Having worked professionally with living artists since 1984 and during a period in which the mainstreaming of gay culture produced a strange erasure of what gay culture was in the era of the closet, Arning was drawn in his personal art collecting to works my gay artists, male, female and more recently non binary. While sympathetic with culture wide adoption of the term queer, Arning has chosen to label this collection as the Bill Arning Gay Art Collection (BAGAC) to refer to an earlier time when he came out as GAY and gay was a non gendered term- the separation of Gay into Gay and Lesbian occurring in the late 70s.  The collection’s goal is to be offered to a public institution as a totality with the word GAY predominantly attached.