10
LEARNING OBJECTIVES
Upon completion of this chapter, you should be able to do the following:
· 10.1 Restate the importance of visual representations of queerness.
· 10.2 Describe the contributions of expatriate artists to the development of queer visual cultures.
· 10.3 Explain the use of physique magazines in the mid-20th century to emerging queer self-consciousness.
· 10.4 List various fine art representations of queerness.
· 10.5 Identify the backlash to queer art in the 20th century.
· 10.6 Survey some of the artistic and political contributions of queer theater.
· 10.7 Assess the relationship between queer art and consumerism.
LGBTQ supporters and activists have claimed many renowned artists, musicians, and writers of the past as gay even though they lived before, to use Foucault’s phrase, “the homosexual was … a species” (43). During the Renaissance in Europe, for example, one aspect of classical Greek and Roman culture that was reborn was homoerotic art. Italian artists Donatello (1386–1466), Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519), and Michelangelo (1475–1564) created sculptures of young men that were clearly designed to showcase the male body. There is in fact evidence indicating that all three men were what we would today call “gay”: Donatello, it was claimed, had love affairs with his male apprentices; da Vinci was arrested for sodomy in 1476; and Michelangelo’s great-nephew carefully changed all the pronouns in the love sonnets from male to female as he was editing the artist’s poetry in 1623. One artist was even popularly known as “Il Sodoma” (the sodomite: Giovanni Antonio Bazzi, 1477–1549).
Still, it is important to remember that although these men, like many others in their time, engaged in same-sex acts, they lived prior to consciousness of a gay identity [λ Chapter 1]. Thus, we risk slipping into the practice of presentism if we insist upon interpreting their art as expressing something essentially gay [λ Introduction]. Nonetheless, these artists are just a few of the well-known figures—including Shakespeare, Emily Dickinson, and countless others—who regularly appear on internet lists of famous lesbians and gay men in history. Clearly, there has been no lack of encomiums—both popular and scholarly—praising the influence of queers (especially gay men) on Western culture. With tongue in cheek, Cathy Crimmins, playing on this idea, titled her book about gay male aesthetic culture How the Homosexuals Saved Civilization: The True and Heroic Story of How Gay Men Shaped the Modern World.
Figure 10.1 “Il Sodoma,” St. Sebastian, 1525.
This chapter makes no attempt to re-hike that well-trodden path. Instead, we focus here on art and public performance that have contributed directly to building queer culture. We must warn you, however: No single chapter can do justice to the range, diversity, and depth of queer art. We can only provide a sampling, highlights, of LGBTQ artistic production. (Given their immense impact on contemporary culture, television and movies will be discussed separately in Chapter 11.) Because self-conscious same-sex art came into existence with the emergence of sexological terms for sexual orientation, our initial focus will be on the work of 19th-century artists in the West, who exerted a profound influence on artistic production by a variety of queer artists throughout the 20th century. Proceeding chronologically, we also turn our attention to the development of self-conscious queer art in a variety of national contexts, particularly as notions of LGBTQ identity have spread around the world, meeting both acceptance and resistance as diverse people attempt to represent their lives, intimacies, and experiences.
VISUALIZING THE HOMOEROTIC
We can see Walt Whitman’s influence on the beginnings of “gay” art in the last part of the 19th century. Two significant figures from this period are Americans Winslow Homer (1836–1910) and Thomas Eakins (1844–1916). Homer typically portrayed the camaraderie of men doing “masculine” things: hunting, laboring, boxing, and so on. This can also be said of Eakins, who specifically intended much of his art of the 1890s to convey the ideas of Whitman [λ Chapter 9]. Richard Mann writes that “Eakins’ carefully composed images of naked youths in arcadian landscape settings (such as The Swimming Hole, 1885) constitute visual equivalents of Whitman’s poems, celebrating male beauty and comradeship.” (See Figure 9.2.) While Homer and Eakins expressed Whitman’s “adhesiveness,” they, like the poet, never self-consciously identified with the new gay identity described by the sexologists. Whitman’s influence continued into the 20th century. English painter David Hockney (b. 1937) openly referenced Whitman throughout his early career. He titled a 1960 painting Adhesiveness and included lines from Whitman’s poetry in other works (e.g., “We Two Boys Together Clinging” [1961]).
Figure 10.2 Thomas Eakins, The Swimming Hole, 1884–1885, Oil on Canvas, 27 3/8 x 36 3/8 in. (69.5 x 92.4 cm), Amon Carter Museum, Fort Worth.
Thomas Eakins, The Swimming Hole.
By the end of the 19th century, as we have discussed in earlier chapters, women and men had begun to self-identify as “inverts,” their identities built around nonnormative sexualities and presentation. Photographer Frances Benjamin Johnston (1864–1952) not only lived her life openly as a lesbian but memorialized this identification in her 1896 self-portrait emphasizing herself as an independent New Woman, complete with beer stein in one hand and cigarette in the other. [new Fig. 9.3 http://loc.gov/pictures/resource/cph.3b11893/]
Figure 10.3 Photographer Frances Benjamin Johnston.
Source: Johnston, Frances Benjamin, photographer. Frances Benjamin Johnston, full-length portrait, seated in front of fireplace, facing left, holding cigarette in one hand and a beer stein in the other, in her Washington, D.C. studio. Photograph. Source: Library of Congress, www.loc.gov/item/98502934/.
American Charles Demuth (1883–1935) was best known during his lifetime as a Precisionist. That is, as Robert Hughes writes, he was “painting a functional American landscape refracted through a deadpan modernist lingo.” But among his images of “grain elevators, water towers, and factory chimneys” are brightly colored paintings of Greenwich Village bathhouses. His Turkish Bath With Self-Portrait (1918) reveals the existence—and the allure—of the thriving gay subculture in New York City (see Figure 10.4).
