow and cross in one move. Later, in the winter 1972 issue of Come Out!, published by the Gay Liberation Front, Silvia Rivera authored a short declaration of transgender liberation (“Transvestites—your half sisters and half brothers of the Revolution”), illustrated with hand lettering and that same trans symbol, this time multiplied and linked three times to form a new symbol that points in all directions. It’s a deeply meaningful move that mutates and builds upon known designs into something different, broadcasting a new kind of plurality and power.

Maybe it’s odd to juxtapose the queerness of Cage’s singularly-authored work in “demilitarized language” with the hardcore queer typography and symbols collectively being used in gay liberation at that same moment. But I think there’s real value in exploring how experiments in shaping liberatory language tried to challenge the militarized language of oppression, even if they approached from radically diverging directions. At the same time that Cage proposed the liberation of meaning and a move towards artistic embodiment and pleasure, gay liberation fighters were building a kind of armed and loaded queer vocabulary to liberate society—typography, design, and symbolic glyphs grounded in previous meanings but attempting to go beyond the confines of history. The triangle, lambda, S.T.A.R. symbols, and T.W.G.R. typography contained a surplus of meanings and associations that were meant to signal and bring about collective action. This new queer vocabulary had a power that spoke to its intended audience with fullness, specificity, and intent. In the face of militarized oppression—the fight for basic rights, life and death survival, and liberation—these symbols were armed and loaded, ready to fight. And they worked so well because they were able to mutate through time and space. They could be adapted and changed endlessly, to suit an enormous range of contexts.

This idea of mutation is crucial when thinking about queer approaches to design and typography. Making typographic moves in order to change, shift, and signal difference across time and space is one of the powers of liberated language, and it continues today. This is remarkably evident in the work of the contemporary Belgian type collective Bye Bye Binary and their powerful experiments in non-binary typography, and how they actively change the French language by designing new glyphs that mutate, alter, and transform the gendered endings of words.

I had a chance to meet up with the BBB collective in Brussels recently and was given a complete tour of their work. This group of about 20 members (half of them are type designers, but others are graphic designers, writers, educators, and philosophers) indexes their own work here, as well as the work of other type designers who create non-binary fonts. Many of their fonts are freely available for anyone to download and use.

During my visit, Camille Circlude, one of the founding members of Bye Bye Binary and author of La Typographie post-binaire (2023), beautifully demonstrated exactly how their fonts work. It’s about changing the way we type in order to adjust, adapt, and make language do more. Again, it’s about a surplus of meaning, or perhaps in this case the extension of meaning into other realms. In Camille’s demo, instead of typing “amoureux” (lover—feminine) or “amoureuse” (lover—masculine), they typed “a-m-o-u-r-e-u” and then two periods “. .” and the new glyph “x•s•e” appeared, completing the new, non-binary version of the word: “amoureuxse.” The x•s•e glyph is a ligature that “falls” below the baseline of the word, its descent signaling a wayward difference, a shift, a break. It’s a queer act of typing that produces change, mutation, and difference. In other fonts that they design, the x•s•e ligature might rise above, or combine in other ways; each one is different. Like the hand-drawn symbol on S.T.A.R.’s flier, it uses the existing, inherited “armed language” (in this case the built-in gender binary of the French language) to mutate into something new; it’s a combination of coded forces that’s activated by the user/author who is empowered to create these designs in the act of writing/typing itself.

I’m back in Los Angeles for a more extended, multi-week visit to the One Archives, as I begin research and writing for a book on queer typography (forthcoming fall 2026). I spent a day here back in August, and wrote about the SURVIVORS printout, an important piece of media archeology in the One’s collection, focusing more on the embodied (or maybe even out-of-body) entanglement I experienced when confronting the ephemerality of this particular artifact in the archive. In all of its power and fragility, the folders, box, and one thousand loose sheets of paper that make up the SURVIVORS printout warp queer time and position me directly in front of major gaps and voids in my own timeline, and I’m still processing that experience.

I want to keep thinking and writing about the SURVIVORS printout, as a way to explore and understand it more deeply. Specifically, there was a page that stood out from all of the others, for a reason that goes beyond the obvious emotional content of the author’s message.

