Band of Thebes

Hide/Seek Curators Show Art, Skim Controversy at NYPL Event

That it's taken three days to write about the Hide/Seek curators' presentation at the NYPL is all the indication you need of how little happened. Understandably, David Ward and Jonathan Katz said they wanted first to do what they were invited to do -- present highlights from the show (rushed, and still too long) -- before addressing the controversy around the Wojnarowicz removal. Unfortunately, they didn't address it afterward -- several esoteric art questions came first -- until absolute hero Ann Northrop reminded them of their promise and asked for answers. Ward's canned replies were along the lines of 'Are we unhappy about it? Absolutely. But there are still 104+ works to see.' Katz's response had more heat -- calling the Catholic League "anti-Semites" and "an American Taliban" -- and revealing himself as a political naif to say he "can't believe in 2010" that politicians would align themselves with such a group. A more interesting point Katz made was about the bitter sting of hearing criticism about the cowardice of the removal from the very New York art institutions that refused to mount or co-curate the exhibit.

Very roughly, the crowd was perhaps forty-percent more angry about the removal (a chant of PUT IT BACK! PUT IT BACK! did not catch on) and sixty-percent more supportive of the NPG for being the one institution brave enough to host the exhibit. The problem with the latter view is that the Smithsonian has said to the homophobic bigots, You're right, we're wrong. The group's trumped-up falsehoods were confirmed as truths; to ignore that travesty and only rally round the capitulators for their earlier bravery gives the haters a free pass and further emboldens them for their next baseless attack on anything they deem unacceptable.

Art+ is organizing Sunday's 1:00pm march from the Metropolitan Museum to the Smithsonian's Cooper-Hewitt, protesting the removal of A Fire in my Belly.

Hide/Seek Week #7: Cass Bird's I Look Just Like My Daddy

I wish it weren't the case that the male curators' energy and insight is usually deepest on the male works and weaker, more shallow, and more obvious regarding lesbian art.

I Look Just Like My Daddy, 2003, by Cass Bird

"Through her photographs, Cass Bird asserts the positive existence of people who subvert and push the perceived boundaries of gender specification. She thereby suggests a world that is polymorphous, indeterminate, and androgynous. In this photograph, taken on a rooftop in Brooklyn, Bird's friend Macaulay stares out from under a cap emblazoned with the words, "I Look Just Like My Daddy." Macaulay's gender -- powerfully self-determined against societal assumptions of what it means to be male or female -- is ambiguous. Her cap's proclamation is likewise ambiguous -- perhaps it is true, perhaps it is an ironic statement of an expectation that will never be realized. Bird's sensitivity toward lives that both resist and intersect with accepted notions of gender and family informs her entire photographic practice."

Hide/Seek Week #6: Cecil Beaton's Gertrude Stein and Alice Toklas

If you needed any proof of the benefits of controversy, the New York Times' art critic Hollard Cotter said he was initially disappointed in the Hide/Seek catalog and decided not to cover the show, dismissing it as a "pride" event, but after the Smithsonian removed the Wojnarowicz piece, he decided to go take a look in person. Today it's a front page news story and finally earns a review on the front page of the arts section.

The Guardian also sent a critic to review the show and talk to curator Jonathan Katz about the fracas.

About 100 protestors demonstrated outside the Portrait Gallery last week, and curators nationwide are highlighting Wojnarowicz's "A Fire in My Belly" in their museums. A Facebook group Support Hide/Seek already has more than 3,400 fans.

Cecil Beaton, Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, 1935

The catalog calls this "an image of exotic domesticity," but otherwise offers too much biography and far too little art criticism. Instead, enjoy this brief highlight by Cecil Beaton in his two pages about "these remarkable ladies" from his 1951 Photobiography:

"I had been extremely impressed by the warmth and simplicity of this American couple, who showed such a passionate interest in everything that was going on around them. But it was when they came to London...that I first photographed them and, as a result of one long morning spent together in the studio, became a devoted admirer and deeply grateful friend of both Alice and Gertrude, who were like newly found fairy godmothers and gave me so much sympathetic encouragement.

"...The twists of electric wire hanging from on high reminded them of a mobile Picasso had made for them.

