The Art of Beg Gay - Camp Widow

Contents:

• THE ARE 3 FABULO NEW BOOKS ABOUT THE FE ART OF BEG GAY
• THE ART OF BEG GAY
• ARE GAY MEN ARTISTIC? A REVIEW OF THE LERATURE

THE ARE 3 FABULO NEW BOOKS ABOUT THE FE ART OF BEG GAY

5Quickly, Hockney also sought to rporate allns to his own homosexualy his patgs, spired by the texts of Christopher Isherwood and Alan Rechy, which revelled the explos of their homosexual characters. Hujar: © 2022 The Peter Hujar Archive, LLC/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New YorkIn amassg work ma by the mostly overlooked gay artists who lived and died durg the crisis, a global group of llectors is refg what the Wtern non looks llector, who wish to rema anonymo, keeps some of his more explic art the bathroom of his Connecticut home, cludg (middle, om top) McDermott & McGough’s “The Spir of the Htler” (2003) and “Uny Repeated” (1993). He rejected that part of himself, attemptg to cure, or at least curb, his gayns through therapy and an outsir, Baer entered middle age as a happily married straight man wh a quirky reer path that ma him popular at dner parti: In addn to beg a Harvard-ted doctor, he also wrote and produced h TV shows such as “ER” and “Law & Orr: SVU.

Enavorg to make up for lost time, Baer, who had been a sual art llector, started buyg work solely by gay artists, begng wh a lorful 1990 acrylic on paper portra by Don Bachardy of the wrer Pl Mote, whose 1992 g-out memoir, “Beg a Man: Half a Life Story, ” helped Baer do the same.

THE ART OF BEG GAY

“I don’t know that the world n change for the better except wh stori, ” says Baer, 67, om the apartment he shar wh his hband, the 37-year-old psychologist Brandon Weiss, which overlooks a seclud tangle of gkgo, ailanth and rk tre Central Park known as the Ramble, where gay men have gone cisg sce at least the 1920s.

Much of Baer’s llectn clus subject matter he’d long nsired taboo — maybe distasteful — and which he now displays throughout his home on Manhattan’s Upper Wt Si for the same reason gay bars screen vtage porn: as a way to rve out a space for himself and others like him where tolerance, even acceptance, of queerns isn’t enough. In the rooms, gayns is worshiped, champned, fend and DavisBaer’s tert queer art spans genr and sexual inti, but there’s an emphasis on work by gay men om the early days of the AIDS epimic the 1980s and ’90s, many of whom created relative obscury and have often been fotten, only to be reclaimed recent years by a new generatn of llectors.

ARE GAY MEN ARTISTIC? A REVIEW OF THE LERATURE

Has arranged the works wh a curator’s eye, pickg up mon threads among the artists: Wojnarowicz’s and Wong’s tratn over feelgs of isolatn and nfement; how Steers and Hujar uld make even an ailg gay man — pecially an ailg gay man — look like a kg; the special cursy and re wh which othered people saw one another and, one another, themselv.

At the time, some dienc found pictns of sickns too disturbg to study or hang above a crenza, among them even gay men who need to have their pa unrstood but may not have wanted to live wh nstant remrs of a plague that had fected every aspect of their liv.

By buyg and biddg on the piec, he and other like-md (not to mentn rich) gay llectors are g their power to sist that stutns and ctn ho rensir art that hasn’t been given s full due. Through programmg and acquisns, art stutns and blue-chip galleri have the power to anot new stars (like the Pakistani-born gay Amerin pater Salman Toor, 39, whose first major exhibn was at New York’s Whney Mm of Amerin Art 2020) and to remd dienc about tablished on (like the Amerin portraist Alice Neel, whose retrospective at New York’s Metropolan Mm of Art last year revigorated her cultural chet nearly four s after her ath).