Gay Artists Research Articles

Christine and the Queens and the art of the cover version: interpretations, audience, place

More than many pop artists, Christine and the Queens performs cover versions of familiar songs, often on live TV or radio shows. His selections frequently are interpretations of hits from the 1980s and 1990s. However they are more than the chance to share a nostalgic trip with the audience. In France, he often chooses familiar songs by much-loved singers from the French tradition, thus reassuring them of his Frenchness, despite his growing position on the world stage. On platforms overseas, he often selects huge hits by global anglophone stars, so claiming his place amongst the most successful international British and American performers, albeit that he is French. Using interviews, reviews, and music videos, my research looks in detail at two examples of cover versions by Christine and the Queens, one in French and one in English, exploring why these songs were selected for these particular moments. First, I examine his performance of Mylène Farmer’s “California” on Taratata Live in September 2018. In choosing this song, Chris aligns himself not only with one of the most provocative and daring French singers, but also one deeply supportive of the LGBTQ+ community. The track, with its topics of escape and reinvention in Los Angeles, has resonance for Chris’s own experience, and the original video shares themes of transactional sex and power with Christine and the Queens’s own video for “5 Dollars.” Next, I consider his performance of George Michael’s “Freedom! ’90” at the Global Citizen in September 2021. Chris sets himself alongside a very high-profile, gay artist who battled to reclaim his musical and personal identity after an early career in a worldfamous, highly commercial pop duo. In doing so, he lays out his desire to break from the shackles of the success of his first album, Chaleur humaine , and to have the freedom to evolve, as an artist and in his place as a trans man.

African American Gay Men

African American Gay Men

“I Know One Day a Miracle Will Happen”: Bruno Balz and the Position of the Gay Artist in Nazi Germany

“I Know One Day a Miracle Will Happen”: Bruno Balz and the Position of the Gay Artist in Nazi Germany

CHAPTER 10 The Master’s Tools Will Not Dismantle the Master’s House: Hip Hop, Young M.A., and Gender Norms

Immediately electrifying the rap game, Young M.A. entered the hip hop scene in 2016 and quickly became one of a few openly gay artists to make it big in hip hop. For many LGBT youth, Young M.A. invokes adoration and respect as a long-awaited depiction of the historically excluded queer rapper. For others, she brings controversy. Some critics call out what they perceive to be Young M.A.’s own disdain for women, while dedicated fans interpret it as turning gender on its head by a woman “doing what the men do.” For other listeners, she sparks derision and outright hostility as a reaction to her failure to adhere to expected gender norms. The reaction to Young M.A.’s groundbreaking entry into the hip hop scene represents an important crossroad for a music genre and culture that rebukes racism on one hand, yet often fails to pivot to embrace a progressive vision of gender equality on another. In this chapter, a Black teen and creative writer inspired by Young M.A. and a Black civil rights scholar offer their collective insights on the artist’s lyrics and rise to fame in the hip hop industry. They contend that as long as hip-hop culture shuns those who fail to conform to expected gender norms – norms that are the vestiges of White American culture and perpetuated through legal doctrine – it will fall short of its revolutionary potential to vocalize a radical social justice vision. A hundred years before the hip hop movement began, the United States Supreme Court relied on gross gender norms and stereotypes to exclude women from the practice of law, invoking what one Justice characterized as an “axiomatic truth” that “God designed the sexes to occupy different spheres of action and that it belonged to men to make, apply, and execute laws.” The legal enforcement of this type of patriarchal structure is the root of multiple forms of gender discrimination still present today, including misogyny, homophobia, and transphobia. Hip Hop’s current embrace of these gender norms is simply “serving the master” by partaking in the subordination of Black girls, Black women, and Black LGBT people. As Audre Lorde brilliantly put it, “the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.”

Malestares sexuales en la ciudad letrada Sexual

This article reviews polemics engaged in by the writers Reinaldo Arenas, Fernando Vallejo, Porfirio Barba Jacob, and Salvador Novo, specifically the ways that these gay artists, who today exert notable influence on the national literatures, confront the most powerful intellectuals of the lettered city -Angel Rama, Jose Vasconcelos, and Pedro Henriquez Urena- to demand a place in a cultural field controlled by sexual hegemony. I propose that these polemics, beyond simply highlighting isolated problems, as critics and even the protagonists themselves have read them, try to re-map and call attention to the influence and novelty of these artists at the margin of power at the same time that they seize power for them. These vulgar and bitter polemics do not only queer intellectualism, but they also testify to the plasticity of a novel body that requires a name to materialize itself once and for all.