"They were quite a startling-looking couple; Gertrude with her closely cropped iron-grey hair, in her flowered waistcoat and tweed skirt, Alice in a large black felt hat and grey flannel suit. In whatever juxtaposition I took them, the effect was incongruous and strange; yet so great was the integrity of their characters that they could not possibly be made to look ridiculous. About Gertrude there was always something monumental. Her magnanimity shone through her trusting brown eyes, so that she was the best sitter any photographer could ever hope to have."

Hide/Seek Week #5: Brotherhood, Crossroads, Etcetera

Given the Smithsonian's censoring David Wojnarowicz's ants on a crucifix from Hide/Seek, it's appropriate to feature this week the image curators worried would spark the greatest outcry, Brotherhood, Crossroads, Etcetera. As religious groups trample the public square, we're wading deeper into cultural quicksand where cartoons, art, speech, ideas are erased from everyone's view if anyone is offended. You don't need to have seen Hitler and the Germans this week to know that's the path to disaster. But we live in a time of enormous cowardice in which no one at the public pulpit is willing to tell religious institutions to keep it in their houses of worship. And by and large LGBT people have reached a level of comfort we don't want to jeopardize by complaining. Or we're too busy.

Martin Sullivan, director of the National Portrait Gallery, invites public comment at npgnews [at] si.edu or send an old-fashioned letter to NPG, PO Box 37012, MRC 973, Washington DC 20013. The museum's general phone number is (202) 633-8300.

Hide/Seek is on view at the NPG through February 13. See it and buy the catalog.

Brotherhood, Crossroads, Etcetera, 1994, a triptych by Lyle Ashton Harris (created with his brother Thomas Allen Harris)

"...the Harris brothers weave a complex visual allegory that invokes ancient African cosmologies, Judeo-Christian myths, and taboo public and private desires. In this provocative center image, the brothers exchange a passionate kiss as Thomas presses a gun into Lyle's chest -- conjuring the original biblical story of Cain's treachery toward his brother, Abel...'As black queer cultural producers, we are celebrating the liberatory potential of this black nationalist icon [UNIA's tricolor flag] by expanding the notion of who may claim to it,' Lyle explains. The image transgresses many dualisms we use to structure society: male vs. female, black vs. white, 'brotherly love' vs. homosexual desire. And it raises provocative questions surrounding themes of domestic abuse between lovers, perceived violence among black men, and the dangers that come from engaging in an 'illicit' love -- whether it be from disease, homophobia, or a lethal combination of the two."

Smithsonian Removes Wojnarowicz Video After Catholics Complain

Ants walking on a crucifix in a 30-second video David Wojnarowicz made to honor his dead lover, photographer Peter Hujar, has been called "hate speech" by the Catholic League, and as a result the Smithsonian has removed it from their Hide/Seek exhibit. (Virginia Rep. Eric Cantor also complained.) As Blake Gopnik writes in today's Washington Post: "Now the NPG, and the Smithsonian Institution it is part of, look set to come off as cowards."

He continues:

"Of course, it's pretty clear that this has almost nothing to do with religion. Eleven seconds of an ant-covered crucifix? Come on.

"This fuss is about the larger topic of the show: Gay love, and images of it. The headline that ran over coverage of the matter on the right-wing Web site CNSnews.com mentioned the crucifix - but as only one item in a list of the exhibition's "shockers" that included "naked brothers kissing, genitalia and Ellen DeGeneres grabbing her breasts." (Through a bra, one might note, in an image that's less shocking than many moves by Lady Gaga.) The same site decries "a painting the Smithsonian itself describes in the show's catalog as 'homoerotic'. "

"The attack is on gayness, and images of it, more than on sacrilege - even though, last I checked, many states are sanctioning gay love in marriage, and none continue to ban homosexuality.

"And the Portrait Gallery has given into this attack."

(The image is Hujar's portrait of Wojnarowicz, not the video removed.)

 

Berlin Postcard: Gay Clubs, Christmas Markets, Hitler Again

Christmas markets are up everywhere and now a snowtubing ramp rises over Potsdamer Platz. Free advice: If you arrive on a Saturday night, go directly to the gay blast GMF [video] -- different djs on three high floors of a former East Berlin apartment block -- or, if it's the last Saturday of the month, do not pause on your way to Gayhane, the monthly party for gay Turks and Arabs.

