‘It will be seen as a political exhibition.’

-The Gay & Lesbian Review

JONATHAN D. KATZ is a pioneering curator and historian of queer æsthetics and scholarship. Currently a professor at the University of Pennsylvania, he has taught at Yale University, Smith College, and City College of San Francisco, among others. He was the founding president of New York’s Leslie-Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art.

Katz has mounted queer-themed exhibitions in Europe, South America, and the U.S. In 2010, his groundbreaking exhibition Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture opened at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Portrait Gallery in Washington DC, featuring paintings, drawings, photography, installations, and media images of lesbian and gay identities in the 20th century. It was a first for a national American museum.

Last July, I reviewed in these pages Katz’ catalogue for About Face: Stonewall, Revolt, and New Queer Art, an exhibition at Chicago’s Wrightwood 659 featuring over 350 artworks by 38 international LGBT artists. Katz has a long history with Wrightwood, a contemporary museum designed by Pritzker Prize-winning architect Tadao Ando. His latest collaboration with Wrightwood, his most ambitious to date, is a show titled The First Homosexuals: The Birth of a New Identity, 1869–1939. It was in 1869 that the term “homosexual” was first coined. The exhibition examines how this new concept impacted societal perceptions and artistic representations in the ensuing decades. It also explores the lives of these artists whose works have been overlooked or “straightwashed” by art critics and curators to date.

 I spoke with Katz via Zoom about his latest exhibition and past projects.  

John R. Killacky: The scope of your exhibition is exhilarating: 300 works by over 125 LGBT artists from forty countries on loan from over a hundred museums and collections. How long did you work on this, and how did you ever convince so many institutions to loan work?

Jonathan D. Katz: Almost seven years. In many respects, this is only the tip of the iceberg. When putting together the exhibition we had three or four checklists. If we got rejected for a loan, we went down the list and got another work. Sometimes we got our first choices, sometimes we got our fourth or fifth choices. Eventually we were able to have a good indicator of what the early homosexual looked like. We have some holes. We ran into a lot of problems with India, former Soviet states, and of course with Russia itself.

The exhibition came out of a desire to do something that hadn’t been done before. I want to mention my assistant curator, Johnny Willis. They are nonbinary and have been absolutely essential in managing the exhibition and also in helping to frame the dynamic of the relationship between queer and trans identities.

JRK: Will the exhibition tour?

JDK: We are in current negotiations with two institutions in Europe. It is telling that no other institution in the U.S. is doing it. I want to underscore that sponsorship for the exhibition extended to these other museums; they would have had it for free. Lest we think we are beyond the politics here, we’re not.

JRK: The catalogue essays are revelatory and erudite: 22 scholars contextualizing works from Europe, Africa, Australia, Asia, and the Americas. The articles are a primer in international queer and gender studies. How did you put this team together?

JDK: I started researching who were the best people in different areas, and I think we got most of them. One of the things that was absolutely critical was making sure we had people who were really developed scholars in each of these geographic areas, and they needed to write in English.

JRK: In the catalogue, I particularly loved the last section of the exhibition, Beyond the Binary. Can you talk about this?

JDK: We felt it was really important at the moment that we were reinforcing the idea of homosexuality to underscore that it was never only about same-sex desire. We wanted to make clear that in many respects, trans and queer have always been with us. You can’t talk about same-sex desire without interrogating what sex you are talking about.

JRK: In 2022, you curated an earlier iteration of The First Homosexuals at Wrightwood 659 featuring 125 works by forty artists. Why did you decide to expand the exhibition?

JDK: What happened was Covid. Many museums all over the world went into loan moratorium, not only in the peak Covid period, but for another year. So, we literally couldn’t do the exhibition that we had planned. We had already had some loan letters go out, so we thought, what the hell, now we have an opportunity to test-market the theme.

JRK: In your work in museums and academia, you challenge the prevailing tendency to erase queerness as part of an artist’s identity, particularly those from the 19th and 20th centuries. Your work makes this case persuasively, yet museums still resist. Why is that?

JDK: I think it goes all the way back to the 1980s and the Robert Mapplethorpe exhibition The Perfect Moment, when the combination of queerness and museums proved to be a third rail. In the museum world, innovation is in short supply, and yet they are very worried about what will be perceived as political. What they fail to see is that by not addressing questions of gender and sexuality, they are being equally political. And they are not wrong; ours will be perceived as a political exhibition.

Our enemies use this in their fundraising. But this does not excuse the cowardice of institutions. And let’s be clear that in this country, private money controls most public museums. And that money skews right. I am a longtime stalwart in this field and can tell you it hasn’t changed very much in the thirty years that I have been doing this.

JRK: In 2010, the director of the Smithsonian pulled a David Wojnarowicz video, A Fire in My Belly, from your exhibition Hide/Seek. What happened?

JDK: This was a kind of classic bureaucratic stupidity. The director of the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery and the curatorial team had worked out every kind of possibility of what would happen and had an ascending series of moves that we had calculated in advance. We had all these plans. Then the head of the Smithsonian panicked because they threatened to cut the budget by $60 million or something like that. He summarily ignored our plans and snatched defeat for the institution out of the jaws of victory.

JRK: For those who don’t know, the video shows a crucifix on the ground with ants crawling over it to the music of Diamanda Galás.

JDK: The funny thing about that image, I wasn’t really sure I wanted to use it because it was so damn Catholic. It was the most religious work in the entire exhibition.

JRK: You’ve been doing a lot of lecturing in France and Germany. Why is that?

JDK: Germany is a fertile ground for us. There are lots of conferences on sexuality. I am working on several exhibitions that will be happening in a couple of years there.

In France we contributed to an exhibition on the work of Gustave Caillebotte, an early French Impressionist who was the subject of a one-person show at the Musée d’Orsay called Gustave Caillebotte: Painting Men. Seventy percent of the work features male subjects, and many of the subjects are nude or partially so.

My husband André Dombrowski and I wrote a chapter in the exhibition catalog about it that got picked up in French newspapers as an example of the colonization of the French Academy by American identity politics. In response, the d’Orsay did something wonderful and hosted a symposium to bring out all the scholarship. Unfortunately, none of the people who attacked us came to the symposium.

JRK: What other shows are you working on?

JDK: There will be an exhibition also at Wrightwood in the spring of 2026, Dispossession in the Americas, featuring contemporary Latin American work including a lot of work by queer and trans artists.

JRK: I know you are planning a book on Jasper Johns…

JDK: I have three books in advance of that. The books before are the catalogue for the current exhibition and then books on two queer artists: photographer Arthur Tress and land artist Jim McGee, not to mention the catalog for the Dispossession in the Americasexhibition.

JRK: Getting back to Jasper Johns, he and all his contemporaries were never out. They were not necessarily closeted, but the press remained completely silent about their queerness.

JDK: I always loved his work. I think he’s one of the greatest artists of our time. I am also looking to underscore the degree to which many of the most celebrated American paintings by Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, and Cy Twombly not only have queerness at their center but also are coy missives sent back and forth to each other referencing each other’s painting, each other’s personalities. Essentially there is a gay love story at the very epicenter of postwar American art.

One of the things that makes this particularly charged is that the generation that proceeded these artists were the Abstract Expressionists, who were completely heterosexual. This next generation of Johns, Rauschenberg, Twombly, Cage, Cunningham, and Warhol were queer. So, obviously sexuality had something to do with it.

The Future Is Now

-Writing About Our Generation

Sixty-two years ago, I was shepherded out of an elementary school classroom and into church to pray for the assassinated President Kennedy. Bob Dylan’s “Blowing in the Wind” was on the radio. In high school, I protested at Chicago’s Democratic National Convention.

Fifty-two years ago, I bought a one-way ticket to New York to pursue my dream of becoming a dancer. I found community with other gay men, although we had no legal protections; we could be fired from jobs and evicted from apartments. Our sexual activity was criminalized. 

Forty years ago, I managed Trisha Brown’s dance company with a rotary phone and rolodex. With press kits in my backpack and a Eurail pass I knocked on doors of theaters and opera houses across Europe introducing the company's work.

Thirty-one years ago in Minneapolis, I was inundated with hate mail during the Culture Wars. The AIDS pandemic was obliterating an entire generation. My artwork eulogized and mourned. Later, complications from spinal surgery left me paraplegic.

