A Queer Year of Love Letters is a collection of "time machine" fonts that take us to our countercultural past and futures

"The first font in the book, named Robert Ford, was born from Nat's creative studies into queer "zinesters" and their desire to extend the research into the world - to push the past into the future. "I didn't have a studio or materials, but I did have a laptop and a font design program. Fonts were something I could make and that other people could use," says Nat."

"Frustrated by "rainbow capitalists" and state-sponsored erasure of queer and trans people, Nat is pushing back against erasure, which "happens even in the best of times" - and they are using fonts as the push back. "Fonts disseminate the histories that they cite in name, form, and metadata," says Nat. There's also a poetic function - "Users of the fonts write with the forms of the past.""

Nat Pyper merges archival research with speculative fiction to preserve and project queer histories. Influenced by Octavia Butler, Ursula K. Le Guin and Joanna Russ, they are publishing a science fiction novella that pairs speculative storytelling with the search for queer history. The first font, Robert Ford, emerged from creative study of queer zinesters and a desire to push the past into the future; limited materials led to laptop-based font design and a plan to release a new font monthly as A Queer Year of Love Letters. Fonts function as resistance to rainbow capitalism and state erasure by embedding histories in name, form, and metadata. Users apply historical letterforms to create new texts and transform cultural memory. The work encompasses love, hate, death, resistance and socialism, collecting varied queer cultural moments.

Read at Itsnicethat