This nice little volume I dragged up from the collection does not have the breadth of a serious survey, but does serve as a quick guide to the major issues involved in the term "queer" as it is approached by a small group of contemporary artists and curators. From a focus on "know thy self" and "faces," the book also makes comments the role of "queer" as applied to stereotypes, male bonding, sex, commitment and AIDS. The book does not attempt to make any systematic conclusions about the term "queer" at all, either as an important part of some social advocacy or as a trait in art; it merely attempts to leave the impression that "queerness" does both of those things. Despite this weakness, the close attention given to each of the works presented makes the book a valuable peak into the usage of "queer" in one subcommunity of the art world.
I love the humor in this one. Harter was actually museum curator at the time he painted this. Apparently, "he was not yet publicly out of the closet," but he certainly gives his audience plenty of clues to work out his sexual orientation, as well as the basic attitude towards culture that it entails. How many ways can you find to say that he's gay?
This portrait of a famous, older, and openly gay photographer by a young admirer makes clever references to the many bonds the two of them share: photography, identity, and the male form, among others.
How many Boomer-era Americans think of a certain friend from their past, someone associated with home, welcomed into the family, and, eventually, the ideal of goodness, beauty, and all that is sexually desirable? The. (Ted) Titulo's photo-collage commemorates this narrative with equal parts fantasy and nostalgia, turning boyhood love into something sublime.
Each painting Michael Meads' patron saints series brings an overt sense of the sacred to scenes of male community. In For St. George, Patron Saint of Boy Scouts (1996), we have a rich meditation on the theme of 'mentoring,' with all of the problematic erotic overtones that are contained therein.
After a strong start, The Culture of Queer begins to fray into too many subtopics with no clear sequence or relation, and many of the pieces are too allusive to stand on their own. At least one discussion is worth remembering however: the pattern of "ultra-masculine stereotyping of gay men that emerged in post-Stonewall America in the 1970s was also taking hold at that time in other parts of the world..." Two examples here are the more familiar Touko Laaksonen, "Tom of Finland" and a new face for me, Japan's Tsuyoshi Yoshida, "Goh Mishima" (1924-1988). Mishima seems to me to provide a link between his namesake the seppuku-loving aesthete and later graphic publications in magazines like Barozoku.
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