Make it Queer

Make it Queer Artistic Visions of the LGBT Community

Essays

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Foreword The Night They Raided Stonewall

Andy Warhol's Defiant Hopes for Queer Art

Elle Pérez's Search for Intensity

Artist Bio

68 78 88 100 110 118 130 142 152

Keith Haring David Hockney David Wojnarowicz Robert Mapplethorpe Elle Pérez Cathrine Opie Zanele Muholi Devan Shimoyama Exhibition Checklist

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Foreword

Make it Queer is an exhibition that celebrates LGBTQ+ artworks that made impacts towards society. Without their brave artwork, Queer rights wouldn’t have had existed today. The rise of gay awareness established from the late 20th century when sexual liberalization initiated to become mainstream within society.

One of the earliest recorded historical movement within the LGBTQ+ community had originated from the 1969 Stonewall Inn riot; The raid sparked a riot among bar patrons and neighborhood residents as police roughly hauled employees and patrons out of the bar, leading to six days of protests and violent clashes with law enforcement outside the bar on Christopher Street, in neighboring streets and in nearby Christopher Park. At that time, having same-sex relations was outlawed so many LGBTQ+ individuals would flock to gay bars and clubs as places of refuge.

Despite the stigma that had been embedded within the LGBTQ+ society thanks to the Regan Administration, many artist have set to educate and eradicate the notion that gay people were carriers of AIDS in the midst of the AIDS pandemic.

Artists, such as Andy Warhol, was notoriously well known figure in the LGBTQ+ community as his artwork normalized the beauty within the male body. This taboo artwork was one of many that initiated conversations for the gay community and as such, sparked a wave of controversial art in hopes of saving the LGBTQ+ community. Keith Haring also was responsible for bringing awareness towards AIDS in the late 80’s; As he was diagnosed with the virus, he set out to tackle the issue by creating artworks in light of the passing of his significant other. Ultimately, he came forward with PSAs that sparks help in light of the AIDS pandemic.

Since then, Queer artist haven’t stopped because queerness is now normalized. As a matter of fact, there isn’t enough representation in this world that would speak for the majority of us Queer people. For young queer individuals whom are still seeking their identity, Elle Pérez’s Search for Intensity talks about the struggles she had overcome in order for her to realize her potential and revealed to herself her identity. Pérez was not the only one though as many Queer artist discover their identity through the form of art. Some artist discover their identity as admirers of the human body, like Robert Mapplethorpe and his expression in photographs of sex; Meanwhile, artist like Zanele Muholi, celebrates the human body in forms of self portraits that would empower her imagery.

Artist like Devan Shimoyama, created a type of Queer art that showcased gender and race stereotype as a Gay Queer Man; Artworks that would break stereotype norms . Queer culture always had some sort of struggle. It is apparent in some of Elle Pérez’s photographs where Queer folks are often shamed for not acting towards societal norms. Despite what others may have said, she would express her art in forms of self harm; the most popular way Queer folks express themselves. Other Artists such as Cathrine Opie, take self-harm to an extreme in order to shock viewers as that is what Queer people had faced for the longest time.

Make it Queer celebrates movements and dedication towards LGBTQ+ Art. While this form of celebration may not be all rainbows, it is important to note that these artist created all these art forms in order for Queerness to embellish within society. As such, it is necessary to showcase the hardship these artist have endeavored for the greater good of the LGBTQ+ Community.

The Night They Raided Stonewall

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The Night They Raided Stonewall Martin Duberman

STONEWALL INN 1969

The Night They Raided Stonewall

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If you got the okay at the door—and for underage street kids that was always problematic—you moved a few steps to a table, usually covered by members of what one wag called the “Junior Achievement Mafia” team. That could mean, on different nights, two of the co-owners, Zucchi and Mario; Ernie Sgroi, who always wore a suit and tie and whose father had started the famed Bon Soir on 8th Street; “Vito,” who was on salary directly from another co-owner, “Fat Tony” Lauria, and was hugely proud of his personal collection of S.S. uniforms and Nazi flags (he made bombs on the side); or “Tony the Sniff ” Verra, who had a legendary nose for no-goods and kept a baseball bat behind the door to deal with them.

At the table, you had to plunk down three dollars (one dollar on weekdays), for which you got two tickets that could be exchanged for two watered-down drinks. (According to Chuck Shaheen, all drinks were watered, even those carrying the fanciest labels.) You then signed your name in a book kept to prove, should the question arise in court, that Stonewall was indeed a private “bottle club.” People rarely signed their real names: “Judy Garland,” “Donald Duck,” and “Elizabeth Taylor” were the popular favorites.2 Once inside Stonewall, you took a step down and straight in front of you was the main bar, where Maggie held court. Behind the bar some pulsating gel lights went on and off—later exaggeratedly claimed by some to be the precursor of the innovative light shows at The Sanctuary and other gay discos that followed. On weekends, a scantily clad go-go boy with a pin spot on him danced in a gilded cage on top of the bar. Straight ahead, beyond the bar, was a spacious dancing area—at one point in the bar’s history lit only with black lights. That in itself became a subject for camp, because the queens, with Murine in their eyes, all looked as if they had white streaks running down their faces. Should the police (known as “Lily Law,” “Alice Blue Gown”—”Alice” for short--or “Betty Badge”) or a suspected plainclothesman unexpectedly arrive, white bulbs instantly came on in the dance area, signaling everyone to stop dancing or touching.3 The queens rarely hung out at the main bar. There was an-other, smaller

GAY LIBERATION FRONT MARCHES ON TIMES SQUARE, NEW YORK CITY, 1969.

Maggie and Tommy were stationed behind the main bar, one of two bars in the Stonewall. But before you could get to it, you had to pass muster at the door (a ritual some of the customers welcomed as a relief from the lax security that characterized most gay bars). That usually meant inspection, through a peephole in the heavy front door, by Ed Murphy, “Bobby Shades,” or muscular Frank Esselourne. “Blond Frankie,” as he was known, was gay, but in those years not advertising it, and was famous for being able to spot straights or undercover cops with a single glance.1

THE STONEWALL RIOT, JUNE 1969

Most of the employees at the Stonewall Inn in Greenwich Village, and some of the customers, did drugs, primarily “uppers.” Desbutal—a mix of Desoxyn and Nembutal—was a great favorite (though later banned by the FDA), and the bar was also known as a good place to buy acid. The chief supplier was Maggie Jiggs, a famous drag queen who worked the main bar at Stonewall, along with her partner, Tommy Long. (Tommy kept a toy duck on the bar that quacked whenever someone left a tip.) They were a well-known team with a big following. Maggie, blond, chubby, and loud, knew everybody’s business and would think nothing of yelling out in the middle of the crowded bar, “Hey, girl, I hear you got a whole new plate of false teeth from that fabulous dentist you been fucking!” But Maggie loved people, had good drugs, was always surrounded with gorgeous men, and arranged wonderful three-ways, so her outspokenness and even her occasional thievery were (usually) forgiven.

The Night They Raided Stonewall

16 room off to one side, with a stone wishing well in the middle, its own jukebox and service bar, and booths, that be- came headquarters for the more flamboyant contingent among Stonewall’s melting pot of customers. There were the “scare drag queens” like Tommy Lanigan-Schmidt, Birdie Rivera, and Martin Boyce—“boys who looked like girls but who you knew were boys.” And there were the “flame” (not “drag”) queens who wore eye makeup and teased hair but essentially dressed in male clothes—if an effeminate version with fluffy sweaters and Tom Jones shirts.

Only a few full-time transvestites, like Tiffany, Spanola Jerry (a hairdresser from Sheepshead Bay), and Tammy Novak (who per-formed at the Eighty Two Club), were allowed to enter Stonewall in drag. (Tammy sometimes transgressed by dressing as a boy.) Not even “Tish” (Joe Tish), who regularly changed back into men’s clothes after a performance, would be admitted in drag, though he had been a well-known drag performer since the early fifties and in the late sixties had a long-running show at the Crazy Horse, a nearby cafe on Bleecker Street. Tish was admitted into some up-town straight clubs in full drag; there, as he sniffily put it, his “artistry” was recognized. 4 The queens considered Stonewall and Washington Square the most congenial downtown bars. If they passed muster at the Stonewall door, they could buy or cajole drinks, exchange cosmetics and the favored Tabu or Ambush perfumes, admire or deplore somebody’s latest Kanecalon wig, make fun of six-foot transsexual Lynn’s size-twelve women’s shoes (while admiring her fishnet stockings and miniskirts and giggling over her tales of servicing the firemen around the corner at the 10th Street station), move constantly in and out of the ladies room (where they deplored the fact that a single red light bulb made the application of makeup difficult), and dance in a feverish sweat till closing time at 4:00 A.M. The jukebox on the dance floor played a variety of songs, even an occasional “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes” to appease the roman-tics. The Motown label was still top of the heap in the summer of 1969, and three of the five hit singles for the week of June 28—by Marvin Gaye, Junior Walker, and the Temptations—carried its imprint. On the pop side, the Stonewall jukebox played the “Love Theme” from Romeo and Juliet over and over, the record’s saccharine periodically cut by the Beatles’ “Get Back” or Elvis Presley’s “In the Ghetto.” And all the new dances—the Boston Jerk, the Monkey, the Spider—were tried out with relish. If the crowd was in a particularly campy mood (and the management was feeling loose enough), ten or fifteen dancers would line up to learn the latest ritual steps, beginning with a shouted “Hit it, girls!” 5 The chinos-and-penny-loafer crowd pretty much stayed near the main bar, fraternizing with the queens, if at all, mostly on the dance floor. (“Two queens can’t bump pussy,” one of them explained. “And I don’t care how beefy and brawny the pussy is. And certainly not for a relationship.”) The age range at Stonewall was mostly late teens to early thirties; the overthirty-five crowd hung out at Julius’, and the leather crowd (then in its infancy) at Keller’s. There could also be seen at Stonewall just a sprinkling of the new kind of gay man beginning to emerge—the hippie: long-haired, bell-bottomed, laid back, and likely to have “weird,” radical views.

Very few women ever appeared in Stonewall. Sascha L. flatly declares that he can’t remember any, except for the occasional “fag hag” (like Blond Frankie’s straight friend Lucille, who lived with the doorman at

The Night They Raided Stonewall One-Two-Three and hung out at Stonewall) or “one or two dykes who looked almost like boys.” But Chuck Shaheen, who spent much more time at Stonewall, remembers—while acknowledging that the bar was “98 percent male”—a few more lesbian customers than Sascha does, and, of those, a number who were decidedly “femme.” One of the lesbians who did go to Stonewall “a few times,” tagging along with some of her gay male friends, recalls that she “felt like a visitor.” It wasn’t as if the male patrons went out of their way to make her feel uncomfortable, but rather that the territory was theirs, not hers. “There didn’t seem to be hostility, but there didn’t seem to be camaraderie.” 6 “Sylvia” Ray Riviera had been invited to Marsha P. Johnson’s birthday party on June 27, 1969, but she decided not to go. It’s not that she was mad at Marsha; she simply felt strung out. She had been working as an accounting clerk in a Jersey City chain-store warehouse, keeping tally sheets of what the truckers took out—a good job with a good boss who let her wear makeup whenever she felt like it. But it was an eleven-to-seven shift, Sun-days through Thursdays, all-night stints that kept her away from her friends on the street and decidedly short of the cash she had made from hustling.

Yes, she wanted to clean up her act and start leading a “normal” life.

But she hadn’t counted on missing the money so much, or on her drug habit persisting—and sixty-seven dollars a week in take-home pay just wasn’t doing it. So she and her lover, Gary, decided to piece out their income with a side gig—passing bad checks—and on June 27 they had just gotten back from papering Washington, D.C. The first news they heard on returning was of Judy Garland’s funeral that very day: how twenty thousand people had waited up to four hours in the blistering heat to view her body at Frank E. Campbell’s Funeral Home on Madison Avenue and 81st Street. The news sent a melodramatic shiver up Sylvia’s spine, and she decided to become “completely hysterical.” “It’s the end of an era,” she tearfully announced. “The greatest singer, the greatest actress of my childhood is no more. Never again ‘Over the Rainbow,’”—here Sylvia sobbed loudly—“no one left to look up to.”

No, she was not going to Marsha’s party. She would stay home, light her consoling religious candles (her grandmother, Viejita, had taught her that much), and say a few prayers for Judy. But then the phone rang, and her buddy Tammy Novak—who sounded more stoned than usual—insisted that Sylvia and Gary join her later that night at Stonewall. Sylvia hesitated.

If she were going out at all—“Was it all right to dance with the martyred Judy not cold in her grave?”—she would go to her favorite, Washington Square. She had never been crazy about Stonewall, she reminded Tammy: Men in makeup were tolerated there, but not exactly cherished. And if she were going to go out, she wanted to vent—to be just as outrageous, as grief-stricken, as makeup would allow. But Tammy absolutely refused to take no for an answer and so Sylvia, moaning theatrically, gave in. She popped a Black Beauty, and she and Gary headed downtown.

Jim Fouratt’s job at CBS required long hours, and he often got back to his apartment (after a stopover at Max’s Kansas City) in the early morning.

On the night of June 27 he had worked in the office until midnight, had gone for a nightcap at Max’s, and about 1:00 A.M. had headed back to his apartment in the Village. Passing by the Stonewall Inn—a bar he despised, insisting it was a haven for marauding chicken hawks—Jim noticed a cluster of cops in front of the bar, looking as if they were about to enter.

He shrugged it off as just another routine raid and even found himself

PROTESTERS TOOK TO THE STREETS IN THE AFTERMATH OF THE STONEWALL RIOTS IN LOWER MANHATTAN IN THE SUMMER OF 1969.

MARSHA P. JOHNSON AND SYLVIA RIVERA: ICONS OF THE QUEER MOVEMENT, JUNE 28, 1969.

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A GROUP OF YOUNG PEOPLE – INCLUDING TOMMY LANIGAN -SCHMIDT ON THE FAR RIGHT – CELEBRATE OUTSIDE THE BOARDED-UP STONEWALL INN AFTER THE RIOTS. STONEWALL RIOTERS THROWING OBJECTS AT THE POLICE, JUNE 1969.

The Night They Raided Stonewall

20 hoping that this time (Stonewall had been raided just two weeks before) the police would succeed in closing the joint.

But as Jim got closer, he could see that a small group of on-lookers had gathered. That was somewhat surprising, since the first sign of a raid usually led to an immediate scattering; typically, gays fled rather than loitered, and fled as quietly and as quickly as possible, grateful not to be implicated at the scene of the “crime.” Jim spotted Craig Rodwell at the top of the row of steps leading up to a brownstone adjacent to the Stonewall Inn. Something was decidedly in the air.

Craig had taken up his position only moments before. Like Jim, he had been on his way home—from playing cards at a friend’s—and had stumbled on the gathering crowd in front of the Stonewall. He was with Fred Sergeant, his current lover, and the two of them had scrambled up the brownstone steps to get a better view. The crowd was decidedly small, but what was riveting was its strangely quiet, expectant air, as if awaiting the next development. Just then, the police pushed open the front door of the Stonewall and marched in. Craig looked at his watch: it was 1:20 A.M. Sylvia was feeling very little pain. The Black Beauty had hopped her up and the scotch had smoothed her out. Her lover, Gary, had come along; Tammy, Bambi, and Ivan were there; and rumor had it that Marsha Johnson, disgusted at all the no-shows for her birthday, was also headed downtown to Stonewall, determined to party somewhere. It looked like a good night. Sylvia expansively decided she did like Stonewall after all, and was just saying that to Tammy, who looked as if she were about to keel over—“that chile [Tammy was seventeen, Sylvia eighteen] could not control her intake”—when the cops came barreling through the front door. (The white warning lights had earlier started flashing on the dance floor, but Sylvia and her friends had been oblivious.)

The next thing she knew, the cops, with their usual arrogance, were stomping through, ordering the patrons to line up and get their IDs ready for examination. “Oh my God!” Sylvia shouted at Gary. “I didn’t bring my ID!” Before she could panic, Gary reached in his pocket and produced her card—he had brought it along. “Praise be to Saint Barbara!” Sylvia shrieked, snatching the precious ID. If the raid went according to the usual pattern, the only people arrested would be those without IDs, those dressed in the clothes of the opposite gender, and some or all of the employees. Everyone else would be let go with a few shoves and a few contemptuous words. The bar would soon reopen, and they would all be back dancing. It was annoying to have one’s Friday night screwed up, but it was hardly unprecedented.

Sylvia tried to take it in stride; she’d been through lots worse, and with her ID in hand and nothing more than makeup on, she knew the hassling would be minimal. But she was pissed; the good high she’d had was gone, and her nerve ends felt as raw as when she had been crying over Judy earlier in the evening. She wished she’d gone to the Washington Square, a place she preferred any-way. She was sick of being treated like scum: “I was just not in the mood,” was how she later put it. “It had got to the point where I didn’t want to be bothered anymore.” When one of the cops grabbed the ID out of her hand and asked her with a smirk if she was a boy or a girl, she almost swung at him, but Gary grabbed her hand in time.