The city's most popular exhibit is Hitler and the Germans: Nation and Crime at the German History Museum (with an expansion by I.M. Pei). This morning it was very crowded, and deservedly so: The curators again emphasize the complementary roles of dictatorship, social institutions (especially the Catholic and Protestant churches), and concurring ordinary citizens. "Hitler was able to assert his unconditional power after the violent actions of his henchmen were legalized" but it was "also possible due to the readiness of ever greater sections of society to give their approval to the Party." They discuss the power of national myth, the "allurement of conformity," and how Germans continued to "approve of the war, as long as they were winning." Crucial reminders for our fractious times, and very forceful in person, but also available in Daniel Goldhagen's Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust. One thing you can't get from Goldhagen: Hitler has been on the cover of the national magazine Der Spiegel forty-six times since 1949, and every single year since the 1990s. He still sells.

Hide/Seek Week #4: Grant Wood's Arnold Comes of Age

Hide/Seek is on view at the Smithsonian's National Portrait Gallery through February 13. See it and get the catalog.

Grant Wood, Arnold Comes of Age, 1930

"...it would be a mistake to see his working in an American vernacular as a simple retreat from modernism. Instead, he inflected traditional forms and subjects with a knowing take on art history and the complexity of social mores; he was a notable satirist, for instance, of American pieties, and his landscapes are so stylized that they become abstractions. In Arnold Comes of Age, the wistful youth set against the homoerotic scene in the background suggest the tension and difficulties faced by gay men who stayed behind in Middle America--or gay men, as was Wood, who returned to their native grounds after realizing they could not find a home in the big cities of America or Europe either."

For much deeper look at this portrait and the artist, read Tripp Evans' revelatory Grant Wood: A Life, newly out from Knopf.

Hide/Seek Week #3: Romaine Brooks' Self-Portrait

For anyone visiting the greater DC area over Thanksgiving, a trip to the Smithsonian's Hide/Seek show is mandatory enlightenment.

Romaine Brooks, Self-Portrait, 1923

The must-have catalog by Jonathan Katz and David Ward says the artist

"...deploys a complex set of codes and pictorial conventions to assert her membership in the elite coterie of lesbians living in Paris between the world wars... Her position on a balcony, the threshold between public and private space -- her sleek masculinized attire coupled with her brightly rouged lips and thickly powdered face, the shadow that obscures (but does not mask) her eyes -- all signify, in various ways, her self-conscious performance of a lesbian identity. As a wealthy woman, Brooks never had to sell her paintings to support her art, so she was freer than most artists to accurately portray the largely queer social universe she inhabited."

[Click the image for a closer view, including her eyes.]

Hide/Seek Week #2: Thomas Eakins' Salutat

Curator Jonathan Katz considers Thomas Eakins' Salutat one of the masterpieces of American painting. He told me he was particularly thrilled to be able to include it in Hide/Seek. So, unless you spend a lot of time hanging with the preppies at Andover, you haven't seen Salutat in person; this is your chance.

Salutat by Thomas Eakins, 1898

"...Yet Easkins turns Gilded Age conventions of the male gaze on their head. By making the object of desire an undraped male instead of a nude female, Eakins resisted social norms. He furthered his deviation from convention by having his boxer not box, thus stripping away the sole acceptable rationale for contemplating a nearly naked male form. The crowd is not admiring the boxer's jab, but his body, especially his buttocks. The boxer is also hardly a paragon of masculine power: he was a featherweight twenty-two year-old working-class lad named Billy Smith, who became much admired in Eakins' circle for his continuing devotion to the painter."

My parents toured the Hide/Seek exhibit in DC this week and loved it. If they can make time to go, so can you. And if you can't, then get the catalog.

Hide/Seek Week #1: Mapplethorpe's Brian Ridley and Lyle Heeter, 1979

Had he lived, Robert Mapplethorpe would have turned 64 on Thursday. Instead, aids killed him at 42. Three months after his death, the Corcoran canceled his retrospective in a far-reaching act of curatorial cowardice that derailed major museum gay exhibits for decades. Jonathan Katz's brand new Hide/Seek show at the Smithsonian's National Portrait Gallery is a rebuke to that homophobia, and -- not coincidentally -- includes four images by Mapplethorpe. Go see the show and buy the excellent catalog, Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture, co-authored by Katz and David Ward. Band of Thebes will run one work from the show each week through the end of the year. For a look at Mapplethorpe's early NYC years, get Patti Smith's Just Kids.