Helping Kids Turn Out Queer: Queer Theory in Art Education

This article explores the possibilities of queer theory in art education, and I playfully, perhaps provocatively, ask how art education can help kids turn out queer. Moving away from both victim narratives of queer subjects and the attention on gay artists, who often are the focus of scholarship in art education, I contemplate the ways in which art education researchers address queerness and how those forms of address impact the relations that are (im)possible within the educational dynamic. I ask, “In what ways has queer been addressed in art education research, and how can other scholars push forward with such work to continue queer projects?” I observe a need to challenge fears around queer topics and contemplate how queerness, embedded in theory and practice, disputes and disrupts art education research.

Loneliness: Black Gay Longing in the Work of Essex Hemphill

Loneliness:Black Gay Longing in the Work of Essex Hemphill Darius Bost (bio) Do you think I could walk pleasantlyand well suited toward annihilation?with a scrotal sack full of primordial lonelinessswinging between my legslike solid bells? —Essex Hemphill Black gay poet, essayist, and performer Essex Hemphill was, arguably, the most prominent of the black gay intellectuals of the 1980s and early 1990s. His work addresses the psychological, social, and political struggles of urban black communities, and often maps the psychological, social, and political location of black gay men onto the black urban landscape. In "Heavy Breathing," Hemphill takes the reader on a city bus ride through 1980s black Washington, DC. The speaker of the poem rides the "X2, the bus I call a slave ship," with the "majority of its riders Black" (lines 65–66). The speaker defines the "X2" as a "risky ride," with its "cargo of block boys, urban pirates" (71–72). The imagery of the city bus as "a slave ship" and the riders as "cargo" conjures the historical trauma of the Middle Passage, suggesting a continuity between the social death of antebellum slavery and the urban poverty and decay produced by neoliberal capitalism. The speaker goes on to describe the spectacular forms of violence that emerged in Washington, DC, in the late '80s and '90s, as the line "the funerals of my brothers" alludes in part to how the nationwide crack epidemic greatly impacted crime in cities like Washington, DC, with a homicide rate so high in the late 1980s and early 1990s that it eventually earned DC the label of "murder capital."1 But the speaker attends these funerals only "at the end of heavy breathing" (63), signaling the climax of public sexual encounters with other men. It is in this same black urban [End Page 353] environment that the speaker negotiates the dangers and pleasures of same-sex desire. If read within this context, the speaker's "brothers" are also his same-sex-desiring brothers, and the "funerals" are also for those who have succumbed to homophobic violence and AIDS. A range of black cultural studies scholars, most notably Frank Wilderson and Jared Sexton, have also theorized a continuity between antebellum slavery and contemporary blackness.2 Drawing on Orlando Patterson's conceptualization of antebellum slavery as "social death" and Saidiya Hartman's conception of "slavery's afterlife," these theorists point out the specificity and ubiquity of antiblackness obscured by hegemonic discourses of multiculturalism and colorblindness in the late twentieth and twenty-first centuries.3 Furthermore, Sexton defines the lived experience of blackness as a "social life of social death" and expresses a political refusal to distance himself from blackness "in a valorization of minor differences that bring one closer to health, life, or sociality."4 But these theories have yet to fully account for gender and sexual difference for the queer "brothers" of Hemphill's poem, who also negotiate their lives under the sign of blackness. In Wilderson's formulation, queerness, as a "human" ontological category, depends on the non-ontology of blackness for its coherence, and, thus, the gratuitous violence done to black queer and transgender bodies is subsumed under the structures of anti-blackness. But afro-pessimist theories fail to address how non-normative black genders and sexualities signify differently, and how these so-called "minor differences" oftentimes bring black gender and sexual minorities closer to illness, death, and social exclusion under regimes of antiblackness. The line "funerals of my brothers" in Hemphill's poem conjures the ghostly presence of 1980s and 90s black gay intellectuals within contemporary theorizations of blackness fixed as pathology and as embodied subjectivity marked by (social) death. In addition to the racial retrenchment affecting urban black communities in the Reagan era, black gay artists, intellectuals, and activists in the 1980s and 90s also experienced amplified cultural stigma attached to homosexuality during the AIDS epidemic. Many of them carried in their bodies the literal pathology of AIDS and a consciousness shaped as much by everyday black life as it was by black (social) death. Though the literary communities that they formed could not prevent their deaths, nor could they alleviate the debilitating psychic and...