Bright colors also characterize the art of Mexican Frida Kahlo (1907–1954). Kahlo lived in pain after a gruesome bus accident in 1925; many of her paintings combine visions of her physical agony with the cheerful reds and golds and yellows associated with much Mexican folk art and culture. In fact, over a third of her works are self-portraits, often emphasizing the disfigurements of her body. Kahlo was bisexual, and in her well-known painting Two Nudes in a Forest (1939), she presents same-sex intimacy as a comforting release from pain and tension [https://www.fridakahlo.org/two-nudes-in-a-forest.jsp].
Figure 10.4 Charles Demuth’s Turkish Bath With Self-Portrait.
Charles Demith’s Turkish Bath With Self-Portait
Figure 10.5 Claude Cahun portrait, 1928
Source: Claude Cahun, “Self Portrait (Reflected in Mirror),” 1928. Courtesy of the Jersey Heritage Collections.
French Surrealist photographer Claude Cahun (1894–1954), like Kahlo, executed many self-portraits. These elaborately staged photographs memorialized Cahun’s flamboyant transvestic; along with her open lesbianism and her Stein-like salon, they created for Cahun a reputation as a transgressive and theatrical figure.
THE EXPATRIATES
For 19th-century women and men seeking to develop same-sex relationships and an artistic life, Rome, Paris, and other European capitals seemed to represent freedom from sex, gender, and racial constraints that inhibited them at home. Gay British and American men often traveled to Italy seeking the lost tradition of classical Greek and Roman homoeroticism [λ Chapter 1]. Women, who were for the first time testing the waters of personal and artistic freedom, had no such readymade models and had to invent new ways of being. The community of artistic proto-lesbians that coalesced around actor Charlotte Cushman (1816–1876) in Rome in the 1850s was one such significant experiment in same-sex living. Cushman and writer Matilda Hays (1823–1908) migrated together to Rome in 1852, where Elizabeth Barrett Browning described their relationship as “a female marriage” (qtd. in Browning 27). They were soon followed by sculptor Harriet Hosmer (1830–1908) and other expatriate women artists: sculptors Emma Stebbins (1815–1882), Edmonia Lewis (1845–c. 1911), and Mary Lloyd (1819–1896); actor Fanny Kemble (1809–1893) and her sister, singer Adelaide Kemble Sartoris (c. 1814– 1879); and others. Both Cushman and Hosmer possessed confident and powerful personalities, and both had been described (by Barrett Browning and Nathaniel Hawthorne, among others) as decidedly mannish in behavior and dress. Henry James raised the specter of deviant sexuality when he called the group a “strange sisterhood”; he also implied that they were cold and celibate by referring to them as “a white, marmoreal flock” (1: 257). The intense and shifting relationships within the group gave the lie to James’s assumption of female frigidity. Their consistent production of fine and marketable art bespoke the power of freedom for women artists from the shackles imposed by family and mid-Victorian social mores.
Figure 10.6 Edmonia Lewis.
By the beginning of the 20th century, the prime locale for expatriate gay person artists was no longer Rome but Paris. Led by wealthy American writer Natalie Barney (1876–1972) and British poet Renée Vivien (1877–1909), an intense, prolific, and decidedly non-monogamous coterie of lesbian expatriates took up residence there during the Belle Époque. Among these were American writer Gertrude Stein (1874–1946) and her partner Alice B. Toklas (1877–1967). Both Stein and Barney were as well known for the salons at which they entertained other (usually poorer) artists of their day as for their own published work. Journalist Solita Solano (1888–1975) wrote of Barney’s entertainments, “Natalie did not collect modern art, she collected people, and you could be sure of being dazzled any Friday (her day) you dropped in for tea.” Stein, by contrast, did collect modern art— by Picasso, Renoir, Gauguin, and others—but she also felt that her European home and expatriate artist friends fueled a kind of artistic genius in her. “I have lived half my life in Paris,” she wrote, “not the half that made me but the half in which I made what I made” (Stein 62). Other notable lesbian or bisexual expatriate women who turned up at Barney’s gatherings at 20 Rue Jacob included American painter Romaine Brooks (1874–1970); Radclyffe Hall (1880–1943), British author of the enormously influential novel The Well of Loneliness [λ Chapter 9]; American journalist Janet Flanner (1892–1978); American author Djuna Barnes (1892–1982); and Polish Art Deco painter Tamara de Lempicka (1898–1980).
Many African American artists emigrated to Paris during the 20th century to escape American racism. Those who were gay, lesbian, or bisexual had even more reason to leave as France was far more accepting of same-sex attraction than the United States. Gay poet Claude McKay (1889–1948) wrote acidly about New York while in “European self-exile” (Lewis xxvii). Bisexual performer Josephine Baker (1906–1975) was far more popular in Paris than she ever was at home. After being called a “Negro wench” by the New York Times during an American tour in the 1930s (The Official Josephine), she returned to France, saying bitterly, “[The Eiffel Tower] looked vastly different from the Statue of Liberty, but what did that matter? What was the good of having the statue without the liberty?” (Vorotova). The best known of the Black expatriates was James Baldwin (1924–1987), who moved to Europe in 1948 for a combination of reasons: “strained relations with his stepfather, problems over sexual identity, suicide of a friend, and racism” (Liukkonen) [λ Chapter 9]. While in Paris, Baldwin wrote what Henry Louis Gates Jr. calls “his most successfully crafted and fully realized novel” (xxvi), Giovanni’s Room (1956), which describes a young white man’s struggle with his same-sex attraction. After his initial exploration of same-sex activities, Baldwin turned in later novels, such as Another Country (1962) and Tell Me How Long the Train’s Been Gone (1968), to complex examinations of both sexuality and race. In Another Country, for instance, Baldwin takes on some of the sociocultural difficulties of men, some bisexual, loving across racial lines.
Figure 10.7 Portrait of the Duchess De La Salle, 1925, by Tamara De Lempicka (1898–1980).
© 2016 Tamara Art Heritage /ADAGP, Paris /ARS, NY.
