It Works If You Work It: Meet the new Ignota.
Please welcome to the stage Ignota Works.
The way to perfection is through a series of disgusts.
—Walter Pater, The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry (1873)
First disgust: the queer issue. A Reputable Publication waves a call for submissions in front of an optics problem. Paradoxically, the call’s very openness attests to the fact that this kind of person is really not their kind of person. Theme: what is queer, who is queer. Is James Franco available to guest-edit.
What a shock to learn that otherwise talented teams of nominally intelligent editors think in anno domini 2017 that this serves and dignifies their LGBTQ readership. merritt and I do not count ourselves among their number. We’re more reputation than repute, for starters, but mostly we’re artsy queers: we’ve gritted our teeth and girded our loins and pitched these sideshows, and we know firsthand their humiliations.
Because this (alongside perhaps the style-section ghetto) is the predominant vehicle for queer creation, one might well think it was the only vehicle for queer creation. In which light, a queer publication is nothing but four quarters of queer issues — a sideshow in the center ring.
“At least they pay,” we mumble to one another abashed. If they pay. They’d better pay.
We began building Ignota Magazine together in 2016. We saw what was at the time an underserved space in the media–industrial complex — a space for a publication that was truly for queer people, and covered the wide New Yorker-ish terrain between your artily authentic small presses and the trade in trade of your Out Magazines. We believed that our unique intersection of talents — me being a sellout ex-writer-cum-editor of a web engineer and merritt having a depth of experience with the business of LGBTQ artmaking — would leave us well positioned to build something interesting in the unexplored territory before the colonists arrived to claim it.
We also believed, in a quieter and harder-to-monetize way, that the voices of queer people were a basso profundo roar underneath the more familiar melodies of civilization, and that anyone who had eyes to see and ears to hear could find queer resonances in all the greatest and more terrible of our human achievements.
We were right that the space was there, it turned out, and everyone from Grindr (Into) to Condé (Them) is squeezing into their assless chaps and going, as the poet has said, west. (Grindr is making an expensive bet that queer people crave queer writing more intensely and profitably than they crave queer sex. Put that in your brain and let it marinate for a while.) There’s a story we could tell about how the crowded market proves out our original hypothesis, and that story would be mostly pretty accurate. We considered soldiering on, renaming the project Her?
Second disgust: the coming-out story. Or the rich embarrassment of narratives for which it is a metonym — first bully, first straight crush, shamed and shameful bodies, family full-stop, the thousand and one ways straight audiences induce queers to perform their abjection.
It’s not that it’s not meaningful and real. Nor is it that we’re somehow beyond it. We’ll always be coming out, over and over and again and again forever; we’re never not explaining our presence and provenance. Rather, it’s that we should attend carefully to who these stories are for. Do they speak in the voice we use alone together and amongst ourselves? With the cadence of intimacy and the lilt of swish? Or do they speak rather in the voices of the gender gendarmes, directed by and directed to the Other’s others?
Reaching electrified across the bar and laying a conspiratorial hand on your fine forearm: What would it be for our stories to be Jungle Red and all a-sharp. What would it be to sing barsmoke and pearlclutch. What would it be to be tender.
It would be a world unto itself, whole and new.
Coming out is all well and good; what, now, do we come out into?
The thing of it is that we wound up creating a magazine of convenience. What we wanted to do was build a platform for gay genius, a queer canon to rival the Renaissance. “Magazine” was just a ready-to-hand reification of our complex and overweening ambition into an objet we could tack a domain name onto — and not the best or best-suited. The cadence that came with it meant that instead of doing deep and focused dives into our contributors’ work and building out delightful editorial experiences around it, we were scrambling to meet deadlines and maintain infrastructure and cover costs. Thirteen-hour days and hundreds in monthly AWS fees turned out not to be sustainable for a bootstrapped and undercapitalized passion project — the rigors of regular releases were going to consign our tiny band to the garage forever.
And fundamentally, we didn’t care. We still don’t. We’d intended to treat the periodical structure as a first experiment among many. We’re not death-of-print nostalgists or necrophiles; we don’t form attachments to form. We think the browser is the most destabilizing thing ever to happen to media, of course, but that’s part of what excites and inspires us — the screen as a canvas that resists, not as the clear pane through which we view “actual” content. The magazine was a momentous midcentury medium which we admire and respect and do not wish in particular to bother to resurrect.
If you’ve never spent thirteen hours straight hammering out JavaScript for a project you’ve stopped caring about, suspecting all the while that to do so was to move farther and farther from the wishes that drove you to pick it up in the first place — don’t.
Third disgust: Ignota Magazine, Issue 1.
I mean it’s fine. It’s fine.
Editorially it’s not the lush and lascivious exemplar of faggotry par excellence that we’d imagined — some of it has kind of the feel of a technical demo, that faint stank that makes you think an engineer designed it (one did 👋) — but it maintains a narrow distance from the small-press pirated-InDesign aesthetic that was its deepest most intimate dread.
And the work is genuinely brilliant. Brilliant in a way that queer people in media don’t often get to be — a distinctively queer way, an uncanny way both perennially strange and viscerally familiar. The way of that queer voice we could hear echoing in the aesthetic aether across historical time and geographical place, made manifest and vital. And in case brilliance is too chilly and rarefied a virtue, it was beautiful to boot: deeply felt and gorgeously realized, playful and truthful. We’re forever grateful to the contributors who entrusted us with its keeping, and it’s not going anywhere — the issue will stay live and the work will live on for as long as there are virtual Cloud-compute resources left in this world to serve it. The content was never the problem and we wouldn’t want it any other way.
It’s not that it’s not good, then, it’s just — is this too confessional? — that it’s not enough.
Ignota was animated by the separatist certainty that queer people, woman people, Black people, are, by and large, magnificent world-historical brilliancies whose genius is strip-mined to churn out cultural baubles that are shadows of fragments of the miracles of which we’re capable. We were interested in building a space in which we could do more.
We still are. We’re just not interested in building it in the moribund media, and we’re not interested in building it weekly or monthly or quarterly. We’re interested in slow work done quickly, in artistry at scale, in deeper dives for bigger treasures, in bringing our unique mélange of talents and skills to bear for queer folks — and, someday soon, other marginalized voices — and giving them the space and support they need to build their most ambitious projects.
And so, a pirouette of a pivot. We’re proud to première Ignota Works, a content studio dedicated to amplifying the voices of queer creators. It’s the next iteration of the same fundamental idea that drove us to put out an issue of the magazine — more gradual, only, and a bit more grand.
Some of the projects we have planned for the next few months — a wide-ranging interview with founder of The Toast Mallory Ortberg; a generative exquisite corpse of a scandal sheet featuring John Leavitt and Kit Mills—are wildly exciting. You can hear more about them and keep up with our progress by subscribing to this blog or following us on Twitter.
And we’re always looking for more to do. Bring us your outsized, your zealous, your ravening aspirations yearning to breathe free. There’s a guide to what we look for in our collaborations here, but if you’re a queer-identified creator, emerging or established, with a project that’s too big to go anywhere else, we want to hear from you.
The queer art of the future is the art of the future.
