Innehållsförteckning för May 2019 från OUT

May 6, 1933 Magnus Hirschfeld’s Institute for Sexual Research is looted by the Nazis. May 20, 1946 Goddess of Pop Cher is born Cherilyn Sarkisian in El Centro, California. May 17, 1963 James Baldwin appears on the cover of TIME. May 14, 1969 Canada decriminalizes homosexual acts between consenting adults decades before the United States. May 21, 1979 Following the lenient sentencing of Harvey Milk’s assassin, San Francisco queers revolt in what is known as the White Night riots. May 21, 1990 ACT UP stages its “Storm the NIH” demonstration, demanding the inclusion of women and people of color in clinical drug trials. May 4, 1993 Tony Kushner’s Angels in America: Millennium Approaches opens on Broadway. May 24, 2000 The season three finale of Dawson’s Creek features primetime’s first passionate…

OVER THE PAST FEW MONTHS, as my work in the world of theatre has started to make its rounds, I’ve found myself in dialogue with cultural critics, peers, and audiences about how I define queer art and whether I deem the art I make to be “queer.” This has been both exhilarating and vexatious; in the most generous light, the impulse to label my work “queer art” comes from an excitement to introduce my thought and works into a canon that is predominantly white, cisgender, and male. Yet in a darker reality, identity politics work in tandem with capitalism, situating work into an identity group that flattens it into a more consumable and possibly profitable object for the populace. This is a curious position to put queer art and artists…

The Met Costume Institute’s spring 2019 exhibition promises to be gayer than ever before, writes Nick Remsen in his profile of the curator Andrew Bolton (page 70). The proof (or should we say the poof?) is in the pudding (clockwise from top left): Jeremy Scott spring/summer 2012 menswear; Marjan Pejoski fall/winter 2000–2001; Alessandro Michele for Gucci fall/winter 2016–2017; Franco Moschino for House of Moschino spring/summer 1991. “Camp: Notes on Fashion” is on view May 9–September 8, 2019.…

GENDER BENDING FASHION Museum of Fine Arts. Boston Fashion is the way we express how we’d like to be perceived. With more than 60 designs, this exhibit demonstrates how brands have pushed historically binary apparel categorizations. On view through August 25 IMPLICIT TENSIONS: MAPPLETHORPE NOW Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. New York Though at times controversial, Robert Mapplethorpe’s work has influenced generations of artists. This exhibition is a retrospective of his early collages, Polaroids, and requisite nudes playing on power, the gaze, and sexuality. On view through July 10 ART AFTER STONEWALL: 1969-1989 Leslie-Lohman Museum. New York This survey of over 150 works of art and visual materials explores the impact of the Queer Liberation Movement on visual culture with work from the likes of Nan Goldin, Lyle Ashton Harris, and…

Troy Powell remembers the late Alvin Ailey fondly. The legendary choreographer saw something in Powell at nine years old and recruited him for a children’s program after leading a masterclass at his elementary school. Perhaps that’s why, when asked about Ailey’s legacy, Powell says simply, “It’s magical.” This year marks more than six decades since Ailey founded the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater—but it’s also the 30th anniversary of his death. It’s taken about this long for the full scope and impact of his art to receive its due beyond the stage. “His story gives people hope. It gives people perspective, not just on dance: it really touches your own life where you're looking at yourself [and] who you are as a human being,” Powell says. “His legacy is so…

Dear Reader, THE TASK OF BEING AN ARTIST IS UNDOUBTEDLY A DAUNTING ONE. In moments of political instability and extreme violence, we have historically turned to artists to help us make some sense of the world around us. (Think of: Gran Fury, Emory Douglas, Jenny Holzer, Zoe Leonard, Fred Wilson, or Ai Weiwei.) With this in mind, I was disenchanted (but not surprised) when, after our country’s most recent presidential election, I saw friends jubilantly forecasting “art in the age of Trump.” While it is true that art made in eras of civic unrest often resonates, it is equally true that artworks should never be divorced from the stories of their authors and co-conspirators. I am always curious about the labor that goes into making art. How does the social…

African art was the first thing we learned about in art school, but they used “primitivism” to describe it—the work coming from people who looked like me was “primitive.” This idea comes from a rich American history of colonization where Black people were enslaved and called “animals.” This canon of Eurocentricity made its way into our curriculums, where it’s disseminated everywhere. An estimated 85 percent of artists in American museums are white. And the nude figures—the skinny white women that appear in art—influence our beauty standards. When Black artists set out to create, we get comments saying art doesn’t look like us. I manage a gallery, and just the other day, a white woman handed me her keys to park her car as she was heading in! Putting myself in…

