Stonewall, revolt, and new queer art

How did you explore what you call the ‘built-in paradox’ of categorizing queer or trans folks?

The key thing to keep in mind is that the definitions we use to describe sexuality were not born with the best interests of queer people at heart. They were born of a policing, dominant culture that sought to know, for legal purposes and medical purposes, how to contain and control people who were dissident. So, there’s an inherent problem with marching under the banner of a terminology that was actually intended to, in many ways, prosecute you.

But any time you attack a group, you also give that group an opportunity to coalesce politically and begin to sue for their civil rights. And that’s exactly of course what happened. That’s what the Stonewall Riots were about. But at the same time, the dominant terminology reduced the complexity of sexuality to a binary: You have gay and straight.

As our language grew more restricted, art picked up the slack. Art could be that sphere where nuances that literally couldn’t be spoken because there was no language for them could nonetheless emerge. The exhibition sought to make this clear.

Can you point to some examples in the book where art picks up that slack?

It’s all about the idea of movement. The way I organized the exhibition was to use the word trans in every section of the show: transpose, transition, etc. This is about a moving target; everything is always in a process of change. History tells us that the only truth is change. What we’re going to understand 50 years from now is that there were all sorts of possibilities, which we today can’t see.

What I wanted to do with the exhibition and later with the book, was to acknowledge that this is a snapshot of a particular historical moment in which things are changing very fast. One of the things that’s so central to that change is the idea of queerness. By queerness, what I’m trying to suggest is a refusal of ‘gay’ and ‘lesbian.’ People are refuting this idea of gay and lesbian and instead are looking for a kind of plurality of possibilities in which this is the defining truth. Sexuality isn’t an essential, defining, totalizing category of identity, but one of many ways in which people can be divided and defined.

In terms of artists, Deborah Kass is a very prominent lesbian feminist painter, but her taste and aesthetic aligns with a stereotypical gay male ethos, using phrases from the most familiar gay male musical fantasies in her painting.

In a remarkable group of photographs, Sophia Wallace hired professional male models, and then essentially worked to break them, to get them to feel small, and to mimic the poses that women are required to take in mainstream media advertising, to essentially trans them against their will.

Another artist in the exhibition who is interesting in this regard is Del LaGrace Volcano, who was born intersex and became very interested in all forms of transness. They produced a series of remarkable photos of a very significant African performance artist doing a performance, in, of all places, Antarctica. And the reason that they’re doing the performance in Antarctica is that it is about the historical account of an enslaved Black woman who passed as a white man to freedom. So, when they started talking about how they wanted this photographic documentation to look, they really wanted it to be black and white, but they didn’t want it to be black-and-white photography. Antarctica became the perfect white setting for this Black performance artist to engage these themes, so you have multiple forms of transness here, not only female/male but black/white, North/South. 

One of the things that Del is so good at is causing us to think through the assumptions we make about binaries or polarities and forcing us to recognize the degree to which we’ve captured the complexity of human experience.

What we’re seeing are ways in which an identity category can’t speak to the question of the complexities of history and to the complexities of identity. This exhibition wants to imagine a world of transness where everything is always changing.

How do you imagine that the world will change further and look back at Stonewall in the next 50 years?

I think it’s going to change in the way that I see my very youngest students now operating. They refuse labels. I had a student who talked to me about a boyfriend and then talked to me about a girlfriend. I said something about a shift because I’m an old guy. And that student said, “God, that’s so old-fashioned. Why are you thinking in terms of categories? I’m interested in a person, not a gender.”

It was the most beautiful comeuppance because what it told me is that the world that I in my wildest dreams envisioned—one in which sexuality would not be a deciding factor in someone’s identity—was possibly coming to the fore.

There is both an opening up and a refusal to name, which is to divide, which is to control. There was a refusal to name before, but that was the closet. That was a very different kind of refusal. This is a positive refusal, one that says, I don’t feel the need to name this because I think that my sexuality is the same as everybody else’s. Without social prejudice, we would be free to fall in love with people we fall in love with. Fundamentally, the issues that govern our lives aren’t related to gender but to shelter, to warmth, to love, to nourishment. And that’s universal.