Grand Illusions: American Art and the First World War by David M. Lubin

Reviewed by: Grand Illusions: American Art and the First World War by David M. Lubin Leann Davis Alspaugh (bio) David M. Lubin, Grand Illusions: American Art and the First World War (Oxford University Press, 2016), 384 pp. One of the most compelling onscreen characters in recent memory is Richard Harrow of the HBO series Boardwalk Empire (2010–2014). Jack Huston’s portrayal of a World War I sharpshooter and gun-for-hire working for bootlegging gangs in Atlantic City is unforgettable. Huston’s husky voice [End Page 456] and haunted eyes would be memorable enough, but the mask he wears across the lower half of his face to conceal a horrific war injury adds a disturbing and unnatural element to his character. Every character in that series grappled with some form of corruption and alienation, but Harrow and his grim visage were more than simply a grotesquerie mined for theatrical effect. As David Lubin points out in Grand Illusions, among the many after-effects of the Great War, soldiers who came home grievously disfigured found they were distinguished not for their bravery but for their wounds, an ever-present reminder of trauma and survivor guilt. Richard Harrow (the last name is no accident) could easily have been one of the patrons of Anna Coleman Ladd’s Paris studio for “portrait masks” where injured soldiers were fitted for facial prostheses that enabled them to appear in public with some semblance of normalcy. But a mask, as Lubin reminds us, is never simply a mask. Masks conceal, protect, or alter the appearance. They can be used for ritualistic, illusionistic, cosmetic, or pragmatic purposes. They might comfort the wearer or make him appear ridiculous, they might engender power or signify powerlessness, they might fascinate or terrify. According to the psychoanalysts, we all wear masks at times. But the mask that troubles Lubin the most is the one constructed by a “dominant culture [to teach] America to avert its gaze.” This perfidious mask enabled citizens to escape the horrors of war while cultivating a complacency that pushed the conflict into the realm of something happening somewhere else to someone else. After America entered the war in 1917, the mask became one of patriotism and duty. In this deeply cynical book, Lubin ranges across media and art of all sorts—silent film, propaganda posters, photography, painting, printmaking, and sculpture—to strip away the mask and reveal not so much how art changed but how inadequate it was to the task of representing a war experience. With traditional aesthetic orientations blasted, artists often grappled with modernism whether they wanted to or not. Lubin captures the deep ambivalence, even remorse, of artists such as Edward Steichen who came to feel guilty about his wartime aerial reconnaissance photographs, or Claggett Wilson whose theatrical and bizarre paintings uneasily depicted the “battlefield sublime.” (Lubin reveals his own ambivalence in the section on John Singer Sargent’s Gassed from 1919, finding it difficult to accept that an artist who was such a favorite among high society also possessed enough moral and artistic integrity to depict mustard gas victims with courage and compassion.) Still, the sympathy that Lubin demonstrates in these instances is lacking when it comes to understanding the preparedness movement or nationwide volunteerism for the cause. “Never before,” Lubin writes, “had a democratic government launched such a massive campaign to mold the minds of its citizens by means of the visual arts.” The first few chapters of Grand Illusions focus on aspects of sexuality and gender, including fetishism, homoeroticism, virility, “battle lust,” and the enigmatic works of gay artists such as Marsden Hartley, Gertrude [End Page 457] Stein, and Romaine Brooks, as well as the repressive sexuality and violence in the films of D. W. Griffith (whose values Lubin finds particularly problematic). The author is adept at verbal description of images and, although the book is profusely illustrated, it is still helpful to be directed to salient details or to aspects of color and composition. At times, however, he becomes obsessed with trivialities such as Lord Kitchener’s luxurious mustache or the accoutrements of cavalry officers—even with names. More than once, he draws attention to the surname of James...

