“I first visited Black’s Beach in 1990. With no phone or app to guide me, I followed rumors and desperation to a dusty parking lot, down a treacherous goat path, to a stunningly beautiful beach dotted with men, mostly naked. Over the years I grew up at that beach. I was an art student nearby at UC San Diego. So certainly I brought my camera with me more than once. But to this day I have zero pictures. No visual history of me learning how to cruise as a gay man exists. This project came from me trying to recreate my own history. “Rumors and Hope” began as a digital project for a show curated by Christopher Clary. Last year I adapted it to create a printed book. All the images were found online with Google maps. The company is supposed to avoid people and faces, but fortunately for me, they are terrible at this. The humans in Google digital detritus give the project, and this book, a real sense of lived, queer life.” –Aaron Krach, 2018