PHYSIQUE MAGAZINES
In Chapter 1, we discussed the attempts of Anselm, Archbishop of Canterbury in England, to shame priests found guilty of sodomy by excommunicating them and publishing their crimes and sentences. As we noted, these publications eventually ceased because they drew extraordinary attention from male parishioners whose primary interest was in discussing who did what to whom [λ Chapter 1]. Clearly, one of the unintended consequences of making sodomy public was that a community of “interested parties” formed around a practice meant to punish men who engaged in sodomy. Nearly 900 years later, in the mid-20th century, a similar phenomenon emerged in the United States with the publication of physique pictorials. In the case of physique pictorials, magazines chock-full of photos of nearly nude male bodybuilders and ostensibly intended for a heterosexual, health-conscious readership, soon became favorites of a largely gay male audience.
Physique magazines began in the late 19th century when Prussian bodybuilder Eugen Sandow (1867–1925) established Physical Culture Magazine in London to help publicize his Institute for Physical Culture. According to writer Jim Webber, Sandow’s magazine, “along with the Boy Scouts and the Olympics, which were founded at about the same time, became part of the ‘muscular Christian’ movement, which promoted nationalism, racial purity, and brazen heterosexuality.”
Bernarr Macfadden began publishing the U.S. version of Physical Culture at the beginning of the 20th century for a straight male audience interested in diet, exercise, and overall physical fitness. By the end of World War II, physique magazines had gained a significant audience among physical fitness buffs. These magazines, and the fitness craze of which they were a part, met the demands of a culture in which increasingly workers were employed in sedentary office jobs and in which technological advances—particularly in domestic appliances—were reducing the physical requirements of maintaining a home. Charles Atlas, whom Physical Culture called “The World’s Most Handsome Man,” had by the mid-20th century posed for 30 years in scanty clothing; Atlas, an Italian whose real name was Angelino Siciliano, turned 62 in 1955, and advertisements for his exercise method, Dynamic Tension, were commonplace at that time in the United States (Waldron).
Figure 10.8 British muscle man Eugen Sandow in pose of the Farnese Hercules.
Time Life Pictures/Getty Images
Figure 10.9 Charles Atlas, strongman.
Bettmann/Getty Images
In 1956, the issue of fitness became a public concern when a study was released showing that American children were less physically fit than their European counterparts; accordingly, the President’s Council on Physical Fitness and Sports was formed. In fact, the bodybuilding, diet, and fitness boom so generally permeated American culture that Alan Miller (writing for the gay magazine Body Politic) remembers being initiated to the pleasures of beefcake magazines in a barbershop:
I first encountered Physique Pictorial in 1960. Several issues were thrown among the magazine collection of Top’s Barber Shop hidden behind a variety store on Queen Mary Road in Montreal. The six barbers were—or so I vaguely remember—not the least bit embarrassed at having these things about, let alone that a young boy would be flipping through them. Even when blatantly erotic, physique magazines were excused (one is not sure how successfully) as works for those interested in bodybuilding, art or nudism—anything to avoid labels being applied to the purchasers.
As Miller’s experience indicates, bodybuilding and beefcake magazines soon became popular homoerotic content.
How did this happen? The 1950s and early 1960s in the United States were marked by several important cultural contradictions. On one hand, the popular culture was focused on policing strict gender roles; women were encouraged to refocus their creative energies and labor on the home and (heterosexual) family because men had returned from World War II and needed employment in the factories that had used women’s labor during the war. On the other hand, many women had learned during the war that they were capable of doing the high-paying industrial work hitherto reserved for men and wanted to continue in that work and contribute to the support of their families or to support themselves outside the constraints of the straight family. The McCarthy era was in full swing, and much attention was paid to ferreting out Communists and “perverts” in the government, to which end Executive Order 10450 was signed by President Eisenhower in 1953. At the same time, the Mattachine Society and the DOB were formed, and both Alfred Kinsey and Evelyn Hooker were studying human sexuality in more objective ways than ever before [λ Chapter 3]. The physique pictorials straddled these oppositional cultural forces and became conduits through which gay male culture passed.
According to David Bianco, though, Bernarr Macfadden “didn’t intend his magazine for sexual titillation. When he became aware of its gay person following, he publicly denounced his gay readers as ‘painted, perfumed, kohl-eyed, lisping, mincing youths,’” whom he encouraged other men to “beat up.” Nonetheless, the popularity of bodybuilding magazines helped create a climate that allowed photographer Bob Mizer to begin publishing gay-oriented Physique Pictorial in 1951. As early as 1948, Mizer distributed a catalog of photographs he advertised as “invaluable for artists, inspirational for bodybuilders” (McGarry and Wasserman 117). Mizer and others capitalized on bodybuilding magazines’ underground gay male following. James M. Saslow says, “Under cover of the venerable physical culture movement, monthlies like Tomorrow’s Man and Adonis printed reams of bodybuilders and athletes in the scantiest G-strings that would pass censorship. Bob Mizer … set up [the] Athletic Model Guild … to connect would-be poster-boys with artists and photographers” (252–253). U.S. postal codes, though vague, were generally interpreted as prohibiting full-frontal nudity, so models in Mizer’s original catalogs and in Physique Pictorial wore posing straps and showed no body hair below the neck (McGarry and Wasserman 121). Bianco points out that the number of physique magazines aimed at a gay male readership grew until, by 1958, there were “several dozen” with as many as 70,000 readers.
Tom of Finland (1920–1991), whose given name was Touko Laaksonen, was probably the best-known illustrator to contribute work to physique magazines. He began publishing in Physique Pictorial when Mizer used one of his drawings for the cover of the spring 1957 issue. Micah Ramakers claims that Bob Mizer invented Laaksonen’s pseudonym, though other sources claim that Laaksonen chose the name “Tom” himself because he worried that Touko would be difficult for the American tongue. Tom of Finland would eventually publish more than 100 images in Mizer’s publication and in other physique magazines, and many of those appeared on the covers (Ramakers 4).
Highly stylized pieces featuring muscled men with enlarged penises and torsos, Tom’s work often portrayed men engaged in sexual acts with one another. Many of his subjects wore uniforms—law enforcement, military, or athletic—signaling a masculinity at odds with some sexologists’ assertions that gay men had the souls of women trapped in male bodies [λ Chapter 2]. The drawings were often inspired by the photos appearing in the very magazines for which Tom was working and, as Ramakers points out, were “intended to complement the photos of desirable young men, which were the basis of the physique magazines’ success” (48).
