TIFFANY SAINT BUNNY
In 2016 Tiffany Saint Bunny founded an Instagram art project dedicated to making trucks gay. TruckSlutsMag has grown to over 48,000 Instagram followers and Bunny is joined by Rachel Saxer and Spencer Faust in running the account. The site documents and chronicles primarily scantily clad women and non-gender conforming people with trucks. These gritty photos are anything but your typical male gaze truck fantasy.
Bunny’s goals are to create a lasting visual archive of her radical queer and trans freak family. In this way TruckSlutsMag is an aggressive response to homophobia and the white supremacist / nationalistic messaging of American truck lovers. Images from the project have been attacked on Instagram, both in hateful comments and by their removal from the platform. This past October saw a large group of posts removed from @TruckSlutsMag. At one point this fully clothed self portrait of Bunny from behind was taken down.
These erasures are an attack on queer, trans, and alt / non-conforming community archives. Bunny has spoken to members of the Queer/Trans community who had their accounts taken down, only to realize they no longer have backups of old photos. These communities are already under attack in our country and now literally being erased from social media.
To Bunny, this digital erasure harkens back to the AIDS crisis. “When queer and trans people die, their histories and memories are often erased from the record by homophobic family members tasked with collecting the affects of the deceased. For the surviving family members, a death was often seen as an opportunity to sanitize the image of the deceased, and the AIDS crisis gave hundreds of thousands of opportunities to do just that. With very little effort, a person’s entire intimate history-- a lifetime of love, pleasure and self-actualization-- was scrubbed from the face of the earth.” - Tiffany Saint Bunny
IMAGE CREDIT: All images courtesy the artist, Tiffany Saint Bunny.