This is message #22757, dated 08/12/87 at 12:13:08, Subj: KEYBOARD PROBLEM. Its author isn’t identified, nor is their gender, age, or any other traits; they wrote the post to share their experience of caring for two people: one who was ill with HIV/AIDS, and that person’s partner and primary caregiver. What’s striking though is that the author begins the post with an apology about their keyboard.

Firs+ of all, I wan+ +o apologize for +he “+” represen+ing a cer+ain le++er; +ha+ key on my compu+er is broken.

What an incredible example of queer typography!

I see it this way for a few reasons that go beyond the obvious context at hand. And that context should be noted: I found this page within the largest LGBTQIA+ archive in the world, and the post was written in 1987, during the height of the HIV/AIDS crisis. The original author’s brief message provides insight into the urgent care and support that was happening as communities were struggling with illness, negligence, and death. Without question, it’s a queer story and the printout enables us to locate this author in the otherwise sparse and confusing timeline(s) of queer history.

It’s the author’s opening line that brings this page of writing into another realm, as they apologize for the “keyboard problem” identified in the subject line. The letter “T” on their keyboard doesn’t work, so they’ve decided to substitute “+” for “T” in order to get their message across, and this is remarkable. Faced with a malfunction that creates a constraint, the “+” is a simple typographic hack. They decided to use one keystroke as a substitute for another (broken) one; more accurately, it’s a code, or a cipher, that functions as a workaround. The reader easily understands how to decode the message because it only involves one letter and the forms are similar: the “+” looks like a lowercase “T.”

In fact, the author could have used any other letter or symbol, and the message would still be readable. They could have even left out all of the Ts entirely. At what point does language completely break down? Any one of these solutions, including the “+” substitution, introduces friction and s l o w s down the reading experience. The slower experience asks more from the reader—more consideration, more time, more patience—and this is echoed in the content of the message itself, which is about dealing “wi+h AIDS in our own way,” about the terror of facing death alone, and about the value of standing by for unconditional support.

John Cage experimented with the removal and eventual breakdown (liberation?) of language in 1974 with Empty Words, a book and spoken performance that gradually eliminated sentences, phrases, words, and syllables from Thoreau’s journals, until the language was “demilitarized.” Could a move like the “+” substitution in the KEYBOARD PROBLEM post be considered “demilitarized” in any way? If we consider queer acts of typing that move away from perfect legibility towards a more poetic place—less regulated, towards “other legibilities”—then yes, I think so.

The decision by the author to substitute a plus/positive sign for the broken T takes this simple substitution into a more poetic dimension because this is also the symbol that’s added to the letters “HIV” in order to designate someone’s seropositive status (HIV+). The “+” indicates that the HIV virus is detectable in the body (a presence, a surplus). There’s also this: that the HIV virus attaches itself to T cells and causes them to die, and the decreasing T cell count is what eventually leads to an autoimmune crisis in the body (AIDS), and death. In the KEYBOARD PROBLEM post, it’s the author’s letter T that is broken, replaced by the positive sign. The author of the post, faced with a keyboard crisis, made the creative decision to hack their tool with a modified alphabet, which introduces friction to the reading experience. The result is compromised, not perfect, but absolutely readable. The post contains 104 “+” positive signs that read as if a filter has been overlaid on top of the language; the text has something more, it takes on a new “texture,” but it’s still legible. The author negotiates between the tool, the language, and the forum (its audience and network of readers), to produce a new kind of slower typing/writing. I see this as a queer act of typing/writing, which requires a new kind of slower, queer read—for the reader, there’s no avoiding it.

Is the queer read imposed here a broken one? Is the transformed text an actual problem for the reader? I would argue that by queerly typing the text in this way, the author has instead created a surplus. There is an abundance of love and care that is expressed in the KEYBOARD PROBLEM post on multiple levels, and this abundance is clearly legible. As a reader, I understand their modification in order to get this message across as a surplus of meaning and language, not a problem or a lack.

And the actual font is irrelevant! It’s all about the typing. The hack can transfer to any computer user on the network, and can be output by any printer. It doesn’t depend on any specific technology or platform. The abundance is transferable, flexible, and easily adaptable.

Was the author thinking about T cells and seropositive status when they made the substitution? Were they being clever? I doubt it, but that’s totally irrelevant. The surplus is there now, as it was then, when this message was read on all of the screens of the readers of the SURVIVORS forum, and when it was printed out. It’s these ideas—

a focus on context;

the hacking of language;

the creation of meaningful codes;

modified alphabets;