The cop gave her a shove toward the door and told her to get the hell out.

The Night They Raided Stonewall Not all of the two hundred or so people who were inside Stonewall fared that well. Chico, a forty-five-year-old patron who looked sixty, was arrested for not having an ID proving he was over eighteen. Another patron, asked for “some kind of ID, like a birth certificate,” said to the cop, “I don’t happen to carry mine around with me. Do you have yours, Officer?” The cop arrested him. Eighteen-year-old Joey Dey had been dancing for a while with a guy in a suit but had decided he wasn’t interested and had tried to get away; the man had insisted they go on dancing and then, just as the police came through the door, pulled out a badge and told him he was under arrest. 7

AN UNIDENTIFIED GROUP OF YOUNG PEOPLE CELEBRATE OUTSIDE THE BOARDED-UP STONEWALL INN AFTER THE RIOTS. THE BAR OPENED THE NIGHT AFTER THE RIOTS, ALTHOUGH IT DID NOT SERVE ALCOHOL.

Harry Beard, one of the dance-floor waiters, had been coming off a ten-day amphetamine run and was crashed out in one of the side-room booths when the police arrived. He knew that the only way to avoid arrest was to pretend he was a customer, so he grabbed a drink off the bar, crossed his legs provocatively, and tried to act unconcerned. Fortunately for him, he had gone into one of the new unisex shops that very day and was wearing a soft pink blouse with ruffles around the wrists and down the front. One of the cops looked at him quizzically and said, “I know you.

You work here.” Harry was on welfare at the time, so, adopting his nelliest tone, he thrust his welfare card at the cop and replied, “Work here? Oh, don’t be silly! I’m just a poor girl on welfare. Here’s my welfare card.

Besides, I wouldn’t work in a toilet like this!” The cop looked skeptical but told Harry he could leave. 8 The Stonewall management had always been tipped off by the police before a raid was due to take place—this happened, on average, once a month—and the raid itself was usually staged early enough in the evening to produce minimal commotion and allow for a quick reopening. (Indeed, sometimes the “raid” consisted of little more than the police striding arrogantly through the bar and then leaving, with no arrests made.) Given the size of the weekly payoff, the police had an understandable stake in keeping the golden calf alive.

But this raid was different. It was carried out by eight detectives from the First Division (only one of them in uniform), and the Sixth Precinct had been asked to participate only at the last possible second. Moreover, the raid had occurred at 1:20 A.M.—the height of the merriment—and with no advance warning to the Stonewall management. (Chuck Shaheen recalls some vague tipoff that a raid might happen, but since the early-evening hours had passed without incident, the management had dismissed the tip as inaccurate.) 9 There have been an abundance of theories as to why the Sixth Precinct failed on this occasion to alert Stonewall’s owners. One centers on the possibility that a payment had not been made on time or made at all.

Another suggests that the extent of Stonewall’s profits had recently become known to the police, and the Sixth Precinct brass had decided, as prelude to its demand for a larger cut, to flex a little muscle. Yet a third explanation points to the possibility that the new commanding officer at the precinct was out of sympathy with payoffs, or hadn’t yet learned how profitable they could be.

But evidence has surfaced to suggest that the machinations of the Sixth Precinct were in fact incidental to the raid. Ryder Fitzgerald, a sometime carpenter who had helped remodel the Stonewall interior and whose friends Willis and Elf (a straight hippie couple) lived rent-free in the apartment above Stonewall in exchange for performing caretaker chores,

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FIRST SAN FRANCISCO PRIDE IN SUMMER OF 1970

The Night They Raided Stonewall

When the raid, contrary to expectations, did get going, the previous systems put into place by the Mafia owners stood them in good stead. The strong front door bought needed time until the white lights had a chance to do their warning work: patrons instantly stopped dancing and touching; the bartenders took the money from the cigar boxes that served as a kind of cash register, jumped from behind the bar, and mingled inconspicuously with the customers. Maggie Jiggs, already known for her “two for the bar, one for myself ” approach to cash, disappeared into the crowd with a cigar box full of money; when a cop asked to see the contents, Maggie said it contained her tips as a “cigarette girl,” and they let her go. When later questioned by her employers, Maggie claimed that the cop had taken the box and the money. She got away with the lie. 11 The standard Mafia policy of putting gay employees on the door so they could take the heat while everyone else got their act together, also paid off for the owners. Eddie Murphy managed to get out (“of course,” his detractors add, “he was on the police payroll”), but Blond Frankie was arrested. There was already a war-rant outstanding for Frankie’s arrest (purportedly for homicide— he was known for “acting first and not bothering to think even later”). Realizing that this was no ordinary raid, that this time an arrest might not merely mean detention for a few hours at Centre Street followed by a quick release, Frankie was determined not to be taken in. The owners, Zucchi and Mario, escaped through a back door connected to the office and were soon safely out on the street in front of the Stonewall. So, too, were almost all of the bar’s customers, released after their IDs had been checked and their attire deemed “appropriate” to their gender—a process accompanied, as in Sylvia’s case, by derisive, ugly police banter. 12 As for Fat Tony, at the time the raid took place he had still not left his apartment on Waverly Place, a few blocks from the Stonewall. Under the spell of methamphetamine, he had already spent three hours recombing his beard and agitatedly changing from one outfit to another, acting for all the world like one of those “demented queens” he vilified. He and Chuck Shaheen could see the commotion from their apartment window, but only after an emergency call from Zucchi could Tony be persuaded to leave the apartment for the bar. 13 Some of the campier patrons, emerging one by one from the Stonewall to find an unexpected crowd, took the opportunity to strike instant poses, starlet-style, while the onlookers whistled and shouted their applause-meter ratings. But when a paddy wagon pulled up, the mood turned more somber. And it grew sullen when the police officers started to emerge from Stonewall with prisoners in tow and moved with them toward the waiting van. Jim Fouratt at the back of the crowd, Sylvia stand-

A MONTH AFTER THE STONEWALL RIOTS, A MASS RALLY WAS HELD IN NEW YORK CITY. HERE, MARTY ROBINSON OF THE MATTACHINE SOCIETY SPEAKS TO THE ASSEMBLED CROWD. “GAY POWER IS HERE.”

was privy the day after the raid to a revealing conversation. Ernie, one of Stonewall’s Mafia team, stormed around Willis and Elf ’s apartment, cursing out the Sixth Precinct (in Ryder’s presence) for having failed to provide warning in time. And in the course of his tirade, Ernie revealed that the raid had been inspired by federal agents. The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (BATF) had apparently discovered that the liquor bottles used at Stonewall had no federal stamps on them—which meant they had been hijacked or bootlegged straight out of the distillery.

Putting Stonewall under surveillance, BATF had then discovered the bar’s corrupt alliance with the Sixth Precinct. Thus, when the Feds decided to launch a raid on Stonewall, they deliberately kept the local police in the dark until the unavoidable last minute. 10

SYLVIA RIVERA WAS A LATINA-AMERICAN DRAG QUEEN WHO BECAME ONE OF THE MOST RADICAL GAY AND TRANSGENDER ACTIVIST OF THE 1960S AND ‘70S.

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The Night They Raided Stonewall

26 ing with Gary near the small park across the street from Stonewall, and Craig perched on top of the crowd—all sensed something unusual in the air, all felt a kind of tensed expectancy.

The police (two of whom were women) were oblivious to it initially. Everything up to that point had gone so routinely that they expected to see the crowd quickly disperse. Instead, a few people started to boo, and others pressed against the waiting van, while the cops standing near it yelled angrily for the crowd to move back. According to Sylvia, “you could feel the electricity going through people. You could actually feel it. People were getting really, really pissed and uptight.” A guy in a dark red T-shirt danced in and out of the crowd, shouting “Nobody’s gonna fuck with me!” and “Ain’t gonna take this shit!” 14 As the cops started loading their prisoners into the van—among them, Blond Frankie, the doorman—more people joined in the shouting. Sylvia spotted Tammy Novak among the three queens lined up for the paddy wagon, and along with others in the crowd started yelling “Tammy! Tammy!”—Sylvia’s shriek rising above the rest. But Tammy apparently didn’t hear, and Sylvia guessed that she was too stoned to know what was going on. Yet when a cop shoved Tammy and told her to “Keep moving! Keep moving!” as he poked her with his club, Tammy told him to stop pushing, and when he didn’t, she started swinging. From that point on, so much happened so quickly as to seem simultaneous. 15 Jim Fouratt insists that the explosive moment came when “a dyke dressed in men’s clothing,” who had been visiting a male employee inside the bar, started to act up as the cops moved her toward the paddy wagon.

According to Jim, “the queens were acting like queens, throwing their change and giving lots of attitude and lip. But the dyke had to be more butch than the queens. So when the police moved her into the wagon, she got out the other side and started to rock it.”

Harry Beard, the Stonewall waiter who had been inside the bar, partly corroborates Jim’s account, though differing on the moment of explosion.

According to Beard, the cops had arrested the cross-dressed lesbian inside the bar for not wearing the requisite three pieces of clothing “appropriate to one’s gender” mandated by Section 887(7) of the New York Code of Criminal Procedure. As they led her out of the bar, so Beard’s version goes, she com-plained that the handcuffs they had put on her were too tight; in response, one of the cops slapped her in the head with his night-stick. Seeing the cops hit her, people standing immediately outside the door started throwing coins at the police. 16 But Craig Rodwell and a number of other eyewitnesses sharply contest the view that the arrest of a lesbian was the precipitating incident, or even that a lesbian had been present in the bar. And they skeptically ask why, if she did exist, she has never stepped forward to claim credit; to the answer that she may long since have died, they sardonically reply, “And she never told another soul? And if she did, why haven’t they stepped forward to claim credit for her?” As if all that isn’t muddle enough, those eyewitnesses who deny the lesbian claimant themselves divide over whether to give the palm to a queen—Tammy Novak being the leading candidate—or to one of the many ordinary gay male patrons of the bar.

Craig Rodwell’s view probably comes as close as we are likely to get to the truth:

The Night They Raided Stonewall “A number of incidents were happening simultaneously. There was no one thing that happened or one person, there was just... a flash of group— of mass—anger.” 17 As the police, amid a growing crowd and mounting anger, continued to load prisoners into the van, Martin Boyce, an eighteen--year-old scare drag queen, saw a leg in nylons and sporting a high heel shoot out from the back of the paddy wagon into the chest of a cop, throwing him backward. Another queen then opened the door on the side of the wagon and jumped out. The cops chased and caught her, but Blond Frankie quickly managed to en-gineer another escape from the van; several queens successfully made their way out with him and were swallowed up in the crowd. Tammy Novak was one of them; she ran all the way to Joe Tish’s apartment, where she holed up throughout the weekend. The po-lice handcuffed subsequent prisoners to the inside of the van and succeeded in driving away from the scene to book them at the precinct house. Deputy Inspector Seymour Pine, the ranking offi-cer, nervously told departing police to “just drop them off at the Sixth Precinct and hurry back.” 18 From this point on, the melee broke out in several directions and swiftly mounted in intensity. The crowd, now in full cry, started screaming epithets at the police: “Pigs! Faggot cops!” Sylvia and Craig enthusiastically joined in, Sylvia shouting her lungs out, Craig letting go with a full-throated “Gay Power!” One young gay Puerto Rican went fearlessly up to a policeman and yelled in his face, “What you got against faggots?! We don’t do you nuthin’!” Another teenager started kicking at a cop, frequently missing as the cop held him at arm’s length. One queen mashed an officer with her heel, knocked him down, grabbed his handcuff keys, freed herself, and passed the keys to another queen behind her. 19 By now the crowd had swelled to a mob, and people were picking up and throwing whatever loose objects came to hand: coins, bottles, cans, bricks from a nearby construction site. Some-one even picked up dog shit from the street and threw it in the cops’ direction. As the fever mounted, Zucchi was overheard nervously asking Mario what the hell the crowd was upset about: the Mafia or the police? The police, Mario reassured him. Zucchi gave a big grin of relief and decided to vent some stored-up anger of his own: he egged on bystanders in their effort to rip up a dam-aged fire hydrant, and he persuaded a young kid named Timmy to throw the wire-mesh garbage can nearby. Timmy was not much bigger than the can (and had just come out the weekend before), but he gave it his all—the can went sailing into the plate-glass win-dow (painted black and reinforced from behind by plywood) that stretched across the front of the Stonewall. 20 Stunned and frightened by the crowd’s unexpected fury, the police, at the order of Deputy Inspector Pine, retreated inside the bar. Pine had been accustomed to two or three cops being able to handle with ease any number of cowering gays, but here the crowd wasn’t cowering; it had routed eight cops and made them run for cover. As Pine later said, “I had been in combat situations, [but] there was never any time that I felt more scared than then.” With the cops holed up inside Stonewall, the crowd was now in control of the street, and it bellowed in triumph and long-repressed rage. 21 Craig dashed to a nearby phone booth. Ever conscious of the need for publicity—for visibility—and realizing that a critical mo-ment had arrived, he called all three daily papers: the Times, the Post, and the Daily News,

28

and alerted them that “a major news story was breaking.” Then he ran to his apartment a few blocks away to get his camera.

Jim Fouratt also dashed to the phones—to call his straight, radical-left friends, to tell them that “people were fighting the cops—it was just like Newark!” He urged them to rush down and lend their support (as he had long done for their causes). Then he went into the nearby Ninth Circle and Julius’ to try to get the patrons to come out into the street. But none of them would. Nor did any of his straight radical friends show up.

It taught Jim a bit-ter lesson about how low on the scale of priorities his erstwhile comrades ranked “faggot” concerns.

Gary tried to persuade Sylvia to go home with him to get a change of clothes. “Are you nuts?!” she yelled. “I’m not missing a minute of this— it’s the revolution!” So Gary left to get clothes for both of them. Blond Frankie, meanwhile—perhaps taking his cue from Zucchi—uprooted a loose parking meter and offered it for use as a battering ram against the Stonewall’s door. At nearly the same moment somebody started squirting lighter fluid through the shattered glass window on the bar’s facade, tossing in matches after it. Inspector Pine later referred to this as “throwing Molotov cocktails into the place,” but the only reality that described was the inflamed state of Pine’s nerves. 22 Still, the danger was very real, and the police were badly fright-ened. The shock to self-esteem had been stunning enough; now came an actual threat to physical safety. Dodging flying glass and missiles, Patrolman Gil Weisman, the one cop in uniform, was hit near the eye with a shard, and blood spurted out. With that, the fear turned abruptly to fury. Three of the cops, led by Pine, ran out the front door, which had caved in from

The Night They Raided Stonewall

STONEWALL PIONEERS. AT THE TIME, HOMOSEXUAL ACTS REMAINED ILLEGAL IN EVERY STATE EXCEPT ILLINOIS, AND BARS AND RESTAURANTS COULD GET SHUT DOWN FOR HAVING GAY EMPLOYEES OR SERVING GAY PATRONS.

the battering, and started screaming threats at the crowd, thinking to cow it. But instead a rain of coins and bottles came down, and a beer can glanced off Deputy Inspector Charles Smyth’s head. Pine lunged into the crowd, grabbed somebody around the waist, pulled him back into the doorway, and then dragged him by the hair inside. 23 Ironically, the prisoner was the well-known—and heterosexual—folk singer Dave Van Ronk. Earlier that night Van Ronk had been in and out of the Lion’s Head, a bar a few doors down from Stonewall that catered to a noisy, macho journalist crowd scornful of the “faggots” down the block.

Once the riot got going, the Lion’s Head locked its doors; the management didn’t want faggots moaning and bleeding over the paying customers. As soon as Pine got Van Ronk back into the Stonewall, he angrily accused him of throwing dangerous objects—a cue to Patrolman Weisman to shout that Van Ronk was the one who had cut his eye and then to start punching the singer hard while several other cops held him down. When Van Ronk looked as if he were going to pass out, the police handcuffed him, and Pine snapped, “All right, we book him for assault.” 24 The cops then found a fire hose, wedged it into a crack in the door, and directed the spray at the crowd, thinking that would certainly scatter it.

But the stream was weak and the crowd howled derisively, while inside the cops started slipping on the wet floor. A reporter from The Village Voice, Howard Smith, had retreated inside the bar when the police did; he later wrote that by that point in the evening “the sound filtering in [didn’t] suggest dancing faggots any more; it sound[ed] like a powerful rage bent on vendetta.” By now the Stonewall’s front door was hanging wide open, the plywood brace behind the windows was splintered, and it

30 seemed only a matter of minutes before the howling mob would break in and wreak its vengeance. One cop armed himself with Tony the Sniff ’s baseball bat, the others drew their guns, and Pine stationed several officers on either side of the corridor leading to the front door. One of them growled, “We’ll shoot the first motherfucker that comes through the door.” 25 At that moment an arm reached in through the shattered win-dow, squirted more lighter fluid into the room, and then threw in another lit match.