Plate 64, Brian Ridley and Lyle Heeter, 1979.

"...The machismo of the couple's leather gear is undercut by the flamboyance of their living room -- replete with an Oriental rug, pewter vases, sculpted lamp and clock, and grass cloth wall covering. This complicated interplay of hypermasculine and homosexual attributes, of perversion and domesticity, undoes any interpretive move that might confine Ridley and Heeter in or as their sadomasochistic roles. That this homosexual S&M ritual takes places in the context of the couple's 'normal' life (which also includes antique collecting), powerfully destabilizes received notions of what it means to be a 'normal' or 'domestic' couple."

Jonathan Katz's Vision Realized: Hide/Seek's 105 LGBT Portraits at NPG

Jonathan Katz came of age at the worst moment possible for someone interested in lgbt curating, just as the Corcoran's cancellation of the Mapplethorpe show cemented the museum world's cowardice on queer art. That prejudice was still evident two decades later, as he was pitching his groundbreaking new exhibit of queer portraiture, Hide/Seek, to the nation's top museums, all of whom said no, except for the Smithsonian's National Portrait Gallery, where he joined forces with co-curator David Ward. Though overdue, the Smithsonian's decision to  mount this first of its kind exhibit in the US warrants sustained praise. By a lucky fluke, I was seated next to Jonathan at Friday's opening dinner and halfway through the meal he mentioned that his proposal package included Band of Thebes' essay on the Met's degayed Greek and Roman galleries.

Jonathan cut an original list of thousands of images to a bare bones, must-have total of 486 works that he wanted to hang salon-style covering every inch of wall space. No chance. The NPG demurred and, after he reduced his wish list, many other museums rejected the loan requests, often specifically because the show is lgbt. The homophobia was not limited to heterosexuals. Gay curators, gay collectors, and gay donors were among those who responded with hostility, accusing Jonathan of projecting his agenda onto asexual art, complaining he was "outing" an artist who died 94 years ago, or claiming that lending a work to such a show would reduce its value.

Deserving of special note is the Philadelphia Museum of Art, whose curators approved every loan request saying, We're agreeing to all of them because we know other museums won't. Also noteworthy: Jasper Johns lent his own work for the show, despite having been reticent about his private life for decades. Hide/Seek is made possible by funding from an unprecedented coalition of 115 donors (disclosure, including my partner), led by the Calamus Foundation and our very handsome/generous friends Don Capoccia and Tommie Pegues.

As for the 105 works that made it into the show, they're a dazzling range of photographs (Thomas Eakins' Walt Whitman; Berenice Abbott's Janet Flanner; Carl van Vechten's Bessie Smith; George Platt Lynes' Ralph McWilliams; Walker Evans' Lincoln Kirstein; Ceil Beaton's Gertrude and Alice; Nan Goldin's Misty and Jimmy Paulette; Robert Mapplethorpe's happy self-portrait, nude Lisa Lyon, disembodied Roy Cohn, S&M couple, and his own death mask; Peter Hujar's David Wojnarowicz and Susan Sontag; Annie Leibovitz's Ellen DeGeneres; Lyle Ashton Harris's 'Brotherhood;' Catherine Opie's dyke buds; and self-portraits by Laura Aguilar, Mark Morrisroe, Anthony Goicolea, and Jack Pierson; among others), installations by Robert Gober and Felix Gonzalez-Torres, and dozens of paintings or sketches whose aggregate is unparalleled queer magnificence. Highlights: Thomas Eakins, George Bellows, John Singer Sargent, Romaine Brooks, Marsden Hartley, Paul Cadmus, Grant Wood, Georgia O'Keeffe, Robert Rauschenberg, Alice Neel, Larry Rivers, David Hockney, Andrew Wyeth, and Andy Warhol.

