Exhibition:

The Queer Writing on the Bathroom Wall

by

Mark Addison Smith

III Queer Studies Easter Symposium, 

Mexico City, 9 April  -  14 April, 2009 

Exhibition Opening: 9. April, 2009: 18:00 

In a culture saturated with anonymous messaging—ranging from blogging to texting—handwritten graffiti remains a staple of texual communication, allowing the viewer to not only receive written information but also to consider the emotional intent behind the author’s scrawled message. 

For the past year, I’ve been photographing graffiti within men’s restrooms throughout the American Midwest. I’ve zeroed in on a small-town truck stop in Illinois, containing a messy stall with the loaded message “gay fagget (sic) fucker die you know it’s a truck driver.” 

I have appropriated the author’s original letterforms to first design a complete uppercase and lowercase alphabet set according to his writing style, and have then morphed the letterforms on top of each other to generate a homo-sexualized alphabet consisting of same-letter ligatures, rooted in semiotic Western representation of homosexuality in duplicate. My research has culminated in a biomorphically-coded typeface for marginalized groups, specifically the queer community, to talk back against instances of personal hatred inscribed on public restroom walls. Through handwritten letterform manipulation coupled with theoretical debate, I’m hoping to uncover the latent homosexuality behind written homophobia, to generate an new, coded alphabet in which the graffiti author cannot answer back, and to explore issues of emotional intent and baggage carried within individual strokes of handwritten, charged words.

Of specific interest to me has been the men’s restroom, a public/private modern-day confessional of bodily necessity, sexual acknowledgement, and self-identity. In my presentation, I wish to provide a historical background on bathroom graffiti via a queer theory lens, a breakdown of gender and language (who’s writing and why?), and provide a hybridized, visual solution fusing my academic interest in handwritten typography with the emotional need to universally answer back against one specific instance of written hatred.