Twenty years ago, I worked in arts administration and philanthropy in San Francisco while creating disability-inflected videos and essays. I married my husband and rekindled a childhood love of Shetland ponies. With equine in tow, we moved to Vermont in 2010.

Seven years ago, I retired from running the Flynn Center in Burlington and served two terms in the Vermont House of Representatives. Writing and media projects continue, along with exercise and daily chores at the barn. I am steeped in the realities of aging.

In each of these decades, optimism raged during boom times as well as despair in downturns. While political, demographic and environmental forecasts appear dystopian, I am buoyed by the grass-roots resistance and resiliency experienced in my lifetime.

As an artist, I learned to begin, and begin again—improving on what works, dropping what doesn’t, whether solo or as a collaborator. Failures and mistakes fuel advances. Cultural investments now will better prepare us for whatever cataclysmic catastrophes lay ahead.

Even in the Trumpian hellscape of eliminating the arts, humanities, DEI initiatives and trans identities, I dream of diverse inclusive downtowns revitalized and people finding common ground through artistic engagement, children finding voice with arts education central in K-12 curriculum and artist soothsayers providing succor.

The arts are where hope lives.

I know artists will create vivifying metaphors, define space (real and imagined), commemorate losses and victories, and articulate the unconscious, engendering a safe space for unsafe ideas—a necessary role in a profane world.

Five years from now, I will have reached my average life expectancy. Did I make a difference? What is my service today? These are my questions as I ponder coming times. In the near-term, if we do the hard and necessary work today, a society we conjure together will flourish.

The future is now. Here’s to robust communities!

Aflame: Learning from Silence

-The Arts Fuse

Amid Donald Trump’s dystopian whirlwind of chaos and destruction, Pico Iyer’s Aflame: Learning from Silence (240 pages, Riverhead Books) offers valuable advice: tune out the ugly noise and focus on connecting more deeply with oneself and others to marshal righteous action. The lessons in his memoir are drawn from notes taken over the course of his over 100 silent retreats in a Benedictine monastery in Big Sur over the last three decades.

Iyer originally came to the center in 1991 after his home burned to the ground and he had no place to stay. He returned again and again: after his father’s death, his child’s cancer treatments, and between international travel writing assignments. In this retreat he discovered that the solitude was “not so much about escape as redirection and recollection.”

Instructions to retreatants are simple: Put the whole world behind you and forget it. If your mind wanders don’t fret. Simply empty yourself out and sit waiting. Over the years, Iyer found that silence and contemplation liberating — it unleashed his creativity. Experiencing uncluttered undistracted time made him realize that “the point of being here is not to get anything done; only to see what may be worth doing.” Repeatedly, Iyer emerged more engaged with his surroundings and a renewed sense of direction.

In addition to beautiful descriptions of the wilderness setting, Aflame is enlivened by loving portraits of sweet-tempered monks as well as passing conversations with fellow seekers. Wisdom from spiritual, philosophical, and literary visionaries are peppered throughout, including reminiscences of Zen practitioner/songwriter Leonard Cohen.

Readers are reminded usefully reminded that clarity and silence are “available in many settings, not always monastic.” We are encouraged to pay more attention to our surroundings in daily life. The book’s title is drawn from a Christian proverb: “If you so wish, you can become aflame.” Iyer’s heart-felt wisdom urges a deeper examination of self as well as deepening our connection to others. Compassion and empathy move us forward — they are essential tools in a profane world.

An Antidote To Trumpian Hate

-Writing About Our Generation

Visiting MASS MoCA’s campus of repurposed industrial mill buildings in North Adams, MA, is always a delight with its Sol LeWitt wall drawings, James Turrell light installations, Louise Bourgeois marble sculptures, Anselm Kiefer leaden beds and Laurie Anderson’s multimedia explorations, along with new large-scale exhibitions of lesser-known artists. 

I just recently visited one of its performing arts spaces to preview a work-in-progress of a new theatrical collaboration between two renowned interdisciplinary artists, Eiko Otake and Wen Hui. Using movement, text and video, they explored the suppressed histories of war on a personal and societal level. 

Otake grew up in post-war Japan and Wen in China during the Cultural Revolution. In What Is War, the artists uncover intimate stories never discussed by parents and grandparents as well as suppressed national histories. 

Both are esteemed artists with long careers. Otake performed for decades with her husband as part of Eiko and Koma, before going solo in the last decade. Wen is widely recognized for her community-based projects as part of Living Dance Studio in Beijing. 

The partnership began in 2020 when Otake visited Wen in China during which time they created video diaries of their process. When Covid curtailed the residency, they continued to share work over Zoom, investigating cultural differences and similarities. This material resulted in a documentary, No Rule Is Our Rule (2023), screened internationally at festivals and universities. 

In the MASS MoCA showing I attended of What Is War, their movement styles are quite different. Otake is at times feral, arms akimbo, slicing through space while Wen is more restrained, and lower to the ground. Their duets are tender, supporting, uplifting and comforting.  

Throughout, they share and then cede the space to each other. The two artists (at times naked) fill the stage with dignity, gravitas and humility, weaving intricately sculptured movement, poignant commentary and striking documentary video.  

Particularly potent is a section utilizing footage of them visiting Nanjing’s museum dedicated to the women forced to work at military brothels by occupying Japanese troops during the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937-1945). Images of those forced into sexual slavery are displayed as the two artists separately perform emotionally riveting movement. 

Language adds another lush layer of complexity to the theatrical tapestry as the artists deftly alternate from Japanese and Mandarin into English as they excavate family and cultural memories. An astonishing moment occurs when each speaks while drawing calligraphy on each other’s bodies. No translation is provided, but none is necessary as the images captivate the viewer. 

Experiencing this work, even in its nascent stage without final production elements, was cathartic. Two fearless women claiming their agency sharing embodied truths. Nothing could be timelier and more resonant—a necessary antidote to Trumpian racist anti-immigrant frenzy and hate-mongering.  

The full production of What Is War will be presented at Walker Art Center in Minneapolis and UCLA in April.

Thinking Inside the Box: 'Black Box' by Dona Ann McAdams

-Seven Days

A photographic memoir documents the Vermonter's 50-year career of taking pictures of everything from gay activists to goats.

As a social documentarian, Dona Ann McAdams illuminates the particularity of place and the innate humanity of the people she photographs. Working with old-school aesthetics, the Sandgate resident shoots with a small Leica camera and prints black-and-white images in an analog darkroom. She never stages photographs, preferring to capture tableaux vivants of the communities she inhabits.

McAdams' latest book, Black Box: A Photographic Memoir, reproduces 107 pictures alongside elucidating backstories from her 50-year career. She is launching her memoir with a companion exhibition at the Vermont Center for Photography in Brattleboro, on view through December 29.

McAdams studied photography at the San Francisco Art Institute in the early 1970s. She writes about running out of film and stopping at the Castro Camera store, where owner Harvey Milk urged her to merge politics and aesthetics into social action. McAdams' images of the burgeoning gay pride movement, sex workers at the Hookers Ball, activist Angela Davis and photographer Hilton Braithwaite are testament to Milk's advice. After Milk's election as the first openly gay city supervisor in 1977 and his assassination in 1978, McAdams left San Francisco and moved back east.

In New York, McAdams found herself amid an avant-garde community of artists. She was the house photographer at Performance Space 122 for 23 years, capturing compelling images there and at other downtown venues. Her stories in the book enliven striking portraits of Eileen Myles, Meredith Monk, Karen Finley, and David Wojnarowicz — a body of work that won her Obie and Bessie Awards.

The book also includes a single hand-colored image from McAdams' 13 years running an arts workshop on Coney Island for people living with mental illness. One day, a participant began coloring on her black-and-white pictures and was soon joined by others.

"Sometimes they took them back to their group home at the Garden of Eden or traded them for cigarettes," McAdams writes. "The staff at the facility would hang them in their offices. People started trading them like baseball cards."

McAdams' agitprop sensibilities are conveyed in adroitly captured shots of queer liberation, ACT UP, and antinuclear and pro-choice protests from the 1980s and '90s. She comes across not as a detached journalist but as an engaged social agitator. Here is her description of shooting an indelible image of performer-poet Assotto Saint holding up a cardboard coffin during an AIDS protest:

I needed perspective. I needed height. I needed to look down on the protest coffins. I shimmied up a lamppost, the way we did in high school gym with the rope, legs wrapped tight around the pole. A man in the crowd with a makeshift coffin looked up at me and said, Be careful. He stared at me from the street then through the years from the photo.

