Richard Porter was sleeping on his brother's couch when he started Pilot Press. A friend lent him the money to print fifty copies of the first anthology, and from there things began to snowball in the way that only happens when someone makes exactly the right thing at exactly the right time. The first publication, A Queer Anthology of Loneliness, appeared in 2017. A Queer Anthology of Joy followed. Then Rage. Then Healing. Each title was a single emotion, a single word that opened into an entire landscape of queer experience — explored through fiction, essays, poetry, and visual art by contributors who ranged from emerging writers responding to open calls on social media to literary heavyweights like Chris Kraus, Olivia Laing, Eileen Myles, and Turner Prize winner Lubaina Himid.
The Healing issue, published in 2020 while bookshops were shuttered during the pandemic, is the one that landed in this database, though it belongs to a larger project that cannot be understood in isolation. Porter founded Pilot Press in London to publish anthologies of queer art, literature, and activism spanning from the 1980s AIDS epidemic to the present. The design references exhibition posters from Black Mountain College — minimal typefaces, subtle imagery, expansive white space — a visual nod toward artistic community that is reflected in the publishing model itself. Open calls on social media welcomed anyone to submit alongside established names. Turnaround times of three weeks to a month encouraged instinctive, unpolished responses to the loose emotional briefs. Porter has said he had no idea what he was doing in the early issues, that he cringes at the typesetting of the first one. That same lack of experience also meant a lack of constraints.
Chris Kraus described the Healing anthology as a mix of cuteness and embarrassment, beauty and confession, magic tricks and pain — a collection that suggests healing can be achieved through revelation, invocation, observation, and disclosure. The contributors include Wayne Koestenbaum, Fanny Howe, G.B. Jones, Kevin Killian, Helen Cammock, Dodie Bellamy, and dozens of lesser-known writers and artists whose work sits alongside these names with equal weight and equal space. It is 94 pages, softcover, perfect-bound, and priced accessibly — the kind of publication that could be pressed into someone's hands at a reading or slipped into a tote bag at a bookfair.
After four years of the Queer Anthologies, Porter shifted direction. Aware of how difficult it is to get a first book published, he began using Pilot Press to publish debut works of queer writing that might not find a home elsewhere — books like D. Mortimer's Last Night A Beef Jerk Saved My Life and Sam Moore's All My Teachers Died of AIDS. He also launched a new anthology series seeking contemporary responses to art made during the AIDS crisis: the first instalment responded to the Cocteau Twins and Harold Budd collaboration The Moon and the Melodies; subsequent issues responded to Derek Jarman's Blue and Voyager 1's Pale Blue Dot photograph. The legacy of queer art and writing, for Porter, is not an aesthetic or historical footnote — it represents a radical morality built around care, equality, and freedom.
Pilot Press punched well above its weight, as Frieze put it. It was a small, independent project run by an individual artist from a couch, then a flat, then wherever Porter happened to be. That it attracted the calibre of contributors it did, that its anthologies ended up in the Wellcome Collection and Printed Matter in New York, that it built a body of work that mapped the emotional interior of contemporary queer life with such tenderness and rigour — all of this happened because one person decided that these feelings deserved to be in print, and then made it so with fifty copies and borrowed money.
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