In February 2021, dance-music site Selector republished a list of 100 important house records taken from a 1992 issue of a short-lived Chicago zine called Crossfade. “Chicago’s House: A Checklist” originally ran in November of that year as part of a story package about house history, sandwiched between a brief but trenchant essay by copublisher and editor Terry Martin on the birth and evolution of Chicago’s underground dance culture and a six-page interview Martin had conducted with the godfather of house, Frankie Knuckles. The cover of that issue—there were only three in total—featured a live shot of pioneering house DJ Ron Hardy, who’d died eight months before.
Thing began as a photocopied and folded half-letter-size zine (8.5 by 5.5 inches) and in just two years grew into a staple-bound letter-size publication professionally printed on newsprint, in the process ballooning from 20 pages to 48. It published interviews with prominent Black queer figures such as future drag star RuPaul Charles, poet Essex Hemphill, and filmmaker Marlon Riggs; Hemphill and Riggs, both of whom died from complications of AIDS in the mid-90s, also contributed to Thing themselves. As publisher and coeditor, Ford ran Thing out of his apartment. The zine never did better than break even, despite a largely volunteer staff, but even on its shoestring budget it had grown popular enough by 1993 to sustain a run of 3,000 copies—and its readers were spread around the U.S. and across the Atlantic. Thing sold subscriptions as well as individual issues, and it appeared on shelves at bookstores in multiple major cities. Even before Thing reached peak circulation, it had become a lifeline for gay and trans people from all walks of life, Black and otherwise—and sometimes that was because of its music coverage.
From fall 2018 till June 2019, McFarland studied Thing and its short-lived predecessor, a Black literary-arts publication called Think Ink that was also founded by Ford, Adkins, and Warren. Art historian and critic Solveig Nelson also answered McFarland’s questions and helped give her more context for the archive; in February 2018 Nelson had published an essay in Artforum on the legacy of Thing, which by then had been all but forgotten. (In December, Thing will be featured in the Art Institute exhibit “Subscribe: Artists and Alternative Magazines, 1970-1995,” which Nelson put together with AIC photography curator Michal Raz-Russo.)
As Ford later detailed in his Think Ink music column, Boplicity, he came out around the same time he discovered the Warehouse. “The Warehouse was a way to conquer repression and escape oppression,” he wrote. “It was a haven, owned and operated by black, gay men for black, gay men. Though all were welcome, it was clear on whose turf you were.”
Ford’s time at the Warehouse inspired him to buy a pair of turntables and a mixer and try his hand at DJing. He practiced mixing in his spare time and funded this new pursuit by working as a sales clerk at the Rose Records location on State Street in the Gold Coast. He started the job in 1982, and among the customers who came in was a gay white DJ named Terry Martin, who struck up a friendship with Ford. “Robert was like an encyclopedia,” Martin says. “He had such wide-ranging tastes, so he was up on everything.”
“Trent was such a social butterfly in so many scenes, and found so many things interesting,” Lafreniere says. “He could go to the white-hot center of something and pluck out what it was that we should all be paying attention to. He was one of those kinds of guys—beloved, funny as hell, really cute. He was this amazing character in that whole scene.” Lafreniere and Adkins eventually dated for about a year.