The only thing I actively dislike about the show is its degayed subtitle, Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture. The exhibit is queer portraits, period. 'Difference' isn't just closety, it's unhelpful. Because of the weak title, the Washington Post's museum listing says only, the show "illustrates the changing social attitudes toward sexual difference and how it is depicted." What's that? Straight male macrophilia? Straight women into plushies? Abstainers? Tantrics? Onanists? Last year's show at London's National Portrait Gallery was called, Gay Icons. Clear and simple.

Given the wait-and-see caution of the museum world, the future of similar shows absolutely hinges on the attendance and catalog sales of Hide/Seek. If you live anywhere near DC, go early and often. You will need multiple viewings to absorb it all. If don't live near, plan a trip between now and February 13. If you can't visit, buy the beautiful, brilliant catalog.

To indicate my commitment, I will feature one work from the show each week through 2010.

Actually, Fellas, It *Is* My First Time at the Rodeo

At today's first go of the 24th annual World Gay Rodeo Finals in Laughlin, Nevada, the emcee announced it was the 407th known gay rodeo event. Most of the approximately 27 gay rodeo associations in the US and Canada held regional competitions throughout the year, and the top performers in each of 13 categories were invited to compete this weekend. Unlike mainstream rodeo, IGRA has no gender barriers for any of the events. Cowgirls rule! After tomorrow's second go, winners will be presented their prizes at an awards banquet.

The IGRA Grand Marshall is straight ally and board member Lorry King. This year's community hero is Kelly McFarlane Smith, publisher of QVegas. The Honorary Grand Marshall is Gregory Hinton (below, aptly astride a white horse), whose fine work I've long admired as founder and producer of Out West, a series of programs frequently at the Autry but also elsewhere, explaining LGBT contributions in the history of the American West. Greg generously let me follow him around the arena and introduced me to many rodeo officials between our discussion of his upcoming fifth novel after Santa Monica Canyon, The Way Things Ought To Be, Desperate Hearts, and Cathedral City.

Mr. IGRA is Roger Courtemanche. Miss IGRA is Ionna Doublewide.

For the novice, the event names are riddled with linguistic traps: Although Calf Roping is roping calves, Team Roping is not some stud tying up a soccer squad. Also, Goat Dressing -- not about outfits. Chute Dogging, again not what you think. Likewise, Pole Bending. And then a guy rode through waving a large blue flag announcing the next event, Bareback Bronc.

Last night at the welcome party, girls in bikinis and boots and these guys farther below passed the boot to raise money for the Trevor Project. If you weren't there, you can donate here.

    

Queer Inclusive Native Alaskan Artifacts from Smithsonian on Display

Long before John Waters and Johnny Depp, the Athabascans along the lower Yukon River had their own queer Cry Baby. That's the name of the artifact above left, described as "a male Giyema spirit who wore earrings and female chin tattoos." Read more about it or browse the 600+ objects the Smithsonian's Arctic Studies department has lent to the Anchorage Museum. The magnificent show features many computers screens on which you can zoom in on any item, read its history, see archival photos of the object in use, and listen to commentary by contemporary elders discussing its creation and function.

Edmund White on the Beats and Allen Ginsberg's Photographs

Edmund White has a wonderfully long post on the New York Review of Books blog about the Beats, sparked by seeing Allen Ginsberg's photographs. He begins by talking about the financial lives of the poets who "discovered late in life that making works of art is the way to get money. Literature just doesn’t do it." Later, White moves on to sex:

"The pictures are fascinating since few of them are well known and they often show their subjects in their youth—a fresh-faced, toothy, nerdy Ginsberg, for instance, long before he became the bearded guru, and a melancholy, poetic William Burroughs [above] before he became the saurian undertaker seen in his familiar portraits. There’s even a shadowy nude of Burroughs in bed during the period when he and Ginsberg were lovers.

"Almost all of the Beats were bisexual and one another’s lovers. Neal Cassady, the heartthrob of the bunch, slept with everyone, male or female, though he preferred women and was never faithful to anyone. He let Ginsberg sleep with him but mainly as a favor and partly as an experiment; soon after their first New York idyll Cassady left a lovesick Ginsberg behind and ran off to Denver and to adventures with numerous women. Ginsberg joined him there but was ignored most of the time." 

Great of him to remind the NYRoB crowd of all the queer connections here, especially after the National Gallery of Art exhibit (through September 16) so completely degayed them.