This time the match caught, and there was a whoosh of flame. Standing only ten feet away, Pine aimed his gun at the receding arm and (he later said) was prepared to shoot when he heard the sound of sirens coming down Christopher Street. At 2:55 A.M. Pine had sent out emergency signal 10-41—a call for help to the fearsome Tactical Patrol Force—and relief was now rounding the corner. 26 The TPF was a highly trained, crack riot-control unit that had been set up to respond to the proliferation of protests against the Vietnam War. Wearing helmets with visors, carrying assorted weapons, including billy clubs and tear gas, its two dozen members all seemed massively proportioned. They were a formidable sight as, linked arm in arm, they came up Christopher Street in a wedge formation that suggested (by design) a Roman legion. In their path, the rioters slowly retreated but—contrary to police expectations—did not break and run. Craig, for one, knelt down in the middle of the street with the camera he’d retrieved from his apartment and, determined to capture the moment, snapped photo after photo of the oncoming TPF minions. 27 As the troopers bore down on him, he scampered up and joined the hundreds of others who scattered to avoid the billy clubs but then raced around the block, doubled back behind the troopers, and pelted them with debris. When the cops realized that a considerable crowd had simply re-formed to their rear, they flailed out angrily at anyone who came within striking distance. But the protesters would not be cowed. The pattern repeated it-self several times: the TPF would disperse the jeering mob only to have it re-form behind them, yelling taunts, tossing bottles and bricks, setting fires in trash cans. When the police whirled around to reverse direction at one point, they found themselves face to face with their worst nightmare: a chorus line of mocking queens, their arms clasped around each other, kicking their heels in the air Rockettes-style and singing at the tops of their sardonic voices:

The Night They Raided Stonewall

We are the Stonewall girls.

We wear our hair in curls.

We wear no underwear We show our pubic hair. . .

We wear our dungarees Above our nelly knees!

32 It was a deliciously witty, contemptuous counterpoint to the TPF’s brute force, a tactic that transformed an otherwise traditionally macho eyefor-an-eye combat and that provided at least the glimpse of a different and revelatory kind of consciousness. Perhaps that was exactly the moment Sylvia had in mind when she later said, “Something lifted off my shoulders.” 28 But the tactic incited the TPF to yet further violence. As they were badly beating up on one effeminate-looking boy, a portion of the angry crowd surged in, snatched the boy away, and prevented the cops from reclaiming him. Elsewhere, a cop grabbed “a wild Puerto Rican queen” and lifted his arm as if to club him. Instead of cowering, the queen yelled, “How would you like a big Spanish dick up your little Irish ass?” The nonplussed cop hesitated just long enough to give the queen time to run off into the crowd. 29 The cops themselves hardly escaped scot-free. Somebody man-aged to drop a concrete block on one parked police car; nobody was injured, but the cops inside were shaken up. At another point, a gold-braided police officer who was being driven around to survey the action had a sack of wet garbage thrown at him through the open window of his car; a direct hit was scored and soggy coffee grounds dripped down the officer’s face as he tried to maintain a stoic expression. Still later, as some hundred people were being chased down Waverly Place by two cops, someone in the crowd suddenly realized the unequal odds and started yelling, “There are two of ’em! Catch ’em! Rip their clothes off! Fuck ’em!” As the crowd took up the cry, the officers fled. 30 Before the police finally succeeded in clearing the streets—for that evening only, it would turn out—a considerable amount of blood had been shed. Among the undetermined number of peo-ple injured was Sylvia’s friend Ivan Valentin; hit in the knee by a policeman’s billy club, he had ten stitches taken at St. Vincent’s Hospital. A teenager named Lenny had his hand slammed in a car door and lost two fingers. Four big cops beat up a young queen so badly—there is evidence that the cops singled out “feminine boys”—that she bled simultaneously from her mouth, nose, and ears. Craig and Sylvia both escaped injury (as did Jim, who hung back on the fringe of the crowd), but so much blood splattered over Sylvia’s blouse that at one point she had to go down to the piers and change into the clean clothes Gary had brought back for her.

Four police officers were also hurt. Most of them sustained mi-nor abrasions from kicks and bites, but Officer Scheu, after being hit with a rolled-up newspaper, had fallen to the cement sidewalk and broken his wrist. When Craig heard that news, he couldn’t resist chuckling over what he called the “symbolic justice” of the injury. Thirteen people (including Dave Van Ronk), seven of them Stonewall employees, were booked at the Sixth Precinct on charges ranging from harassment to resisting arrest to disorderly conduct. At 3:35 A.M., signal 10-41 was canceled, and an uneasy calm settled over the area. It was not to last.

Word of the confrontation spread through the gay grape-vine all day Saturday. Moreover, all three of the dailies wrote about the riot (the Daily News put the story on page one), and local television and radio reported it as well. The extensive coverage brought out the crowds, just as Craig had pre-dicted (and had worked to achieve). All day Saturday, curious knots of people gathered outside the bar to gape at the damage and warily celebrate the implausible fact that, for once, cops, not gays, had

The Night They Raided Stonewall been routed.

The police had left Stonewall a shambles. Jukeboxes, mirrors, and cigarette machines had been smashed; phones were ripped out; toilets were plugged up and overflowing; and shards of glass and debris littered the floors. (According to at least one account, moreover, the police had pocketed all the money from the jukeboxes, cigarette machines, cash register, and safe.) On the boarded-up front window that faced the street, anonymous protesters had scrawled signs and slogans: THEY INVADED OUR RIGHTS, THERE IS ALL COLLEGE BOYS AND GIRLS IN HERE, LEGALIZE GAY BARS, SUPPORT GAY POWER—and newly emboldened same-gender couples were seen holding hands as they anxiously conferred about the meaning of these uncommon new assumptions.

Something like a carnival, an outsized block party, had got-ten going by early Saturday evening in front of the Stonewall. While older, conservative chinos-and-sweater gays watched warily, and some disapprovingly, from the sidelines, “stars” from the previous night’s confrontation reappeared to pose campily for photographs. Handholding and kissing became endemic; cheer-leaders led the crowd in shouts of “Gay Power”; and chorus lines repeatedly belted out refrains of “We are the girls from Stonewall.”

But the cops, including Tactical Patrol Force units, were out in force, were not amused at the antics, and seemed grimfacedly determined not to have a repeat of Friday night’s humiliation. The TPF lined up across the street from the Stonewall, visors in place, batons and shields at the ready.

When the fearless chorus line of queens insisted on yet another refrain, kicking their heels high in the air as if in direct defiance, the TPF moved forward, ferociously pushing their nightsticks into the ribs of anyone who didn’t jump immediately out of their path.

But the crowd had grown too large to be easily cowed or con-trolled.

Thousands of people were by now spilling over the side-walks, including an indeterminate but sizable number of curious straights and a sprinkling of street people gleefully poised to join any kind of developing rampage. When the TPF tried to sweep people away from the front of the Stonewall, the crowd simply repeated the previous night’s strategy of temporarily retreating down a side street and then doubling back on the police. In Craig’s part of the crowd, the idea took hold of blocking off Christopher Street, preventing any vehicular traffic from coming through. When an occasional car did try to bulldoze its way in, the crowd quickly surrounded it, rocking it back and forth so vigorously that the occupants soon proved more than happy to be allowed to retreat.

Craig was enjoying all this hugely until a taxicab edged around the corner from Greenwich Avenue. As the crowd gave the cab a vigorous rocking and a frenzied queen jumped on top of it and started beating on the hood, Craig caught a glimpse inside and saw two terrified passengers and a driver who looked as if he were having a heart attack. Sylvia came on that same scene and glee-fully cheered the queen on. But Craig realized that the cab held innocent people, not fag-hating cops, and he worked with others to free it from the crowd’s grip so it could back out.

From that point on, and in several parts of the crowd simultaneously, all hell broke loose. Sylvia’s friend Marsha P. Johnson climbed to the top of a lamppost and dropped a bag with some-thing heavy in it on a squad car parked directly below, shattering its windshield. Craig was only six feet

34 away and saw the cops jump out of the car, grab some luckless soul who happened to be close at hand, and beat him badly. On nearby Gay Street, three or four cars filled with a wedding party were stopped in their tracks for a while; somebody in the crowd shouted, “We have the right to marry, too!” The unintimidated and decidedly unamused passengers screamed back, angrily threatening to call the police. That produced some laughter (“The police are already here!”) and more shouts, until finally the wedding party was allowed to proceed.

From the park side of Sheridan Square, a barrage of bottles and bricks— seemingly hundreds of them, apparently aimed at the police lines— rained down across the square, injuring several on-lookers but no officers. Jim had returned to the Stonewall scene in the early evening; when the bottle-throwing started, he raced to the area where it seemed to be coming from and—using his experience from previous street actions— tried to persuade the bottle-tossers that they were playing a dangerous game, threaten-ing the lives of the protesters more than those of the police.

They didn’t seem to care. Jim identified them as “straight an-archist types, Weathermen types,” determined “to be really butch about their anger” (unlike those “frightened sissies”), to foment as large-scale and gory a riot as possible. He thought they were pos-sibly “crazies”—or police provocateurs—and he realized it would be ineffective simply to say, “Stop doing this!” So, as he tells it, he tried to temper their behavior by appealing to their macho in-stincts, suggesting that it would be even braver of them to throw their bottles from the front of the line; that way, if the police, taunted by the flying glass, charged the crowd, they could bear the brunt of the attack themselves. The argument didn’t wash; the bottle-throwing continued.

If Jim didn’t want people actually getting hurt, he did want to feed the riot. Still smoldering from the failure of his straight friends to show up the previous night (some of his closeted left--wing gay friends had also done nothing in response to his calls), he wanted this gay riot “to be as good as any riot” his straight onetime comrades had ever put together or participated in. And to that end, he carried with him the tools of the guerrilla trade: marbles (to throw under the hooves of the contingent of mounted police that had by now arrived) and pins (to stick into the horses’ flanks).

But the cops needed no additional provocation; they had been determined from the beginning to quell the demonstration, and at whatever cost in bashed heads and shattered bones. Twice the po-lice broke ranks and charged into the crowd, flailing wildly with their nightsticks; at least two men were clubbed to the ground. The sporadic skirmishing went on until 4:00 A.M., when the police finally withdrew their units from the area. The next day, the New York Times insisted that Saturday night was “less violent” than Friday (even while describing the crowd as “angrier”).

Sylvia too consid-ered the first night “the worst.” But a number of others, including Craig, thought the second night was the more violent one, that it marked “a public assertion of real anger by gay people that was just electric.”

When he got back to his apartment early Sunday morning, his anger and excitement still bubbling, Craig sat down and composed a one-page flyer.

Speaking in the name of the Homophile Youth Movement (HYMN) that he had founded, Craig headlined the flyer, GET THE MAFIA AND THE COPS

The Night They Raided Stonewall OUT OF GAY BARS—a rally-ing cry that would have chilled Zucchi. Using his own money, Craig printed up thousands of the flyers and then set about organizing his two-person teams. He had them out on the streets leafleting passersby by midday on Sunday. They weren’t alone. After the sec-ond night of rioting, it had become clear to many that a major upheaval, a kind of seismic shift, was at hand, and brisk activity was developing in several quarters.

But not all gays were pleased about the eruption at Stonewall. Those satisfied by, or at least habituated to, the status quo pre-ferred to minimize or dismiss what was happening. Many wealthier gays, sunning at Fire Island or in the Hamptons for the weekend, either heard about the rioting and ignored it (as one of them later put it: “No one [at Fire Island Pines] mentioned Stonewall”) or caught up with the news belatedly.

When they did, they tended to characterize the events at Stonewall as “regrettable,” as the de-mented carryings-on of “stoned, tacky queens”— precisely those elements in the gay world from whom they had long since disasso-ciated themselves. Coming back into the city on Sunday night, the beach set might have hastened off to see the nude stage show Oh, Calautta! or the film Midnight Cowboy (in which Jon Voigt played a 42nd Street hustler), titillated by such mainstream daring while oblivious or scornful of the real-life counterparts being acted out before their averted eyes.

Indeed some older gays, and not just the wealthy ones, even sided with the police, praising them for the “restraint” they had shown in not employing more violence against the protesters. As one of the leaders of the West Side Discussion Group purportedly said, “How can we expect the police to allow us to congregate? Let’s face it, we’re criminals. You can’t allow criminals to congre-gate.” Others applauded what they called the “long-overdue” clos-ing of what for years had been an unsightly “sleaze joint.” There are even tales that some of the customers at Julius’, the bar down the street from Stonewall that had long been favored by older gays (“the good girls from the fifties,” as one queen put it), actually held three of the rioters for the police.

Along with Craig’s teams, there were others on the streets of the Village that Sunday who had been galvanized into action and were trying to organize demonstrations or meetings. Left-wing radicals like Jim Fouratt, thrilled with the lack of leadership in evi-dence during the two nights of rioting, saw the chance for a new kind of egalitarian gay organization to emerge. He hoped it would incorporate ideas about gender parity and “rotating leadership” from the burgeoning feminist movement and build, as well, on the long-standing struggle of the Black movement against racism. At the same time, Jim and his fellow gay radicals were not interested in being subsumed any longer under anyone else’s banner. They had long fought for every worthy cause other than their own and—as the events at Stonewall had proven—without any hope of reciprocity. They felt it was time to refocus their energies on themselves.

The Mattachine Society had still another view. With its head-quarters right down the street from the Stonewall Inn, Mattachine was in 1969 pretty much the creature of Dick Leitsch, who had considerable sympathy for New Left causes but none for chal-lenges to his leadership. Randy Wicker, himself a pioneer activist and lately a critic of Leitsch, now joined forces with him to pronounce the events at Stonewall “horrible.” Wicker’s earlier activism had been fueled by the notion that gays were “jes’ folks”— just like straights except for their sexual orientation—and the sight (in

36 his words) “of screaming queens forming chorus lines and kicking, went against everything that I wanted people to think about homosexuals...that we were a bunch of drag queens in the Village acting disorderly and tacky and cheap.” On Sunday those wandering by Stonewall saw a new sign on its boarded-up facade, this one printed in neat block letters:

WE HOMOSEXUALS PLEAD WITH OUR PEOPLE TO PLEASE HELP MAINTAIN PEACEFUL AND QUIET CONDUCT ON THE STREETS OF THE VILLAGE —MATTACHINE. The streets that Sunday evening stayed comparatively quiet, dominated by what one observer called a “tense watchfulness.” Knots of the curious continued to congregate in front of Stonewall, and some of the primping and posing of the previous two nights was still in evidence.

The police seemed spoiling for trouble. “Start something, faggot, just start something,” one cop repeated over and over. “I’d like to break your ass wide open.” (A brave young man pur-portedly yelled, “What a Freudian comment, Officer!”—and then scampered to safety.) Two other cops, cruising in a police car, kept yelling obscenities at passersby, trying to start a fight, and a third, standing on the corner of Christopher Street and Wa-verly Place, kept swinging his nightstick and making nasty remarks about “faggots.”

At 1:00 A.M. the TPF made a largely uncontested sweep of the area, and the crowds melted away. Allen Ginsberg strolled by, flashed the peace sign and, after seeing “Gay Power!” scratched on the front of the Stonewall, expressed satisfaction to a Village Voice reporter: “We’re one of the largest minorities in the country—10 percent, you know. It’s about time we did something to assert ourselves.”

By Sunday, some of the wreckage inside the bar had been cleaned up, and employees had been stationed out on the street to coax patrons back in: “We’re honest businessmen here. We’re American-born boys. We run a legitimate joint here. There ain’t nuttin’ bein’ done wrong in dis place.

Everybody come and see.” Never having been inside the Stonewall, Ginsberg went in and briefly joined the handful of dancers. After emerging, he described the patrons as “beautiful—they’ve lost that wounded look that fags all had ten years ago.” Deputy Inspector Pine later echoed Ginsberg: “For those of us in public morals, things were completely changed...suddenly they were not submissive anymore.”

The Night They Raided Stonewall Andrew Kopkind On Stonewall As revolutions go, the street-fighting that took place around Sheridan Square in Greenwich Village on the night of June 27, 1969, lacked the splendor of the Bastille or the sweep of the Finland Station. State power did not crumble, great leaders did not appear, no clear objective was advanced. A bunch of drag queens and their friends, pulled from the Stonewall gay bar in a police raid, refused to go docilely into the paddy wagons, and all hell broke loose along Christopher Street and the adjoining parks and alleys. Fighting between the queers and the cops resumed on the next night, but that was the extent of the violence. And yet the Stonewall riot must count as a transformative moment of libera-tion, not only for homosexuals, who were the street fighters, but for the entire sexual culture, which broke out of confinement that night as surely as gay people emerged from the closet.

Stonewall was a material metaphor for emergence, visibility, and pride, and its historic power has been its affirmation of gay identity rather than its establishment of a particular homosexual agenda. Unlike the “national days” of other communities, coun-tries, and ethnic groups, the nationwide celebration of the anniver-sary of the riots memorializes an act of legitimization, not an act of parliament, a treaty, or a war. Gay Pride Week, the name for the ob-servance, could hardly be more appropriate.

