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Saslow, James M. Pictures and Passions: A History of Homosexuality in the Visual Arts. New York, NY: Viking, 2000. 146-147. Love and sexuality in all its forms have been central themes in art from its earliest days. The way we experience the world is mediated by our desires, so I think that no matter what an artist is portraying, they are always also representing who and what they love. So many masters used their desire to convey ideas far beyond love, but because queer love stands out as the exception, whenever it is present in a piece, it’s assumed to only be able to speak about queerness. For that reason, I feel it’s important to represent how my queerness is embedded in my life as directly and honestly as I can, to celebrate all the ways in which we are different and all the ways in which we are the same, and to give queer desire equal gravity and meaning. Control. Acting as subject and muse, I work to convey my own fluid identity—an identity that bridges the binaries of gender and ethnicity. Can you tell us a bit about how your publication Indigenous Woman (2018) evolved? 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. The death penalty for sodomy was abolished in 1861 but it was still punishable with imprisonment. Sex between women was not illegal and society sometimes tolerated such relationships. Yet for most people, there seems to have been little sense that certain sexual practices or forms of gender expression reflected a core aspect of the self. Instead, this was a world of fluid possibilities.
In response to these closures and the heightened atmosphere of fear and mourning in the community, we dedicated nine months to traveling the U.K., forcing ourselves into male-dominant or male-only spaces, filming gay bars, and creating an archive that would function both as an art work, a public resource, and a call to arms. There was an urgency to the project that drove us to such a gargantuan undertaking. Often, we would arrive in a city and a much-loved gay bar had closed its doors only days before. The feeling of loss permeated the archive, which has a ghostly, elegiac quality. Do you believe your work responds to––or critiques––hierarchies at play in the LGBTQ community?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.” Parkinson, R.B. A Little Gay History: Desire and Diversity Across the World. London: The British Museum Press, 2013, 73. Where can I view this artwork?: The Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, MA (USA) (Museum Council Gallery (Gallery 254)) 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? His posthumous success has undoubtedly been bolstered by the fact that in 1984, towards the end of his life, Laaksonen founded a non-profit foundation with his friend Durk Dehner to preserve and promote his catalogue of more than 3,500 illustrations. The Tom of Finland Foundation has championed Laaksonen’s work so effectively that it’s now displayed at leading galleries including New York City’s Museum of Modern Art, the Art Institute of Chicago and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. In 2014, the Finnish postal service even celebrated his impact with a set of commemorative postage stamps. And this month, the UK’s first public exhibition dedicated solely to his work opened at London’s House of Illustration (though the gallery is currently closed due to the Coronavirus crisis). Curator Olivia Ahmad says the show, produced in collaboration with the Tom of Finland Foundation on the centenary of Laaksonen’s birth, is necessary because he’s “one of the most influential figurative artists of the late 20th Century”.
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.Let's consider the process of queering the sailor in art and its function. To be a mariner, or more explicitly to escape the societal conventions of life on the land was powerful indeed and recognised by queer audiences historically. Same-sex desire and affection was a facet of life at sea – in single-sex environments freedom of movement and access to different cultures afforded more options. Gay bars in ports around the world mirrored this, as did the spread of the queer language Polari (a way to speak openly and in code without overtly incriminating yourself).
Such objects clarify that centuries of erotic art have existed out in the open, barely concealed through evocations of antiquity and other allegorical guises. How does he go about finding them? “Once we were established as collectors,” Leslie explained, “we’d get these calls from people we’d never heard of.” Dealers and artists came out of the woodwork. “There simply were not other avenues to publicly show this work,” he said. I started MOTHA in 2013. I originally conceived of it as a poster, Transgender Hiroes (2013), but over the year it took me to assemble it, I began to imagine all the different forms this museum could take without it being an actual physical space. The project continues to be a celebration of trans art and history as well as a critique of the elements at play that have kept trans, genderqueer, gender non-conforming, and non-binary identities marginalized.
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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'. 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. The first official Leslie-Lohman Gallery opened on Broome Street in 1972. “Finally, this art could come out of the closet,” Leslie said. “We also showed lesbian imagery, which was somewhat less contentious,” he observed, “because straight men love lesbians.” Still, many challenges remained. That year, an elderly Italian neighbor called the police from the rectory of a local Catholic Church, disturbed by an exhibition of Marion Pinto nudes. Crizio E Nesiote.” Crizio E Nesiote — Sito Ufficiale Del Museo Archeologico Nazionale Di Napoli. Accessed August, 2017. http://cir.campania.beniculturali.it/museoarcheologiconazionale/glossario/ploneglossarydefinition.2008-06-09.8429349527 Summers, Claude J. “Erotic Miniature Painting.” In The Queer Encyclopedia of the Visual Arts. San Francisco: Cleis Press, 2004.
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