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

“I describe myself as an alphabet artist,” says Nat Pyper, the Brazilian-American author of A Queer Year of Love Letters, a collection of fonts that pay homage to “the countercultural queers of the past several decades” – G.B Jones, Robert Ford, Women’s Car Repair Collective, Moonstorm (lesbian-feminist magazine published by the Lesbian Alliance of St. Louis, Missouri) and more. Remembering overlooked histories through the accessibility of type design, especially OpenType, which have maintained their ubiquity and utility as reliable formats since the 90s, this new book is a gateway into queer typography and inside of that – decades of history, resistance and love.

Using fonts as “time machines”, the book takes the reader back to Black gay and lesbian underground publishing in the early 90s Chicago, to socialist-feminist enclaves in 70s Missouri and the queer punk filmmaking in 80s downtown Toronto – but they also look forward to the future of queer design through digital design. The font Third World Gay Revolution is playful, squiggly and life affirming – based on letterforms created by Juan Carlos Vidal that were featured on the back cover of an issue of The Gay Liberation’s newspaper Come Out!

As well as functioning as a sort of archival project, Nat’s interest in paving the way for queer futures is evident in their interest in science fiction writers like Octavia Butler, Ursula K. Le Guin and Joanna Russ. “I read these writers for the same reason I research queer histories: they offer radical alternatives to the status quo,” Nat shares. They are even publishing a science fiction novella this fall, combining speculative fiction and the search for queer history.

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. “I decided to turn it into a series and planned to make a new font every month for a year, so it became A Queer Year of Love Letters.”

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. Through writing, they extend that past and put it to new use. Writing changes us, we get transformed, via the creative act of reorganizing the world through language.” Nat’s book expands queer culture and goes above and beyond in creativity, respect and tribute. It’s moulded by every aspect of queer culture: love, hate, death, resistance, socialism, even times countercultural icons were “too much” for “a tolerant society”. So be it, the history may be kaleidoscopic, but one thing is for sure – Nat Pyper is collecting it all and sharing it with the world.