The Brooklyn Rail

I photographed this Jack in the Box in Los Angeles as part of a project, in progress, that illustrates a night as described by Alan Bell’s Black Jack Newsletter. The newsletter announced a roving, monthly safer sex club party for Black gay men, which lasted from 1986 through 1989. Newcomers, known as “Green Members,” would meet Black Jack staff at fast-food restaurants throughout Los Angeles to receive that night’s address; in a cruising culture lacking the casualness with which it can take place today, this was an opportunity for each party goer to vet each other. 


Informed by this, I’ve been thinking about the precarity of gay and queer sites, specifically as emphasized by their relationship to sites like these fast-food restaurants that hosted and inadvertently provided cover for these gay exchanges. While gay and queer spaces are in flux, creating space out of need with a taste for the end somewhere on the tongue, these sites renovate in place. Instead, I approach this with less lament and am interested in how queerness shapes its needs with roving borders. These photographs are abstracted from the larger project to focus on this process.