Artist Statement

Artist Statement Dan Taulapapa McMullin (bio) Tiki is a word I avoided much of my life. As a Polynesian, I associated Tiki with tiki kitsch that is not only impossible to avoid but must, I realized, be addressed. The abject associations of tiki kitsch sometimes makes identifying as Polynesian feel like inhabiting all the dumbed-down representations of us in movies, books, magazines, paintings, songs, cartoons, tourist items, and jokes. But to avoid tiki kitsch, that manufactured parody of our deity Tiki, is to avoid the history of Tiki himself. How can I say that tiki kitsch is not part of who I am, and indicative of something powerful in my life, that is, my political resistance and my creative process? If I look for authenticity, I might find that such a thing doesn’t exist. From a certain kind of village people painting with cubist elements that tourists collect the world over, to conceptual art pieces in international biennials that represent identity based on the visual moment of our colonization, to popular forms of Pacific art whose standards are set in the media, the world of Pacific art today is hybrid and complicated. Finding authenticity is not only about the objects of art—most museum collections of Pacific art are rife with fakes, and tiki kitsch began in the Western tradition of manufacturing fake Pacific art. If Western contact had happened a hundred years after the historical moment we know of, I think our basic cultures today would each be different, because our ancestors were changing all the time. Authenticity is about personal choice and understanding: it is the narrative we create and live. I grew up in the aiga in Samoa, in my great-grandmother Fa‘asapa’s faletele, in the nu‘u, but now I live far away in time and place in a gay artists’ town in upstate New York with my partner, Stephen, and my nu‘u, such as it is, is woven in with the Internet, the telephone, the airport, the screen. My life is tiki kitsch. And my life is Tiki. [End Page 583] Artist Notes on the Paintings Tiki in Frozen Hell is composed of computer-altered photographs that were printed on transparent mylar, then collaged in layers on a panel, with some acrylic painting. The main photograph is from a series I took of my hands in black gloves; a finger puppet, sexual, critical, satirical, queer, and expressive; referencing sculpture, the Polynesian body, and deity. The fire circle is from an altered found postcard of Samoan fire dancing. To quote Gertrude Stein, “the figure wanders on alone,” meaning the modern condition of identity, which makes us see ourselves as mirrors of ourselves. This is a piece about memory and forgetting, a Black Orpheus. Tired of Tourists is based on a found photograph of hula dancers from an old Honolulu newspaper, which I altered in Photoshop so that the final figure is changing into a plumeria tree. I printed it in black and white and filled in the plumeria with colored pencil; also in part of the text I left my change of mind as part of the piece, which is about desire and metamorphosis. Fake Hula for Alien Tiki is also based on found photographs; in this case the main photograph was from a collection of pornography from the 1940s–1970s that I found on the Internet, of which this is perhaps the tamest image. Tiki kitsch pornography consists of European American women writhing in pagan ecstasy before a tiki of some sort, in this case a space alien tiki. I altered the image by adding the crown of Sauron, and images of Sala Baker, the Polynesian actor who played Sauron, and Orcs in The Lord of the Rings, a film I interpret as a form of tiki kitsch given its location in Aotearoa–New Zealand and within the history of New Zealand film. Polynesie is a sort of collage of found images, although I painted it entirely with vinyl and oil paint on canvas. The lower two figures are from a painting by Paul Gauguin. He often used postcards from Samoa and elsewhere even while painting in Tahiti and the...

"Reel Companions: Contemporary Gay Cinema"

Reel Companions:Contemporary Gay Cinema Warren Sonbert [End Page 233] [End Page 234] [End Page 235] [End Page 236] Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 14. Friendly Witness (Warren Sonbert, US, 1989) [End Page 237] Copyright © 2015 Wayne State University Press

Queer subversions in Mexican and Chicana/o art activism

abstractAs they developed in the 1970s, the LGBT (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender) and feminist movements in Mexico and among Mexican Americans (Chicana/os) in the United States (US) faced many formidable challenges. Not least of these was how to transform a cultural politics of national/ethnic identity that rested discursively on the patriarchal constructs of heterosexism, machismo, pious motherhood, and rigid binaries of gender and sexuality. Given the history of European colonialism, US imperialism, and North American racism, queer and feminist activists were typically part of larger networks of leftist movements for which cultural nationalism was a cornerstone. The fit was often uncomfortable at best, as many ‘progressive’ Mexican and Chicano social movements of the era conformed to the culture's hegemonic heterosexism. Activist art proved to be one of the feminist and queer movements’ most effective tools for producing counterhegemonic discourses of gender and sexuality. This Article describes how gay, lesbian, and feminist artists active in social movements worked to queer representations of Mexican and Chicana/o identity and to subvert dominant constructions of gender and sexuality.