McAdams and her husband, writer Brad Kessler, moved to Vermont in 1998 and started raising American Nubian goats. In a shift from New York City's art and protest scenes, she focused her camera on neighboring farmers and their work animals. At the Saratoga RaceTrack, McAdams became certified as a hot-walker — someone who walks horses to cool them down. There, she has recorded workers, human and equine, on the backstretch for the past two decades.

The stories from her childhood that McAdams includes add poignancy and humor to the book, placed next to family snapshots as well as her later work. She pairs a photograph of a docent lecturing beside a Degas sculpture at the Musée d'Orsay in Paris with an anecdote about one of her high school teachers who wouldn't let her write a paper on Diane Arbus because, he said, "Photography is not art."

Horses, Humans, and Love

-The Arts Fuse

Tim Hayes’s Horses, Humans, and Love (Trafalgar Square Books) is an indispensable coaching guide for those with equines. I board my pony with twenty other horses, and working with these animals can generate frustration and backsliding. This book is helpful because of its specificity and humane approach.

The author draws on natural horsemanship principles. Readers are reminded that creating relationships of mutual trust, respect, and kindness are far more beneficial than turning to the tactics of force, fear, and intimidation. For Hayes, the most effective way to make horses to change their behavior is for us to change ours first. Relaxation and recalibration, rather than tension and anxiety, smooth out problematic habits and improve human/animal interactions.

A previous book, Riding Home: The Power of Horses to Heal (St. Martin’s Press) contains several equine therapeutic practices, exploring how establishing relationships with horses have proven to help troubled teenagers, war veterans with PTSD, those struggling with addiction and eating disorders, survivors of sexual trauma and people on the autism spectrum.

In this new book, Hayes draws from his own story of leaving the film industry to work with equines and the welcome impact that decision had on his self-acceptance, marriages, and sobriety. He and his students learned that the issues they encountered with horses “turned out to be the same difficulties they experienced in other areas of their life.” Connecting to horses physically, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually nurtured healing compassion for themselves and created empathy for others.

A central point in Horses, Humans, and Love is understanding the herd mentality of the animal. Once a hierarchy is established, the horses care about and protect each other. The author’s hope is “If we can learn from horses…. maybe we can learn how to love ourselves, each other, and the herd of eight billion we call humanity.” Pertinent lessons from the barn for our fractious times.

Cher Speaks Out - Part One

-The Arts Fuse

Now 78, Cher has written a compellingly candid chronicle of her early life and showbiz career, up until her move into the movies, which will be told in Part Two.

CHER: The Memoir, Part One. Dey Street Books 413 pages, $40

In August 1965 Sonny and Cher sang “I Got You Babe” on The Ed Sullivan Show. I was 13. The moment I saw that doe-eyed waif in bell-bottoms sing to her shaggy-haired partner in a bobcat vest, I knew I was leaving my crew cut behind. I’ve been a fan ever since.

For over sixty years, Cher’s expansive talents have not only blazed multiple trails, but been amazingly resilient. She has garnered Oscar, Emmy, and Grammy Awards and is the only artist to chart number one records in seven consecutive decades. Last month, Cher was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

Now 78, she has written an autobiography, The Memoir, Part One. The initial installment covers her family history, including an itinerant childhood, attaining international success as part of a singing duo with Sonny Bono, and surviving that partnership’s demise. Further reinventions from the ’80s onwards — as an infomercial queen, serious actress and über-goddess — will have to wait for Part Two.

Her mother, Georgia Holt (born Jackie Jean Crouch), was a former model and retired actress/model of Irish, English, German, and Cherokee ancestry. The family led a hardscrabble life. When a child, Jackie accompanied her parents in the fields as they picked cotton. Dad brought his young daughter along to sing for nickels at local bars. When she was eight, the pair hitchhiked from Oklahoma to California, imagining that she might become the next Shirley Temple. As an adult, Cher’s mother continued to pursue a quest for stardom, occasionally winning walk-on parts in television shows, including I Love Lucy and The Adventures of Ozzy and Harriet.

However, her early career aspirations were chaotically derailed. Jackie was married seven times to six husbands (wedding Cher’s biological father twice). In her memoir, Cher calls Jackie “a serial monogamist.” Given that each relationship only lasted a few years, Cher and her younger sister Gee (from another husband) were continually uprooted — sometimes her mother returned to Hollywood in order to purse her elusive dreams of stardom. Predictably, there was a lot of intergenerational collateral damage, especially centered on men. Still, Cher waxes lovingly of her mother and sister’s early life together

It didn’t start out well. Jackie was 18 when she met Johnnie Sarkisian, a handsome Armenian-American who was struggling with heroin and gambling disorders. They were married and gave birth to Cher. In Scranton, PA, Jackie worked as a waitress and singer at night to support them. Dad abandoned the family, dropping the baby off at a Catholic children’s home on his way out of town.

Cher’s young mother was deemed “unfit” by the Mother Superior. It took considerable time to regain custody. Cher doesn’t remember being at the facility, but “it must have been several months,” she writes. “As I arrived as an infant barely able to crawl and when I came out, I was walking.”

Cher took care of her sister when mom was off on casting calls. Left to her own devices, she often rebelled and went out on potentially dangerous adventures; she hopped on a freight train when she was nine and “borrowed” her mother’s car at 13. Eventually she dropped out of high school and moved in with Sonny Bono when she was 16. He was 27.

Bono was “Wall of Sound” music producer Phil Spector’s assistant. Before long, they were doing backup singing for The Ronettes and The Righteous Brothers, eventually morphing into their own act as Sonny and Cher. In 1965 the folk-rocking duo had five songs in the Top Twenty charts. Bono produced a slew of other pop hits and two (unsuccessful) movies for the couple.

All was great with the Svengali and his young muse until it wasn’t. They lost their record contracts and owed $270,000 in back taxes in 1969. “Just give me two years and I promise we’ll be bigger than ever,” Bono reassured Cher.

They went on the road playing supper clubs and casinos, slowly reinventing themselves, creating a wisecracking glitzy lounge act that would appeal to an adult crowd. “They didn’t come for our singing, they wanted to hear our jokes,” Cher recalls. CBS gave them a summer TV pilot that was a hit: The Sonny and Cher Comedy Hour aired from 1971-74.

They may have been America’s favorite couple on television, but all was not copasetic at home. Bono was controlling; he never wanted Cher to go out socially and he booked performance tours whenever they weren’t filming. Cher chafed at having to work constantly, wanting more of a life for her and the couple’s child, Chastity.

Bono always slept around and that marital tension was diffused when his girlfriend moved into their 12,600 square foot mansion. “Strange as it seems,” Cher explains, “we all got along.” Their variety show and touring continued, and the couple enjoyed performing together. “We were always Sonny and Cher even when we weren’t Cher and Sonny,” she remembers.

Cher began to date on her own and eventually settled in with record mogul David Geffen. When the producer asked about Cher’s contractual obligations, the singer couldn’t answer him. She discovered that she was an employee of “Cher Enterprises” with Bono owning 95% and their lawyer the other 5%.” Confronting Bono about why he has arranged to take in just about everything the act made, he responded, “Because I knew you’d always leave me someday.”

She filed for divorce in 1974 citing involuntary servitude. Bono moved to ABC and failed with his own variety show. CBS invited Cher back for a successful solo series. However, she tired of carrying the program alone and invited Bono back in 1976 — now as a divorced couple, joking and singing away. Things were further complicated because she had by this time married heroin-addicted Southern rocker Gregg Allman. And she was pregnant. Allman and Cher divorced and the show was not renewed.

So, with two kids in tow, Cher returned to a performance regimen in Las Vegas. The Memoir, Part One ends with director Francis Ford Coppola visiting her backstage asking, “Why aren’t you making movies?” He gave her this advice in moving forward: “The problem is that until you do something, nobody will believe you can. The worst thing that can happen is that you fail, but at least you’ll have tried…. So, what are you waiting for.” Details to follow in Part Two.

Arts and artists: dissenters more necessary than ever

-The Other Paper

Moving to New York to study dance in 1973, I retailed at Macy’s and was an answering service operator, janitor, artist model, and office assistant to support myself. Short-term contracts and unemployment benefits subsidized my performing career. In between tours, I finished my college degree in psychology and was a nanny and pre-school teacher.