Many people get to work in the perfume business, but very few get to call themselves “Master Perfumers.” With a pedigree from the most exclusive training in Grasse, France, acclaimed Nose Jacques Cavallier-Belletrud works with some of the world’s finest raw materials—florals, citruses, and beyond—and finds ways to recreate them using molecules in a laboratory. But for his latest creation for Cologne Perfumes Louis Vuitton, Belletrud set his sights on (of all places) California, where he traded his traditional Calabrian and Sicilian fruits for newer, unexpected elements, like cactus. “Some cacti smell a bit like maté, others like cucumber,” he quips. The note plays a central role in “Cactus Garden,” an eau de toilette that’s rounded out by elements of lemongrass and bergamot. Nearly four years in the making, Belletrud’s…

SINCE KEITH HARING’S DEATH DUE TO AIDS-RELATED COMPLICATIONS in 1990, the artist’s work has leapt from the sides of buildings to the front of t-shirts, laces of shoes, and the backs of ball gowns. As Haring’s images have increased in popularity, they’ve also become divorced from their emergent context: New York’s Lower East Side in the 1980s. And it was the Black and Latinx, specifically Puerto Rican, community that imbued his work with a deeper meaning. “[Haring’s work] was always meant to detach itself from whatever space it emerged,” Ricardo Montez, author of the forthcoming book Keith Haring’s Line: Race and the Performance of Desire, says. The economically devastated Lower East Side was a multicultural melting pot when a 20-year-old Haring, the son of a cartoonist, arrived in 1978 from…

Angal Field Photographer Whether lounging along the Pacific coastline or cradled within cluttered New York apartments, photographer Angal Field’s cast of their queer and trans friends is held by a tender gaze. One subject, in a work titled Jos that exhibited at Field’s debut solo, appears reclining shirtless below a colorful clothesline. A warm, sunlit glow lends the image an intimate feel, as if daydreamed into existence. Anchored by self-portraits documenting their own transition, Field’s compositions are a compass for the many ways of existing within a body. “I’m interested in the mythos of the coastline, as a point of epic departure and homecoming, as it dovetails with a history of queer cruising,” they say. “My artistic practice is founded on intimacy, consent, and collaboration.” Field is also a dab…

Cheryl Bell is absolutely furious. She had recently arrived in Paris “on holiday” with her 15-year-old twin daughters, Ruth and May. Just as she was trying to figure out where they’d venture next in Montmartre, the Parisian neighborhood best known for its sex shops and, of course, the famed Moulin Rouge, an older man approached her girls. Maternal instincts fully engaged, Cheryl hightailed it over to Ruth and May, immediately shielding them with her body. The man insists that he’s from an agency, and he believes Ruth and May “should be models.” With her voice raised, Cheryl proudly tells the creep to fuck off, before hurrying the girls down the stairs of the nearest metro station. Right before he gave up (and unbeknownst to the trio), he slipped a business…

WHEN OUT ASKED IF I’D BE INTERESTED in writing a piece surrounding the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s new Costume Institute exhibition “Camp: Notes on Fashion,” opening May 9, and its curator Andrew Bolton, I was sitting at a bar in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, during the city’s annual Carnaval festivities. I’ve since come to understand that Rio during Carnaval clocks in at a pretty high camp score: the feathery splendor, the street glitter, the costumed and sometimes satirical sex appeal. The hotel I was staying in—the Copacabana Palace—is very camp, both in name (it was never a palace) and in lore (it’s shot in a 1933 film called Flying Down to Rio starring Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire). And, while there, I saw the supermodels Caroline Trentini and Jhona Burjack…

THERE ARE TWO ART WORLDS. There’s the high, fine, fancy art depicted in high-concept comedies and esoteric dramas alike; the type of art for which a rich man on a yacht calls into an auction and dramatically bids a pearl-clutching $27 million on an iconic Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Paul Gauguin, or Jasper Johns. Men gasp as their glasses fog up. Women in Chanel suits nearly faint. Everything is about rarity and impeccable provenance. It’s a world where some of history’s most renowned works are stored away in massive, “offshore” warehouses so that collectors can avoid paying taxes on their art’s value. Then, there’s the world where art is accessible to everyone. And despite being raised in a famous art-collecting family, Nats Getty prefers to use her family’s access to expand that…