Although Stonewall came at the very end of a decade of convulsive change and was profoundly informed by the struggles of black Americans, women, radical students, and insurgent movements throughout the Third World, it was in many ways the purest cultural revolution of them all and the precursor of the postmodern politics of identity that proliferated in the decades to follow. Lesbians and gays are surely today’s children of Stonewall, but many more are stepchildren or close cousins. That June night almost a quarter of a century ago now belongs to everyone.

It has taken a generation—or is it now two?—for the crucial significance of Stonewall to emerge from its own gay closet and be seen in the light of the social history of its time. Because the event was so much a revolution of personal identity, it is natural that historians focus on details of personal experience, on the lives of the participants, on the hilarious, humdrum, and sad details of an utterly incongruous melee. In the preceding excerpt, Martin Duberman tells the story of the riot’s beginnings through the accounts of the band of barflies, bartenders, and bouncers, the drags, spear-carriers, and politicos who just happened to be in the same place on the same night and think of themselves as a historic happy few way back on the eve of their own private Agincourt.

Lenin said somewhere that a revolution is a “festival of the op-pressed,” and although Stonewall wasn’t remotely Leninist in any other regard, it was certainly festive, and the crowd that poured out of the bar was definitely low-down. The prominence of drag queens in the vanguard of the insurgency always made theoretical sense: as one of the most marginal, disdained, and isolated sectors of the homosexual world (it could not yet be called a “gay community”), the drags had the least to lose from acting out, or acting up—and perhaps the most to gain. But as much as “straight-appearing” gay men (an epithet that still appears in the personals columns) kept their distance from drag queens, or treated them only as camp objects of amusement, the “chinos-and-penny-loafers” boys, as Duberman calls them, could see that those qualities in the drags that were most despised by the straight world were hidden in all

38 homosexuals in one form or another. The most untempered, outrageous, and flamboyant behavior—and the most oppressed—was thus the most liberating expression of all. In the gay liberation movement that exploded after Stonewall, young lesbians and gay men were urged to “get into their oppression,” to comb the crannies of gay consciousness and sensibility, and to feel solidarity with those who suffered the most.

Stonewall was the beginning of something, but it was also the culmination of a long siege of conflict, during which protest had become a normal way of making politics, and all sorts and sizes of groups had bid for power. Many of the campaigns crossed commu-nal lines, but there was a great deal of fear, a sense of threat, and sometimes an ardent “nationalism” that kept the groups apart. Stonewall is often described as a narrowly constructed, exclusively gay male “happening” (in the sixties sense), but lots of lines were crossed. As Duberman points out, the drag contingent, at least, was remarkably integrated in racial terms. Although the bar was not known as a lesbian hangout, lesbians were sometimes in attendance, and one story suggests that a butch lesbian cross-dresser might have been the instigator of the riot. Jim Fouratt, one of Duberman’s witnesses, reported that he was unable to get his friends from “the Left” to join in the second-night fight, but if leftists didn’t “get it” from the start, in less than a year gay liberation was on the agenda at every radical event, and Fouratt himself—as a gay politico—was a star speaker at the legendary “Free the Panthers” rally on the New Haven green on May Day, 1970.

Craig Rodwell, another witness, said in an earlier interview, for the documentary film Before Stonewall, that what was most magical about the Stonewall riot was that “everything came together that night.” Somewhere in the existential depths of that brawl of screaming transvestites were all the antiwar marches, the sit-ins, the smoke-ins, the freedom rides, the bra-burnings, the levitation of the Pentagon, the endless meetings and broken hearts. Not only that, but the years of gay men and lesbians locking them-selves in windowless, unnamed bars; writing dangerous, anonymous novels and articles; lying about their identity to their families, their bosses, the military; suffering silently when they were found out; hiding and seeking and winking at each other, or drinking and dying by themselves. And sometimes, not often, braving it out and surviving. It’s absolutely astonishing to think that on one early summer’s night in New York that world ended, and a new one began.

The Night They Raided Stonewall

1. “Frank Esselourne, “Doorman Remembers,” Gay Community News, June 23, 1979. “Bobby Shades” also slept with men, and dated Chuck Shaheen at one point (interview, Nov. 20, 1991).

2. Interview with Ryder Fitzgerald, May 5, 1992 (Ernie and Vito); New York Sunday News, June 29, 1969 (Verra); Shaheen interview, Nov. 20, 1991. According to Shaheen, it was Ernie, somewhat older than the others, who dealt with Matty the Horse. In regard to the watered drinks, Shaheen puts it this way: “We didn’t throw the bottles away. We reused those bottles all the time. We kept a real bottle of Dewar’s and a real bottle of Smirnoff—for special customers.”

3. Interviews with Tommy Lanigan-Schmidt, May 2, 1992, and Martin Boyce, May 19, 1992; Scherker interview with Danny Garvin, Dec. 15, 1988 (courtesy Scherker Estate). Lanigan-Schmidt added that the police cars, which then had one large light on top of the hood, were known as “bubble-gum machines.”

According to Shaheen (interview Nov. 20, 1991), there was bad blood between Fat Tony and the owners of the Sanctuary; when they took him on a tour of the about-to-open Sanctuary, Tony had Shaheen accompany” “him with firebombs strapped to his body. He distributed them strategically during the tour, but they failed to detonate.

4. Interview with Joe Tish, Nov. 15, 1991. Tiffany, who had silicon breast implants, lived for a while with Fat Tony and Chuck Shaheen. She once tried suicide and had to be taken out by ambulance; Tony’s father “went through the roof ” (Shaheen interview, Nov. 20, 1991).

5. Will Hermes, “Summer ’69: Sweet Stone(wall) Soul Music,” Windy City Times, June 22, 1989. Tommy Lanigan-Schmidt, at the time a dirt-poor street queen (in 1992, a well-known artist), described in our interview of May 2 the various hurdles he had to get over during a given night at Stonewall: getting admitted at the door; hurrying by the coat check to avoid paying the twenty-five-cent charge; evading the waiters’ constant pressure to buy drinks. Many of the queens had a set routine for not having to buy drinks they couldn’t afford: They would find discarded cans of beer, or glasses, and hold them; a beer can was preferable, because[…]

6. Interviews with Sascha L. (Aug. 26, 1991) and Shaheen (Nov. 20, 1991). Bebe Scarpi (phone interview, Aug. 22, 1990) also confirms that “a few lesbians did go to Stonewall.” The quote about “territory” is from an unidentified lesbian, one of the many “testimonies” about Stonewall recorded by Michael Scherker at the Lesbian and Gay Community Services Center on May 13, 1989 (tape courtesy Scherker Estate).

7. Testimony of Jerry [?] and an unidentified man on “Stonewall Reunion” tape made by Scherker at the Lesbian and Gay Community Services Center on June 13, 1989; Scherker with Joseph Dey, June 6,

1989 (tapes courtesy Scherker Estate).

8. Scherker interview with Harry Beard, Aug. 3, 1988; see also the reminiscences of Beard, Gene Huss, and Don Knapp in Mike Long, “The Night the Girls Said No!” San Francisco Sentinel, June 22, 1989.

9. Howard Smith, “Full Moon over Stonewall,” The Village Voice, July 3, 1969 (First Division); interview with Chuck Shaheen, Nov. 20, 1991; Scherker interview with Beard, Aug. 3, 1988; the time is established by the Sixth Precinct police records, obtained by Michael Scherker (courtesy Scherker Estate).

10. Interview with Ryder Fitzgerald, May 5, 1992.

Fitzgerald also heard Ernie swear that[...]

11. Chris Davis interview with Ed Murphy, 1987 [?], tape courtesy Davis; interview with Sascha L., August 26, 1991.

12. Interview with Ryder Fitzgerald, May 5, 1992.

Frankie later died in a bomb “accident.”

13. Interview with Shaheen, Nov. 20, 1991.

14. “Queen Power: Fags Against Police in Stonewall Bust,” RAT, July 1969 (for guy in T-shirt); New York Times, June 29, 1969; Lucian Truscott IV, “Gay Power Comes to Sheridan Square,” The Village Voice, July 3, 1969.

15. Bebe Scarpi (phone interview, Aug. 22, 1990) confirms Sylvia’s description: “Tammy hit the cop and was so stoned she didn’t know what she was doing—or didn’t care.”

16. Though Harry Beard seems in general to be a reliable witness with a precise memory, there are some small discrepancies between his interview version (with Michael Scherker, Aug. 3, 1988; tape courtesy Scherker Estate) and his printed version (Mike Long, “The Night the Girls Said No!” San Francisco Sentinel, June 22, 1989). In the printed version, for example, Beard says the cop “slapped her upside the head with something—I can’t recall if it was a blackjack or a nightstick or what it was”; in the interview version he describes the[...]

17. Bob Kohler (interview Aug. 20, 1990) is another who denies the involvement of a lesbian, but Kohler does add that Tony Lightfoot, “a lesbian who people thought was a drag queen,” used to hang out with the queens in the small park opposite the Stonewall bar.

18. Interviews with Joe Tish, Nov. 15, 1991, and Martin Boyce, May 19, 1992; Rivera and Pine testimonies on Isay’s show Remembering Stonewall. The Pine quote is from Howard Smith, “Full Moon,” Village Voice, July 3, 1969. Seymour Pine had been assigned in 1968 as deputy inspector in charge of enforcing public morals (that is, enforcing all laws relating to vice, gambling, prostitution, narcotics, and homo-

sexuality) in the police department’s First Division, which ran from Thirty-eighth Street in Manhattan to the Battery. According to Sascha L., Pine “worked both ways . . . he used to have his friend pick up money [from gay bars] in a patrol car” (interview, Aug. 26, 1991).

Once again, there are confusions and contradictions in the evidence. For example, in Blond Frankie’s printed account (Frank Esselourne, “Doorman Remembers,” Gay Community News, June 23, 1979), he credits only himself with engineering the escape from the van, and has the arrested queens following him out.

19. Scherker interview with “D.D.,” Dec. 24, 1988 (Puerto Rican), and Robert Rivera, June 10, 1989 (mashed cop); Isay show, Remembering Stonewall.

20. Interviews with Shaheen, Nov. 20, 1991 (Zucchi) and Sascha L., Aug. 26, 1991 (dog shit); Scherker interviews, courtesy Scherker[...]

21. Frank Esselourne, “Doorman Remembers”; Pine’s testimony on Isay show, Remembering Stonewall.

22. Mike Long, “The Night the Girls Said No!”; Pine testimony on Isay show, Remembering Stonewall.

Martin Boyce (interview May 19, 1992) credits “the demented” “Miss New Orleans” and two other queens with tearing up the parking meter.

23. Howard Smith, “Full Moon over the Stonewall”; Sunday News, June 29, 1991; New York Times, June 28, 1969.

24. Phone interviews with Jim Slaven (sous-chef at the Lion’s Head), Sept. 3, 1990, and Nick Browne (bartender at the Lion’s Head), Sept. 12, 1990; Smith, “Full Moon over the Stonewall.”

25. Smith, “Full Moon over the Stonewall.”

26. Smith, “Full Moon over the Stonewall”; police records, June 28, 1969 (time; signal; courtesy Scherker Estate).

27. Police records (courtesy Scherker Estate) give the names of the TPF squad members. They came from three different precincts, the Fourth, Fifth, and Tenth. Sad to report, none of Craig Rodwell’s photos came out.

28. Marty Robinson, “I Remember Stonewall,” San Francisco Examiner, June 4, 1989; Maida Tilchen, “Mythologizing Stonewall,” Gay Community News, June 23, 1979.”

29. The incidents described in this and the following paragraph are from Dick Leitsch, “Police Raid on New York Club Sets Off First Gay Riot,” The Advocate, Sept. 1969, p. 3. According to Ryder Fitzgerald (interview, May 5, 1992), Blond Frankie told him

MARSHA P. JOHNSON AT THE STONEWALL INN, 1973

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The Night They Raided Stonewall

“Becoming human is becoming individual, and we become individual under the guidance of cultural patterns . . . which give form, order, point, and direction to our lives. . . . [But] we must . . . descend into detail, past the misleading tags, past the metaphysical types, past the empty similarities, to grasp firmly the essential character of not only the various cultures but the various sorts of individuals within each culture, if we wish to encounter humanity face to face."

—CLIFFORD GEERTZ THE INTERPRETATION OF CULTURE

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Andy Warhol's Defiant Hopes for Queer Art

The Night They Raided Stonewall

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Andy Warhol's Defiant Hopes for Queer Art

Blake Gopnik

IN AN ESSAY IN “ANDY WARHOL: LOVE, SEX, AND DESIRE,” OUT FROM TASCHEN, GOPNIK ARGUES THAT WARHOL HAD GOOD REASON TO BELIEVE THAT DARING GAY IMAGERY WAS WHERE ART OUGHT TO HAVE BEEN HEADING. THIS ESSAY IS EXCERPTED FROM ANDY WARHOL: LOVE, SEX, AND DESIRE. DRAWINGS 1950–1962 PUBLISHED BY TASCHEN.

ANDY WARHOL, 1957.

Andy Warhol's Defiant Hopes for Queer Art

46 One day, somewhere maybe around the summer of 1952, a rising commercial illustrator named Andy Warhol began to angle for a show of his “real” art in a new avant-garde space in New York. That was the Tanager Gallery, an artists’ co-op that counted several of Warhol’s art-school classmates as members. One of them was Joe Groell, who had also been a New York roommate of Warhol’s. He remembered Warhol approaching him with pictures of boys kissing that Groell found frankly embarrassing. Warhol’s boy-on-boy images “weren’t anything we wanted the gallery to be associated with,” Groell recalled, and he told Warhol the same.

Warhol tried again a few months later. This time he chose to make a cold call, wandering into the Tanager one winter’s day and presenting his portfolio to George Ortman, the member who was sitting the gallery. Ortman recalled being shown a picture of “two male full figures embracing.” He told Warhol there was no chance that such stuff could win a show at the Tanager, adding that the gallery was entirely devoted to abstraction — a lie, actually, but a white one that must have been meant to soften the sting of rejection.

Sting or no sting, Warhol tried for the Tanager yet a third time, more than half a decade later. In December of 1959, Philip Pearlstein, another former roommate of Warhol’s who had been a much closer college friend, scored a hit with a Tanager show. The day after that show got praised in the New York Times, Warhol spent $300 on one of its pictures and was soon asking Pearlstein to get the Tanager to give him a chance at an exhibition. Yet again, Warhol was offering up gay imagery: pictures of boys “with their tongues in each others’ mouth,” according to Pearlstein.

But despite what Pearlstein described as his own best efforts, the gallery’s “macho oriented” members just could not see their way to showing such work. With the manly abstractionist Willem de Kooning established as the art scene’s “big dog” — in a studio next door to the Tanager, in fact — there was no way they would take a chance on a figurative artist who flaunted his effeminacy.

Three attempts at showing his “serious” art in a “serious” gallery; three portfolios of gay-themed pictures; three rejections. Warhol’s Tanager flailings have often been billed as the product of a certain cluelessness on his part, and on a gay identity that he just did not have the capacity — or the savvy — to repress, even when art-world success depended on it. But the explanation for Warhol’s triple attempt may be less psychological or biographical than properly artistic. He had good reason to believe that the daring gay imagery he was proposing was where art ought to have been heading at that particular juncture, and that if he only kept pushing his idea long enough, the art world would sign on. He was right, but also 50 years too early.

Warhol came honestly by his belief in the potential of queer subjects.

Despite the dominance of abstraction out in the wider art world, the Pittsburgh of his youth had presented him with an artistic cutting edge that was all about figuration and the substantial content it could carry. The local art museum held prestigious annual surveys that favored socially conscious work. The political imagery of Ben Shahn was given especially big play there, and in the 1950s Shahn’s art was widely seen as the model for Warhol’s. Outlines, Pittsburgh’s superb if short-lived contemporary gallery, showed such content-heavy, progressive material as Soviet film and Käthe Kollwitz’s prints of “saddened women wrecked by war,” all meant to advance the founder’s belief that “modern arts, like modern sciences, bear directly on our lives and thinking.”

ANDY WARHOL, “UNKNOWN MALE WITH STAMPS” 1958.

Andy Warhol's Defiant Hopes for Queer Art

48 The Carnegie Institute of Technology, where Warhol got his art degree, was equally dedicated to the social value and content of its students’ work. Warhol recalled being especially inspired by the art history course taught by a painter named Balcomb Greene, using a textbook that stressed the social functions and meanings of art and that described art history as “cultural and social geography.” Greene had first made his mark in the 1930s with a quite different approach to art, helping to found the American Abstract Artists group and to promote its uncompromising rejection of figuration. By the spring of 1947, however, just as Warhol’s sophomore year was winding down, Greene was turning his back on that past in a series of paintings based on photos of nude women that, as the New York Times wrote, stood as “his answer to the trend back toward the realm of natural appearances.” At almost the same moment that Abstract Expressionism was set to take over New York, and the world, Greene and others were sensing a countervailing tendency that was pushing vanguard art back toward contact with reality. This is the vanguard that Warhol was trying to push still further ahead with the pictures of boys he offered the Tanager.