After a vision quest in the Himalayans, I managed two dance companies and a festival. Philanthropy called; suddenly I was funnier and smarter, until I left the foundation - accolades and joyful embraces ceased overnight. Moving to Minneapolis, the Culture Wars of the ‘90s had me battling right wing media, religious leaders, and politicians who cared little about the truth so long as they could raise money off controversy..

The Bay Area beckoned and I directed a contemporary art center with another bout in philanthropy. In 2010, I relocated to Vermont to run The Flynn and served two terms in the House of Representatives. As I moved through the world, I was blessed to have my husband willing to relocate.

All the while I continued writing personal essays and making films. My ongoing artistic practices sustained me throughout. My artist-self sensed how to improve on what worked, and change course when things were unsuccessful. Filmmaking is inherently collaborative which is an asset in solving institutional problems. I often relied more on ingenuity than experience jumping in with a ‘beginner’s mind’ to business challenges.

My art background was also beneficial personally. Twenty-eight years ago, I was paralyzed from complications from spinal surgery. While kinesthetic connections in my legs were lost, I learned how to walk again in front of mirrors, just like I did in dance class.

Now retired from day jobs, what a joy it is to wake up every morning and imagine, “What can I make today?” I finished my twentieth short film and have work on view in galleries in Stowe, Brattleboro, and Philadelphia. Videos of mine will be broadcast on Vermont Public and Maine Public. While tremendously validating, there is little financial reward. Even with grants, commissions, royalties, publishing and broadcast fees, breaking even remains aspirational.

The Vermont Arts Council recently awarded creation grants of up to five thousand dollars to twenty-two artists which cover a portion of their estimated expenses. Winners are only eligible to apply again after a five-year waiting period. So, few can realistically pursue an artistic career full-time locally. National opportunities are as slim. Artmaking in America remains avocational.

In these fractious times, further capitalizing the arts seems prudent as culture demonstrably builds community and creativity sparks innovation – necessary components for a path forward. Science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) curriculum is enhanced when you add the ‘a’ for art to provide STEAM problem solving in our schools. Making work is stimulating and filled with wonder; I wish this for others.

Artists are often among the first responders in political protests with potent iconography. Civil Rights, Queer Liberation, Reproductive Freedom, and Black Lives Matter protests are pertinent examples. These kinds of voices are essential to democracy. In our post-election Trumpian apocalypse, clarion dissenters are even more necessary, along with soothsayers offering hope.

Artifacts from every epoch are indicators of the vibrancy of that society. It is the disruptors that are often remembered. In art (as in politics), change happens from the fringes. What will our legacies be? For an emboldened and transformed future, invest more deeply in artists. They begin, and begin again.

Me dancing in 1973 with Winnipeg’s Contemporary Dancers

Invasion of the Daffodils

-The Arts Fuse

Dino Enrique Piacentini’s compelling debut novel, Invasion of the Daffodils (Astrophil Press, 263 pages) is an intergenerational tale of Mexican American families living on an island off the coast of California during the early ’50s. Self-consciously drawing on florid prose and macabre surrealism, the fable-like narrative centers on the trials and tribulations of a teenage boy, Chico Flores, who stumbles upon a crate filled with daffodil bulbs.

He and his brother sell off the stash of plants throughout the island. Before long, the shoots begin splintering rocks, porches, pipes, buildings, docks, even the church. The destruction disrupts the tourist economy, threatening the livelihood of the Italian business owners and bankers. What’s more, pollen from the flowers burns the skins of white inhabitants but the Mexican families find the daffodils fragrant, harvesting them for contraband — further deepening racial fissures.

The chaos generated by the mysterious bulbs serves as a backdrop for the drama of a young boy who is grappling with his gay sexuality. The teen’s domestic life is another challenge: he is living with his senile grandmother, ailing father, double amputee war veteran brother, who is dealing with PTSD, and a sister who works three jobs to support the family.

Not only is Chico blamed for unleashing horrific flowers, but his stumbling schoolboy desire adds to his isolation from others. Eventually, innuendo about his behavior escalates into violence. Still, despite poverty, racism, and homophobia, Piacentini’s characters are convincingly resilient and tenacious. Miraculously, they maintain hope in the future. The marauding wildflowers fade and wither away, but the lives on the island have been changed forever.

Piacentini teaches creative writing at the Lighthouse Writers Workshop and the University of Denver, and this novel, a colorful variation on magic realism, is an immersive read.

A Little Queer Natural History

-The Arts Fuse

Science writer Josh L. Davis leads LGBTQ+ tours at the Natural History Museum in London. His charming and informative presentations have become popular on YouTube and they have inspired A Little Queer Natural History (University of Chicago Press, 128 page), a beautifully illustrated book celebrating the “non-heteronormative biology and behaviors that exist in the natural world.”

Gorgeous photographs accompany stories of hermaphroditic fish, lesbian gulls, and male swan couples raising chicks, as well as spotted hyenas in female-centric colonies. Davis provides evidence of the prevalence of homosexual activity among gorillas, giraffes, and sheep. Same-sex coupling in penguin colonies is documented along with instances of male dolphins pairing off for life. Studies prove that environmental factors determine the gender of turtles, bearded dragon lizards, crocodiles, and the common pill woodlouse.

Adaptability is essential for survival. Readers learn that tiny moss mites have been asexually reproducing for 400 million years. Caribbean mangrove killifish produce both sperm and eggs, fertilizing them by “selfing” with itself. Elusive eels are unsexed until midlife. Frogs and toads are gender fluid. The author expands his thesis with research that demonstrates ”85% of all flowering plants … are hermaphroditic” and fungi reproduce “asexually, sexually, or parasexually.”

Davis’s colorful encyclopedia takes on “scientific” literature dating back to Aristotle, critiquing it for for its biases and “moral language” regarding the diversity of sexual expression. By looking so closely at the queering of the natural world, the author underlines and celebrates an expansive view of erotic behavior. Rooted in empiricism, with no anthropomorphizing or didacticism allowed, A Little Queer Natural History is a valuable counterweight against the homophobia bred by today’s culture wars.

Night swimming, ambling toward the light

-Writing About Our Generation

By day, I am an arts warrior, public servant, heroic crip. Open, responsive, cocksure, ambitious – I seize the public gaze as a bully pulpit. Offstage finds me enslaved by quivering muscles contorting my stride.

After surgery, my swollen spine shut down. Gurus and saints abounded, but no roses from above. Paralyzed weeks turned into months – a flicker, a twitch, a wave, sitting to standing, six steps to go home, with wheelchair, ankle brace, and cane.

Gestures repeat to imprint; but gravity intervenes. Syncopated embellishments focus spatial awareness, though alignment remains akimbo. With little sensation, each footstep is defiant. Only in the pool can I run with the ponies again.

Twenty-eight years now – I still fixate on atrophy, ignoring progress. Balancing rehab and recovery, clinging to a reconnecting, physical therapy and pharmaceuticals combat lost kinesis, encouraging hope.

Night murmurs locate points of pleasure: behind the left knee, above the nipple. I crawl inside the softness, relishing the incandescent kundalini rush absent pain. Legs lie quiet, the burning subsides. Stillness embraces me.

In the extra room (that we do not have), I plié and pirouette with dramatic abandon, leaving behind my imploded, twisted carcass. The tumor does not return. My pelvis aligns. Depression dissipates. Then I awake.

Violent spasms hurl me out of body. Heart and breath stop. I stare down at my contorted gaping hole of a mouth and rehearse death, porous and seductive. Floating in this space between, I no longer fear dying, only waiting.

Stolen shadows hover. It seems easy (one breath away), but is so hard to surrender into the void, although I am well practiced, writing libretti for lost lives in vigils through the night and surviving my own demise, time and again.

Larry carries me back once more through his weight, touch, and voice. Unfettered love makes the journey familiar and secure. No past, no future, just present.  Grasping for now, I pray for clear seeing, acceptance without judgment.

Morning comes. I amble toward the light.

“The Work of Art” — Capturing the Experience of Creativity

-The Arts Fuse

Last week I was artist-in-residence at The Fabric Workshop and Museum in Philadelphia developing ideas for an interdisciplinary installation for an exhibition this fall. I am primarily a filmmaker and got to experiment with a very talented studio production team. A rare and precious opportunity indeed.

Accompanying me was a perfect book, Adam Moss’ The Work of Art: How something comes from nothing. The writer, former editor of New York magazine and The New York Times Magazine, interviews 43 creatives on how they make their work, using iconic examples to illuminate their process.

