Written by ‘Baseball Boys’ Creative Director and Photographer Luca Varano:
This growing project explores queer memory, sexuality, and fantasy through constructed imagery and collected stories. The first part of the project, Baseball Cards, grew out of a series of interviews I conducted with gay men about their earliest sexual awakenings. I was interested not only in what sparked desire, but in how those moments linger over time how they become charged, distorted, humorous, or strangely vivid in hindsight.
Many of these memories are tied to objects, images, and spaces shaped by American consumer culture: trading cards, magazines, television, advertising, sports memorabilia, and mass-produced fantasies of boyhood and masculinity. These materials circulate desire long before it is understood. They quietly teach who is supposed to be admired, wanted, or imitated, while leaving queer longing unnamed.
I recreated these formative moments as staged photographs, styled with a sense of camp, parody, and playful exaggeration. Drawing from the visual language of commercial photography, packaging, and collectible design, the images reference the aesthetics of promotion and display. Rather than aiming for realism, they embrace artifice and performance, reflecting the way memory itself is unstable and continually rewritten.
The format of the baseball card, a familiar symbol of American leisure, hero worship, and consumer identity becomes a framing device to disrupt and subvert those same systems. By inserting queer desire into this language of collecting, trading, and branding, the project reclaims a space historically shaped by exclusion. The work asks how desire is marketed, how masculinity is sold, and how personal histories are formed at the intersection of private fantasy and mass-produced imagery.
Check out the full ‘Baseball Boys’ photo editorial by Luca Varano below, and follow Luca on Instagram @varano.co
MODELS:
Kijuro (喜十郎) – @kijurotakata
Colton Dane – @coltonleedane
Nathan – @gorpcorp_
Tyler Sastre – @tylersastre
All graphic design for the project was created by Annie McLean
Instagram: @annniemclean
Website: https://anniemclean.com