Already at Tech, Warhol would have got hints that gay culture might be involved in that push. Although Greene himself was straight, his course notes show that Warhol would have heard him lecture on “the homosexual as an artist, and in the art world.” Warhol’s friend and classmate George Klauber was fully out; Warhol recalled that it was Klauber who first introduced him to the gay scene in New York, once the two met up there after graduation. On top of being gay, Klauber was also the most culturally advanced of Warhol’s classmates, fully informed about Picasso, Mondrian, and Proust in a way that his classmates — and professors — might not have been.

Warhol very likely viewed Klauber’s sexuality and sophistication as connected. In The Homosexual in America, a gay confessional published less than two years after Warhol finished at Tech, the author wrote about his community’s sense that “Our gay world is actually a superior one ... that homosexuals are usually of superior artistic and intellectual abilities.

Everywhere we look, we seize upon outstanding examples of brilliant people, either in our own circles or in the public domain, who are gay, or are supposed to be gay.” In Pittsburgh, Warhol would have found evidence to support such a view.

Among several gay instructors at Tech, Perry Davis had been both the most openly queer and the most obviously and deeply invested in the latest moves and news of the wider art world. Most weekends, he invited his students to gatherings in his home, where they found support for their most avant-garde, even Dada ideas. At one such get-together, Warhol showed up with his hair dyed emerald, a move all his peers would have read as an obvious nod to a new movie called The Boy With Green Hair, whose title character suffers persecution, even beatings, because of his difference from his peers. In the movie, that queered character woke up one day to find himself altered, and he clearly wished that he were still “normal.” At Tech, Warhol was happy to take on his own alteration: not waking to green hair, that is, but choosing to green it himself; not trying to blend in, but wearing nail polish and a pink suit that would make sure he didn’t. One of his senior-year paintings was a full-frontal self-portrait that depicted him as a grade-school child, entirely naked except for a pair of girls’ Mary Janes and with his pinky stuck far up his nose, in obvious contempt for all the niceties. This was art, queerness, and rebellion all wrapped up in one carefully crafted package.

ANDY WARHOL, “UNTITLED (FEET WITH CAMPBELL’S SOUP CAN)” 1960.

Andy Warhol's Defiant Hopes for Queer Art

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ANDY WARHOL, “UNTITLED (MALE PORTRAIT)” 1956.

Andy Warhol's Defiant Hopes for Queer Art

ANDY WARHOL, “STANDING MALE NUDE TORSO” 1950S.

ANDY WARHOL, “UNKNOWN MALE” 1950S.

52 Warhol’s years at Tech had taught him that, in any modern art worthy of the name, mainstream rejection and avant-garde excellence were supposed to go together. As Balcomb Greene once said, “I advocate arrogance, not arrogance in painting, but complete arrogance,” and he welcomed any social consequences that might follow. (He and his sculptor wife, who dared to call herself Peter, were once arrested for punching a cop during a raid on a speakeasy.) Gays in Pittsburgh knew as much about mainstream rejection, and its sometimes life-or-death consequences, as anyone else, anywhere else. While Warhol was in college, two local judges declared homosexuality to be “society’s greatest menace,” triggering the creation of a vicious new police squad whose only job was to root that menace out — via shootings, beatings, or extortion, if need be.

So as Warhol first made his way to New York, just then emerging as a rival to Paris as the art world’s capital, his head would have been filled with the idea that significant art ought to involve significant, even defiant content, and that the most defiant content of all might involve queerness.

Not too long after his arrival, Warhol had found some New York confirmation for a connection between queerness and the avant-garde. In the summer of 1952, he actually won a solo show — his first — thanks to a portfolio of images probably not too far from the ones he first took to the Tanager around the same time, and which he assembled into an exhibition called Fifteen Drawings Based on the Writings of Truman Capote.

The gallery hosting his show, called the Hugo, was known for its dedication to the most radical of European modernism, which still had shock value in New York: Bloodflames, a notorious group show at the Hugo, had been reviewed as “the extreme of the extreme” and earned the Times headline “Modernism Rampant.” That “rampant” might as easily have been applied to the gallery’s owner, a wildly flamboyant former ballet dancer named Alexander Iolas, who claimed to have offered Warhol that first exhibition right after spotting him on the street as a kindred spirit.

Bringing together radical modernism, blue-velvet walls, and an extravagantly fay owner, the Hugo Gallery that welcomed Warhol’s Capote drawings could only have confirmed the connection he had made at Tech between queerness and avant-garde promise. It’s no wonder that Warhol’s failure to connect at the Tanager, a lesser venue than the Hugo by most standards, might not have completely discouraged him.

In 1950s art circles, it was well established that the inconvenient, even time-wasting labors of commercial art had the upside of letting serious artists get on with their “independent work, free of economic care,” as the catalogue to one notable exhibition put it. In Warhol’s case, even as he made his name and fortune in safely salable illustration, his personal projects were indeed independent, in the extreme, and distinctly uncommercial. If boys kissing boys got him nowhere in public — even his tamer Hugo pictures had barely been reviewed — in private his art went much further than mere osculation. This current volume’s gay imagery, ranging from merely suggestive to frankly pornographic, represents just a small sampling from the many hundreds of queer pictures that survive from Warhol’s 1950s art, and even those represent only a fraction of what he must have produced in the same genre, since we know of several later moments when Warhol destroyed piles of his early work.

Endless stories have come down to us about the overheated drawing sessions that provided Warhol’s subject matter. “Andy had this great passion for drawing people’s cocks and he had pads and pads and pads of drawings of people’s lower regions,” said a queer friend and assistant

ANDY WARHOL, “MALE NUDE LOWER TORSO” 1956–57.

Andy Warhol's Defiant Hopes for Queer Art

54 of Warhol’s. “They’re drawings of the penis, the balls and everything, and there’d be a little heart on them or tied with a little ribbon. ... Every time he got to know somebody, even as a friend sometimes, he’d say, ‘Let me draw your cock.’ ... They’d drop their pants, and Andy would make a drawing. That was it. And then he’d say, ‘Thank you.’”

Warhol had begged one new acquaintance to reveal his “big meat” so he could draw it. “And before I knew it — we were all very young and silly — I was sitting with my pants down, with a daffodil wound around my dick.

That was my first meeting with Andy.” These accounts, and several others like them that are much less demure, have always seemed to bill Warhol’s dick drawings as the product of an amusing, hands-off voyeurism — as something closer to a sexual and social practice, that is, than to a truly artistic one. There may be some germ of truth in that, but it’s counterbalanced by the real avant-gardist dividends that the drawings paid to art lovers with the sense to understand them — a group that, in the 1950s, may have included Warhol himself as just about its sole member.

The 1950s were, after all, the heyday of formalist criticism — of talk that was all and only about such things as color, form, and composition. Novelty in style was the mark of important art. And as critics complained at the time, Warhol’s drawings didn’t have much new to say on that front: Their style had strong and obvious roots in earlier innovations by the likes of Ben Shahn, Henri Matisse, and Jean Cocteau. What the critics were not ready to see — and mostly couldn’t handle even once Pop came along — was that Warhol’s innovation lay in using accepted styles, sometimes almost no style at all, to give a transparent window onto the novel content he wanted to show. Without the distractions of style, that is, Warhol could play a game of show-and-tell that was much more about showing than about how it chose to tell. Just pointing at what matters to you in the world — simple ostension, to borrow a term from philosophy — became Warhol’s radically new aesthetic gambit. It reached its maturity with the uninflected, style-free pointing of his Campbell’s soups and Brillo boxes, but it got its start in the drawings of his gay friends.

Warhol did eventually get to show a sampling, at least, of his queer drawings, in an exhibition called Studies for a Boy Book. The exhibition seems to have been mostly chaste portraits of Warhol’s crushes, with maybe a few nudes with pubic hair and nipples romantically covered in hearts.

This was the first of several shows that Warhol received at the Bodley Gallery, owned by a man who had assisted Iolas in mounting the Capote show at the Hugo. Warhol’s Boy Book exhibition ran for just two weeks, in 1956, beginning on Valentine’s Day, which gives some indication of the gay clientele that the gallery appealed to. It showed work by Stephen Tennant, the queer English dandy, and by an artist who did “tender and observant, slightly obsessive paintings of adolescent body builders,” according to a rare Bodley review in the Times.

The Bodley was just up the street from Serendipity café, a favorite locale for Warhol and the scene’s other “window-decorator types” (that’s what Capote himself called them), and not far from the so-called Bird Circuit of gay bars in the same neighborhood. That did not bode well for the exhibition’s reception out in the wider world. One newspaper gave it a review that counted all of 33 words, four of which proclaimed it to be “in sometimes doubtful taste.” The prestigious Art News magazine gave it one more word than that, while omitting almost all description of what the drawings actually depicted; while a review in the Times, any New York artist’s holy grail, went on for a whole 36 words, but with no more

Andy Warhol's Defiant Hopes for Queer Art specifics than a nod to the drawings as being “sly” and full of “private meaning” in a Jean Cocteau mode — code, for those few who could read it, for the drawings’ gay slant.

So the lesson that Warhol must have taken from this first “success” at the Bodley, coupled with his multiple rejections at the Tanager, is that an audience for this, his most truly radical work, could be found only within a gay ghetto. And that was simply an insufficient audience for a ferociously ambitious artist like Warhol, especially since the modernist transgression of his gay imagery seemed to be taken, in homosexual circles, as evidence of nothing more than someone having some good, queer fun.

That may explain why, as Warhol ramped up his hunt for fine-art success in the early 1960s, the Pop pictures he devised — still bravely representational and content filled — had only the subtlest traces of gay content.

(The Campbell’s soup can, with its fin-de-siècle label, was read by some gays as a camp icon; Warhol included a dishy musleman in a painting not too long after the Bodley showed its bodybuilder paintings.)

Roy Lichtenstein, Warhol’s colleague-in-Pop, remembered how their new movement was born of a desire to shock, in a buzzing art world where that had become all but impossible: “It was hard to get a painting that was despicable enough so that no one would hang it — everybody was hanging everything. ... The one thing everyone hated was commercial art.” So that, of course, is what Warhol and his peers built their revolution around. Yet the one thing “everyone” hated even more than commercialism — hated so much that its shock value was too great to be safely incorporated into the latest vanguard of American art — was gay culture.

Only the outrageous, unlikely success of Pop art, and the gradual advent of a full-blown ’60s counterculture, gave Warhol permission to venture into the public homoerotics of films such as Sleep and Blow Job.

“Everybody knows that I’m a queen,” Warhol said. But it took him almost until his death to say it.

ANDY WARHOL, “SEATED MALE NUDE” 1950S.

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Elle Pérez's Search for Intensity

58

Elle Pérez's Search for Intensity Larissa Pham

ELLE PEREZ. HOBBES, 2015/2018.

60 TOP

“I always forget that I can use my actual life in my work,” Elle Pérez says to me, in the kitchen of their live-work studio space in Brooklyn. Pérez is putting together lunch—a salad, sauteed broccoli, and a rosy slab of perfectly seared salmon—while their cat bats a paw over my tape recorder.

In Pérez’s earlier practice, making art was often about being in the right place at the right time: a queer sanctuary in Tennessee; backstage at nightclubs and the ballroom scene; ringside at entertainment-wrestling matches in the Bronx. “But it’s about looking at what’s closest to you,” Pérez continues. “Look under your nose! Just look down!” Their most recent body of work, in contrast to the site-specific shoots they’ve worked with before, considers how the themes and formal qualities that interest them are embedded in the fabric of ordinary life.

ELLE PEREZ. TATTOO ELIZABETH, 2016/2018.

"Perez is motivated by more than representation."

Pérez’s words might surprise viewers first encountering the young Puerto-Rican American photographer’s work. Their images—intimately wrought slices of life and portraits of the artist’s friends and community—can appear effortless and naturalistic, akin to documentary photography. Yet Pérez is motivated by more than representation. Carefully staged, and often the result of collaboration between photographer and subject, their work depicts the undercurrents of language, expression, and performance that transform us into who we constantly seek to become. In an open conversation, centered on the subject, Pérez creates portraits that illuminate both character and agency.

In one black-and-white photograph, a person lies on a couch, their face turned away from the camera. Outside of the frame, someone straddles their back, knees bent. The focal point of the image is the first person’s hand, which curls protectively around the edge of a pillow. It’s a snapshot of intimate, unknowable grace: the subject’s face turned away, fingers clenched in anticipation of pleasure or pain. It’s also a moment, Pérez reveals to me, of physical transformation. Barely visible on one freckled shoulder is a fresh stick-and-poke tattoo: a pair of initials. Easily unnoticed by a casual observer, the tattoo is the entire point of the photograph. It moves the image from a depiction of physical closeness to an invitation to a conversation about body modification, marking, and community.

In this moment—altering, pushing, and manipulating the body—the idea of self-expression enters the work. The theme of expression through performance, especially in conjunction with the body and its modification, runs through Pérez’s work. In one of Pérez’s best-known photographs, Binder, the eponymous garment hangs on a white wire hanger against the backdrop of an empty shower stall. Thinned with age and darkened by wear, the binder takes on a presence of its own. Weighted with the aura of the body, it becomes a stand-in for not only the body but also its effect on the body: constriction, transformation, presentation. Paradoxically, it’s through this restrictive binding that gender fluidity can be performed. As viewers, we sense the body’s desire in this image, hovering like a ghost.

RIGHT

ELLE PEREZ. WATER BODY, 2016/2018.

BOTTOM

ELLE PEREZ. BINDER, 2015/2018.

Elle Pérez's Search for Intensity

62

Elle Pérez's Search for Intensity TOP

ELLE PEREZ. T, 2018.

"A constant current within Pérez's work is an exploration of physical intensity."

“I’m always drawn to intensity. I channel my own desire for intensity that comes out in the work,” Pérez tells me. This intensity takes many forms, including strong emotions: some of Pérez’s portraits, especially those that originate from their relationship to the sitter, can feel almost unbearably close, as though viewers are eavesdropping on a private conversation between lovers or friends. Yet a constant current within Pérez’s work is an exploration of physical intensity—specifically, the idea of pushing the body to its limits to find a kind of self-expression.

"The image's character changes once more, suggesting a collaboration within a performance. . ."

LEFT

ELLE PEREZ. UNTITLED (JUNIOR), 2014/2018.

Pérez’s photographs of entertainment wrestlers in the Bronx exemplify this theme. In this sport, each bout is meticulously choreographed, each move rehearsed. Out of these practices, a fight scene emerges. Pérez’s images of these wrestlers convey an exquisite balance of tenderness and violence. In Untitled (Junior) (2014/2018), a wrestler on his back has his eyes closed and his hands crossed over the foot that steps on his neck.

If one ignores the foot (and the figure to which it belongs), the subject seems nearly angelic—long eyelashes and tight curls standing out sharply in the photograph’s wide focus—and in peaceful repose. Yet the foot turns the composition toward violence and asks the viewer to consider the uses of pain.

Looking closer, one can see that the wrestler’s hand is holding the foot that steps upon his neck; his fingers are fanned across it, as in a gesture of support. Now the image’s character changes once more, suggesting a collaboration within a performance, a gesture shared between two actors. One wonders what dialogue they had, to get to this place.

BOTTOM

ELLE PEREZ. IAN, 2017/2018.

My lunchtime conversation with Pérez turns to how one deals with the fact of a body, not just in art but also in life. When I mention that I’ve recently rediscovered running, Pérez immediately relates to this, describing a newfound Muay Thai practice. “It’s been really nice to push my body through something as intense as Muay Thai,” they tell me. “It’s not about aggression, which I really appreciate.” Rather, Pérez explains, it’s about that same desire for intensity being channeled into a productive, healing place.

64 As in Binder (2015/2018) sometimes the body takes other forms. In the photograph titled Soft Stone (2015/2018), two rocks, nestled together, jut out of water, appearing like phalluses; it’s an image that’s twinned in another photograph, a self-portrait for you (2016/2018). Sometimes, artifacts of lived experience are written on the body, like surgery scars, piercings, and tattoos. These marks are evidence of the agency of the body.

As Pérez prepares a series of work for inclusion in the 2019 Whitney Biennial, they describe a group of photographs that display a quiet, subtle intensity. The new work includes images that thoroughly engage with the body—including a homage to Catherine Opie’s depictions of sadomasochism—and several portraits, composed with the care and collaboration with their subjects that’s a hallmark of Pérez’s practice. Says Pérez, “This is a process of following.” It is a process of allowing the subject to guide the work, without the work speaking in place of the subject. It is a process of intensely looking at the people, places, and objects that surround us and the choices that we all make, to move ever closer to who we wish to become.

ELLE PEREZ. SOFT STONE, 2015/2018.

Elle Pérez's Search for Intensity

ELLE PEREZ. A SELF PORTRAIT FOR YOU, 2016/2018.

