Goodbye Lesbian/Gay History HelloQueer Sensibility

Abstract

This piece is dedicated to Felix Gonzalez-Torres, an inspiring artist and activist, who died of HIV-related complications in January 1996 during its editing.Loking back at the Stonewall 25 art season (loosely defined), two emblematic events stand out: Art in America's “After Stonewall” cover story in its June 1994 issue, and the In a Different Light exhibition at the University Art Museum in Berkeley, which opened seven months later. Both disturbed me deeply. Instead of the varied surveys they implied-the former of a quarter-century of gay and lesbian art, the latter of so-called queer sensibility in twentieth-century art-both virtually erased lesbian and gay art history of the seventies and early eighties. But the organizers of In a Different Light did far more than that. They not only passed up the opportunity to compile a much-needed historical record of lesbian and gay artists, but consciously rejected the notion of identity politics in favor of an amorphous notion of queer sensibility.