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Statues at this time were no longer static and archaic. Instead, they showed idealized realism and movement in posture as the figures place their feet forward and stand in contraposto (meaning, that weight is shifted to one side of the figure.) I was invited to bring an iteration of MOTHA to the New Museum. I began to think what a regional trans history could focus on. When I realized the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall Riots was approaching, I knew it would be a good time to think critically about how this history is remembered. I invited almost a dozen artists to reconceptualize monuments to commemorate this hirstory, knowing full well that monuments themselves are a fraught way to point to history. Can you tell us about your work in the current exhibition “Queer California: Untold Stories” at the Oakland Museum of California?
Parkinson, R.B. A Little Gay History: Desire and Diversity Across the World. London: The British Museum Press, 2013, 73. Achilles and Patroclus, are one of the most celebrated male warrior pairs in Greek literature after the Trojan War. Achilles is a young Greek warrior in Homer’s Iliad who possesses superhuman strength and ability as he was born from a nymph and a mortal. He is known for his only weakness being in his heel as his mother dipped him in the river Styx as an infant and held him by his heel. Patroclus is a warrior who grew up as a role model and companion to Achilles as appointed by Achilles’ father.
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Homer, the poet writes the pair as two friends with a tender relationship later deemed as pederastic by the Greeks, where in which an older male figure mentors and cares for the younger as a “rite of passage” that could include sexual relations. After the death Patroclus, Achilles’ aim for fighting in the war became Patroclus. Achilles’ grief causes him insomnia and a great drive to fight and avenge Patroclus’ death at the hands of Hector, a Trojan prince and fighter for Troy. After Homer’s Iliad, the two can be found in art and literature demonstrating their bond and companionship. Morales, Manuel Sanz, and Gabriel Laguna Mariscal. “The Relationship between Achilles and Patroclus According to Chariton of Aphrodisias.” The Classical Quarterly 53, no. 1 (2003): 292-95. For years, nobody, except close friends, have seen my gay works. There is still a lot of prejudices in Russia, so it's impossible to publish them officially. Nevertheless last year I printed my first gay calendar with a circulation of 30 copies. Addaura Cave Engravings (11,000 BCE).” A-Z Of PREHISTORIC ART , www.visual-arts-cork.com/prehistoric/addaura-cave.htm. Accessed 15 July 2018.
May life provide all that you desire from three lips: those of your lover, the river, and the cup.” A century after his birth, Tom of Finland’s original art also remains provocative and challenging to audiences still catching up with his unabashedly sexual, queer utopian vision. But as his reputation continues to swell it’s hard to deny that he achieved his primary aim: “I want to show that gays can feel happy together – that they have a right to be happy together.”
Representation of non-normative bodies and identities within artworks and institutions is incredibly important, but I think that’s just the beginning of what we need to be thinking about. As a transgender artist, I am thinking more about the ways that we can refuse these forms of naming, taxonomizing, and classifying bodies. I look to art—both making it and viewing it—as a method for relearning how to perceive bodies in ways that are more expansive, unstable, and consensual. Muholi is among many contemporary artists who are creating work that challenges the all-too-narrow, heteronomative, white-dominated depictions of love found across art history. Artists working today, from photographers to figurative painters to sculptors, are shattering the conception that love looks a certain way, and creating greater visibility for the LGBTQ+ community in the process. Their portrayals of love—not just couples, but gatherings of friends and expressions of self-love and desire—are not only historically important, they’re also gestures of support for the many young people who will follow in their footsteps. It is very important for artists to portray LGBTQ+ love as there is still so little of it visible, even though it may seem that in some small urban bubbles that everything is “cool.” Everything is not cool, as we are emerging from centuries of being defined as unnatural and unclean and we spent most of the last 150 years fighting repressive anti-sodomy laws. A fight that necessarily drew its inspiration from getting sex itself legalized between consenting adults in private, at, I believe, the expense of a more nuanced focus on some notion of love.
Von Gloeden offers even further proof that gay art is by no means a new phenomenon, just one that has only recently been permitted to see the light. Now, Leslie wants to liberate us from our own puritanism, hatred, and fear. “I just want to tell people they should relax about male imagery and not be so horrified all the time,” he said. “People are nuts.” Historical precedents for queer art renders this priggishness especially odd. “The measure of art education used to be the life class,” he explained. “Now, that’s no longer true. Now, you put a garbage lid on the floor and put cotton balls in it, and that’s high art.”
