Posters and Flyer Making 

"Let's Celebrate Having Tits" Party Flyer

Oral History Quotes

You had these stick on letters that you rubbed onto a piece of paper, right? You weren't using a computer, you were using these rub-on letters. So we had these pages and pages of rub on letters. So you'd rub it onto the sheet, and you’re like, “Does this look good?” Then, you’d do a little handwriting on it.(...) I still remember that our main [paper] colors were Orbit Orange and Solar Yellow. They were really fun. I had one buddy who I did this with a lot, and he and I would go to the - you know, this was our Sunday afternoon routine. (...) We’d get to the copy shop and we'd feel very, again, very brave. These copy shop people are seeing what it says on your poster, and it was just the two of us going. You just didn't know! You just didn't know what was going to happen. And so then when you get your posters, this big old stack (...) And we would start divvying them up with a couple other people because the campus was so big. Then, you'd start running around the campus. Sunday night was usually the best time because most people were kind of in their rooms, they weren’t roaming around so much. Getting ready for the week. So you would get into every dorm that you could and stick these up on the bulletin boards. Then, sneak out as fast as you could and hope that nobody really spotted you because you just never knew. And so, some days, you'd feel really, really brave. You'd be like, “We should go to RISD, we should go to the fraternities.” It's like, “Are you crazy?” Well, “Let's go see if it's quiet- I got one up! I got one up!” So it was this really subversive thing that we did, but, but that was a really important way of communicating.

-Annette Huddle reflecting on her routine of making posters for the LGSA along with another member, as well as the adrenaline rush of putting up LGSA posters on campus in spaces that were not seen to be outwardly LGBTQ friendly at the time. 

When I would make flyers, it was like collage (...) We didn't have Canva back in the day. I'm sure we had earlier versions of photoshop, but it was fun to just, you know, make flyers, like with your hands (...) We had access to the photocopy machines at Pembroke and at TWC [Third World Center]. But, yeah. Just good, clean arts and crafts and sharing responsibility with other folks who are part of the organization. And then, you know, just putting them in kind of the most visible places, like around the post office and wherever there were posts around campus where we could staple or tape.

-Gigi Otálvaro-Hormillosa speaking about the methods of creating posters for TNT in the 90s

Stickers became a big thing in Act Up, in the Queer Nation movement around the very end of the eighties [to] early nineties. And so at that end, you know, if you're studying queer politics of that time at all, you've seen the stickers. I'm talking about these Dayglo [fluorescent] stickers. We'd have them on our leather jackets, all that stuff. But at Brown, a lot of people wore pins. Pins were a big thing in the eighties. 

-Rebecca Hensler speaking about the progression from buttons to stickers as a form of queer outreach in the 1980s