I may not loose much weight this holiday break but my little rowhouse sure is.  I haven’t tossed so much paper into the recycling bins in ages. 

I have this bad habit of saving magazines and periodicals.  Not everything I read, but stuff I think could be valuable later.  Like the software developer’s periodicals I read for example.  Journals from the few professional organizations I am a member of, such as The Association for Computer Machinery.  I tell myself there is reference material in these I may need later.  But the fact is it’s all time sensitive.  Most of the fifteen years of computer trade journals I have on my shelves I can safely toss away now, because it either references technology now that is completely out of date and orphaned, or is online where I can more easily get to what I’m looking for via the seach engines.

It’s not like I have stacks of magazines here at Casa del Garrett.  I hate clutter.  So they’re all tucked neatly into those cardboard periodical holders and labeled according to publication and date.  It’s amazing how much of that stuff you can throw out when you ask yourself if you’ve ever so much as touched it in the last ten years.  That came to about four-fifths of it. Then I ask myself how much of it is online anyway and that’s another four-fifths of what’s left.

I’ve saved some newspapers, some of them whole, from certain historical event days.  Like the day the first humans walked on the moon.  The day Nixon resigned.  The day the supreme court overturned Hardwick v. Bowers.  I have the front pages of all the local Washington D.C. newspapers the day gay folk rioted in San Francisco after Dan White got off with Voluntary Manslaughter.  I’ll post the front page of the Washington Star that day later. 

I have lots of old Advocates and other gay periodicals, journals and underground ‘zines from the early to late 1970s, when the movement for respect and equality was getting up some steam.  The optimism of those days is almost painful to read again.  Everyone just assumed that the gains made in the sexual revolution, and for racial equality and women’s rights would naturally translate into a better world for gay people too and it didn’t.  But when you look at how the rest of the era’s equal rights movements played out that’s not so surprising. The straight, white, protestant majority took in the new freedoms that applied to themselves, and pretty much let everyone else keep on struggling.  Racism is still a curse on our country, women are freer to have sex with men now, but not so much to make the same money for the same work, climb the corporate latter, or rise in politics.  Yes, it’s all better now then it was back in 1972 when I graduated from high school.  But isn’t that what they tell gay people when we complain that we are still, after decades of struggle, second class citizens?   Oh cheer up…think of how better off you are now then you Were…!  I was flipping though some of the old gay community newspapers and magazines from the 70’s and marvelling and how anti-gay bullshit just hasn’t changed At All in decades, just the faces speaking it. 

Most of that stuff is going in a Rubbermaid storage container and I’ll have to find someplace in the house for it because that old newsprint degrades rapidly if it’s subjected to wide temperature and humidity swings.  By the time the recycling drop-off reopens I reckon I’ll have another few hundred pounds…yes, that’s right…of paper to deposit into it.  All the old computer journals.  The old libertarian movement journals, Inquiry and Reason.  The occasional lifestyle magazine issues I’ve saved because that particular month’s issue was really good…Cigar Affectionado…Vanity Fair…  The old Regardes from back when I was working as an architectural modelmaker…  The issues of Popular Photography and Camera 35 and Peterson’s Photo-Graphic from when I was trying to be a freelance photographer….  It’s fun to look back on the world as it was when those issues were published, but that world is gone now and if I want to go for a stroll in it again I can do it online.  I need the space more then I need the paper memories.

I’m holding onto my old Mad Magazines and Consumer Reports though.  And the issues of Model Car Science I bought and read thoroughly when I was a kid.