Clearly, beefcake magazines served a particular function for white gay men. However, they also reflected the pervasive racism that has so plagued U.S. constructions of maleness and, by extension, male same-sex attraction. Tracy Morgan points out that when the Mattachine Society and the DOB were protesting the McCarthy purges of white gay people from government jobs, “few Black people were federally employed” (284) at all. Morgan notes that the kind of racism that excluded Black people from government employment was reflected as well in the pages of physique magazines, where the portrait of masculinity was “patriotic, strong, and white” (284) and that gay men who found these images sexually arousing might enjoy the magazines less if the images were more racially diverse. This does not mean, however, that no men of color appeared as models in physiques. Of the three main types of magazines Morgan found—those using a Grecian metaphor, the “all-American” style directed at fitness buffs, and those that served as “early homophile publications” (287)—the second type was the most (though not significantly) racially integrated. Morgan says,
Black men were generally underrepresented in physique publications in relation to their actual numbers in U.S. society during the years 1955–60…. The “all-American”-style physique magazines I surveyed included more than four times as many images of Black men as did the Grecian publications. In the latter category, in approximately twenty-six volumes published over a five-year period (1955–60), a paltry four images of Black men made it into print. In contrast, the magazines oriented toward bodybuilding included an average of one Black male image per issue, and often more. (289)
Figure 10.10 Tom of Finland drawing.
Tom of Finland
To understand the presence of Black men in some physique magazines as indicative of any kind of effort to resist the racism in the larger culture would be a mistake. As Morgan notes, Black men were often photographed with “props” like heavy chains and cargo crates, and the few Latino men who appeared in the pages of physiques, though “generally represented with fewer accoutrements, occasionally don straw hats while surrounded by rum bottles” (290). As is clear, the racial stereotypes of the mid-century United States and the tendency to exoticize the racial other were reflected in these magazines.
FINE ART: FROM THE BEAUTIFUL TO THE POLITICAL
Beginning roughly at the time of the Stonewall riots in 1969, LGBTQ art in the United States took on an overtly political purpose. Harmony Hammond, for instance, defines lesbian art as “art that comes out of a feminist consciousness and reflects the experience of having lesbian relationships or being lesbian in patriarchal culture” (8). Unlike art by men, claims Arlene Raven, “None of it was developed exclusively in the rarefied world of art” (6). Photographers such as Ann Meredith, Bettye Lane, and Joan E. Biren (b. 1944) used the camera to freeze and celebrate moments in the development of Lesbian Nation [λ Chapter 4]. Kate Millett’s (b. 1934) monumental papier mâché Naked Ladies (1977) spoke to the necessity for women to take up physical space in a world controlled by men. Louise Fishman’s (b. 1939) Angry Painting (1973) embodied an attitude common to many lesbians of that era. And of course, even in that period when representations of sex were seen as problematic, Tee A. Corinne (b. 1943) and others produced images of female genitalia. In Australia, the galvanizing event for lesbian art was police violence at the 1978 Sydney Mardi Gras parade. Over the following decade, gay people in Australia gradually obtained rights and freedom from most harassment; visibility in the art world grew as well. Artists such as Maree Azzopardi, Fiona Lawry, and Jane Becker came into their own in the 1990s.
Some artists, such as Andy Warhol (1928–1987), became as famous for their lifestyles as for their art. One of the principal proponents of pop art in the 1960s, Warhol’s famous canvases, many silk-screened, took items from popular culture—such as Campbell’s soup cans or pictures of Marilyn Monroe—and recast them as art objects intended for contemplation in museums. While such work was not explicitly queer or even homoerotic, it quickly became associated with a gay aesthetic, perhaps in that it valued the typically undervalued or cast a sympathetic light on objects normally cast off or ignored. Warhol’s portraits of Monroe, Liza Minnelli, Elizabeth Taylor, and Judy Garland seemed gay in the sense that they idolized figures popular among gay male subcultures. Such work seemed to validate for many gay men the value of their cultural icons. But Warhol’s lesser known work, such as the film Blow Job (1964), is frankly homoerotic. Blow Job focuses our attention on the face of a handsome young man as he supposedly receives fellatio from another man. Blurring the boundary between pornography and art, Warhol challenged viewers to consider the beauty in the homoerotic.
Beginning in the 1980s, the AIDS epidemic led to a rush of new political art. The powerful image “Silence = Death” [λ Chapter 4] was the most widely recognized but by no means the only production by political graphics collectives such as Gran Fury and Visual AIDS in New York and General Idea in Toronto. Their immediate goal was to raise money for AIDS research because their governments were slow in responding to the crisis. Simultaneously, activist Cleve Jones (b. 1954) conceived of the NAMES Project Quilt, which has “ballooned into the largest gay art project in history” (Saslow 279). Keith Haring (1958–1990) drew cartoonlike figures that came to stand for AIDS activism. The photographer Robert Mapplethorpe (1946–1989) created deliberately provocative images that raised right-wing hackles and led to calls for censorship and elimination of funding for the National Endowment for the Arts. These powerful images elicited sympathy for AIDS victims while often refusing to soften the confrontational queer effect.
In the early 21st century in a growing portion of the world, queer art links aesthetic production to cultural and political concerns. An art project titled “Hey Hetero!” performs an educational function on buses and billboards in Australia. The artist created large posters featuring straight couples with captions like, “Hey Hetero! Get married because you can!” (Kelly and Fiveash). Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist Jim Borgman (b. 1954) used the bully pulpit of his syndicated newspaper connection to argue for an end to gay bashing in the wake of the murder of Matthew Shepard in 1998 with a cartoon featuring a religious figure standing next to a grave and the caption, “Gay Rites” (Borgman). Chicana artist Ester Hernández (b. 1944) overlays the iconic image of the Virgin of Guadalupe upon a lesbian figure (La Ofrenda, 1990). And Nigerian artist Adejoke Tugbiyele (b. 1977) seeks deliberately to blend artistic and political concerns in her three-dimensional work such as Homeless Hungry Homo (2014).
