You see one flyer for a gay party, you've seen them all. It seems that bars and promoters use the same handful of photogenic guys to adorn the adverts for bear parties, airbrush off some hair for the wolf parties, wasn't that guy on the Fourth of July and the Labor Day flyer, and I remember that bulge from Memorial Day. The creativity isn't there anymore. Sorry guys, but it's true.
This wasn't always the case.
Friends of Dorothy in the 80s and 90s had to make bold guesses at the sexuality of passersby when handing out flyers promoting queer club nights. Does he have an earring in his right ear? A hanky hanging out of his jeans pocket? There were even gay hanky codes that you would literally need a chart to decipher. (A doily worn on the right apparently means he’s a tearoom bottom.) These were all signifiers of whether or not someone was down to RSVP to a night such as Dublin’s H.A.M. or GAG.
The flyers, often featuring explicit or cheeky graphics and language, would be distributed in “hip cafés, clothes shops, music stores and the like,” says Tonie Walsh, LGBT rights activist and founder of the Irish Queer Archive. “Concessions and teasers were usually given out by hand, on the street to interesting individuals, or in bars.”
Walsh, 55, was behind iconic Dublin gay night H.A.M., which ran from 1997 to 2005, along with Niall Sweeny and Rory O’Neill. “Anybody who was there on the first night will remember that it was hot, packed, and an insane mix of staff in slaughterhouse aprons and white boots with blood smeared all over them, kick ass music and a dance floor,” recalls Sweeny in an issue of Free!
For a new exhibition called Pilly Willy: Rave Ephemera from the Queer Underground, Walsh has contributed a host of his own personal collection of flyers showing an electric history of Ireland’s queer club culture. – dazeddigital.com
In a posting titled "The Raunchy Hilarity Of Ireland’s Queer Club Flyers, we are informed that the Irish Queer Archive has lent an extensive collection of dicks and butts that will be on display at Dublin exhibition Pilly Willy. Head on over to dazeddigital.com for the entire article, a Q & A with Tonie Walsh, and some NSFW posters we cannot share here, but we are able to show you the ones below.
Do you agree that today's gay flyers are a little banal?
h/t: dazeddigital.com
How marvelous. I love it
How marvelous. I love it when gay history is recorded and preserved. So much talent and originality has gone into so many such graphics, especially in the late, late 60's, the 70's and 80's. Once digital graphics took over, well, the party was pretty much over. And much in the same way that movie posters have lost much of their glamor and allure, so is it true of culturally specific flyers like these. I would love to see more of these and exhibitions of this nature. Bravo!