Zanele Muholi

Devan Shimoyama

Cathrine Opie

David Wojnarowicz

Elle Pérez

David Hockney

Robert Mapplethorpe

Keith Haring

Artist Bio

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Elle Pérez's Search for Intensity

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Keith Haring

Keith Haring

Keith Allen Haring (May 4, 1958 – February 16, 1990) was an American artist whose pop art and graffiti-like work grew out of the New York City street culture of the 1980s. Much of his work includes sexual allusions that turned into social activism. He achieved this by using sexual images to advocate for safe sex and AIDS awareness.

Haring’s work grew to popularity from his spontaneous drawings in New York City subways—chalk outlines of figures, dogs, and other stylized images on blank black advertising-space backgrounds. He also painted his figures on the lower part of the subway walls sitting on the floor.

After public recognition he created larger scale works, such as colorful murals, many of them commissioned. His imagery has “become a widely recognized visual language”. His later work often addressed political and societal themes—especially homosexuality and AIDS—through his own iconography.

Haring died on February 16, 1990, of AIDS-related complications. In 2014 Haring was one of the inaugural honorees in the Rainbow Honor Walk, a walk of fame in San Francisco’s Castro neighborhood noting LGBTQ people who have “made significant contributions in their fields.” In June 2019, Haring was one of the inaugural fifty American “pioneers, trailblazers, and heroes” inducted on the National LGBTQ Wall of Honor within the Stonewall National Monument (SNM) in New York City’s Stonewall Inn.

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KEITH HARRING, BILL T. JONES BODY PAINTING. 1983.

KEITH HARING WITH LA2. TONY SHAFRAZI ANNOUNCEMENT 1982, 1982.

Keith Haring

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Keith Haring

KEITH HARING. TONY SHAFRAZI GALLERY, EXHIBITION POSTER, 1984.

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KEITH HARING. RETROSPECT, 1989.

Keith Haring

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Keith Haring

KEITH HARING. “IGNORANCE = FEAR”, 1989.

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David Hockney

David Hockney

David Hockney is an English painter, draftsman, printmaker, stage designer, and photographer. As an important contributor to the pop art movement of the 1960s, he is considered one of the most influential British artists of the 20th century.

Because he frequently went to the movies with his father as a child, Hockney once quipped that he was raised in both Bradford and Hollywood. He was drawn to the light and the heat of California, and first visited Los Angeles in 1963. He officially moved there in 1966. The swimming pools of L.A. were one of his favorite subjects, and he became known for large, iconic works such as A Bigger Splash. His expressionistic style evolved, and by the 1970s, he was considered more of a realist.

In addition to pools, Hockney painted the interiors and exteriors of California homes. In 1970, this led to the creation of his first “joiner,” an assemblage of Polaroid photos laid out in a grid. Although this medium would become one of his claims to fame, he stumbled upon it by accident. While working on a painting of a Los Angeles living room, he took a series of photos for his own reference, and fixed them together so he could paint from the image. When he finished, however, he recognized the collage as an art form unto itself, and began to create more.

Hockney was an adept photographer, and he began working with photography more extensively. By the mid 1970s, he had all but abandoned painting in favor of projects involving photography, lithographs, and set and costume design for the ballet, opera and theater.

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David Hockney

DAVID HOCKNEY, CHRISTOPHER ISHERWOOD AND DON BACHARDY. 1968

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DAVID HOCKNEY, A BIGGER SPLASH. 1967

David Hockney

DAVID HOCKNEY, DOMESTIC SCENE, LOS ANGELES. 1963

DAVID HOCKNEY, CLEANING TEETH, EARLY EVENING (10PM) W11. 1962

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David Hockney

DAVID HOCKNEY, MAN IN SHOWER IN BEVERLY HILLS. 1964

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David Hockney

DAVID HOCKNEY, PORTRAIT OF AN ARTIST (POOL WITH TWO FIGURES). 1972

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David Wojnarowicz

David Wojnarowicz

Beginning in the late 1970s, David Wojnarowicz (1954–1992) created a body of work that spanned photography, painting, music, film, sculpture, writing, and activism. Largely self-taught, he came to prominence in New York in the 1980s, a period marked by creative energy, financial precariousness, and profound cultural changes. Intersecting movements—graffiti, new and no wave music, conceptual photography, performance, and neo-expressionist painting—made New York a laboratory for innovation. Wojnarowicz refused a signature style, adopting a wide variety of techniques with an attitude of radical possibility. Distrustful of inherited structures—a feeling amplified by the resurgence of conservative politics—he varied his repertoire to better infiltrate the prevailing culture.

DAVID WOJNAROWICZ WITH TOM WARREN, SELF-PORTRAIT OF DAVID WOJNAROWICZ, 1983–84.

Wojnarowicz saw the outsider as his true subject. Queer and later diagnosed as HIV-positive, he became an impassioned advocate for people with AIDS when an inconceivable number of friends, lovers, and strangers were dying due to government inaction. Wojnarowicz’s work documents and illuminates a desperate period of American history: that of the AIDS crisis and culture wars of the late 1980s and early 1990s. But his rightful place is also among the raging and haunting iconoclastic voices, from Walt Whitman to William S. Burroughs, who explore American myths, their perpetuation, their repercussions, and their violence. Like theirs, his work deals directly with the timeless subjects of sex, spirituality, love, and loss. Wojnarowicz, who was thirty-seven when he died from AIDS-related complications, wrote: “To make the private into something public is an action that has terrific ramifications.”

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DAVID WOJNAROWICZ, UNTITLED (GREEN HEAD), 1982.

The Night They David Raided Wojnarowicz Stonewall

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The Night They David Raided Wojnarowicz Stonewall

PETER HUJAR, DAVID WOJNAROWICZ, 1981.

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PETER HUJAR, DAVID WOJNAROWICZ, VILLAGE VOICE “HEARTSICK: FEAR AND LOVING IN THE GAY COMMUNITY”, 1983.

The Night They David Raided Wojnarowicz Stonewall

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David Wojnarowicz

PETER HUJAR, DAVID LIGHTING UP, 1985.

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DAVID WOJNAROWICZ, PETER HUJAR DREAMING/ YUKIO MISHIMA: SAINT SEBASTIAN, 1982.

David Wojnarowicz

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Robert Mapplethorpe

Robert Mapplethorpe

Robert Michael Mapplethorpe (November 4, 1946 – March 9, 1989) was an American photographer, best known for his black-and-white photographs. His work featured an array of subjects, including celebrity portraits, male and female nudes, self-portraits, and still-life images.

His most controversial works documented and examined the gay male BDSM subculture of New York City in the late 1960s and early 1970s. A 1989 exhibition of Mapplethorpe's work, titled Robert Mapplethorpe: The Perfect Moment, sparked a debate in the United States concerning both use of public funds for "obscene" artwork and the Constitutional limits of free speech in the United States.

ROBERT MAPPLETHORPE, SELF PORTRAIT, 1980.

Mapplethorpe studied painting at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, where he met singer/poet Patti Smith in 1968, whom he later photographed for her album covers. His initial interest in photography took the form of collages from photographs he found, but in 1972 he began to take pictures with a Polaroid camera. His images are classical and formal in appearance, his favorites subjects being male nudes, flowers, and still lifes. His homoerotic images became the subject of a much publicized obscenity charge in 1990 involving the Cincinnati Art Museum. Mapplethorpe also did a series of self-portraits toward the end of his life, documenting his deteriorating health from AIDS.

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Robert Mapplethorpe

ROBERT MAPPLETHORPE, PATTI SMITH, 1976.

Robert Mapplethorpe

ROBERT MAPPLETHORPE, SELF PORTRAIT WITH WHIP, 1978.

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Robert Mapplethorpe

Robert Mapplethorpe

ROBERT MAPPLETHORPE, KEN AND TYLER, 1985.

ROBERT MAPPLETHORPE, AJITTO, 1981.

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ROBERT MAPPLETHORPE, CALLA LILY, 1986.

ROBERT MAPPLETHORPE, LISA LYON, 1982.

Robert Mapplethorpe

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ROBERT MAPPLETHORPE, JOE RUBBERMAN, 1978.

Robert Mapplethorpe

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Elle Perez

The Night They Raided Stonewall Elle Pérez

Elle Pérez was born in 1989 in Bronx, New York and lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. Since receiving their MFA from Yale School of Art in 2015, Pérez has worked primarily in photography, depicting the intimate moments, emotional exchanges, and visceral details of their subjects and landscapes.

Early on in their career, Pérez photographed aspiring entertainment wrestlers in the Bronx, fascinated by the performativity and choreography of the wrestling matches. Pérez continues to play with the notion of authenticity, utilizing a collaborative approach to portrait photography that blurs the lines between traditional documentary, still life, and landscape photography.

Working closely with their peers from the LGBTQIA+ community as their subjects, Pérez visualizes the complexities of gender identity: the scars left behind on a subject’s chest after surgery, intertwined limbs after a moment of intimacy, a worn and tattered breast binder. Imbued with desire and a profound sense of care for their subjects, the photographs depict the traces of queer experiences and reflect the ever changing nature of identity.

Pérez relates this undefinable and unboundaried quality of queerness to photography, calling the “photograph a perfect container because it is not actually, ever, definitive.”

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KEITH HARING AND LA II IN FRONT OF THEIR COLLABORATION, 1982.

Elle Pérez

ELLE PEREZ. JOSE GABRIEL, 2019

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ELLE PEREZ. WILDING AND CHARLES, 2019

Elle Pérez

ELLE PEREZ. MAE (THREE DAYS AFTER), 2019

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ELLE PEREZ. DAHLIA AND DAVID (FAG WITH A SCAR THAT SAYS DYKE), 2019

Elle Pérez

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Catherine Opie

Cathetine Opie

Catherine Opie was born in Sandusky, Ohio in 1961. Opie investigates the ways in which photographs both document and give voice to social phenomena in America today, registering people’s attitudes and relationships to themselves and others, and the ways in which they occupy the landscape. At the core of her investigations are perplexing questions about relationships to community, which she explores on multiple levels across all her bodies of work.

CATHERINE OPIE, SELF-PORTRAIT/NURSING, 2004.

Working between conceptual and documentary approaches to image making, Opie examines familiar genres—portraiture, landscape, and studio photography—in surprising uses of serial images, unexpected compositions, and the pursuit of radically different subject matters in parallel. Many of her works capture the expression of individual identity through groups (couples, teams, crowds) and reveal an undercurrent of her own biography vis-à-vis her subjects.

Whether documenting political movements, queer subcultures, or urban transformation, Opie’s images of contemporary life comprise a portrait of our time in America, which she often considers in relation to a discourse of opposition. Her work resonates with formal ideas that convey the importance of “the way things should look,” evidence of the influence of her early exposure to the history of art and painting.

Catherine Opie received a BFA from the San Francisco Art Institute (1985), an MFA from CalArts (1988), and since 2001 has taught at the University of California, Los Angeles. She has received many awards, including the President’s Award for Lifetime Achievement from the Women’s Caucus for Art (2009); United States Artists Fellowship (2006); Larry Aldrich Award (2004); and the CalArts Alpert Award in the Arts (2003). Her work has appeared in major exhibitions at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston (2011); Los Angeles County Museum of Art (2010); Guggenheim Museum, New York (2008); MCA Chicago (2006); and the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis (2002). Catherine Opie lives and works in Los Angeles, California.

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Cathetine Opie

CATHERINE OPIE, SELF-PORTRAIT/CUTTING, 1993.

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CATHERINE OPIE, SELF-PORTRAIT/PERVERT, 1994.

Cathetine Opie

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CATHERINE OPIE, IDEXA, 1993.

Cathetine Opie

CATHERINE OPIE, MIKE AND SKY, 1993.

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CATHERINE OPIE, PIG PEN (TATTOOS), 2009.

Cathetine Opie

CATHERINE OPIE, DIANA, 2010.

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Cathetine Opie

CATHERINE OPIE, MIGGI & ILENE, LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA, 1995.

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Zanele Muholi

Zanele Muholi

ZANELE MUHOLI, BONA , CHARLOTTESVILLE, VIRGINIA, 2015.

Zanele Muholi was born in Umlazi, a township southwest of Durban, South Africa, in 1972. From self-portraiture to photographs of Black lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and intersex people living in South Africa, Muholi creates work that asserts the presence of South Africa’s historically marginalized and discriminated LGBTI community. Both joyful and courageous, Muholi self-identifies as a visual activist, driven by a dedication to owning their voice, identity, and history and providing space for others in their community to do the same.

In the self-portrait series, Somnyama Ngonyama (Hail the Dark Lioness), Muholi exaggerates the darkness of their skin tone and tries on different characters and costumes both to experiment with South Africa’s layered history and cultures and to record their existence as a queer Zulu person. For the ongoing, lifetime project Faces and Phases, Muholi creates arresting portraits of Black lesbian and transgender individuals. The project documents the visual history of this overlooked queer community, in the hopes of eradicating the stigma, violence, and negativity that has pervaded it. In the Brave Beauties series, Muholi focuses their camera on transgender people who participate in beauty pageants, powerfully expressing and claiming their femininity.

Muholi studied advanced photography at the Market Photo Workshop in Newtown, Johannesburg, and completed an MFA in documentary media at Ryerson University, Toronto (2009). Awards and residencies include France’s Knight in the Order of Arts and Letters (2017); ICP Infinity Award for Documentary and Photojournalism (2016); Africa’Sout! Courage and Creativity Award (2016); Outstanding International Alumni Award from Ryerson University (2016); the Fine Prize, for an emerging artist at the 2013 Carnegie International (2013); and a Prince Claus Award (2013).

Muholi’s work has been exhibited at Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam (2017); Kulturhistorek Museum, Oslo (2016); Brooklyn Museum (2015); Schwules Museum, Berlin (2014); Venice Biennale (2013); Documenta 13 (2012); and Casa Africa, Las Palmas (2011). Muholi is an honorary professor at the Hochschule für Künste Bremen. Muholi lives and works in Johannesburg.

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ZANELE MUHOLI, BONA II, CHARLOTTESVILLE, VIRGINIA, 2015.

The Night They Raided Zanele Stonewall Muholi

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ZANELE MUHOLI, NOMALANDI WENDA III, PARKTOWN, 2016.

ZANELE MUHOLI, NOMALANDI WENDA III, PARKTOWN, 20

016.

The Night They Raided Zanele Stonewall Muholi

ZANELE MUHOLI, NOMALANDI WENDA III, PARKTOWN, 2016.

ZANELE MUHOLI, BESTER II, PARIS, 2014.

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ZANELE MUHOLI, VILE, GOTHENBURG, SWEDEN, 2015.

The Night They Raided Zanele Stonewall Muholi

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The Night They Raided Zanele Stonewall Muholi

ZANELE MUHOLI, NTOZAKHE II, PARKTOWN, 2016.

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ZANELE MUHOLI, HLONIPHA, CASSILHAUS, CHAPEL HILL, NORTH CAROLINA, 2016.

The Night They Raided Zanele Stonewall Muholi

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Devan Shimoyama

Devan Shimoyama

Devan Shimoyama (b. 1989, US) is a visual artist whose work explores depictions of the black, queer, male body. Through the medias of painting, sculpture, printmaking and installation, he creates compositions inspired by classical painters such as Francisco Goya, or Caravaggio.

However, Shimoyama’s use of materials is distinctly contemporary, as is the subject matter he depicts. He has stated that he wants the figures in his work to be perceived as “both desirable and desirous.” He is aware of the politics of queer culture, and the ways in which those politics relate to black American culture. These elements come together in his works in a way that is both celebratory and complicated.

The celebratory aspects come through in his choice of materials, such as fur, feathers, glitter and costume jewels like rhinestones, and sequins.

These materials endow the figures in the works with a sort of magical aura and joyful spirit. Yet, many of the men in Shimoyama’s works also literally have jewels in their eyes, giving them a mystified expression, interrupting the connection between their inner selves and the viewer, and suggesting a sort of silent suffering. Many also shed tears.

Shimoyama was awarded the Al Held Fellowship at the Yale School of Art in 2013 and has had a residency at the 2015 Fire Island Artist Residency.

His work has been exhibited in solo and group exhibitions throughout the United States.

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DEVAN SHIMOYAMA, EVENING READER, 2019.

DEVAN SHIMOYAMA, SELF PORTRAIT WITH RIVER, 2020.

Devan Shimoyama

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Devan Shimoyama

DEVAN SHIMOYAMA, MIDNIGHT RUMINATION, 2019.

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DEVAN SHIMOYAMA, SHAPE UP AND A TRIM, 2017.

Devan Shimoyama

DEVAN SHIMOYAMA, FINESSE, 2017.

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DEVAN SHIMOYAMA, SHAPE UP AND A TRIM, 2017.

Devan Shimoyama

DEVAN SHIMOYAMA, FINESSE, 2017.