Find Out More about Ester Hernández’s work, including La Ofrenda II, at esterhernandez.com.
Tugbiyele’s creations represent “aesthetic and political assemblages in the sense that they always already escape inscriptions, descriptions, and definitions precisely because they foreground affective corporeality’s whose intensity reflects both intimate emotions and collective forms of agency” (Migraine-George 7). In other words, Tugbiyele’s art offers viewers a personal, queer Africanness at the same time as it responds to and instigates action in a political context. In short, these artists and others producing queer-themed art have made and are making a significant impact on cultures worldwide. Museums specializing in their work, such as the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art in New York City, collect and archive this important queer cultural heritage (https://www.leslielohman.org/).
Artist Nayland Blake (b. 1960) works in paint, drawing, video, and installation, and their work critically examines race and queerness. Since beginning to exhibit their work in 1985, Blake has gained a reputation for provocation, particularly as they often include sadomasochistic elements in their video and installation work to comment on the tortures of racism, homophobia, and transphobia. [λ Chapter 9] Gorge (1998), for instance, is one of Blake’s most famous videos, in which the bare-chested artist sits in a chair while a Black man, also bare-chested, feeds him. At first the feeding seems playful, even gentle, but it quickly comes to seem like a force feeding, reminiscent of scenes of forced feeding of prisoners. As we watch the video, we might wonder if we are seeing erotic foreplay with food, a scene of consensual, sadomasochistic power play, or a scene of torture. By blurring these lines, Blake points out the often-uncomfortable connections between power and the sexual. Further, while Blake identifies as a person is color, they can often appear to people as a white person, so the image of a Black man force feeding what looks like a white man can provoke us to think about the complex relations of power and intimacy between not just what visibly appear to be men but between what visibly appear to be two people of different races. Are we witnessing a “flipping of the script,” in which a Black man controls a white man? What exactly is their relationship? And what happens when we discover that Blake is a Black person? Gorge becomes an intimate, homoerotic meditation on violence between people, particularly racialized violence. The simultaneous care and violence between the supposed white man and the Black man shows both how we are interdependent even as we hurt one another. We move toward love, but we also enact violence, especially against those who are different. Blake doesn’t offer easy solutions to this dilemma, but his art provokes us to consider how we relate to one another along lines of both intimacy and race—which is perhaps what the absolute best art can do: provoke us to consider puzzling questions about our humanity and our relationships with one another.
BACKLASH AGAINST QUEER ART
An example of a conservative, right-wing attempt to create a moral panic under the guise of protecting the American public from same-sex art was a resolution sponsored by the late Senator Jesse Helms in 1989. Helms’s bill proposed prohibiting
the use of funds by the National Endowment for the Arts or the National Endowment for the Humanities to promote, disseminate, or produce materials that may be considered obscene, including but not limited to, depictions of sadomasochism, homoeroticism, the sexual exploitation of children, or individuals engaged in sex acts and which, when taken as a whole, do not have serious literary, artistic, political or scientific value. (HR 2788)
Defining such value required making highly contingent judgments. What might be considered devoid of literary value and merely obscene in one circumstance and by one group might be seen very differently in another circumstance or by another group. For instance, Senator Helms intended passages such as this, from Sapphire’s “Wild Thing” (which he read out loud to the Senate) to disgust his colleagues:
I remember when
Christ sucked my dick
behind the pulpit,
I was 6 years old
he made me promise
not to tell no one.
Sapphire’s performance poetry is indeed provocative, but she seeks here to speak the truth about the experience of child molestation in a racist, patriarchal society.
Another of Helms’s targets was a posthumous exhibition of Robert Mapplethorpe’s photography, titled Robert Mapplethorpe: The Perfect Moment. The exhibition had been slated to appear at art galleries across the nation over an 18-month period, beginning at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia, which had organized it, and moving to Chicago, Washington D.C., Hartford, Berkeley, Cincinnati, and Boston. The show met with positive response in Philadelphia and Chicago, but its appearance in Washington was canceled because Corcoran Art Gallery Director Christina Orr-Cahall hoped to avoid giving Senator Helms ammunition for his battle against National Endowment for the Arts funding for the work of controversial artists. So, by the time the exhibit moved to Cincinnati’s Contemporary Arts Center (CAC) in 1989, much ado had been made of its contents, and local conservative forces, particularly those connected to Citizens for Community Values (the same organization that would later spearhead the successful effort to remove sexual orientation from the city’s human rights ordinance), were prepared for a full-blown assault against the CAC [λ Chapter 4].
On the day the Mapplethorpe exhibit opened in Cincinnati, according to one local newspaper,
Hundreds of people waited in the arcade outside the CAC while police closed the facility and videotaped the exhibit to use as evidence in criminal cases against [Museum Director Dennis] Barrie and the center. The crowd became agitated, chanting and booing the cops who remained stationed at the center’s front doors. (Fox)
Local prosecutors charged Barrie with obscenity, and while Barrie and the CAC were eventually acquitted in a jury trial, the fuss underscored Mapplethorpe’s reputation as a provocative and boundary-pushing artist.
