[Your Ad Here] by Finley Eliasmith
[Your Ad Here] was inspired by the advertisements in various feminist and queer publications from the 1970s, ‘80s and ‘90s (listed below). I wanted to use these advertisements in a way that would both highlight and surpass the limits of the archive and of advertising while exploring the source publications’ continuing relevance to queer life today.
Historical advertisements are inherently limited. As advertisements, they have to appeal to a broad audience, which necessarily precludes specificity and nuance. As historically situated advertisements, they often refer to people, places, products, events, and services that no longer exist and cannot be accessed by a modern viewer, thus losing their relevance and therefore their advertorial function. The historical queer archive is similarly unnuanced due to its limited capacity for preservation. It often – though of course not always, as many of the publications I perused for this project demonstrate – excludes personalized, everyday queer perspectives in favour of what are deemed ‘historically significant’ records.
In using these advertisements as building blocks for collage poems that are (mostly) about my own personal, everyday queer experiences, I am taking the words and images used in these advertisements beyond their limited archival context. At the same time, I am maintaining their relationality to queer writing, and even partially restoring their lost advertorial function by bringing them, fragmented as they are, forward in time and relating them to my present-day queer experience.
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The publications I sourced advertisements from are as follows:
Anything That Moves, no. 4, 1992. The Internet Archive. Accessed 15 February 2023. https://archive.org/details/anything-that-moves/Issue%20%234%20%281992%29/mode/2up.
Anything That Moves, no. 19, 1999. The Internet Archive. Accessed 15 February 2023. https://archive.org/details/anything-that-moves/Issue%20%2319%20%281999%29/.
The Gay Alternative, no. 7, summer 1974. Reveal Digital, JSTOR. Accessed 15 February 2023. https://www.jstor.org/stable/community.28037157.
Joining Our Struggles; Making Our Future. International Lesbian and Gay People of Colour Conference ‘86. Fonds 493, File 4. Lesbians of Colour and Lesbian Dance Committee collection. City of Toronto Archives. Accessed 20 January 2023.
OtherWise: Lesbian Supplement, vol. 1, no. 3, 1 February 1985. Fonds 70, Series 600, Subseries 4, File 204. Larry Becker collection. City of Toronto Archives. Accessed 20 January 2023.
Siren: Irresistibly Tempting, for Lesbians, vol. 1, no. 5, December/January 1997. Fonds 70, Series 2495, File 165. Larry Becker collection. City of Toronto Archives. Accessed 20 January 2023.
The TV-TS Tapestry, no. 44, 1984. The Internet Archive. Accessed 15 February 2023. https://archive.org/details/tvtstapestry4419unse/mode/2up.
The TV-TS Tapestry, no. 68, summer 1994. The Internet Archive. Accessed 15 February 2023. https://archive.org/details/tvtstapestry6819unse/mode/2up.
WomaNews, February 1986. Fonds 493, File 3. Lesbians of Colour and Lesbian Dance Committee collection. City of Toronto Archives. Accessed 20 January 2023.