A Queer Thing

The article focuses on the 2010 art exhibition Swallow My Pride (SMP), a visceral response to the commercialization of gay culture in Cape Town and a critique of notions of queerness and its visibility in the public sphere. SMP brought local lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and intersex artists together to reflect upon queerness through methodology and an appeal to the personal. In the exhibit, queerness functioned as a strategy to articulate difference, challenge heteronormativity, and problematize gender identifications. The artworks brought a fresh focus to the courage, suffering, humor, intelligence, and enormous variety of local queer culture. The article investigates how the exhibition, as a queer archive, embraced a critical history of sexuality and gender in the present moment, as well as acknowledging absent voices and narratives, which have been previously silenced and unnamed.

‘In the manner of Cavafy’: The example of the poet from Alexandria

The Greek poet C.P. Cavafy (1863–1933) is held in high esteem around the world by readers and authors alike. He had influenced not only some of the greatest authors of the twentieth century, but due to the fact that his work lends itself particularly well to translation, he is also a relatively strong presence in literatures other than Greek and English. For many – most notably gay readers, authors and artists – Cavafy holds an exemplary status both in terms of literature and life. W.H. Auden has argued that, what ultimately distinguishes Cavafy, is his tone of voice which reveals a person with a unique perspective on the world. Within the context of a research project on idiolectic author identity, this contribution attempts to review the distinguishing features of Cavafy’s work in terms of both form and content. This is done within the framework of the broad critical discourse on Cavafy, and with reference to some manifestations or examples of a Dutch and Afrikaans critical and creative perspective on his poetry, with the aim to shed specific light on the special kind of wisdom communicated in Cavafy’s work.

<i>Gay Artists in Modern American Culture: An Imagined Conspiracy</i> (review)

<i>Gay Artists in Modern American Culture: An Imagined Conspiracy</i> (review)

Hide/Seek: difference and desire in American portraiture

Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture, a survey of portrait art by and about lesbian and gay artists, ably addresses questions of disclosure and revelation in the work of twentieth-century artists. The book was published to accompany the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery exhibit of the same name (October 2010 to February 2011); besides the visual delight of seeing works by some of this country’s most acclaimed artists, the exhibit and book unveil and decode the contributions of lesbian and gay artists to American modernism, offering a new way of thinking about American portraiture of the past hundred years. One of the ways in which a society invalidates the experience, and even the lives, of its marginalized members is by obscuring or destroying the history and stories of those lives. Jonathan D. Katz and David C. Ward show how American society has attempted to do so with the history and stories of the lesbian and gay community, creating a situation in which its members are seen as “other,” and demonized for their difference. Especially moving is the Annie Leibovitz photographic portrait of Ellen DeGeneres, a study at once conflicted and beautiful in its “carnival of visual signs.” Coming out, said DeGeneres, was a freeing experience, “because people can’t hurt me anymore.” Authors Katz and Ward bring these stories to light and return them to the history of American art and culture, thus enriching it by calling it to recognize, if not yet wholly embrace, all of its members. They say of Walt Whitman in his time that, “It was Whitman’s essence as a gay man that allowed him to ask American democracy to fulfill its promise.” This important and compelling work demands the same of our country today. It goes a long way toward restoring the history, narrative, and legacy of artists who, in spite of being marginalized, have made lasting contributions to American art and culture. Katz founded and directed the Larry Kramer Initiative for Lesbian and Gay Studies at Yale University and is director of the Visual Studies doctoral program at SUNY–Buffalo. Ward is a historian at the National Portrait Gallery, and the author of Charles Willson Peale: Art and Selfhood in the Early Republic. He is also a poet and critic. KRISTINE MORRIS (October 16, 2010)