Though these efforts to outlaw public exhibitions of Mapplethorpe’s work have been at the forefront of recent debates about obscenity, it would be misleading to argue that conservative politicians and activists are alone in their objections to the work. Liberal and left-leaning critics, though usually not inclined to argue for censorship, have had problems with Mapplethorpe’s photographs. For instance, gay African American author and poet Essex Hemphill was deeply disturbed by the apparent objectification of Black male bodies in some of Mapplethorpe’s photographs. Cultural critic Kobena Mercer also voiced concern about those Mapplethorpe photographs that feature African American men, saying that his first impulse when viewing the photos was to be
immediately disturbed by the racial dimension of the imagery and, above all, angered by the aesthetic objectification that reduced these individual black men to purely abstract ‘things,’ silenced as subjects and serving mainly as aesthetic trophies to enhance Mapplethorpe’s privileged position as a white gay male artist in the New York avant-garde. (464)
Noting that the popular discussion of Mapplethorpe’s work tended to be framed as a “straightforward opposition between censorship and freedom of artistic expression,” Mercer warns against reducing that discussion to a “neat dichotomy between bigoted Philistines and enlightened cultural liberals” (472). In his essay “Just Looking for Trouble,” Mercer describes how cultural conservatives sometimes use seemingly progressive stances to forward their own agendas:
In his original proposal to regulate public funding of art deemed “obscene and indecent,” Jesse Helms went beyond the traditional remit of moral fundamentalism to add new grounds for legal intervention based on discrimination against minorities. Helms wanted the state to intervene in instances where artistic and cultural materials “denigrate, debase or revile a person, group or class of citizens on the basis of race, creed, sex, handicap or national origin.” By means of this rhetorical move, he sought to promote a climate of opinion favorable to new forms of coercive intervention. In making such a move, the strategy is not simply to win support from Black people and ethnic minorities, nor simply to modernize the traditional “moral” discourse against obscenity, but to broaden and extend the threshold of illegitimacy to a wider range of cultural texts. (473)
The desire to protect the public from offensive material and the move to protect minorities from discrimination become conflated in censoring transgressive art. In other words, some cultural conservatives try to use politically progressive rhetoric to advance a conservative agenda. This move was not unprecedented; it had proved somewhat successful during the so-called sex wars of the 1980s, when feminists allied with conservative forces to create legislation that would allow women and other minorities to seek damages against producers and distributors of pornography.
The work of filmmaker Marlon Riggs (1957–1994) proved less easily manipulable for this kind of recasting. Riggs’s Tongues Untied, a 1989 documentary about being both gay and Black, provoked a firestorm of protest. Funded in part through federal grants, the film outraged conservatives who did not want taxpayers’ money supporting explorations of same-sex attraction. In a powerful scene in the film, a Pride Day parade features a group of Black men carrying a banner proclaiming, “Black Men Loving Black Men Is a Revolutionary Act.” The film’s boldness was simply too much for conservatives such as Pat Buchanan, who called Tongues Untied “pornographic art” (Smith). Riggs’s counterclaim was both eloquent and pointed in its acknowledgment of how dominant cultures often elide any humane recognition of the diversity within them: “Implicit in the much-overworked rhetoric of community standards is the assumption of only one central community (patriarchal, heterosexual and usually white) and only one overarching cultural standard (ditto)” (Riggs).
PERFORMING QUEER: THEATER
The limp-wristed aesthete, swishing into a drawing room or contemplating a lily, was a figure of fun before Oscar Wilde came to be his ideal embodiment. William S. Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan’s operetta Patience (1881), for instance, tells the love story of Reginald Bunthorne, who admits to being an “aesthetic sham.” Bunthorne instructs the audience precisely how to affect the persona of a “fleshly poet” by walking
down Piccadilly with a poppy
or a lily in your medieval hand.
And ev’ryone will say,
As you walk your flow’ry way,
“If he’s content with a vegetable love
which would certainly not suit me,
Why, what a most particularly pure
young man
this pure young man must be!”
(Patience No. 6)
Bunthorne was a satirical rendering of the poet and noted aesthete Algernon Swinburne (1837–1909). But it was through the witty and epigrammatical Wilde that the figure of the aesthete solidified into the popular image of the gay man. Early in 1895, just weeks before the trials that were to end Wilde’s successful career as a dramatist—and that led directly to his death five years later—his satirical comedy of manners, The Importance of Being Earnest, opened at the St. James Theatre in London [λ Chapter 8]. The play’s two male leads, Algernon and Jack, are both clever young men who seek wives, believing all the while that “[d]ivorces are made in Heaven.” Both men engage in the practice of Bun burying, which permits them to escape from tedious obligations. As Algernon remarks,
Figure 10.11 George Grossmith as Bunthorne, 1881.
I have invented an invaluable permanent invalid called Bunbury, in order that I may be able to go down into the country whenever I choose. Bunbury is perfectly invaluable. If it wasn’t for Bunbury’s extraordinary bad health, for instance, I wouldn’t be able to dine with you at Willis’s to-night. (The Importance) While not an explicitly sexual term, Bunburying seems to serve as a metaphor for living a double life, as Wilde himself (married and carrying on gay affairs) certainly needed to do.
The British artist Aubrey Beardsley (1872–1898) was part of Wilde’s circle of aesthetes and illustrated Wilde’s play Salome in 1893. Beardsley’s distorted pen-and-ink erotic drawings earned him notoriety during his short life. As he wrote, “I have one aim—the grotesque. If I am not grotesque, I am nothing” (Navarre 79). The Salome illustrations included “naked figures, hermaphroditic men, ugly, deformed dwarfs and sinister women” (Cooper 80). Like Beardsley, the Russian Léon Bakst (1866–1924) received his first boost to fame through connection to a circle of artists and writers—in this case, one led by impresario Sergei Diaghilev (1872–1929). This group founded a journal, Mir iskusstva (World of Art), which promoted the principles of Art Nouveau. Through Diaghilev, Bakst became associated with the Ballets Russes, which formed in Paris in 1909. As artistic director of the ballet, Bakst designed sets and costumes; his famous painting of dancer Vaslav Nijinsky (1890–1950) in costume for Debussy’s L’aprèsmidi d’un faune (Afternoon of a Faun) reveals at once his homoerotic gaze and the Beardsley-like grotesquerie of the costume. We should note that all these artistic endeavors, from Wilde’s plays to Diaghilev’s ballet, were generally part of a privileged “high art” cultural scene that was somewhat tolerant of homoerotic gestures—provided that they could be passed off as “artistic” (as in Beardsley’s case) or laughable (as in Wilde’s).
Figure 10.12 Aubrey Beardsley’s Woman in the Moon.
Aubrey Beardsley’s “Woman in the Moon”
Figure 10.13 Vaslav Fomich Nijinsky (1890–1950), in the ballet Afternoon of a Faun, 1912.