His aim: “to render the experience of creativity – that is, the frustration, elation, regret, first glimmers, second thoughts, distress, and triumph that leads to works of art.” Conversations are augmented with notebook entries, napkin doodles, early sketches, reams of false starts, iPhone photos, lyric fragments, and other ephemera illustrating the alchemical process of artistic conjuring.

Tenacity and resilience abound throughout the beautifully designed compendium. Author Michael Cunningham shares multiple drafts of what became his Pulitzer Prize winning The Hours and we see 39 iterations for a single canvas by Amy Sillman.

Tony Kushner details free associations, chance happenings, practical constraints, and deep listening to his characters (“I was just taking dictation”) as Angels in America develops. The late poet Louise Glück mentions lines appearing in dreams or fragments scribbled during faculty meetings, only to be fleshed out during long walks.

Cartoonist Roz Chast keeps a shoebox of “idea germs” to draw upon and choreographer Twyla Tharp uses her “sperm bank” of archival videos. Others hack their own systems. Visual artist Kara Walker began one project by drawing with her feet: “I can’t trust this hand not to make something very obvious, that we already know.”

The late Stephen Sondheim recalled dropping a song from Company for its out-of-town tryout and having one week to come up with “Getting Married Today.” Fashion designer Marc Jacobs reiterates the pragmaticism of deadlines: “Time becomes the greatest editor. The only way to get things done is to finish.”

Backstories by pioneering journalists are quite satisfying. Gay Talese’s meticulous and colorful outlines of his travails of never getting to interview Frank Sinatra for his 1966 Esquire piece “Frank Sinatra Has a Cold” sheds light on the what it takes to produce exemplary feature writing.

Excerpts from Wesley Morris’ discursive “My Mustache, My Self” 2020 essay in The New York Times on Black identity and masculinity elucidates why he has been awarded two Pulitzer Prizes in criticism. Fun too are his snippets culled from notes written in the dark while viewing films.

Architectural inspirations are also provided. Frank Gehry’s initial scribble for the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao opens the book, and in later pages Elizabeth Diller describes the conception of her firm’s Blur Building, which was inspired by airness of water. Like others in the book, she affirms the importance of doodling, as it “imprints something in my brain.”

As a filmmaker, I was particularly heartened to read Andrew Jarecki reminding us that, despite the value of storyboarding, “the footage suggested its own path” and Sofia Coppola’s advice: “…when you have an instinct to do something, you shouldn’t doubt yourself – go with it.”

Other photographers, chefs, puzzle masters, songwriters, radio hosts, sculptors, and graphic designers complement the treasure-trove. And the appendix is chock-a-block full of glorious artifacts from Bob Dylan, Sylvia Plath, Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman, and other aesthetic forbearers.

The culminating chapter is Suzan-Lori Parks discussing Plays for the Plague Year. Unlike her Tony award-winning Topdog/Underdog, which was written in three days, this episodic theatrical work began during Covid lockdowns and took over two years to come into being. Despite the struggle, she is grateful: “But we are lucky enough to do what we enjoy right? Even if it is hard.”

As for my residency at The Fabric Workshop and Museum, each day brought new possibilities to explore with the production team. All the while, stories from The Work of Art encouraged me to contribute to a collaborative environment of play, creative investigation, and trusting the process.

Horse Sense for Politicians

-Writing About Our Generation

As election season is in full swing, I thought I’d share some horse sense for your amusement and, I hope, edification for those running for office.

Equines are herd animals. Group dynamics and hierarchy are important to them. There’s always a top mare, and horses are quite content to follow the leader of the pack. However, reconfigure the group in any way, and leadership is up for grabs. Size, tenure and age don’t matter; taking charge with a few nips and kicks delivers the appropriate gravitas.

If elected, many of you will be in a leadership position one day and a supporting role the next. Step up, when necessary, even if you must elbow your way in, for issues important to your constituencies. Challenge each other to accomplish even more.

Horses have eyes on the sides of their heads and see the world peripherally with 350-degree vision. When driving my pony, I put her in a bridle with blinders to focus her on the work ahead. You will have your own blinders on dealing with the bottom line. However, embrace the periphery and don’t forget those that live outside this chamber. As you charge ahead, remember those alongside and behind you.

Training a horse requires patience, consistency, taking the long view, positive reinforcement, changing patterns so as not to get stale, getting out of your comfort zone, and reaching for new achievements. Failure is an essential component of learning. Sound familiar? Many of you will toil on bills for years before passage. Stay the course.

Horse training used to rely mostly on domination, now we seek to learn the animal and understand how it perceives the world. With tough decisions ahead on balancing expenditures and revenues, remember these line items represent real people struggling with real concerns. Seek authentic input and dialogue, listen intently, and adapt accordingly, since your realities may be quite different than those of the people you seek to serve.

A lot of my time with the pony in winter is drudgery: mucking out stalls, chopping ice in frozen water buckets, cleaning hooves, and exercising her in the unheated drafty barn. But this is my happy place with all the effort worth it.

My wish is that you find joy in your daily chores. I hope your efforts come to fruition, and more importantly, that they contribute to a just and civil society where all people can have safe, healthy, robust and expressive lives.

Scenes From The AIDS War

PechaKucha Night Burlington

20 images x 20 seconds

In 1979, friends began to get sick. In 1981, the New York Times warned of a “Rare Cancer Seen in 41 Homosexuals.” By the ‘90's, my entire generation of gay men was dying of AIDS. Here are stills and excerpts from my pandemic videos.

At first, people died alone abandoned by families. Medical staff would leave food outside the room afraid to come in. Community care circles, vigils through the night, and writing libretti for lost lives for operatic memorial services.

In 1993, I was back in New York and went to see the AIDS film, Philadelphia. Afterwards, I walked from the theater on the Upper East Side to Greenwich Village, where I was staying. It was a Sunday morning; the streets were empty and haunted.

I passed 62nd and 2nd where I used to listen to Bill’s concerns about plummeting T-cell counts. Further down on Lexington Avenue, I passed the apartment where Gary lived. He moved to Florida after his partner died. I never got to say good-bye.

Crossing over to the West Side was Manhattan Plaza. Kevin moved there after Don died. On 24th and 9th, I passed Vito’s apartment. We often gossiped. How angry he’d be, if he were still alive, about how little has changed in the Hollywood closet.

A few blocks further downtown and I was in the Village. Here, on every block, I looked up and saw shadows of those taken far too soon. Images of my lost ones surrounded me. Numb with grief, I tried hard to hold on to some of my stolen shadows.

Charlie would call in the middle of the night, screaming through his dementia - begging us to get him out of the hospital, away from his real and imagined demons. I never did visit him. I was too ashamed. He never came home again.

I held Peter, trying to warm his shivering body—hoping that somehow, I could heal him, even for a short while, so he would sleep. Both of us were drenched in his night sweats. Months later, I dreamt of him and called. Peter died that morning.

I telephoned my running friend Lee. I had just returned from a trip and wanted to reestablish contact. His sister answered the phone, thanked me for calling, and asked if I wanted to share something with those gathered at his memorial service.

When the news came ending Kevin’s deathwatch, I was relieved. I wouldn’t have to call the hospital anymore. In his last days, with morphine obliterating all feeling, I would be told his condition was “satisfactory, SATISFACTORY…”

Margie crawled into Christopher’s deathbed. As his spirit began to leave, instead of releasing, his body contracted (as only a dancer could) and tightly embraced her. She held on, knowing his work was now done, hers only begun.

After his troupe’s performance, Reza was exhausted, shivering under blankets. Startled by his skeletal shell, I held him closely, knowing it was the last time I’d see him. I told him I loved him. He whispered, “I love you too.”

Backstage, David was feverish. I let him know it was okay to cancel, but he replied, “I came here to witness.” Soon afterward, he was dead. I still imagine what his legacy might have been, along with Keith, Ron, Huck, and Marlon.

From the Kirov stage in St. Petersburg, I learned Rudolf died that morning. They said from a heart attack, no mention of AIDS. His name was evoked again in a performance in Tel Aviv, alongside Gene, Arnie, Dominique, Jorge, and Tom.

I hold on to my dead. They have become the elements in my reality. I hear Celie’s fluid-filled lungs gurgling as her family healed itself, gathered around her wasted transgendered body. Her quick, shallow breaths are wind in my universe.

