Two years earlier, Ford had aspired to embrace an emergent intersectional counterculture with his 1987 magazine project Think Ink as the turbulent second half of the 20th century accelerated from the Black Power and Black Arts Movements, producing a broader chosen community bonded by the excesses of an integrationist post-soul aesthetic. Featuring quippy columns, editorial features, and fiction, the aim of THING was simple yet revolutionary: to document LGBTQ+ and nightlife culture in Chicago. Ford-alongside Trent Adkins and Lawrence Warren- published the inaugural edition.
It was November 1989, two months after ACT UP movement members had chained themselves inside the New York Stock Exchange to protest the inflated pricing of the AIDS medication, AZT, when writer and DJ Robert T.
“She Knows Who She Is,” read the tagline of the first issue of THING magazine. takes us inside the countercultural publication that served as a relic of desire and community-building before the internet