Source: Leon Bakst, Vaslav Fomich Nijinsky (Вацлав Фомич Нижинский) (1890–1950), in the ballet Afternoon of a Faun 1912.
In contrast, the American stage at the time was more conservative than its European counterparts. The God of Vengeance (1907), by Yiddish playwright Sholem Asch (1880–1957), enjoyed a successful run in Berlin in 1910 before Asch emigrated from Germany to the United States in 1914. But when the play (in English translation) opened in New York in 1922, its lesbian theme, combined with its setting in a brothel, so offended local censors that the producer, director, and 12 actors were arrested and later found guilty of presenting an indecent play. Considering this history, Paula Vogel and Rebecca Taichman’s play Indecent, which deals with the production of The God of Vengeance, had a successful run in New York and San Diego during 2016–2017 (Lambert).
British writer Ronald Firbank’s (1886–1926) three-act comedy The Princess Zoubaroff (1920), which deals with a lesbian convent, avoided the censors by having no major public performances in Europe and no performances at all in the United States. When The Captive, by French author Edouard Bourdet (1887–1945), opened on Broadway in 1926, Mayor Jimmy Walker signed the now-infamous Padlock Law, whereby city authorities would literally padlock the doors and arrest the cast of any theater that dared to present same-sex activity, sex outside of marriage, or prostitution (Whittaker 278). From this time through the next four decades, censorship kept most LGBTQ-themed drama off the stage in American cities. To be sure, Lillian Hellman’s (1905–1984) 1934 play, The Children’s Hour, had a long run at New York’s Maxine Elliott Theatre, but the play might well have won the Pulitzer Prize had not the selection committee refused to see it. Furthermore, its core plot involving a teacher accused of lesbianism by a student [λ Chapter 1, the 1811 Pirie and Woods case] simply vanished in the 1936 film version, replaced by a straight love triangle. (The lesbian plot returned in the 1961 remake of The Children’s Hour with Audrey Hepburn and Shirley MacLaine.) The Breen Office, charged with enforcing adherence to the Motion Picture Production Code, excised the gay references from Tennessee Williams’s (1911–1983) A Streetcar Named Desire (1947) when it was made into a film in 1951. In London, however, despite state censorship that officially continued into the 1960s, gay themed plays such as Noel Coward’s (1899–1973) Design for Living (1934) and Robert Anderson’s (1917–2009) Tea and Sympathy (1953) escaped prosecution for obscenity, probably because they took low-key approaches, not directly tackling homophobia, as had Hellman’s play (Morley).
By the late 20th century, especially in the United States, the concerns and attitudes of a newly empowered gay movement were beginning to be reflected onstage. Plays such as Boys in the Band (1968), Bent (1979), and Torch Song Trilogy (1981) brought gay men to center stage as never before. The devastation of AIDS, ironically, seems to have contributed to the success of dramas such as Larry Kramer’s (1935-2020) The Normal Heart (1984), Tony Kushner’s (b. 1956) Angels in America (1991), and Jonathan Larson’s (1960–1996) Rent (1996). The change over a decade from the searing accusatory tone of Kramer’s play to the slick mainstream appeal of Rent reflected the way AIDS had positioned gay men as protagonists in a great national tragedy; moreover, organizing against the scourge provided gay male artists with access to media and entertainment power brokers.
Figure 10.14 Carolyn Gage as Joan of Arc.
© Linda J. Russell
Not surprisingly, lesbian drama was absent from high-visibility venues, reflecting the ongoing exclusion of women in public performance generally. Carolyn Gage (b. 1952) attributes lesbian invisibility in theater to lesbian playwrights’ tendency to focus on socially threatening “uncolonized women.” Gage’s one-woman play, The Second Coming of Joan of Arc (1986), is one such threatening play: “We watch as [Joan] decolonizes herself—from the church, from the military, from the state—and at the end names and separates herself from her internalized misogyny,” states Gage in an interview. This play, Gage’s best known, was performed in church basements and at festivals for years before receiving any wide attention.
A similar erasure is Sarah Dreher’s (1937–2012) award-winning play 8 × 10 Glossy (1985), which is seldom performed—in fact, it has never been performed by anyone outside the author’s own drama circle. Like Gage, Dreher focuses on sexual abuse, which wreaks lifelong damage upon women and enforces oppressive silence. Both these plays, and many others by lesbians, are overtly political, even polemical, and this appears to have stood in the way of their gaining wide crossover recognition. It is important to note, however, that these and other lesbian plays never aimed for such recognition but focused instead on reaching lesbians oppressed by homophobic culture. As Gage says, “Telling the truth is always disruptive. And theatre, of all the art forms, is a particularly powerful medium for truth-telling. Playwrights historically have ended up in hot water because the nature of live theatre is inherently political” (Cramer 7).
Of course, there are exceptions to the “rule” concerning the absence of lesbians in public performance. Fun Home, a musical based on Alison Bechdel’s best-selling graphic memoir, played off and on Broadway from 2013 to 2016, and won the Tony award for Best Musical. The show has been called “the first mainstream musical about a young lesbian” (Thomas). The song “Ring of Keys” from Fun Home has become an unofficial anthem for many lesbians and others (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wMJvLTZOhpE) [λ Chapter 12].
Another exception is the opera Patience and Sarah (1998) by Paula Kimgar, based on Alma Routsong’s 1969 novel. Indeed, a few opera composers have undertaken LGBTQ themes in the 21st century. Consider, for example, Harvey Milk (1995) by Stewart Wallace, the trans-focused As One (2014) by Laura Kaminsky, Brokeback Mountain (2014) by Charles Wuorinen, Fellow Travelers (2016) by Gregory Spears, and The Stonewall Operas (2019) by Kevin Cummings. All these queer works assume a mostly non-queer audience, raising some questions about how queer is to be represented in 21st-century entertainment. To what extent are they designed to educate the straight public about queer lives and experiences? What are non-queer people prepared to see onstage? Is there a de rigeur social justice component to these works, such that the audience leaves feeling sympathy and even identification with the LGBTQ characters? What is the connection between mainstream and alternative entertainment, and what happens when alternative subject matter is presented in a mainstream form to a mainstream audience? These first decades of the 21st century appear to be a time when queer performance is not just tolerated, but valorized. In the future, will queer themes and characters be less and less noticeable? Is this good or bad?