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Exhibition Checklist

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Andy Warhol Solo Exhibitions 1975 Andy Warhol: paintings Los Angeles: Margo Leavin Gallery April 3 - May 3, 1975 Andy Warhol: Hand-Colored Flowers New York: Leo Castelli Gallery Major Warhol retrospective Zurich: Kunsthaus

1976 Andy Warhol: Animals New York: Arno Schefler May 25 - June 11, 1976 Portraits of Each Other [Joint Andy Warhol - Jamie Wyeth show] New York: Coe Kerr Gallery June 3 - July 9, 1976

1977 Andy Warhol New York: Leo Castelli Gallery January 8 - 29, 1977 Retrospective Exhibition of Paintings by Andy Warhol from 1962-1976 Washington, D.C: Pyramid Galleries January 17 - February 18, 1977 Andy Warhol Toronto: Sable-Castelli Gallery February 19 - March 12, 1977 Andy Warhol: The American Indian Geneva: Musee d'Art et d'Histoire October 28, 1977 - January 22, 1978

1978 Andy Warhol: Athletes London: Institute of Contemporary Arts July 1978

1980 Beuys by Warhol Munich: Schellman & Kluser May 6 - July 9, 1980 Andy Warhol: Reversals Zurich: Galerie Bruno Bischofberger May 14 - June 11, 1980 Joseph Beuys by Andy Warhol

Exhibition History Geneva: Centre d'Art Contemporain June 7 - 30, 1980

1981 Andy Warhol: The Shoe Portfolio [prints] Tokyo: Watari Gallery February 25 - April 4, 1981 Warhol '80 Reversal Serie Vienna: Museum Moderner Kunst, Museum des 20 April 9 - 10 May 1981 Andy Warhol's Myths [prints] New York: Ronald Feldman Fine Arts September 15 - October 17, 1981

1982 Andy Warhol: Dollar Signs New York: Leo Castelli Gallery January 9 - January 30, 1982

Cathrine Opie Solo Exhibitions 2008 Catherine Opie The Photographers' Gallery, London; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago American Photographer Guggenheim Museum, New York City September 26, 2008 – January 7, 2009

2011 Somewhere in the Middle The Hillcrest Hospital Cleveland Clinic, 2011 Empty and Full Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, 2011

2015 Portraits and Landscapes Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, 2015

2016 700 Nimes Road The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, 2016

2018 The Modernist Regen Projects, Los Angeles, 2018

156 Keeping an Eye on the World Henie Onstad Kunstsenter October 6, 2017 – January 7, 2018

Group Exhibition Kiss My Genders With Holly Falconer, Peter Hujar, and Del LaGrace Volcano.

Hayward Gallery, Southbank Centre, London, 2019

David Hockney Solo Exhibitions 2013 Mapping the Contemporary Print de Young Museum, San Francisco Feb 23 – Jul 7, 2013 Pop Art to Britart: Modern Masters from the David Ross Collection Djanogly Art Gallery, Lakeside Arts Centre, Nottingham, U.K. Nov 23, 2013 – Feb 9, 2014

2014 Keywords: Art, Culture and Society in 1980s Britain Tate Liverpool, Singapore Feb 28 – May 11, 2014 Visual Deception II: Into the Future Bunkamura Museum of Art, Tokyo; Hyogo Prefectural Museum of Art, Kobe (Oct 15–Dec 28) Nagoya City Art Museum (Jan 10–Mar 22, 2015) Aug 9 – Oct 5, 2014 Face Value: Portraiture in the Age of Abstraction Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery, Washington, D.C. Apr 18, 2014 – Jan 11, 2015 Pop to Popism Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia Nov 1, 2014 – Mar 1, 2015

2015 Self: Image and Identity Turner Contemporary, Margate, U.K. Jan 24 – May 10, 2015 Landscapes of the Mind (Paisajismo Británico. Colección Tate, 1690–2007) Museo Nacional de Arte, Mexico City, Mexico Mar 25 – June 24, 2015

2017

Exhibition History Queer British Art Tate Britain, London, UK Apr 5 – Oct 1, 2017 Side by Side: Dual Portraits of Artist San Francisco Museum of Modern Art Jun 17 – Dec 3, 2017 Painting Pop: Paintings from 1960s Britain Lakeland Arts, Abbot Hall Art Gallery, Kendal, U.K. Jul 14 – Oct 7, 2017 Coming Out: An Incomplete Art History since 1967 Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool, UK Jul 28 – Nov 5, 2017

2018 Coming Out: Sexually, Gender and Identity Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery, Birmingham, U.K. Nov 20, 2017 – April 15, 2018

David Wojnarowicz Group Exhibitions 2004 Selected work from 21 years of P.P.O.W history P.P.O.W. Gallery, New York 19 Nov – 23 Dec 2004

2008 Street Art, Street Life: From the 1950s to Now Bronx Museum of the Arts, NY 14 Sep 2008 – 25 Jan 2009

2010 Mean Streets IVAM Institut d'Art Modern, Valencia, Spain 10 Feb – 9 May 2010 Mixed Use, Manhattan Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia (MNCARS), Madrid, Spain 10 Jun – 27 Sep 2010

2012 HIDE/SEEK: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture Brooklyn Museum of Art, Brooklyn, NY 18 Nov 2011 – 12 Feb 2012 This Will Have Been ICA Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, MA 15 Nov 2012 – 3 Mar 2013

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2015 IRREVERENT: A Celebration of Censorship Leslie-Lohman Gay Art Foundation, NY 13 Feb – 19 Apr 2015 Take One: Contemporary Photographs Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia, PA 19130 25 Apr – 5 Aug 2015

2016 Art AIDS America Bronx Museum of the Arts, NY 13 Jul – 23 Oct 2016

2017 Screaming in the Streets: AIDS, Art, Activism ClampArt, NY 3 Aug – 23 Sep 2017 AIDS at Home Museum of the City of New York, New York 10 May – 22 Oct 2017 Re-imagining A Safe Space NYU Tisch School of the Arts, New York 26 Oct 2017 – 13 Jan 2018

2018 La parte mas bella MAM Museo de Arte Moderno, Mexico 19 Oct 2017 – 11 Mar 2018 INTIMACY Yossi Milo Gallery, New York 28 Jun – 24 Aug 2018 Rough Trade: Art and Sex Work in the Late 20th Century ClampArt, New York 2 Aug – 22 Sep 2018 DRAG: Self-portraits and Body Politics Hayward Gallery, London, UK 22 Aug – 14 Oct 2018 The Body: Concealing and Revealing Addison Gallery of American Art. Andover, MA 1 Sep 2018 – 31 Mar 2019

Exhibition History

Devan Shimoyama Solo Exhibitions 2015 Hocus Pocus Bunker Projects, Pittsburgh, PA

2016 Solo Booth PULSE Miami Beach with Samuel Freeman Gallery Myth and Body Lesley Heller Workspace, New York, NY Devan Shimoyama Lesley Heller Workspace, New York, NY Devan Shimoyama|Salamon Huerta Samuel Freeman Gallery, Los Angeles, CA

2017 Sweet De Buck Gallery, New York, NY

2018 Cry, Baby: Devan Shimoyama curated by Jessica Beck The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh, PA

2019 We Named Her Gladys Kavi Gupta | Washington Blvd., Chicago, IL The Barbershop Project CulturalDC, Washington, DC Shh...

De Buck Gallery, New York, NY

Group Exhibitions 2015 Love is Love Emmanuel Gallery, Denver, CO UNLOADED Northern Illinois University Art Museum, Dekalb, IL

2016 The Soul of Black Art: A Collector’s View Upfor Gallery, Portland, OR Introspective BravinLee Programs, New York, NY

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2018 LOVE 2018: Purple Hearts LeRoy Neiman Gallery, New York, NY Parallel Lives Kavi Gupta | Washington Blvd., Chicago, IL

2019 Geting to Know You Cleveland Institute of Art, Cleveland, OH Men of Change: Power. Triumph. Truth.

National Underground Railroad Freedom Center, Cincinnati, OH

2020 Translating Valence: redefining black male identity Urban Institute for Contemporary Arts, MI Tell Me Your Story Kunsthal KAdE, Amersfoort, Netherlands

Elle Pérez Solo Exhibitions 2011 You Are Making Me Uncomfortable, University of Nebraska, Lincoln, NE

2014 Bronx X Bronx Bronx Documentary Center, Bronx, NY LGBTQ: Perspectives on Equality, The Levine Museum of the New South, Charlotte, NC The Time Has Come Longwood Art Gallery, Bronx, NY Here and Now: Queer Geographies, Curated by Rafael Soldi Silver Eye Center, Pittsburgh, PA

2015 Lovely Dark Regen Projects, Los Angeles, CA The Model Reader Transmitter Gallery, Brooklyn, NY

2016 Queering Space Yale School of Art, New Haven, CT. Fosdick-Nelson Gallery, Alfred University Culture

Exhibition History Roots and Culture Gallery, Chicago, IL Group Show, Curated by Daniel Shea Andrew Rafacz Gallery, Chicago, IL Here and Now: Queer Geographies Stonewall National Museum & Archives, Fort Lauderdale, FL

2018 Putting Out Gavin Brown’s Enterprise, New York, NY This Is Not a Prop David Zwirner Gallery, New York, NY Intimacy Yossi Milo Gallery, New York, NY Everyday Muse, Curated by John Edmonds LTD Gallery, Los Angeles, CA In Bloom, Solo Exhibition 47 Canal, New York, NY

Keith Haring Solo Exhibitions 1980 Keith Haring and Frank Holiday Club 57, New York City Videotapes: Kenny Scharf and Keith Haring Club 57, New York City Xerox Show Club 57, New York City Club 57 Invitational New York City Times Square Show New York City Open Studio Exhibition P.S. 122, New York City

1981 New York/New Wave P.S.1, LongIsland City, N.Y. Lisson Gallery, London, U.K. Brooke Alexander Gallery, New York City Tony Shafrazi Gallery, New York Annina Nosei Gallery, New York City Patrick Verelst Gallery, Antwerp, Belgium Bard College, Annendale-on-Hudson, New York

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1982 Young Americans Tony Shafrazi Gallery, New York Larry Gagosian Gallery, Los Angeles, California Blum Helman Gallery, New York City New Painting 1: Americans Middendorf Lane Gallery, Washington, D.C. Art of the 80’s Westport Weston Arts Council, Westport, Connecticut Wave Hill, Bronx, New York The Pressure to Paint Marlborough Gallery, New York City Documenta 82 Kassel, Germany The U.F.O. Show Queens Museum,New York Urban Kisses Institute of Contemporary Art, London, UK

1983 Morton G. Neumann Family Collection Kalamazoo Institute of Arts, Kalamazoo, Michigan New York Painting Today Carnegie-Mellon University, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania The Comic Art Show Whitney Museum of American Art, Downtown Branch, New York City Back to the U.S.A. Kunstmuseum, Lucerne, Switzerland

1988 Committed to Print The Museum of Modern Art, New York City Hokin Gallery, Bay Harbor Islands, Florida Penson Gallery, New York City (collaboration with Gian Franco Gorgoni) Bernice Steinbaum Gallery, New York City Leo Castelli Gallery, New York City (Benefit) Gran Pavese: The Flag Project Museum van Hedendaagse Kunst, Antwerp, Belgium

1993 Coming from the Subway: New York Graffiti Art Groninger Museum, Groninger, Holland Art Against AIDS Peggy Guggenheim Museum, Venice, Italy Guggenheim Museum Soho, New York

Exhibition History

Robert Mapplethorpe Solo Exhibitions 1985 Robert Mapplethorpe Galerie Daniel Templon, Paris, France New Works in Platinum Robert Miller Gallery, New York Robert Mapplethorpe-Black Flowers Galerie Comicos, Lisbon, Portugal, Process, Barbara Gladstone Gallery, New York Betsy Rosenfield Gallery, Chicago, Illinois Fay Gold Gallery, Atlanta, Georgia Michael Lord Gallery, Milwaukee, Wisconsin Recent Works in Platinum Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco

1986 Australian Center for Contemporary Art, South Yarra, Victoria, Australia Robert Mapplethorpe: Photographs 1976 – 1985, Melbourne, Australia Betsy Rosenfield Gallery, Chicago, Illinois; Texas Gallery, Houston, Texas New Photographs, Palladium, New York, New York

1987 Robert Mapplethorpe Raab Galerie, Berlin, Germany 1986 Robert Mapplethorpe Kicken-Pauseback Galerie, Cologne, West Germany Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco, California Obalne Galerije, Piran, Ljubljana, Yugoslavia Galerie Pierre-Hubert, Geneva, Switzerland Galerie Francoise Lambert, Milan, Italy 1986 Robert Mapplethorpe: Photographs Claus Runkel Fine Art Ltd., London, United Kingdom

1988 Mapplethorpe Portraits National Portrait Gallery, London, Catalogue with text by Peter Conrad Robert Mapplethorpe: The Perfect Moment Institute of Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Traveled to Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Washington Project for the Arts, Washington, D.C.; Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, Connecticut; University Art Museum, University of California, Berkeley and Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, Contemporary Art Center, Cincinnati Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, New York

164 Photographien Mai 36 Galerie, Lucerne, France New Color Work Robert Miller Gallery, New York, New York Hamiltons Gallery, London, United Kingdom Galerie Jurka, Amsterdam, The Netherlands Middendorf Gallery, Washington Blum Helman Gallery, Santa Monica, California A Season in Hell Greg Kucera Gallery, Seattle, Washington Betsy Rosenfeld Gallery, Chicago, Illinois Autoportraits Grand Palais, Paris, France

1989 The Modernist Still Life Photographed University of Missouri-Kansas City, Kansas City, Missouri Betsy Rosenfield Gallery, Chicago, Illinois Robert Mapplethorpe Een Retrospective Museum van Hedendaagse Kunst, Citadelpark, Gent, Belgium

1991 Robert Mapplethorpe: Early Works Robert Miller Gallery, New York Lady ACE Gallery, Los Angeles, California

Exhibition History

Zanele Muholi Solo Exhibitions The Sao Paulo Biennial, 2010 Casa Africa, Las Palmas, Spain, 2011 Documenta, 2012 Goethe-Institut, Johannesburg, 2012 Fondazione Cassa di Risparmio di Modena, Italy, 2013 The South African Pavilion at the Venice Biennale, 2013 Schwules Museum, Berlin, 2014 Brooklyn Museum, New York, 2015 Kulturhistorek Museum, Oslo, 2016 Autograph ABP, London, 2017 Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, 2017 Museo de Arte moderno de Buenos Aires, 2018

Group Exhibitions

The Leslie-Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art, New York, 2015 Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, 2016 High Museum of Art, Atlanta, 2017 Walther Collection Project Space, New York, 2018

166

Checklist Andy Warhol's Defiant Hopes for Queer Art

ANDY WARHOL, 1957.

(COPYRIGHT © THE ANDY WARHOL FOUNDATION FOR THE VISUAL ARTS, INC. AND ANDY WARHOL) ANDY WARHOL, “UNKNOWN MALE WITH STAMPS” 1958. (COPYRIGHT © THE ANDY WARHOL FOUNDATION FOR THE VISUAL ARTS, INC.) ANDY WARHOL, “UNTITLED (FEET WITH CAMPBELL’S SOUP CAN)” 1960.

(COPYRIGHT © THE ANDY WARHOL FOUNDATION FOR THE VISUAL ARTS, INC.) ANDY WARHOL, “UNTITLED (MALE PORTRAIT)” 1956. (COPYRIGHT © THE ANDY WARHOL FOUNDATION FOR THE VISUAL ARTS, INC.) ANDY WARHOL, “STANDING MALE NUDE TORSO” 1950S. (COPYRIGHT © THE ANDY WARHOL FOUNDATION FOR THE VISUAL ARTS, INC.) ANDY WARHOL, “UNKNOWN MALE” 1950S. (COPYRIGHT © THE ANDY WARHOL FOUNDATION FOR THE VISUAL ARTS, INC.) ANDY WARHOL, “MALE NUDE LOWER TORSO” 1956–57. (COPYRIGHT © THE ANDY WARHOL FOUNDATION FOR THE VISUAL ARTS, INC.) ANDY WARHOL, “SEATED MALE NUDE” 1950S. (COPYRIGHT © THE ANDY WARHOL FOUNDATION FOR THE VISUAL ARTS, INC.)

Elle Perez's Search for intensity

ELLE PEREZ. HOBBES, 2015/2018.

ARCHIVAL PIGMENT PRINT; 443/8 x 31 x 2 INCHES (112.71 x 78.74 x 5.08 CM).

IMAGE COURTESY OF THE ARTIST AND 47 CANAL, NEW YORK. ELLE PEREZ. TATTOO ELIZABETH, 2016/2018.

DIGITAL SILVER GELATIN PRINT; 443/8 x 31 INCHES (112.71 x 78.74 CM).

IMAGE COURTESY OF THE ARTIST AND 47 CANAL, NEW YORK. ELLE PEREZ. WATER BODY, 2016/2018.

ARCHIVAL PIGMENT PRINT; 443/8 x 31 x 2 INCHES (112.71 x 78.74 x 5.08 CM). IMAGE COURTESY OF THE ARTIST AND 47 CANAL, NEW YORK. ELLE PEREZ. BINDER, 2015/2018.

