• Donatello, da Vinci, and Michelangelo to behaviors of modern queerness and sodomy
  • Shakespeare, Dickinson, etc.
• “No single chapter can do justice to the range, diversity, and depth of queer art. We can only provide a sampling, highlights, of LGBTQ artistic production.”
• focus on end of the 19th century onwards
  • Whitman influence
    • Winslow Homer: masculinity and camraderie
    • Eakins: Whitman ideology and imagery
    • Hockney: references to Whitman
  • “invert” influence and non-heteronormative presentation
    • Frances Benjamin Johnston: openly lesbian photographer: 1896 self-portrait of an independent New Woman
    • Charles Demuth: “Precisionist”; gay subculture and modernism
    • Frida Kahlo
      • Kahlo and Demuth, bright colors and depiction of homosexual intimacy
    • Claude Cahun: Surrealist photography, staging
      • transvestic, lesbianism, transgression
      • Kahlo and Cahun: self-portraits
• 19th century expatriates in European centers
  • restoration of classical homoeroticism and art
  • artistic proto-lesbian community
    • Charlotte Cushman, Matilda Hays, Harriet Hosmer, Emma Stebbins, Edmonia Lewis, Mary Lloyd, Adelaide Kemble Sartoris, etc.
    • artists, actors, singers, sculptor
    • Rome
  • 20th century expatriate center: Paris
    • Natalie Barney, Renée Vivien, Gertrude Stein, Alice Toklas
    • writers, poets
    • visited by painters aandd aauthors: Romaine Brooks, Radclyffe Hall, Janet Flanner, Djuna Barnes, Tamara de Lempicka
      • art deco
    • African American emigration
      • France was more accepting of attraction vs. U.S.
      • Josephine Baker
      • James Baldwin: Giovanni’s Room
• “physique magazines”: nude magazines co-opted for the male homosexual audience
  • originally part of the “muscular Christian” movement
  • late 19th century–WWII conception in a culture of officework and reduced domestic life
  • bodybuilding and beefcake boom
  • inversion of gender roles; lead to a gay-oriented physique magazine, Physique Pictorial in 1951
  • passed censorship
  • later included stylized sexual illustrations (Tom of Finland) that contrasted sexology
  • focus on a white gay audience, no racial diversity
• highly political U.S. LGBTQ art
  • “lesbian art” opposing patriarchal culture
    • Ann Meredith, Bettye Lane, Joan Biren, Kate Millett, Louise Fishman, Tee Corinnee, Maree Azzopardi, Fiona Lawry, Jane Becker
  • photography, paper mache, stylized painting
  • evocative art: genitalia, pop art
  • AIDS epidemic
  • Warhol, Cleve Jones, Keith Haring, Robert Mapplethorpe
  • public political queer art on buses, billboards, newspapers
    • Adejoke Tugbiyele 3d work, intersectionality + Nayland Blake
• backlash by right-wing and conservatives
  • pathos and subjective judgements against provocative works
  • Jesse Helms
  • backlash also by liberal and left-leaning critics disturbed by works
    • “The desire to protect the public from offensive material and the move to protect minorities from discrimination become conflated in censoring transgressive art.”

queer theater

• aesthetes
  • Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest
    • “bunburying”; Bunthorne and Bunbury invalid
• Ballets Russes and Léon Bakst
  • grotesque inspiration; Aubrey Beardsley
• comparing American vs. European environments of theatre
  • large censorship of indecency
  • Padlock Law, Walker: padlocking doors and arresting performers for homosexual, pre-marital sex media
  • The Normal Heart, Angels in America, Rent in the late 20th century onward, esp. Rent
  • large absence of lesbians in media
    • modern: Fun Home, based on Bechdel’s memoir
    • Patience and Sarah opera, among many other operas; Harvey Milk, As One, Fellow Travelers, The Stonewall Operas
    • thinking about it (Wicked’s homosexual themes in its book and intersectionality being erased on theatre and likely musical movie…)
• using LGBTQ art to challenge consumerist ideology

queer social networking

• enhanced by the Internet and its increase in population/popularity since the mid-1990s
• “the idea that the internet provides interaction and information on a global scale and in an unequivocally egalitarian way is problematic; it does not consider issues such as nationality, social class, and general access to resources—reliable electricity, for instance—needed to use the internet. It also does not account for the fact that some governments prohibit access to specific sites and information or for the fact that, in the United States, access can be limited for people whose primary internet usage occurs in schools or libraries.”
  • “For those with access, the internet, with its multiple venues for textually complex and visually rich expression, offers LGBTQ people some opportunity to articulate their concerns, interests, and desires. Given the highly interactive nature of the internet, users can not only represent themselves but also exchange ideas, form a variety of communities, and meet others from around the world.”
• “strength in numbers” as much as it can harm through false information and hoaxing
• increase in information/spread of information
  • large spheres of internet activism
  • “keyboard activism” vs. real-life grassroots work
  • physical vs online communities and discussions; why not transform real-life physical areas as well as the online sphere to increase acceptance and encouragement of queer communities
• expression of identity and larger awareness of diversity and intersectionality
• increase in ways to encounter homophobia due to crossover of slurs reclaimed or reused by different groups
  • public awareness of information → public discrimination and homophobia even years after
  • public outing enhanced by social media: wikis, blogs, organized sites, etc.
• easier access to erotic and pornographic media, sex positivity
  • also increased pedophilia and predation
  • curated apps and websites for certain kinks, communities, etc.
• censorship
  • China wrt pornographic sites
  • Iranian Queer Organization and censorship in Iran
    • should online queer activism for other countries be based on a Western or U.S. model? non-universal, non-centric
    • “global gay” vs. transnationality
  • ISP censorship carries over to many areas, including U.S. and Western servers
  • capitalist censorship by larger corporations: Facebook, Youtube, Craigslist
    • marketing and targeting specific consumers of specific communities
    • “LGBTQ people are the subjects of marketing, so the price we pay for virtual queer space is the price we pay for the services and equipment needed to access that space and for the products sold by those who underwrite it”
• “The technologies themselves might be politically “neutral,” but the uses to which they are put never are”