ART AND CONSUMERISM
Queer artists have been producing work that challenges assumptions about sex, gender, sexuality, and identity. As we have seen in previous chapters, ACT UP’s various public performances, such as kiss-ins and demonstrations in Catholic churches in New York, were designed to be provocative and transgressive. The point was to insert queer into spaces where people either felt safe from queerness or were not expecting displays of sexuality [λ Chapter 4]. In transgressing social norms about when and where sexuality, particularly queer sexualities, can be performed, ACT UP hoped to remind a complacent, indifferent, and even hostile culture that queer people and their issues, such as the AIDS epidemic, are part of the larger social and political fabric. To be recognized as citizens demanding ethical treatment, queer activists transgressed some of the West’s “sacred” spaces, such as churches and shopping malls.
More recent LGBTQ and queer artists have used a comparable transgressive energy to enliven their work and offer cultural critiques within a consumer culture. As we saw earlier in this chapter, Robert Mapplethorpe’s photographs—some frankly sadomasochistic—simultaneously shocked and titillated a variety of viewers, both queer and straight. An obvious question one must ask about him is whether an artist whose work becomes familiar in the popular culture can still be considered transgressive. The same question could be asked of photographer Annie Leibovitz, who was named “America’s Best-Known Photographer” by Newsweek in 2007. Leibovitz began her career shooting for the fledgling Rolling Stone, and among her most familiar photographs, shot for that magazine, is one of Yoko Ono and John Lennon taken only hours before Lennon’s murder in 1980. In 1991, a Leibovitz photograph of Demi Moore seven months pregnant and nude appeared on the cover of the mainstream magazine Vanity Fair. Except in New York City, that issue of the magazine appeared on bookstore shelves wrapped in a white envelope, with only Moore’s eyes showing above (Anderson). In Pregnant Pictures, Sandra Matthews and Laura Wexler argue that “Leibovitz crossed a boundary at a ripe cultural moment, and with her image of the pregnant woman, pregnant pictures crossed over into the public visual domain” (qtd. in Bartlett 3). Leibovitz’s work also seems to find “ripe cultural moments” for transgressing normative sexual boundaries with photographs of lesbian and gay celebrities such as Melissa Etheridge, Martina Navratilova, and Leibovitz’s longtime partner, Susan Sontag.
Leibovitz has enjoyed great popularity, much of it in mainstream culture and, most recently, in advertising. This fact highlights some important questions about transgression: if, as often happens in capitalist societies, art is commodified and accepted as part of the popular culture, can it still be considered transgressive? Are there ways in which art popularized and commodified in a culture can transgress traditional boundaries by reaching an audience that would not necessarily seek exposure to that which is more clearly transgressive?
Desiring to collapse the boundaries between the public and the private, or perhaps to show the artificiality of such boundaries in a consumerist culture that uses sex to sell merchandise, some gay designers have created controversy with public advertisements depicting gays, lesbians, and bisexuals together, often holding hands or kissing. This kind of representation can be both mainstream-oriented and transgressive. For example, a widely distributed 2012 J.C. Penney catalog shows a wholesome and casually dressed gay male couple playing affectionately with their children. This advertisement promises attractively assimilated gay parents. More confrontational is the Italian photographer Oliviero Toscani, who has produced controversial advertising images that aim not only to sell products, such as clothing for Benetton, but also to level pointed social critiques at war, capital punishment, racism, and homophobia. Unlike J.C. Penney, Toscani challenges viewers to recognize and support his brand behind the difficult subject matter. One reporter chronicles Toscani’s mixing of advertising and activism:
In 1990, Toscani’s “United Colors of Benetton” campaign launched a ten-year span [of] symbolic, poignant, jarring, and controversial ads that the man and the company became known for: a priest kissing a nun; a bloody baby fresh from the womb; a black stallion mounting a white mare; a colorful mix of condoms spread over a bright background; a white infant suckling a black woman’s breast; the exposed pulsing hearts of three different races shown during surgery; the body of an AIDS victim moments before death; frightened refugees clawing for food at a ship’s cargo net; and the bloody uniform of a dead Bosnian soldier. (Lyman)
Toscani’s advertisements for the clothing company Ra-Re have stirred protest in some countries, particularly the photographer’s home country of Italy. The advertisements are frank depictions of male-male intimacy; in one photo, an older man clutches a younger man’s crotch, and in another photo, the pair embrace on a couch (McMahon). According to reports from Italy, some parents and conservative citizens have complained vociferously about these advertisements, saying that they do not know how to explain such flagrant displays of same-sex attraction to children. But creating such dilemmas may be the aim of Toscani’s work: to provoke consideration and discussion of that which still, in much of the West, remains hidden, closeted, and out of the public view. Toscani’s photos transgress those boundaries, forcing the queer into public consciousness.
QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION
1. This chapter can cover only a handful of important artists and performers. What work do you know about that we haven’t mentioned in this chapter? How would you situate that work and those artists within the historical context we have outlined in this chapter? How might the work you know of challenge the context we have provided?
2. The art of Tom of Finland typically eroticizes uniformed, jackbooted, muscular men in scenarios where they dominate other men. What do you believe the artist intended viewers to experience? Is there any political or social meaning to Tom’s art?
3. A 2016 exhibit sponsored by the ONE Archives, “Cock, Paper, Scissors” (http://one.usc.edu/cock-paper-scissors/), emphasized the importance of collage to queer artists, particularly as artists remixed pieces of “classic” (and often heterosexual) art and images from pop culture to “queer” them. The collages show the queerness latent in much art and pop culture or the attempt by queer artists to make space for queer intimacies and desires within the visual realm. Experiment with your own collage making to queer traditional or popular culture.
This chapter offers a brief overview of LGBTQ and queer art, visual media, and the performing arts. We trace the development of art and drama that explicitly articulates queer desires and relationships.