Cruis'n: Uncovering Gay Design History Through Collecting

A collector's archive turned work of visual storytelling, Cruis'n is graphic designer Rick Heffner's 312-page excavation of postwar gay print culture: the physique magazines, pulp paperbacks, pamphlets, protest buttons, and posters through which gay men found identity, community, and each other in an analog world.

Built from Heffner's own collection of historical gay memorabilia, the book reproduces the material at full scale in dense, collaged spreads: Athletic Model Guild and Physique Pictorial imagery, RAM-10 pulp series covers, hanky codes and other secret languages of sex and survival, and the activist graphics of figures like Frank Kameny, Marsha P. Johnson, Sylvia Rivera, Harvey Milk, and ACT UP. Decades before the internet and hookup apps, Heffner argues, it was print culture (easy to disseminate, difficult to track) that let gay men find their compatriots the book aims to be an accessible archive that preserves that history. Developed as Heffner's MFA in Graphic Design thesis at Vermont College of Fine Arts, it was self-published in 2023 under his HEFF Publishing imprint in Alexandria, Virginia, as a large-format (30.5 × 22.9 cm) digitally printed paperback, and distributed through Printed Matter.

Heffner is a graphic design professor at George Mason University School of Art and creative director of the Alexandria studio Fuszion, whose clients have included the Smithsonian Institution and National Geographic. Named a fellow of Writing Space's Design Writing Fellowship, he is developing Cruis'n into an expanded trade book on gay design history.