Peter’s night sweats become water. Entwined in fevers, chills, and sweat; I kissed his cracked lips and held him forever that night. He kept apologizing as he cried. I wept, too, but my tears were filled with rage.

My fire resides in Bill’s fever-ridden body on the ice mattress. It was too early on to name the disease, so he wasted away, an anomaly for the medical students to ponder. I’d nap with him on the frozen bed: “No, I’m not cold, I’m with my friend.”

David’s ashes are my earth. Defiled at death, his family cremated him before an autopsy could reveal how his lesion-filled organs functioned for so long. I smear his ashes, warrior-like on my body and scream into the night.

My dead: they are my mandala. Telling their unfinished stories affirms my life. Decades later, I still cry for the devastation among us. Heroes, all of them, needlessly lost. I am blessed to have been loved by angels.

I stopped counting after losing 119 friends. For all that have gone before and for those that remain, may there be passionate, unforgiven fire.      

Thank you for listening.

Thom Gunn: A Cool Queer Life - A Poet Who Spoke to Unbearable Loss

-The Arts Fuse

This is not a dry, academic look at Thom Gunn’s life: the biographer supplies a loving — though at times unflinchingly honest — view of the self-punishing poet.

Thom Gunn: A Cool Queer Life by Michael Nott. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 720 pp, $40

Michael Nott’s Thom Gunn: A Cool Queer Life contains a treasure trove of illustrative backstories as it probes the life and literary accomplishments of a prolific, acclaimed, and controversial poet. Nott was a co-editor of The Letters of Thom Gunn (2022) and in this compelling new biography draws on that research, as well as on interviews as well as excerpts from the artist’s notebooks and diaries.

Gunn published over thirty books of poems, two collections of essays, and edited four collections of poetry. He was the recipient of numerous awards and prizes for his achievements in literature. Mid-career, he became a queer icon when he eulogized friends lost to AIDS and celebrated gay sexuality via his ‘Leatherman’ persona. He died of “acute polysubstance abuse” in 2004.

Gunn’s early poetry was erudite, witty, and elegantly wrought, but it was usually coolly detached,  framed in meter and rhyme. As he progressed as a poet, he experimented with free verse and syllabic friskiness, juggling tradition and innovation as he merged high and low themes.

He was born in England in 1929; both parents were journalists. At the age of 15, he and his younger brother Ander found their mother dead — she had committed suicide. It took him over fifty years to address this obviously profound loss in his work. In one of his last poems, “My Mother’s Pride,” Gunn wrote: “I am made by her, and undone.”

Gunn was educated at Cambridge University and wrote his first collection of poems while still an undergraduate. There he met his life-partner Mike Kitay, an American theater artist. They moved to California in 1953 and settled in the Bay Area. A Guggenheim Foundation fellowship gave him the financial wherewithal to put a down payment on their Victorian House in San Francisco’s Upper Haight neighborhood.

Gunn taught at UC Berkeley from 1958-1999, but it was only for one term each year so he could focus on writing. California themes and urban landscapes infused his poetry: drug taking, gay sexuality, and hypermasculine bikers in leather were lyrically portrayed. He also published critical essays on a variety of poets he admired: Ben Jonson, William Carlos Williams, Gary Snyder, Robert Duncan, Ezra Pound, Christopher Isherwood, Elizabeth Bishop, and Marianne Moore among them.

Despite his considerable success as a poet, Gunn struggled with writer’s block after completing each of his volumes. “I don’t usually feel fully alive unless I am in the middle of writing,” he told a friend. During these dry periods, Nott describes how Gunn would lose himself in sexual cruising and escalating drug use. This mode of escape became increasingly complicated (and physically challenging) as he aged, beset by worries he was becoming less desirable.

In 1992, Gunn published an elegiac collection, The Man With Night Sweats, that grappled with the AIDS pandemic. In one poem, he laments: “Now as I watch the progress of the plague, / The friends surrounding me fall sick, grow thin, / And drop away.” The book became his most acclaimed achievement, hailed as a poignant testament to the power of art to speak to unbearable loss. The following year Gunn was awarded a MacArthur Foundation “Genius” grant.

Gunn’s final book of poems, Boss Cupid, was published in 2000, the year after he retired from teaching. His recreational use of crystal meth had by then spiraled into full addiction — according to his housemates. Gunn was increasingly tweaked during encounters with the “homeless speed freaks” he picked up for sexual encounters. In 2004, they found Gunn dead at the age of 74.

Nott’s scholarship is extremely impressive: he provides 144 pages of footnotes, attributing his sources to interviews, letters, notebooks and diary entries. But this is not a dry, academic look at Gunn’s life:  the biographer supplies a loving — though at times unflinchingly honest — view of the self-punishing poet. On top of that, we are taken into the artist’s compositional process — drafts and unfinished works are probed insightfully.

Often reticent, Gunn warned critics and (perhaps) future biographers, “I don’t like dramatizing myself.” In A Cool Queer Life, Nott has created an illuminating theatrical framework in which to chronicle Thom Gunn’s private life, adding resonance and significance to his beautiful poetry.

stillpoint

hospital gurney

overhead white light

spinal tumor at C2

postmorbid - paraplegic

lost coordination, balance, strength

no location left side

lacking sensation on right

neuropathy constant

electric shocks each step

excruciating throbbing

hips akimbo

stumbling bifurcated stride

slipped - fractured fibula

unrelenting fiery torment

setbacks devastate

physical emotional exhaustion

doctors prescribe

medication, stimulation, repose

technicians scan

to no avail

loved ones too

live with chronic pain

energy and attention wanes

social gatherings limited

daytime chores distract

slow walks for stamina

nighttime disassociations

until sleep intervenes

ricochet between modalities

body/mind reprocessing

yearn for a stillpoint

elusive bliss

dissolve expectations

observe without judgment

surrender into ease

learn from the body

a path forward

The Life and Times of Keith Haring, An Iconic Artist

-The Arts Fuse

This biography of Keith Haring is a compendium of vivid, first-person narratives that provide an engaging insider’s perspective on the artist’s life.

Radiant: The Life and Line of Keith Haring by Brad Gooch. HarperCollins, 512 pages, $42.

Brad Gooch is an esteemed memoirist, novelist, and biographer of such literary figures as Rumi, Flannery O’Connor, and Frank O’Hara. His latest book is a compelling analysis of the remarkable legacy of visual artist Keith Haring.

Gooch was a contemporary of Haring — they inhabited the same queer mise-en-scène in 1980’s New York. He draws on this on-the-spot knowledge to good effect. Much has been written about Haring from an art history perspective, but Gooch adds immeasurably to the literature with this sensitive and engaging contextualized portrait that examines the life and times of the iconic artist.

The biographer was given full access to Haring’s archives and interviewed more than 200 people. The result is a compendium of vivid, first-person narratives that provide an engaging insider’s perspective on the artist’s life. Because he focuses on friends and colleagues, Gooch delivers less academic artspeak about the work and more backstories about his inspirations and frustrations.

Growing up in Kutztown, PA with working class parents and three sisters, Haring described himself as being a “little nerd.”Even as a young child he often doodled abstract cartoons with his engineer dad. In middle school, Haring had a paper route and was briefly a Jesus-freak. He became a bit of a hippie in high school and began experimenting with drugs.

After graduating, Haring briefly went to Pittsburgh to study art, but landed in New York in 1978. Gallery assistant, busboy, and club doorman were some of his early jobs as he attended School of the Visual Arts for two semesters.

At that time, the bankrupt city was under siege: its many problems included high crime and unemployment, burned-out blocks, power outages, and crumbling infrastructure. Stuck in the accumulating detritus, artists in all disciplines took the opportunity to create in polyglot, do-it-yourself ways. Haring eagerly jumped into the churn.

Attracted to the emerging graffiti scene, Haring began drawing images of crawling children and barking dogs on outdoor walls and in public spaces. He also posted Xeroxed agitprop broadsheets — a strategy inspired by William Burroughs’ cut-up methods.

Haring found a kindred tribe in the burgeoning club scene in the East Village. Gooch details the gonzo performances, installations, and experimental videos he participated in with friends — the then unknown Kenny Scharf, Madonna, Ann Magnuson, and Jean-Michel Basquiat — at such venues as Club 57 and the Mudd Club.