ARCHIVAL PIGMENT PRINT; 443/8 x 31 INCHES (112.71 x 78.74 CM).

IMAGE COURTESY OF THE ARTIST AND 47 CANAL, NEW YORK.

ELLE PEREZ. T, 2018.

DIGITAL SILVER GELATIN PRINT; 20 x 14 INCHES (50.80 x 35.56 CM).

IMAGE COURTESY OF THE ARTIST AND 47 CANAL, NEW YORK.

DAVID HOCKNEY. BRITISH, BORN BRADFORD, 1937 CLEANING TEETH, EARLY EVENING (10PM) W11, 1962, OIL ON CANVAS, 71 15/16 X 48 1/16 IN. (182.7 X 122 CM), ASTRUP FEARNLEY COLLECTION, OSLO, NORWAY, SL.16.2017.44.1

ELLE PEREZ. UNTITLED (JUNIOR), 2014/2018.

DIGITAL SILVER GELATIN PRINT; 34 x 28 INCHES (86.36 x 71.12 CM).

IMAGE COURTESY OF THE ARTIST AND 47 CANAL, NEW YORK.

DAVID HOCKNEY. BRITISH, BORN BRADFORD, 1937 MAN IN SHOWER IN BEVERLY HILLS, 1964, ACRYLIC ON CANVAS, 65 7/8 X 65 3/4 IN. (167.3 X 167 CM), TATE PURCHASED 1980, SL.16.2017.34.4

ELLE PEREZ. IAN, 2017/2018.

ARCHIVAL PIGMENT PRINT; 443/8 x 31 INCHES (112.71 x 78.74 CM).

IMAGE COURTESY OF THE ARTIST AND 47 CANAL, NEW YORK. ELLE PEREZ. SOFT STONE, 2015/2018.

DIGITAL SILVER GELATIN PRINT; 443/8 x 31 INCHES (112.71 x 78.74 CM).

IMAGE COURTESY OF THE ARTIST AND 47 CANAL, NEW YORK. ELLE PEREZ. A SELF PORTRAIT FOR YOU, 2016/2018.

ARCHIVAL PIGMENT PRINT; 20 x 14 INCHES (50.80 x 35.56 CM).

IMAGE COURTESY OF THE ARTIST AND 47 CANAL, NEW YORK.

Keith Haring

KEITH HARING WITH LA2. TONY SHAFRAZI ANNOUNCEMENT 1982, 1982. OFFSET PRINTED ANNOUNCEMENT CARD. 6 X 4 IN. (15.2 X 10.2 CM) KEITH HARRING, BILL T. JONES BODY PAINTING. 1983. GELATIN SILVER PRINT. 19 X 15" IMAGE ON 20 X 16" SHEET. EDITION OF 25 KEITH HARING. TONY SHAFRAZI GALLERY, EXHIBITION POSTER, 1984. INKJET PRINT ON PAPER. 35 5/8 X 23 1/8 IN. (90.5 X 58.7 CM) KEITH HARING. RETROSPECT, 1989. SILKSCREEN. 46 X 82 IN. (117 X 208 CM). EDITION: 75 KEITH HARING. “IGNORANCE = FEAR”, 1989. SILKSCREEN. 24 X 43 1/4 IN. (61 X 110 CM)

David Hockney

DAVID HOCKNEY. BRITISH, BORN BRADFORD, 1937 CHRISTOPHER ISHERWOOD AND DON BACHARDY, 1968, ACRYLIC ON CANVAS, 83 7/16 IN. X 9 FT. 11 1/2 IN. (212 X 303.5 CM), PRIVATE COLLECTION, SL.16.2017.29.1 DAVID HOCKNEY. BRITISH, BORN BRADFORD, 1937 A BIGGER SPLASH, 1967, ACRYLIC ON CANVAS, 95 1/2 X 96X 1 3/16 IN. (242.5 X 243.9 X 3 CM), TATE PURCHASED 1981, SL.16.2017.34.5 DAVID HOCKNEY. BRITISH, BORN BRADFORD, 1937 DOMESTIC SCENE, LOS ANGELES, 1963, OIL ON CANVAS, 60 1/4 X 60 1/4 IN. (153 X 153 CM), PRIVATE COLLECTION, SL.16.2017.1.1

DAVID HOCKNEY. BRITISH, BORN BRADFORD, 1937 PORTRAIT OF AN ARTIST (POOL WITH TWO FIGURES), 1972, ACRYLIC ON CANVAS, 84 1/4 IN. X 9 FT. 1/4 IN. (214 X 275 CM), THE LEWIS COLLECTION, SL.16.2017.38.1

David Wojnarowicz

DAVID WOJNAROWICZ WITH TOM WARREN, SELF-PORTRAIT OF DAVID WOJNAROWICZ, 1983–84. ACRYLIC AND COLLAGED PAPER ON GELATIN SILVER PRINT; 60 x 40 IN. (152.4 x 101.6 CM).

COLLECTION OF BROOKE GARBER NEIDICH AND DANIEL NEIDICH, PHOTOGRAPH BY RON AMSTUTZ. DAVID WOJNAROWICZ, UNTITLED (GREEN HEAD), 1982. ACRYLIC ON MASONITE; 48 x 96 IN. (121.9 x 243.8 CM).

COLLECTION OF HAL BROMM AND DONELEY MERIS. IMAGE COURTESY THE ESTATE OF DAVID WOJNAROWICZ AND P.P.O.W, NEW YORK PETER HUJAR, DAVID WOJNAROWICZ, 1981. GELATIN SILVER PRINT: SHEET; 193/16 x 157/8 IN. (50.3 x 40.3 CM).

WHITNEY MUSEUM OF AMERICAN ART, NEW YORK; PURCHASE WITH FUNDS FROM THE PHOTOGRAPHY COMMITTEE 93.76. © THE PETER HUJAR ARCHIVE PETER HUJAR, DAVID WOJNAROWICZ, VILLAGE VOICE “HEARTSICK: FEAR AND LOVING IN THE GAY COMMUNITY”, 1983. GELATIN SILVER PRINT; 107/8 x 135/8 IN. (27.6 x 34.6 CM).

COLLECTION OF PHILIP E. AND SHELLEY FOX AARONS. © 1987 THE PETER HUJAR ARCHIVE LLC, COURTESY PACE/MACGILL GALLERY, NEW YORK, AND FRAENKEL GALLERY, SAN FRANCISCO. PETER HUJAR, DAVID LIGHTING UP, 1985. GELATIN SILVER PRINT: SHEET, 1413/16 x 147/8 IN. (37.6 x 37.8 CM); IMAGE, 145/8 x 143/4 IN. (37.1 x 37.5 CM).

WHITNEY MUSEUM OF AMERICAN ART, NEW YORK; PROMISED GIFT OF THE FISHER LANDAU CENTER FOR ART P.2010.321 ©1987 THE PETER HUJAR ARCHIVE LLC; COURTESY PACEMACGILL GALLERY, N.Y. AND FRAENKEL GALLERY, SAN FRANCISCO DAVID WOJNAROWICZ, PETER HUJAR DREAMING/YUKIO MISHIMA: SAINT SEBASTIAN, 1982. ACRYLIC AND SPRAY PAINT ON MASONITE; 48 x 48 IN. (121.9 x 121.9 CM).

COLLECTION OF MATTHIJS ERDMAN. IMAGE COURTESY THE ESTATE OF DAVID WOJNAROWICZ AND P.P.O.W, NEW YORK.

Robert Mapplethorpe

Catherine Opie

ROBERT MAPPLETHORPE, PATTI SMITH, 1976. © ROBERT MAPPLETHORPE FOUNDATION. USED BY PERMISSION. COURTESY OF THE GUGGENHEIM MUSEUM.

CATHERINE OPIE. SELF-PORTRAIT/CUTTING, 1993. C-PRINT 40 X 30 INCHES. EDITION OF 8, 2 AP. COURTESY OF REGEN PROJECTS, LOS ANGELES. © CATHERINE OPIE.

ROBERT MAPPLETHORPE, SELF PORTRAIT, 1980. © ROBERT MAPPLETHORPE FOUNDATION. USED

BY PERMISSION. COURTESY OF THE GUGGENHEIM MUSEUM

ROBERT MAPPLETHORPE, SELF PORTRAIT WITH WHIP, 1978.

ROBERT MAPPLETHORPE, AJITTO, 1981. © ROBERT MAPPLETHORPE FOUNDATION. USED BY PERMISSION. COURTESY OF THE GUGGENHEIM MUSEUM. ROBERT MAPPLETHORPE, KEN AND TYLER, 1985. © ROBERT MAPPLETHORPE FOUNDATION. USED

BY PERMISSION. COURTESY OF THE GUGGENHEIM MUSEUM. ROBERT MAPPLETHORPE, CALLA LILY, 1986. © ROBERT MAPPLETHORPE FOUNDATION. USED BY PERMISSION. COURTESY OF THE GUGGENHEIM MUSEUM. ROBERT MAPPLETHORPE, LISA LYON, 1982. © ROBERT MAPPLETHORPE FOUNDATION. USED BY PERMISSION. COURTESY OF THE GUGGENHEIM MUSEUM. ROBERT MAPPLETHORPE, JOE RUBBERMAN, 1978.

"MAPPLETHORPE + MUNCH" AT MUNCH MUSEUM, OSLO.

Elle Perez

ELLE PEREZ HANGING A LARGE PRINT IN THEIR BROOKLYN ART STUDIO. PRODUCTION STILL FROM THE NEW YORK CLOSE UP EPISODE, “ELLE PEREZ WORKS BETWEEN THE FRAME.” © ART21, INC. 2019.

ELLE PEREZ. JOSE GABRIEL, 2019. INKJET PRINT, 44 3/8 X 31 IN. (112.7 X 78.7 CM). IMAGE COURTESY THE ARTIST AND 47 CANAL, NEW YORK. ELLE PEREZ. WILDING AND CHARLES, 2019. INKJET PRINT, 44 3/8 X 31 IN. (112.7 X 78.7 CM). IMAGE COURTESY THE ARTIST AND 47 CANAL, NEW YORK. ELLE PEREZ. MAE (THREE DAYS AFTER), 2019.

INKJET PRINT, 44 3/8 X 31 IN. (112.7 X 78.7 CM). IMAGE COURTESY THE ARTIST AND 47 CANAL, NEW YORK. ELLE PEREZ. DAHLIA AND DAVID (FAG WITH A SCAR THAT SAYS DYKE), 2019. INKJET PRINT, 44 3/8 X 31 IN. (112.7 X 78.7 CM). IMAGE COURTESY THE ARTIST AND 47 CANAL, NEW YORK.

CATHERINE OPIE, SELF-PORTRAIT/NURSING, 2004. C-PRINT 40 X 32 INCHES. EDITION OF 8, 2 AP. COURTESY OF REGEN PROJECTS, LOS ANGELES. © CATHERINE OPIE.

CATHERINE OPIE, SELF-PORTRAIT/PERVERT, 1994. C-PRINT 40 X 30 INCHES. EDITION OF 8, 2 AP. COURTESY OF REGEN PROJECTS, LOS ANGELES. © CATHERINE OPIE. CATHERINE OPIE, IDEXA, 1993. C-PRINT 40 X 30 INCHES. EDITION OF 8, 2 AP. COURTESY OF REGEN PROJECTS, LOS ANGELES. © CATHERINE OPIE. CATHERINE OPIE, MIKE AND SKY, 1993. C-PRINT 20 X 16 INCHES. EDITION OF 8, 2 AP. COURTESY OF REGEN PROJECTS, LOS ANGELES. © CATHERINE OPIE. CATHERINE OPIE, PIG PEN (TATTOOS), 2009.

C-PRINT 32 X 24 INCHES. EDITION OF 8, 2 AP. COURTESY OF REGEN PROJECTS, LOS ANGELES. © CATHERINE OPIE. CATHERINE OPIE, DIANA, 2010. C-PRINT 32 X 24 INCHES. EDITION OF 8, 2 AP. COURTESY OF REGEN PROJECTS, LOS ANGELES. © CATHERINE OPIE. CATHERINE OPIE, MIGGI & ILENE, LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA, 1995. C-PRINT 40 X 50 INCHES. EDITION OF 8, 2 AP. COURTESY OF REGEN PROJECTS, LOS ANGELES. © CATHERINE OPIE.

Zanele Muholi

ZANELE MUHOLI. BONA, CHARLOTTESVILLE. 2015.

FROM THE SERIES "SOMNYAMA NGONYAMA (HAIL THE BLACK LIONESS)." SILVER GELATIN PRINT 80 X 50.6 CM. COURTESY OF THE ARTIST, YANCEY RICHARDSON, NEW YORK, AND STEVENSON, CAPE TOWN/ JOHANNESBURG. ZANELE MUHOLI. BONA II, VIRGINIA. 2015. FROM THE SERIES "SOMNYAMA NGONYAMA (HAIL THE BLACK LIONESS)." SILVER GELATIN PRINT 29 X 50 CM. COURTESY OF THE ARTIST, YANCEY RICHARDSON, NEW YORK, AND STEVENSON, CAPE TOWN/ JOHANNESBURG. ZANELE MUHOLI. NOMALANDI WENDA III, PARKTOWN, 2016. FROM THE SERIES "SOMNYAMA NGONYAMA (HAIL THE BLACK LIONESS)." SILVER GELATIN PRINT 80 X 59 CM EACH. COURTESY OF THE ARTIST, YANCEY RICHARDSON, NEW YORK, AND STEVENSON, CAPE TOWN/JOHANNESBURG. ZANELE MUHOLI. BESTER II, PARIS, 2014. FROM THE SERIES "SOMNYAMA NGONYAMA (HAIL THE BLACK LIONESS)." SILVER GELATIN PRINT 80 X 53.3 CM. COURTESY OF THE ARTIST, YANCEY RICHARDSON, NEW YORK, AND STEVENSON, CAPE TOWN/JOHANNESBURG.

ZANELE MUHOLI. VILE, GOTHENBURG, SWEDEN, 2015. FROM THE SERIES "SOMNYAMA NGONYAMA (HAIL THE BLACK LIONESS)." SILVER GELATIN PRINT 80 X 66.3 CM. COURTESY OF THE ARTIST, YANCEY RICHARDSON, NEW YORK, AND STEVENSON, CAPE TOWN/JOHANNESBURG. ZANELE MUHOLI. NTOZAKHE II, PARKTOWN, 2016.

FROM THE SERIES "SOMNYAMA NGONYAMA (HAIL THE BLACK LIONESS)." SILVER GELATIN PRINT 100 X 72 CM. COURTESY OF THE ARTIST, YANCEY RICHARDSON, NEW YORK, AND STEVENSON, CAPE TOWN/ JOHANNESBURG. ZANELE MUHOLI. HLONIPHA, CASSILHAUS, CHAPEL HILL, NORTH CAROLINA, 2016. FROM THE SERIES "SOMNYAMA NGONYAMA (HAIL THE BLACK LIONESS)." SILVER GELATIN PRINT 100 X 66.6 CM. COURTESY OF THE ARTIST, YANCEY RICHARDSON, NEW YORK, AND STEVENSON, CAPE TOWN/JOHANNESBURG.

Devan Shimoyama

DEVAN SHIMOYAMA. SELF PORTRAIT WITH RIVER, 2020. COLOR PENCIL, COLLAGE AND RHINESTONES ON PAPER. 30 X 22 1/4 IN. (76.2 X 56.5 CM) DEVAN SHIMOYAMA. EVENING READER, 2019. OIL, COLOR PENCIL, JEWELRY, FLASHE, GLITTER, COLLAGE, CLOTHING AND SEQUINS ON CANVAS. 84 X 72 IN. (213.4 X 182.9 CM) DEVAN SHIMOYAMA. MIDNIGHT RUMINATION, 2019. OIL, ACRYLIC, COLOR PENCIL. JEWELRY, FLASHE, GLITTER, COLLAGE, SEQUINS AND FABRIC ON CANVAS STRETCHED OVER PANEL. 72 X 84 IN. (182.9 X 213.4 CM) DEVAN SHIMOYAMA. SHAPE UP AND A TRIM, 2017.

MIXED MEDIA. 48 X 36 IN. (121.9 X 91.4 CM) DEVAN SHIMOYAMA. FINESSE, 2017. MIXED MEDIA ON CANVAS STRETCHED OVER PANEL. 48 X 36 IN. (121.9 X 91.4 CM) DEVAN SHIMOYAMA. THE ABDUCTION OF GANYMEDE, 2019. OIL, COLOR PENCIL, DYE, SEQUINS, COLLAGE, GLITTER, AND JEWELRY ON CANVAS. 84 X 72 IN. (213.4 X 182.9 CM) DEVAN SHIMOYAMA. BUTTERFLY EATER, 2017. OIL, FLASHE, SEQUINS, COLOR PENCIL, BEADS, COLLAGE AND JEWERLY ON CANVAS. 28 X 38 IN. (71.1 X 96.5 CM)

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