White continues with a critique of their work, praising their "daring" while also pointing out "the Beats’ refusal to edit themselves also led to poems and novels that were repetitious and full of dreary longueurs." If you can't get to the show, buy the big handsome catalog, which is not degayed.

Smithsonian NMAH Finally Hangs Mattachine Picket Sign in Exhibit

Four years after successfully vying against other institutions for twelve historic DC Mattachine Society picket signs then keeping them in storage, the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History is finally displaying one of those signs in a permanent exhibit. The picket appears in the section of the American Presidency collection called "Public Opinion," devoted to how groups get the president's attention (e.g. demonstrating). After four years stalled without any clear signal of when the pickets would be on view to the public -- and with others fearing it could be as long a wait as the re-installation of a museum wing in 2013 or 2014 -- two founding members of the Kameny Papers Project got the Smithsonian's attention by publishing their essay about the standstill, The Smithsonian Puts Gays in the Vault, at the end of June. Within days, a dialog ensued and within two weeks, not three or four more years, this sign was hanging where it belongs.

The lesson is the same as the exhibit's: You must speak up in public to be heard.

Francis & Witeck on HuffPost: Smithsonian Sticks Gays in the Vault

Charles Francis and Bob Witeck have published an important essay today on the Huffington Post criticizing the National Museum of American History for hiding from public view the Mattachine pickets that the Smithsonian was so eager to add to its collection in 2006. They write:

"A dozen picket signs on old wooden sticks carry the DNA of the gay civil equality movement in America. Forty-five years ago, this month, in 1965, these pickets were held high by men and women considered among the first generation of LGBT activists in front of Lyndon Johnson's White House.

"With the men wearing jackets and ties and tailored skirts for the ladies, all arrived neatly dressed to disarm the looks of fellow citizens, while their hand-lettered signs proclaimed unimaginable things like "First Class Citizenship for Homosexuals". Despite their professional appearances, this handful of men and women on this history-making picket line, knew perfectly well that their conduct literally put themselves and their jobs on the line, in broad daylight.

"Today, however, those brave pickets are stored in the dark of a Smithsonian vault, where they have been held for they past four years, ever since they first were presented to The National Museum of American History...

Continue reading at the Huffington Post.

Warsaw Opens Major LGBT Exhibit, Will Host Europride in July

Opening today at Warsaw's National Museum is Ars Homo Erotica, a major exhibit devoted to lgbt love in art from antiquity to the present. Despite conservative opposition, Piotr Piot­rowski, who became the museum's director last year, said he believes the lgbt exhibit will “change this institution, this city and this country.” Beginning in the main lobby with a section called Time of Struggle, the show continues with Homoerotic Classicism, Male Nude, Male Couples, Ganymede, Saint Sebastian, Lesbian Imaginarium, Transgender, and Archive.

The exhibition's openly gay curator Paweł Leszkowicz writes:

Ars Homo Erotica is immersed in the tradition of culture while touching on the current politics of minority rights. It combines myths and the history of art with the contemporary and the debate on the condition of democracy. It builds on the philosophy of eroticism as an experience formative to humanist ideas and their affirmation of the joy of life and sex, even in the face of repression. 

The exhibition proposes a different perspective on the history of culture, the collection of the Museum, and the art of Central and Eastern Europe. Works from the collection of the National Museum in Warsaw as well as works of specially invited contemporary artists survey the history of culture, from Antiquity until the present, from the point of view of the homosexual imagination. This perspective points to a different canon of art and love in Western civilisation and liberates it of the heteronormative filter and taboo. The homoerotic is taken as an aesthetic and erotic quality present in visual representation. The selection criterion is not the artist’s orientation, it is the theme or context of the work.

Ending its three-month run this weekend at Warsaw's Zacheta National Gallery of Art is a mammoth show of more than 300 works by 200 artists called "Gender Check: Femininity and Masculinity in the Art of Eastern Europe." It was curated by Bojana Pejić working with a "team of experts" from 24 countries. Read a big interview with her about the show here. 

Poland has a difficult recent history with lgbt rights, further complicated by the death this April of homophobic president Lech Kaczynski and much of his cabinet, giving rise to a renewed old-fashioned patriotism, according to Leszkowicz. As mayor of Warsaw, Kaczynski referred to the gay pride parade's organizers as "perverts" and twice canceled the event in 2004 and 2005, a popular move that many people believe helped him to win the presidency.