Haring’s public profile increased enormously after he began drawing with white chalk on the blank advertising panels on subway station walls. He’d jump off a train and sketch in full public view, all the while furtively avoiding arrest. Under these sped-up circumstances, his pictographic imagery of zapping spaceships, pulsing TV’s, barking dogs, crawling babies, leaping porpoises, and smiling faces matured.

Over the next five years, it is estimated he drew over 5,000 chalk drawings (all unsigned) throughout New York City’s boroughs. Photographer Tseng Kwong Chi documented many of his underground performative actions. Eventually, some of these drawings were digitized for a Time Square electronic billboard show.

Despite the growing attention, an early review of Haring’s work in Artforum (1981) was somewhat dismissive: “The Radiant Child on the button is Haring’s Tag. It is a slick Madison Avenue colophon. It looks as if it’s always been there. The greatest thing is to come up with something so good it seems as if it’s always been there, like a proverb.” In contrast, artist Roy Lichtenstein was more affirming: “There just isn’t a false move. It’s all so beautifully devised.”

Galleries, collectors, and museums began to take note of Haring’s growing notoriety. His first one-person gallery show took place in 1982. A year later, the artist was featured in the Whitney Museum biennial. Invitations soon followed from institutions in Europe, Australia, and Japan.

In 1983, Andy Warhol befriended him. Haring began to emulate the artist. They spoke on the phone regularly, often partied together at night, collaborated, and traded artworks. When Warhol died, Haring stated, “Whatever I’ve done would not be possible without Andy.”

As demand for Haring’s work increased, he robustly expanded his output to ink drawings, woodcut prints, paintings on tarpaulins and wood, aluminum sculptures, theatrical sets, and costumes as well as large-scale outdoor sculptures for playgrounds and murals for inner city walls, clubs, and children’s hospitals across the world. Haring was dedicated to making his art accessible to a wide audience, outside of the elitist, insular domain of curators, galleries, and museums.

Whatever the medium or scale, Haring maintained the ethos of his early subway drawings: no preparation, no preliminary sketches, just sure-handed strokes in his inimitable style. Interviews with gallerists tell a repeated tale: Haring would sequester himself in the exhibition space days before an opening, creating the entire show en masse. Often, the paint was still drying as the public was entering.

Throughout his life, Haring surrounded himself with kids. Young graffiti artists partied with him in his homes and studios. He collaborated with teenager tagger, LA II (Angel Ortiz), embellishing ready-made statues with hieroglyphic images and worked with 1,000 students in an enormous mural celebrating the Statue of Liberty (1986). In Gooch’s biography, we also learn more about the private side of Haring’s loving relationship with multiple godchildren around the world.

Sex, love, and drugs were also a huge factor in Haring’s life (deliciously detailed in Gooch’s reporting). He met his first significant lover, Juan Dubose, at the St. Mark’s Baths. Every weekend the pair went to The Paradise Garage — a club primarily for Black and Latino gay men. No alcohol was served, though many of the partygoers used hallucinogenic enhancements as they danced through the night. Madonna previewed two unreleased songs at the artist’s 26th birthday party (1984) at the venue — only to be upstaged by Diana Ross serenading Haring with “Happy Birthday.”

Trying to maintain accessibility to his work as prices for his art soared, Haring opened his Pop Shop (1986) in Manhattan, where he sold pins, T-shirts, calendars, watches, magnets, and prints. Critics trashed him for this, calling him “a disco-decorator.” While it was never a money-maker, the Pop Shop remained open until 2005 — and it maintains an online presence today. A Pop Shop in Tokyo was less successful; it closed after a year.

Even as his fame grew, Haring remained dedicated to grass-roots activism: designing posters for anti-nuke rallies, anti-apartheid protests, safe sex promotions, and events for a myriad of LGBTQ causes. During 1985’s Live Aidbenefit for famine relief in Ethiopia Haring painted on stage as Tina Turner, Michael Jackson, and Mick Jagger sang.

While working in Tokyo in 1988, Haring noticed purple lesions on his leg; his HIV status was confirmed upon returning home. Using his celebrity as a bully pulpit, he publicly announced that he was living with AIDS in Rolling Stone a year later: “In a way it’s really liberating… Part of the reason that I’m not having trouble facing the reality of death is that it’s not a limitation… Everything I’m doing right now is exactly what I want to do.”

Rather than slowing down after his diagnosis, Haring ramped up his artmaking and political activity. In his journals at the time he described his life as “working obsessively and constantly every day… the only time I am happy is when I am working.”

To celebrate the 20th anniversary of Stonewall Riots in an 1989 exhibition at New York’s Lesbian and Gay Community Center, Haring painted the men’s bathroom on the second floor with his “Once Upon A Time” mural, which celebrates the pre-AIDS world of unbridled gay male sexuality.

Haring died in 1990 at the age of 31. His memorial service at St. John the Divine Cathedral in Manhattan was attended by “more than a thousand invited guests.” Soprano Jessye Norman sang, choreographer Molissa Fenley danced, and actor Dennis Hopper eulogized. Kenny Scharf and Ann Magnuson were among the less reverent at the ceremony, joking that “Keith would be really bored right now,” as they recreated some “shtick and act” from Haring’s Club 57 days.

Ann Temkin, the curator at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, testifies to the ever-growing interest in Haring’s work after his death: “It’s a sort of truism that more radical work needs about thirty years for everyone to catch up and for the work to look as if it’s contemporary at that moment… His work can seem timeless now.”

In his endnote, Gooch’s succinctly articulates the transcendent power of Haring’s example and work: “In our own era of engagement by so many artists with any available surface; with personal icons and licensing; with activism, collaboration, communication; and with the fostering of community, Keith seems more than ever one of us.”

Mall Meditations

-VTDigger

Wintry months have me meandering indoors at the University Mall in South Burlington.  Morning crew starts at 8:30 am when only the IHop restaurant is open. We are quiet and determined with our walkers, canes, and shuffling gaits. Regulars acknowledge each other. We are on task in our forward momentum.

After a lap or two, some sit and join their coffee klatch. Others soldier on. Even with my Ferrari stickers, me and my walker are about the slowest; I am passed again and again as I do three rounds. A few determined shop owners get their steps in before start of business.

Professional service folks exercising with nonverbal clients join the fray, as do some fashionistas rolling in their wheelchairs who settle in the food court. People who seem to be unhoused wash up and use the facilities, and then linger on benches to stay warm.

As we continue to circle, administrators do daily walk throughs and security benignly strolls. Retailers raise grates and open doors while taking out garbage and restocking. Special events teams set up tables and prepare temporary displays all before the public arrives.

Late afternoons are quite different. Unsteady walkers dodge teenagers paying attention to themselves and their phones. Girls with their off-shoulder sweaters and impossibly tiny shopping bags have so much more game than unfocused boy packs. A few couples tentatively hold hands.

One man carries a teddy bear on his walks between stopping at both coffee shops at opposite ends. He never initiates contact, but warmly smiles when greeted. I marvel at trans individuals growing more assuredly into being in this public space - flowing granny dresses for the young and miniskirts for bewigged boomers.

Weekends, during business hours, are family fests. Moms set the itineraries, with dads and kids in tow. Grandparents put little ones on the mini carousels, swings, and train. Birthdays are celebrated. Gamers line up for competition. Even miniature golf is played. It can be a bit of bumper cars for me. 

Holiday pop-up shops are gone, but free tax helpers have taken their place. They too will season out soon. Amidst all the economic churn, it is reassuring how many stores survive. I wave to a few Kiosk operators and worry when they close even for a short vacation.

Friends sometimes accompany me. I find sauntering allows for freer conversations, although I prefer walking alone. My snail pace is constant, there is no second gear. To keep it fresh, I change directions, layer in shortcuts, even add store extensions into the routine. Occasionally I count steps in one of my three loops to gauge consistency.

Mostly, I feel invisible in my circumambulations - no one pays attention to an old man using a walker. No bully pulpit here. I am caught up short at how difficult it is for me to observe without judgement. I so often want to give unsolicited advice. A little mouth yoga (smiling) and breathing quiets my all too busy mind.  

Warmer temperatures will soon invite me to stroll outdoors to experience spring and listen to the birds. Here I encounter joggers, dogs, parents pushing strollers, and walking neighbors. I look forward to greeting them - we made it through the winter!

Of course, I will still have rain dates with my mall family.

