Category: {gay}

Gay

City of Spades

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Today’s book purchase is a secondhand copy of the first novel in Colin MacInnes’ London trilogy (Absolute Beginners and Mr Love and Justice were the others). City of Spades was first published in 1957 but this is the 1985 reissue with a cover by Neville Brody which is the main reason for my picking it up. The books were reprinted in the mid-Eighties to coincide with the release of Julien Temple’s dreadful musical adaptation of Absolute Beginners, a film that must have done a lot to drive people away from MacInnes’ books; it certainly had that effect on me. Brody supplied all the faux-pulp covers for the reissued series.

MacInnes is remembered now by contemporary writers like Iain Sinclair for his pungent documenting of London lowlife. He was also something of a pioneer in writing about the Fifties’ gay scene in a matter-of-fact manner. You can read more about his works here.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The book covers archive

Michael Petry’s flag

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Monument to an Unknown Soldier: Portrait of an American Patriot (detail) by Michael Petry.

American artist Michael Petry has made works in the past using freshwater pearls threaded on sheets of black velvet. Viewers can admire the pearls then be disconcerted when given the additional information that the shapes they make are derived from those produced by human seminal emissions. A new work by Petry uses the same effect with a full-size US flag taking the place of the black velvet. The emission pattern in this case was produced by a gay American soldier and serves as a comment on the US military’s ridiculous “Don’t ask, don’t tell” policy towards gay servicemen and women. The soldier in this instance must remain unknown or risk expulsion from the army.

It remains to be seen what reaction this will provoke when the work goes on display at the Sundaram Tagore Gallery in New York as part of the America the Beautiful exhibition. The flag in the United States is a sacred object in a way it could never be here and many patriots won’t take kindly to seeing it “besmirched” even if it is by a small arrangement of pearls. In this kind of work context is all. If people were told the pearls were arranged in the shape of the Marshall Islands (where the US conducted its nuclear tests) they’d be less upset than when informed as to the real origin of the design. Yet nothing would physically change; the flag and pearls would remain the same, all that would alter would be a single piece of information and the perception of the viewer.

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White Flag (1955) by Jasper Johns.

Petry isn’t the first artist to use the American flag as a subject, of course, Jasper Johns (another gay artist, incidentally) produced a number of flag-derived paintings in the 1950s and 60s. His famous White Flag of 1955 was intended to be abstract rather than political (although it’s debatable how using such a highly-charged symbol could ever be unpolitical) but it’s interesting to consider how this would be viewed if it had been painted today. White flags are only used to signify surrender; in time of war Johns’ exercise in abstraction gains a new resonance.

Sundaram Tagore Gallery
547 West 27th Street,
New York.

Via Towleroad.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The gay artists archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Army Day

Another blow for the god squad

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A mob on the march from Frankenstein (1931).

That’s blow as in bludgeon, not, er, smoking drugs or oral sex… From the BBC:

New rules outlawing businesses from discriminating against homosexuals have been upheld in the House of Lords.

A challenge led by Lord Morrow of the Democratic Unionist Party failed by a majority of three to one.

He had argued that the rules forced people to choose between obedience to God and obedience to the state.

But Northern Ireland Minister Lord Rooker said it would be “quite wrong” to elevate the rights of one group above those of another.

In the time-honoured tradition of angry mobs everywhere, “Christian and Muslim groups … stage(d) a torchlit protest outside the House of Lords tonight against a proposed new gay rights law that they say would force them to “actively condone and promote” homosexuality.” The law would do nothing of the sort but these aren’t the kind of people to worry themselves with inconvenient facts. No reports as to whether they were carrying nooses and pitchforks along with their flaming brands but their chilly vigil was in vain, the challenge was defeated by 199 votes to 68. As Warren Ellis so aptly put it: “House Of Lords To Homophobes & Intolerant Christians: Shut The Fuck Up”. Amen to that. Polly Toynbee had a great piece of polemic in The Guardian eviscerating the litany of nonsense being used to support the challenge. All this and the iPhone too; that’s what I call a good day.