Michael Wertz:
The book was called Gay Life. Opening it up and seeing the cut pages was like holding
a dead thing: here lies a body [of] information that is lost forever. The book was basic
information for queers living in New York City: how to find a lover, how to take care of
your appearance, how to act in a gay bar, what to do if you’ve been abused by a lover.
I drew another body for the book, replaced some words that had been cut out and added
a few others, and gave it back to the pages.
Anne Maria Hardeman:
There is a thread woven into this project’s origin: overcoming one person’s act of repetitive
hate. I think of the energy required to sustain this vandalism; this act that brought these
books to our attention. The path of this individual’s destruction [has] now become a
sub-collection of books married to individuals, each person or collaboration becoming
more involved with a book and its voice than it did in its previous life. Gay Life described
the healthy and unhealthy ways for gay men to conduct themselves; loving to oneself,
partners and their community. Themes and words from the cut pages inspired me to
reemphasize them in thread, collage, type and pen. In collaboration, Michael and I would
have a dialogue, talking while working with individual pages, then hang them to view our
conversation. Only at the end did we see the symbolic (3) in our pages, just like the
triangular cut into the body of Gay Life.
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