About Face: Stonewall, Revolt, And New Queer Art

-The Arts Fuse

Jonathan D. Katz is a pioneering historian working in queer and gender studies. In 2019, he curated About Face: Stonewall, Revolt, And New Queer Art for Chicago’s Wrightwood 659 Gallery’s commemoration of the 50thanniversary of Stonewall. About Face featured over 350 artworks by 38 LGBTQ+ international artists.

Focusing on underrecognized interracial and multi-gendered artists across generations, Katz assortment challenged the prevailing prejudices of homonormativity, which overlooks BIPOC and trans folks in favor of assimilated white and cisgendered people. The show was a self-conscious provocation, an attempt to revise the LGBTQ+ canon.

The recently published catalogue for About Face (Monacelli Press, 272 pages, $65) includes elucidating essays and texts by Julian Carter, Anthony Cianciolo, Amelia Jones, Ava L. J. Kim, Joshua Chambers-Letson, Christopher Reed, Jacolby Satterwhite, and Dagmawi Woubshet. This lushly designed book — there’s 300 illustrations — offers proof of concept for Katz’s curatorial vision of the ever-evolving hybrid intersectionality of queer aesthetics.

Such well known American artists as Nick Cave, Keith Haring, Lyle Ashton Harris, and Peter Hujar are included. More significant, given Katz’s revisionist approach, are the appearances of installation artist Tianzhuo Chen, Leonard Suryajaya’s color-saturated photographs, Bhupen Khakhar’s figurative paintings, and the performative tableaus of Keioui Keijaun Thomas and Del Lagrace Volcano.

Other highlights in the volume confront the art world’s systemic racism; these include Jacolby Satterwhite’s immersive 3D animated media creations inspired by gaming, as well as South African photographer Zanele Muholi, and Canadian Cree interdisciplinary performance artist Kent Monkman.

The primary focus of About Face is on the new, but the work of deceased artists add welcome depth to the tapestry. The Bay Area is represented by Harvey Milk’s early photographs from the ‘50s and Jerome Caja’s irony-infused paintings, created with day-glow colors as he was dying from AIDS in the ‘90s. Greer Lankton’s tawdry sculptural dolls is a vision of East Village New York during the ’80s.

Necessary Action

A print of mine, Necessary Action, created from a word cloud of voice-overs from three of my disability-related videos is included in The S.P.A.C.E. Gallery’s “All that Feels” exhibition, February 2-24.

NECESSARY ACTION (2000)

Seizures at bedtime. MRIs locate a tumor inside the spinal cord. A hospital gurney takes me into overhead white light. I wake up screaming, covered in blood and iodine, paralyzed from the neck down. Body and mind are ripped apart. I cannot stop the jerking of my limbs, unclench my hand, or move my toes. There is no location on my left side and no sensation on my right.

All I have is Larry. His eyes say  “Don’t Die.” Dawn is the worst -- with him asleep and the medical shifts changing, I stare back at the world, whimper, and cry. What’s the movie today? I fantasize getting to the window, breaking the glass, slitting my throat.

Two boys down the hall -- motorcycle crashes screwed cages into their skulls. No one’s told them they’ll never leave. The elegant woman across the way -- flawless on top, but her legs are dead. Another surgery gone wrong. My roommate lost toes to diabetes and had another stroke. His wife screams on the phone to come home.

People worse off make me feel less sorry for myself, until someone more mobile shows up. I’d rather be alone glaring at my swollen and skewed left side that is flaccid, sagging and lifeless. My movie in this room has the helmet kids not shrieking, the young men walking upright, the old ones not drooling, and me tapping my fingers.

Six weeks in the hospital and two months in a wheelchair at home, then I navigate life on the outside. Alarmed expressions, sympathetic smiles, and open-mouthed pity: the more generous people are to me, the more I resent them. Few really care to know, most want only to be reassured. Each encounter makes me smaller.

Meeting other crips, I never ask my real questions. I’m frightened when Jack regresses, Stephanie gets depressed, Judy breaks her hand, or Mark dies. The movie here? Stephanie’s legs untangle, Jack walks unassisted, Mark gets published, and Judy rides her horse with me running free. I still dream fully able, they all do too.

Life at home revolves around getting to work and fitting in rehab with Larry as my soccer mom. Cooking and cleaning, the dog and me; I’m a burden to him. While my relation to living remains elusive, I don’t know how to ask his forgiveness to go first. As we drive across the Golden Gate Bridge, I imagine us as Thelma and Louise, blissfully accelerating into oblivion.

With no sensation, sex is purely visual. Reciprocating with my enfeebled fingers and locked-in neck is short lived. Often, I disassociate to retrieve stored memories of thrusting, receiving, grasping, hardness, wetness, stickiness, and release. It’s not enough. The movie should have us rolling around wrestling and jousting, fucking and sucking with gleeful abandon.

I’m despondent whenever my body fails and it always fails me. Sadness and anger, frustration and tears are constant -- but private. As the neuropathy increases in my legs, I obsess on long-term survivors whose over compensating bent frames refuse to give in. My debilitation fuels self-loathing. I embarrass myself with fear and shame.

What I wanted to be temporary is permanent. There are no happy endings for the movie today: no transformations, no miracles to celebrate, and no heroic deeds. There’s just Larry and me, holding on to one another, slowly making our way in the world, careening side by side.

DREAMING AWAKE (2003)

I dissociate from the burning in my legs,

silently crying between sleep and the morning.

Hopes and dreams keep me safe through the night.

After surgery, I died then,

but you refused and brought me back.

Seven years and counting, of tilting toward the ground.

I am afraid if I sit down, I will never get up again.

The dancer in me learned to stand visually,

the marathoner took the second step.

Rehab gave me strength and range of motion.

But with each new modality, 

I interrupt expectations:

improvements are not cures.

If I sit down, I will never get up again.

Still imagining a body I cannot have,

I startle myself, glimpsing fatigue in passing windows.

My bifurcated body torques with every stride,

neuropathy and weariness debilitates.

Therapists caution about wear and tear,

while friends cheer, “You’re getting better!”

If I sit down, I will never get up again.

Navigating deadened limbs and twisted trunk,

pain remains constant, dulling our life together.

After a day’s activities, I have no comfort left to give you.

Living through chemistry, libido is gone.

Holding and touching you,

I long for remembered sensations.

I’m afraid if I sit down, I’ll never get up again.

If I sit down, I’ll never get up again.

*  *  *

In this metaphorical body,

I try to intercept suffering,

abide in discomfort,

forgive the trauma. 

Bearing witness,

I sit with loss,

move toward unobstructed feeling,

and bring you along into my dreaming awake.

NIGHT SWIMMING (2004)

By day, I am an arts warrior, public servant, heroic crip. Open, responsive, cocksure, ambitious – I seize the public gaze as a bully pulpit. Offstage finds me enslaved by quivering muscles contorting my stride.

After surgery, my swollen spine shut down. Gurus and saints abounded, but no roses from above. Paralyzed weeks turned into months – a flicker, a twitch, a wave; sitting to standing, six steps to go home, with wheelchair, ankle brace, and cane.

Gestures repeat to imprint; but gravity intervenes. Syncopated embellishments focus spatial awareness, though alignment remains akimbo. With little sensation, each footstep is defiant. Only in the pool can I run with the ponies again.

Eight years now – I still fixate on atrophy, ignoring progress. Balancing rehab and recovery, clinging to a reconnecting, physical therapy and pharmaceuticals combat lost kinesis, encouraging hope.

Night murmurs locate points of pleasure: behind the left knee, above the nipple. I crawl inside the softness, relishing the incandescent kundalini rush absent pain. Legs lie quiet, the burning subsides. Stillness embraces me.

In the extra room (that we do not have), I plié and pirouette with dramatic abandon, leaving behind my imploded, twisted carcass. The tumor does not return. My pelvis aligns. Depression dissipates. Then I awake.

Violent spasms hurl me out of body. Heart and breath stop. I stare down at my contorted gaping hole of a mouth and rehearse death, porous and seductive. Floating in this space between, I no longer fear dying, only waiting.

Stolen shadows hover. It seems easy (one breath away), but is so hard to surrender into the void, although I am well practiced, writing libretti for lost lives in vigils through the night and surviving my own demise, time and again.

Larry carries me back once more through his weight, touch, and voice. Unfettered love makes the journey familiar and secure. No past, no future, just present. Grasping for now, I pray for clear seeing, acceptance without judgment.

Morning comes. I amble toward the light.