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The Bloomsbury Group of artists and writers famously ‘lived in squares and loved in triangles’. Dora Carrington had relationships with men and women but loved and was loved by Lytton Strachey, who was attracted to men. Duncan Grant and Vanessa Bell lived together in Charleston Farmhouse in East Sussex. A chosen few of Duncan Grant’s male lovers made visits but Paul Roche was forced to camp on the South Downs as he did not meet with Bell’s approval. Bell’s husband Clive lived apart from her but they remained happily married. While sexual intimacy was valued by the Group, it was not the most important bond tying the members together. Their network was a profoundly queer experiment in modern living founded on radical honesty and mutual support. It’s still as abstract as it has always been, but through this process, it allowed me to see them as pharmaceutical readymades. They contribute to a larger idea that the distinction between “natural” and “artificial” is rarely as binary as we’d like to think it is. Do you find empowerment in absurdity? The flourishing of gay life in the 1970s soon gave way to the AIDS epidemic of the ’80s. “The whole decade was like a nightmare,” Leslie recalled with a shudder. “We were endlessly at bedsides and memorials and cremations. You’re always with friends trying to do something and you can’t do anything. Three people died in our house.” Everything closed down: the baths, the bars. Even the gallery had to close: “No one came anymore,” Leslie said; artists stopped bringing work. “It was such a pall over the city.” Still, it was during this decade, in 1987, that Leslie and Lohman created their nonprofit foundation, which was accredited as a museum in 2016. Perseus Digital Library.” Classical Tyrannicides (Sculpture). Accessed August, 2017. http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/artifact?name=Classical%2BTyrannicides&object=Sculpture. Demuth was an openly gay artist based in Lancaster, Pennsylvania (USA). He is known by most museum-goers as a precisionist architectural watercolorist. Yet, Demuth also painted more homoerotic works of art set in bathhouses and other accepted homosocial environments.
One Emerging is a hybrid fictional documentary. It’s a collaborative portrait of two women whose paths crossed in Lesvos a couple years ago. One is a photojournalist who was documenting the refugee crisis on the island and the other is a young transgender refugee from Morocco who was in a camp there. Together we created parallel fantasy worlds that overlap through the narrative and projected image. You were previously involved in community organizing. How has that affected your artistic process? These relationships were not what we would today call homosexual. The older lover would typically have a wife at home and the younger lover would be expected to marry a woman later in life. The pederastic partnership was also heavily hedged about with social rules. Many Greek poets lamented the first growth of a boy's beard because that was the age at which their relationship had to end. Any man who carried on sexual relationships with other adults could expect to find themselves deeply ridiculed. The plays of Aristophanes contain lacerating lampoons of 'men-lovers'. Each had a “discreet collection” of their own, so joining forces “was another thing that bonded us.” They developed minimal criteria for their buying. It’s a misconception that their collection only features work by gay artists. “You don’t have to be gay,” he clarified. “The art has to resonate with gay people.” Otherwise, a work has “to at least be good,” Leslie said, “unless it’s such horrible junk that it becomes a ding an sich, a thing unto itself”—erotic camp, in other words. Mostly, the pair collected what they liked. (“Every time I hear about someone collecting something as an investment, it makes me almost vomit,” Leslie added.)Editor of The Queer Review, James Kleinmann has had over twenty years of media experience, both LGBTQ and mainstream. He was the on air film critic on both Gaydar Radio and Gaydio's breakfast shows and has contributed to the UK's best selling LGBTQ publication, Attitude Magazine. James is a member of GALECA The Society of LGBTQ Entertainment Critics. A homoerotic ritual conducted by the two shamans with the lines representing energy and/or male ejaculation at or after puberty. I was developing Untitled (Holding Horizon) over the summer in 2018, in the same space that Kem—the queer and feminist collective that I am part of—was throwing a series of parties called “Dragana Bar.” These nights brought together distinct experimental sets of sounds by Warsaw-based DJs, such as Facheroia, Yana, and JŚA. This experience of running the night with the collective had a direct impact on making Untitled (Holding Horizon).
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