Illusgaytion by Weston Wei
Reporting by Stephanie Rudig

Here at The InQueery, we’re usually future-focused, but sometimes we must revisit the past. At our last corporate retreat, the C-Suite participated in various trust-building exercises requiring us to bust open our childhood traumas. There were quite a few stories about parents being less than fully supportive of a career in theater arts, which inspired several executives to locate VHS tape recordings to show us all just how good they were in Oliver! or how seriously they took their role as the ‘understanding angel’ in the annual Christmas pageant. After raiding childhood home basements and school theater archives, we had a mountain of cassettes that were digitized by our fleet of interns. But even with all the performances backed up on the cloud, ready to stream from home or office, we couldn’t quite part with the tapes.

All of our music, memories, and mementos are digital now, relegated to the cloud. When The Cloud first came to our attention, we were ecstatic at the mystical storage possibilities. It seemed as if we wouldn’t need data or hardware anymore, that everything would float up into the sky, where it looks like a Renaissance painting of heaven. All our RAM would glitter up in the stratosphere, our data pinging satellites forever like our own personal “San Junipero.” The cloud promised to take us somewhere over the rainbow. The cloud should be queer, but it isn’t. It’s soulless, surgical, and decidedly not magical. Our conversations, media consumption, education, and memories aren’t just hidden away in a formless place, they’re essentially in the closet.

Ever since we pivoted from meatspace, the tyranny of “You might also like,” algorithms have started to destroy the joy of discovery and finding one’s own taste (this, dear reader, is why The InQueery is in the business of trend forecasting and pop culture analysis — to guide hopelessly uncultured lost lambs). Along with it, we’ve lost the hallowed art of curating mix CDs, perusing the $1 video bin hoping to find a cult classic treasure, wistfully turning the crinkly, plastic-wrapped pages in the family photo album. We believe the children are our future, but we also think that today’s young queers are missing out on crucial tangible experiences, so we’re here to commemorate some of these lost formats and devices and stick it to the cloud with some object permanence.

Abacus

Yep, we’re going all the way back in the archives for this one. It’s math, but with beads, an excellent way to make an unpleasant subject more palatable to gays.

Typewriter 

A typewriter is a keyboard you can accessorize — they require dust covers, alien-looking erasers, correction tape, sound muffling pads, and even ribbons, for Megan Pete’s sake. Picture a solitary figure, a queer icon like Virginia Woolf or James Baldwin, bent over typing out screeds, pecking away. Imagine lines of keys that stick or type slightly off-kilter, that refuse to conform neatly into line.

Landline phones

What a shame that all phones are now uniform shiny rectangles; and we thought it was bad when our families switched to cordless phones (reporter’s note: a core queer childhood memory I have is of my family’s clear plastic phone that showed the rainbow guts of its interior). Landline phones were designed with pizzazz, commanded attention with their rings, dial tones, and muted pastel colors. Most importantly, they each came with their own ponytail, a spiral cord made to be twirled around your finger while you gossiped after school. Is there anything campier than someone handing you the landline and saying, “It’s for you”?

VHS and Audio Cassettes

The pageantry of rewinding a video tape or flipping an audio cassette over to play the other side is unparalleled. Cassettes require finesse; one must carefully fast-forward to the sections you want and take care that the shiny magnetic tape doesn’t come unspooled. The advent of home video was accompanied by a need for home entertainment centers, gargantuan cabinets for media storage that are too gauche for today’s decorating standards, which is too bad because they are pure camp.

LaserDiscs

When the teacher wheeled the TV cart into the classroom and unsheathed what looked like a CD the size of a medium pizza, you could cut the tension with a knife: you just knew you were about to get a video with comically outdated outfits, slang, and probably science.

Overhead projectors

Another educational device that required the pomp of the teacher rolling out a ceremonial cart. You think you’re going to be diagramming sentences, and then bam — it’s a dramatic shadow puppet show! Every young queer sat at their desks, just itching to get called up to write upon the transparency and play puppet master themselves. Choose your dry-erase color wisely (pink) and tell the class ya gay.

CDs

These glimmering, chromatic circles double as prisms or suncatchers. They’re delicate and breakable, and thus they must be held by the tips of your fingers on the sides, as gently and tenderly as all of us soft souls would like to be held. CDs wear every scratch like a battle scar and turn that pain into sk-sk-skipping. Outside of the surgically plastic-sealed CDs available for purchase, burned mix CDs were the ultimate symbol of either romantic longing or ironclad friendship. If your grades had been good enough, you could beg your parents to pick up a 100-pack of blank CDs at Costco, then go to town elaborately writing the tracklist in Sharpie on the CD itself.

DVDs

The gay awakening of popping in a selection from Blockbuster at a sleepover and waking up at 3 am to the glow of the Donnie Darko menu.

iPods

With “aughties” culture having such a huge resurgence among the Y2K-obsessed Zoomers too young to remember the millennium meltdown, we’re shocked that iPods haven’t made an ironic comeback. We can’t overstate the absolute frenzy that this gadget caused when it came on the scene via the ubiquitous, neon-hued ads featuring dancing silhouettes and white headphones. Then the iPod Minis and Nanos rolled out like Skittles, almost as though Steve Jobs himself was saying, “This one is for the queers.”

Vinyl

You’d think vinyl would be gay as well, but let us set the record straight: this is one piece of analog media that has wormed its way back into the mainstream. No longer subversive, vinyl is crushingly heteronormative.

Our conclusion: We’re reinstating fax machines and other vestiges of offices of yore at The InQueery HQ. Call us, beep us, if you wanna reach us.

Queer rating: A 90s home video-inspired drag king who goes by the name of Cam Corder.