Across disciplines, scholars have diagnosed the twenty-first century West with a peculiar affliction: analog nostalgia (e.g., Beverland et al. 2024; Schrey 2024). They note that artists and consumers revive analog media such as photography, vinyl records, and analog synthesizers to retrieve a materiality, agency, and intentionality they perceive to be lacking in an increasingly digital world.

However, analog nostalgia has been a part of Western music cultures ever since the rise of digital technologies in the late 1970s. One early analog revival scene took place in San Francisco’s queer underground around 1990, spearheaded by artist Michael Collins. Many of his and his comrades’ activities revived the analog styles of new wave music from a decade earlier: from the original songs by Collins’ performance group the Popstitutes, to drag performances of new wave music videos, to “Club Analog,” a nightlife event with the subtitle “Stop worrying and learn to love the Moog synthesizer.”

In this paper, I ask how and why Collins and his associates enacted analog nostalgia for an era barely ten years past. Closely reading their archival materials—flyers, press clippings, video recordings, and more—I argue that analog technology was crucial to this circle’s queer worldbuilding in the face of the AIDS crisis. While this analog revival could be seen as a precursor to today’s analog nostalgia, the San Francisco underground made explicit the queer pleasures of analog technology in a way that recent analog revivals, centered on hegemonically masculine discourses of control and mastery, have obscured.