Gerard Dillon: Nationalism, Homosexuality, and the Modern Irish Artist

Gerard Dillon: Nationalism, Homosexuality, and the Modern Irish Artist* Riann Coulter (bio) In Self-contained flat, ca. 1955 (cover image), the Northern Irish artist Gerard Dillon presents himself inhabiting a domestic space of his own creation. Depicting the basement flat of his sister's house in London, where he lived from 1945 to 1963, the painting is divided into three sections, each featuring a self-portrait. The images of Dillon entering the living room and in the garden represent the public narrative of daily life, while the third portrait is located in the private realm of the bedroom. Dressed in the knitted sweater and loose trousers adopted from the west of Ireland fishermen, the central figure provides a distinct contrast to the self-consciously modern image in the foreground, whose green face and bohemian dress mark him as other. 1 The central figure enters a room containing Dillon's decorator tools, canvases, and a statue of the Madonna, while the self-portrait in the foreground inhabits a space dominated by paintings and a sleeping nude (back cover). 2 This sleeping figure can be related to the female nude in Paul Gauguin's Manao Tupapau, [End Page 63] Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. Paul Gauguin, Manao Tupapau (The Spirit of the Dead Watching), 1892, oil on burlap mounted on canvas, 72.4 x 97.5 cm, Collection Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, NY. [End Page 64] 1892 (fig. 1), yet the broad shoulders and narrow hips make its gender ambiguous. If the central figure represents Dillon's public persona as artist and tradesman—and perhaps also, through the Madonna and fisherman garb, suggests his Irish Catholic roots—the portrait in the foreground can be read as his self-identification as a modern artist and a gay man. To date, Dillon's sexuality has been either ignored or underplayed and seldom related to his paintings. In the only monograph on the artist, James White tentatively suggests that Dillon's sexuality influenced his work, but he also attempts to minimize that influence by claiming that "such was his religious feeling that although he was drawn to people of that type, if he once had an encounter I believe that it never occurred again." 3 In contrast to White's speculations, the Belfast author Gerard Keenan, who knew Dillon in London, insists that he was "a very well-adjusted homosexual" unburdened by the censure that his Catholic upbringing imposed on homosexuality. 4 However, the artist's nephew, Martin Dillon, recalls that after his uncle's death he found a diary entry describing a homosexual encounter with a sense of guilt and concludes, "I think he had it there for people in the future to see that that was the sort of man he was; he couldn't tell people except in his paintings." 5 In his study of art and homosexuality in the twentieth century, Emmanuel Cooper argues that social, legal, and religious restraints on homosexuality, illegal in England until 1967, prevented gay artists from addressing their sexuality through their art. 6 Although these constraints did not eliminate homosexual expression, the fear of being found out and the guilt that resulted from societal disapproval and religious censure helped to drive homosexuals underground. 7 Despite the even greater restraints of Irish society, where homosexuality was illegal until 1993, several of Dillon's paintings can be interpreted through the lens of his sexuality. Existing readings of his work focus on his nationalist sympathies and his romantic [End Page 65] depictions of the west of Ireland but fail to recognize the significant influence that Dillon's sexuality had on his paintings. Reconsidering the oeuvre in terms of the artist's homosexuality and the tensions that it created with his Catholic and Irish nationalist background not only suggests new dimensions in his work but also reveals his ability to create multilayered personal images that could, nevertheless, be incorporated into the conservative canon of Irish art. Dillon's homosexuality is only one of many influences that informed his painting. However, the conflict between that identification and his romantic nationalist vision of a pure and uncorrupted Ireland makes his sexuality a disrupting presence within his oeuvre...

Comin' at Ya! The Homoerotic 3-D Photographs of Denny Denfield (review)