IN 1999, for the spring/summer 2000 season, John Galliano introduced an it bag that would become a staple of the early aughts: the Christian Dior Saddle. With its short arm strap and iconic dangling “D” charm, the equestrian-inspired purse made appearances on the shoulders of Beyoncé, Paris Hilton, and even Carrie Bradshaw. Now, almost 20 years later, with Kim Jones as the new artistic director of Dior Men, the staple receives a masculine reinvention. Unveiled in Tokyo as a part of the Pre-Fall 2019 range, the new Saddle is created in collaboration with Japanese artist Hajime Sorayama. Known for his android pin-ups, Sorayama turned the must-have into a miniature sculpture—of which only 100 numbered editions were made. With a metal buckle designed by Matthew Williams, creative director of 1017 ALYX…

Dear Papi, I’m a lesbian college student studying dance, and in a few months I have to perform a solo I’m choreographing about my experience with internalized homophobia. The piece deals with some really personal and painful material, and I don’t quite know how I’ll get the courage to perform it in front of an audience of clueless straight people. I’ve performed little parts of it for close friends, and I still felt so scared and vulnerable. My question is, how does any gay ever get the courage and the willpower to reveal their most difficult experiences with homophobia to a bunch of heteros? Love, Scared Gay Dancer™ “Art is powerful because it makes us vulnerable. It’s putting your thoughts and feelings out into the world. That’s an inherently scary…

IN 2010, ACTIVIST GROUP ART+POSITIVE stood on the steps of New York’s Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum, a Manhattan-based Smithsonian institution, to demand that the Smithsonian return the film A Fire in My Belly, by HIV-positive artist David Wojnarowicz, to the National Portrait Gallery’s exhibition “Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture.” Its eventual expulsion from the show underlined not only the queerphobia of American institutions, but also how they actively erase HIV-positive artists from the national conversation. Art has always played an integral part in the AIDS epidemic. Gran Fury, the ACT UP-affiliated collective, created the Silence = Death poster. Visual imagery in pamphlets fought miseducation about the virus and spread safe-sex messaging throughout queer communities. And while some art was meant for the street, just as much art around…

“As you see, I have a lot of phalli lying around,” quips Charles Leslie, who co-founded the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art in New York with his late partner J. Frederic “Fritz” Lohman. Leslie sits, legs crossed, on a couch in the museum’s foyer, where a recreation of his 1,800-square-foot SoHo loft, just around the corner, has been staged as an exhibition titled “Male Gaze: Life, Legacy, Legend.” He motions toward a glass case filled with crystal and ceramic penises, scrimshawed whale-bone dildos—the various explicitly pointed objects for which his apartment, where homoerotic art in all styles and media cover every surface, has been lovingly dubbed the “Phallus Palace.” One painting by the artist Marion Pinto, a dual nude of Leslie and Lohman lying side by side, hangs…

On the tail end of his first solo museum exhibition, sculptor and performance artist Raúl de Nieves reflects on the queer spaces that shaped him. THERE IS NO LOCK ON THE DOOR of Raúl de Nieves’ studio—at first glance, in fact, there is little precious to be found, just walls lined with plastic bags and lucite containers cradling the everyday craft supplies for which the sculptor and performance artist’s work has become synonymous: thousands upon thousands of candy-colored microbeads; flimsy plastic masks resembling animals and cartoon characters (one Flintstones mask, de Nieves notes, was rescued from a dumpster); and tiny, jingling metal bells. Countless hours of repetitious hand-sewing and hot gluing will see glittering piles of the miniscule matter, like cells to a body, meet to form joyful, towering sculptures: anthropomorphic stalactites…

Zanele Muholi is skeptical of me. The visual activist can’t quite make out who I am, where I come from, or what my background is over our teleconference call. We’ve been trying for days to find the perfect time that works with both of our busy schedules, as I’m on Eastern Standard Time and they’re currently in their home country of South Africa—vacillating between Johannesburg, Capetown, and Durban. For Muholi, it matters that I’m a Black transgender woman, even if I’m from the United States. And while they are reassured by our shared diasporic experience, the identity labels I use—that we use—that they used once upon a time to describe their sexual orientation and gender don’t suffice for them. The Durbanite is quick to explain that more specific terms discussing…

WHEN RÍO SOFIA EXHIBITED HER FORCED WOMANHOOD! series of self-portraits in her final year as a student at Cooper Union, she braced herself for a backlash. The work, a mix of still and moving images inspired by forced feminization erotica, was too jarring, abrasive, and unrepentantly deviant, she thought, to warrant celebration. To the visual artist’s surprise, the school community loved it. The president even personally thanked her for creating it, and the admissions office toured prospective students and their parents through the exhibition space to show how safe the school’s students felt to express themselves. Though positive, the response unsettled Sofia. “I was just so confused,” she says. “I made a body of work that was explicitly critical of trans empowerment narratives, and the institution still found a way…