There is a popular perceptn that gay men are artistic. Although art historians and others have documented the substantial ntributn to art ma by gay men, the existence of a unique gay sensibily remas ntroversial. Mental health practners who work wh gay men have addrsed athetic …
Contents:
ARE GAY MEN ARTISTIC? A REVIEW OF THE LERATURE
* art and homosexuality *
In an UK Gay News op-ed piece, Baker wrote: “In my view the rabow flag is unfished, as the movement reprents, an arc that begs well before me, s breadth far broar than all of our experienc put together, reachg the fartht rners of the world wh a msage of solidary and a bean of hope for those who follow our footsteps. Gay prisoners Nazi ncentratn mps were forced to wear the pk triangle to show that they were homosexuals, which meant that they often received worse treatment and as a rult were ls likely to survive the mps. His art reflected that grief, anger, tratn and fear by drawg attentn to Amerin relig fundamentalism, nservatism, fear of the body, homophobia, enomic imperialism, all while raisg up the voic of margalized and stigmatized dividuals.
They are perhaps most famo for their image of three terracial upl (straight, gay and lbian) kissg above the ptn “Kissg Don’t Kill: Greed and Indifference Do, ” as well as their work at the 1990 Venice Biennale where they juxtaposed two billboards: the image of the Pope wh a text about the church’s anti-safe-sex rhetoric; the other a two-foot-high erect penis wh texts about women and ndom e. But fish strong, as the nflict over Richie’s bathhoe project grows and Mx has to nsir whether ’s too risky for the magaze to speak to gay men, or even gay moments like this, the historil fictn feels not entirely historil. In one of the few books that overview the tersectn of both topics, Art and Homosexualy, Reed (2011) exam a broad span of artworks and artists om around the world, sometim gog back lennia, to discs the changg nature of ias about homosexualy and s acceptance the var societi he rearch.
This rearch gap was addrsed by curator Lenzi her paper “How Queer Translat Southeast Asian Contemporary Art” (2015), a nuanced applitn of queer analysis to a number of artworks that often do not explicly reference homosexualy—if they refer to at all. Taylor (2009) is ut about histori that rce performance to an offshoot of ntemporary art, or that approximate performance and ’s background law glimmers through her reful analysis, ncurrg wh Aronson (1999) that homosexualy has been ls well tolerated Vietnam than elsewhere Southeast Asia. Aronson (1999: 204) studi legal s om ancient to ntemporary, observg that the absence of laws agast homosexualy Vietnam reified s visibily the public realm and served “to ny the possibily of s existence”.