The city will host Europride 2010 from July 8 to 18, with the parade on the 17th. Expect a lot of complaining from Kaczynski's twin brother and his ilk, only to be outdone by the Vatican next summer when Rome hosts Europride 2011.

Block of DC's 17th Street Renamed for Frank Kameny, Historic Picket Signs Still MIA at Smithsonian's Museum of American History

This morning, DC's mayor Adrian Fenty is at a ceremony officially renaming a popular block of 17th St. Frank Kameny Way in honor of the pioneering gay rights leader. Fifty-three years ago in 1957 Kameny (2nd from left, below) was fired from his astronomy job with the Army Map Service because he is homosexual, unleashing a one-man starburst galaxy of indignation, outrage, and action for gay equality. Last month he turned 85 and he's still at it. My partner has edited an absolutely awesome book of Kameny's papers, Gay Is Good, currently in publishing limbo because of the problems at Alyson. Even more troubling, the Smithsonian National Museum of American History, which lobbied hard to get their twelve original pickets that Kameny, Barbara Gittings, and other early members of the Mattachine Society used to protest outside the White House in 1965, continues to refuse to display these historic signs. (One picket sign appeared in a temporary installation of new acquisitions, shown in the Air & Space Museum, while the NMAH was renovated. The total number of complaints from the public about displaying a pro-gay sign was zero.) At no point in the entire museum devoted the sweep of the nation's history can visitors find any mention that lgbt Americans have ever participated in democracy or even existed. Frank's work isn't over.

Greece's Ancient Life at Home Exhibit Includes Gay Erotic Play

Jetlagged though I was, this suggestive illustration in the Greek National Museum of Archeology's new exhibit on Eretria caught my attention this afternoon. Happily, the text is gay inclusive when discussing aspects of the symposium, which were attended only by males. "The discussion between men flourished in parallel, along with songs, dexterity games and erotic play, in which occasionally prostitutes took part." Two of the show's several ancient images supporting that view appear after the jump.

In another gallery hall the headbanded lad called to mind Darren Ryleston, of Jonathan's Strong's wise and compassionate new novel Consolation discussed below.

 

Allen Ginsberg's Photos Degayed at National Gallery of Art

 

You don't think of simple, 2-D, single-frame photos as being cubist but Allen Ginsberg's prints capture ordinary moments in the lives of a core group of friends, ex-lovers, and partners, and they simultaneously offer a view back from the future, as Ginsberg wrote descriptions of each sitting when he reprinted the images decades later. On display in three rooms of the west wing of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, until September 6, Beat Memories radiates all kinds of love. I saw it on Friday and loved the portraits and snapped moments of William S Burroughs, Jack Kerouac, Peter Orlovsky, Gary Snyder, Neal Cassady, Larry Rivers, Francesco Clemente, and Gregory Corso (above, in Paris). The subjects are almost exclusively male and the vibe is proudly queer. Indeed, Ginsberg says the idea for writing on his images came from wondering what Rimbaud and Verlaine were doing before and after they were photographed.

Senior curator Sarah Greenough and NGA director Rusty Powell repeatedly acknowledge the gay aspect of Ginsberg's life (while perhaps missing the centrality of it in the creation of his work) in their respective smart essay and welcoming letter in the handsome exhibition catalogue, which retails for $50. However in the gallery itself, and online, all the places the text information is public and free, every curatorial mention of homosexuality has been banished. If the image of a young Peter Orlovsky cartwheeling nude in tall grass by a pond speaks for itself, his relationship to Ginsberg remains a mystery to viewers. Typical of the museums cowering in the shadow of the Capitol, with one hand they write on the wall about the Beats' "sexual openness" and with the other hand they erase every trace of it from their visitors' gaze. Greenough unwisely wondered aloud at a recent press preview what Ginsberg would think of her exhibit. She already has the answer, in Ginsberg's own handwriting on the museum's piece 2008.131.14, in which he complains of Heavy Petting, "final movie version cut out Bill's queer loves." If that's not clear enough, then Howl.

The exhibit was co-funded by the Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation. View 12 images here.