Hola, Los Angeles:

I’m culture writer Carolina A. Miranda and I intend to get through this summer by making Hetty Lui McKinnon’s chili crisp chickpea salad over and over again. It’s soooo goooood.

I’ll also be taking a short break: Art Insider is going dark for the month of August so that we can take a moment to exhale and make a few trips to the beach. We’ll have one more newsletter next week, then expect us back in the driver’s seat on September 2nd. 

In the meantime, here’s what I’m ogling:

• A wondrous show of queer photography
• A story on Argentina’s mysterious Black dandy
• An essay about the US intellectual class in the Trump era

Keep that cursor moving!

The featured image at top is Fabian Guerrero's Jose in Front of Laundromat, Lynwood, CA, 2017, as seen in the Getty Museum's Queer Lens: A History of Photography. (Gift of Herbert Jeffries, Autry Museum)

QUEER NATION

A 1927 image by James Van Der Zee captures men and women in drag. (James Van Der Zee Archive / Metropolitan Museum of Art / Courtesy of Henry Art Gallery)

There are two very good reasons to go see Queer Lens: A History of Photography at the Getty Museum. Number one: it is a big, absorbing lesson on the myriad ways in which photography has been used as a tool of representation. Within it, you’ll find elaborate studio portraits, informal snaps, private erotic moments, domestic scenes, street photography, journalistic reportage, conceptual pieces, and even manipulated images — like the prismatic gelatin silver prints produced by the polymathic artist and activist Tee Corinne from the 1980s, which show fantastical images of women making love as if viewed through a kaleidoscope.

Secondly, the exhibition functions as a vivid, often joyous document of queer life dating back to the 19th century — and back to the origins of words like “homosexual” and “heterosexual.” The rise of photography and the concept of queer identity, it turns out, occupy intersecting historical tracks. 

Among the earliest images presented in the show is a remarkable studio portrait taken sometime around 1870 that shows the duo known as Fanny and Stella, a pair of crossdressing entertainers born Frederick Park and Ernest Boulton, who had the temerity to take to the street in their feminine styles — for which they were prosecuted and ultimately found innocent. A sepia portrait of the pair shows them in a gentle embrace, decked out in luxuriant Victorian gowns. It is at once tender and — given the circumstances — quite daring.

For as long as LGBTQ+ people have existed, society has tried to find ways to legislate them — if not out of existence, then out of mind. In 1863, San Francisco passed a law that essentially outlawed drag. In the 1930s, FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover (who was likely deeply closeted) launched a ”Sex Deviates Program” to investigate queer people — which helped power the “Lavender Scare” of the 1940s and ‘50s, when LGBTQ+ staffers were purged from the ranks of government. Fast forward to the 1990s, when President Bill Clinton issued the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy, prohibiting openly gay people from serving in the military. 

And, of course, there is the Trump Administration, which is currently leading an attack on trans people, from an executive order that has decreed the existence of only two genders to a ban on trans people joining the military. Among his cruel cuts: health care for trans youth at Children’s Hospital Los Angeles.

The Getty’s exhibition, organized by photography curator Paul Martineau, is an incredible, much-needed counter to the politics of erasure, showing that queer life is part of life — or to put it in the words of the activist group Queer Nation: “We’re here, we’re queer, get used to it.”

Among the works on display are captivating images that circulated privately or within relatively closed circles, including a turn-of-the-20th-century snapshot showing one man sitting cozily on another’s lap, as well as iconic snapshots by early gay rights advocate J.J. Belanger, which feature two men posing and smooching flirtily in a photo booth in the ’50s. Many other works record facets of public life: performances, nightlife, crackdowns, protests — like an image by photojournalist Diana Davies that shows a gay liberation march in New York City’s Times Square in 1969. The queer civil rights victories of the 21st century — like gay marriage — were hard-won (and, sadly, are now in danger). 

J.J. Belanger captured two young men expressing affection in the early 1950s. (ONE Archives at the USC Libraries)

The show is sprawling and features recognizable classics — like the image by Robert Mapplethorpe showing two men posing in bondage gear. But there are many lesser-known photos, such as the elegant 19th-century portrait of a Zuni Two-Spirit spiritual leader named We’wha, who once met with President Grover Cleveland. I found myself particularly absorbed by the self-fashioning I saw throughout: the English poet Radclyffe Hall, who was open about being a lesbian, looking dapper in a man’s suit; artist Marcel Duchamp dressed up as his feminine alter ego Rrose Sélavy; and the drag performer Divine, looking outrageous with a generous application of black eyeliner and a gravity-defying blonde wig. As Ken Gonzales-Day writes in the fantastic exhibition catalog, “dressing up can be a powerful first step in finding oneself.”

Given that Queer Lens was born in Los Angeles, there are some omissions. Not featured but worth exploring is the late Chicano artist Teddy Sandoval, who produced a wonderful self-portrait as his drag alter ego, Rosa de la Montaña — a wry nod to Duchamp that shows how the aesthetic actions of one generation can inspire another. Also missing was Gronk (born Glugio Nicandro), who is best known as a painter and a member of the performance collective Asco, but who also took photographs in the ’80s that captured gay life and queer desire. It’s puzzling that he doesn’t make an appearance in the show.

Diana Davies, Gay Liberation March on Times Square, 1969. (New York Public Library)

A vintage flyer on display at VPAM advertises a Latina lesbian event at Kitty's in 1987. (Elena Popp Papers / UCLA CSRC)

🏳️‍🌈🏳️‍🌈🏳️‍🌈

Queer Lens: A History of Photography is on view at the Getty Center through September 28th; getty.edu.

On the Side of Angels: Latina Lesbian Activism is on view at the Vincent Price Art Museum through August 30th; vincentpriceartmuseum.org.

AROUND THE INTERNET 

A photo I once snuck of Walter de Maria's Earth Room in lower Manhattan.  (Carolina A. Miranda)

• Bill Dilworth, who for decades tended to land artist Walter De Maria’s The New York Earth Room, is dead at 70.
  
• The Los Angeles County Museum of Art has commissioned a sculpture of a sphinx by LA artist Lauren Halsey.
  
• The Gamble House is kicking off its “Upstairs, Downstairs” tours, which get into the lives of the domestic workers who labored there.
  
• I enjoyed this collection of interviews that Fresh Air put together in honor of gay lit pioneer Edmund White, who died last month.
  
• The architecture of Marcel Breuer plays a role in Bad Bunny’s video for “NUEVAYoL.”
  
• And the building that inspired Superman’s Hall of Justice.
  
• I’m fascinated by this story on “El Negro Raúl,” the Black dandy of Buenos Aires.
  
• Critic Coco Fusco has a heartbreaking interview with jailed Cuban artist Luis Manuel Otero Alcántara.
  
• Republicans have proposed renaming the Kennedy Center’s Opera House the “First Lady Melania Trump Opera House.”
• A work of interactive theater in London reimagines the storming of the US Capitol.
• Signing off with this essay by Pankaj Mishra on how the intellectual class is (and mostly isn’t) responding to the era of Trump.
  

Thank you, as always, for tuning in.  🤓🙏

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