Reviewed by: Comin' at Ya! The Homoerotic 3-D Photographs of Denny Denfield Donald W. McLeod (bio) David L. Chapman and Thomas Waugh, editors. Comin' at Ya! The Homoerotic 3-D Photographs of Denny Denfield. Arsenal Pulp. 2007. 208. $31.95 Lloyd 'Denny' Denfield (1918-92) of San Francisco was a nondescript accountant by day, a retiring bachelor who was known as a mama's boy. Denny made his mark through his avocation, a secretive obsession with photographing the male nude. As David L. Chapman explains in the introduction to Comin at Ya! Denfield's obsession was sparked during his wartime career in the South Pacific when he witnessed a group of handsome marines strip naked and jump into a jungle stream. This event crystallized his gay feelings as well as a conscious desire somehow to record the fleeting beauty of manhood. Denfield began to experiment with cameras and photography almost as soon as he returned to civilian life, determined to become a master photographer 'in order to record the transient beauty of as many male bodies as he could.' Technique was learned through trial and error, and by searching out and befriending major physique photographers of the day, including Bruce Bellas (Bruce of Los Angeles), Lon Hanagan (Lon of New York), Douglas Juleff (Douglas of Detroit), and Bob Mizer (Athletic Model Guild). The world of gay photography at mid-century was small, secretive, and illegal. Denfield was able to avoid arrest for selling nude photographs by simply being a devoted amateur who never intended to sell his images. His collection was private and was kept safely locked away. Denny Denfield had no trouble finding willing subjects to photograph. Some of these men were well-known physique models, most were friends [End Page 454] or even strangers. A devoted naturist, Denfield would often be seen in summertime during the mid-1950s strolling San Francisco's most prominent nude beach, wearing only the cameras that dangled from his neck. There he would scout for likely subjects, who were most cooperative. Some of these men were also invited to indoor photo parties at Denfield's home (when mother was away), and, later, to a large, isolated party house in Marin County. Comin at Ya! focuses on one aspect of Denfield's photographic oeuvre. In 1947 a remarkable new camera was introduced. The Stereo Realist was a compact, easy-to-use 3-D camera that produced vivid, life-like Kodachrome stereoview slides. It was Bob Mizer who encouraged Denfield to take up stereo photography in 1954, which he did with a vengeance. He took thousands of Realist stereoviews; Denfield once claimed that he took stereoviews of 1,500 men before he stopped counting. Some of these surviving stereoviews are displayed in this book, 177 full-colour figures in all, with a hand-held 3-D viewer inserted in a pouch at the back. The result is a spectacular feast of vibrant and highly erotic images, enhanced greatly by the 'pop-up,' in-your-face effect produced by using the viewer. And what makes these images so exciting and rare is that they are unique: they have never been reproduced before. Thomas Waugh's foreword characterizes Denfield as a type of 'talented but tormented' gay artist common to the pre-Stonewall gay erotic underground. Although Denfield was never arrested for his photographic hobby, the pursuit was not without dangers. In 1951 thieves broke into the trunk of his car and stole a large number of his best slides. In 1965, he was beaten and robbed after a party. By 1968, after years of heavy drinking, smoking, and riotous living, Denfield's health was ruined and his photographic career was over. Although Denfield lived another twenty-four years, he gradually abandoned all ties to his old friends and associates and turned away from his former gay life. Original gay pornographic photographic images from the mid-twentieth century are rare, and it is remarkable that so many of Denfield's stereoviews have survived. At his death in 1992, Denfield willed his entire photographic archive to a former friend, who looked after it until his own sudden death in 2004. The collection was then broken up and...

"Look Baby, I Know You": Gay Fiction and the Cold War Era

It is easy to write the history of queer studies in the academy as a triumphant march toward progress, from the crude identity politics of gay liberation to the subtlety of postidentity queer theory, which deconstructs identity categories, critiques normativity, and embraces a wide range of marginalized sexual practices. Michel Foucault, Judith Butler, and Eve Sedgwick figure prominently in such a narrative, a postmodern trinity for an increasingly diverse queer praxis. Certainly, given the explosion of queer studies in the last twenty years, this narrative feels at least useful, if not true. Queer studies continues to thrive in interdisciplinary conferences and publications, and queer studies programs are still being established at universities across the country. Both Michael Sherry's Gay Artists in Modern American Culture: An Imagined Conspiracy (2007) and Bertram J. Cohler's Writing Desire: Sixty Years of Gay Autobiography (2007) benefit from a larger acceptance of the study of sexuality. Gay Artists in Modern American Culture uncovers a forgotten Cold War gay renaissance; Writing Desire traces the evolution of gay autobiography in the twentieth century. Both are deeply indebted to history, describing shifts in gay life from the 1950s to the present. The fact that both include “gay,” not “queer,” in their titles marks a divergence from queer theory, particularly regarding identity politics. The books, then, suggest what has been left behind in queer theory's grand march across the disciplines.

Review: Gay Artists in Modern American Culture: An Imagined Conspiracy, by Michael S. Sherry

Review: <i>Gay Artists in Modern American Culture: An Imagined Conspiracy</i>, by Michael S. Sherry

Eugene Dening: Young Artist from Alberta

Eugene Dening, an emerging artist in Canada, recently earned his Bachelors degree at the Calvin College (Grand Rapids, MI). This essay on his artwork explores the value of art making to LGBT youth, those gay and lesbian artists who have influenced their work, and those queer and critical readings practices that one can apply to arts’ viewing.