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. “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.

THE ART OF BEG GAY

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.

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.

ARE GAY MEN ARTISTIC? A REVIEW OF THE LERATURE

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). Elsewhere his 18th-century untry home Connecticut are patgs by the English terdisciplary filmmaker Derek Jarman; a bedsi portra of Hler and the nam of gay men he persecuted durg the Holot by McDermott & McGough, an art duo who lived and drsed throughout much of the 1980s as if were the Victorian Age; and his latt acquisn: a $125, 000 st plaster head by DavisIt’s probably easier to spend so much time the pany of such sad, often nontatnal work — to look at a mournful slow dance between wasted bodi, or a sailor lyg unnsc on a rtroom floor, scen that are reprented the Steers patgs he owns — when you know how much ’s worth.

” Then there was the fact that the largely figurative works had been phed asi by Neo-Geometric Conceptualism, whose rise populary cid wh the epimic: By the mid-80s, the emergg Neo-Geo star Jeff Koons had replaced Wojnarowicz as the artist of the moment — which also meant that gay artists found themselv the impossible posn of havg to make sense of and articulate the trma of their liv, even as people grew disterted.

’” he 1969, Llie buted his first group exhibn of homoerotic art his SoHo loft; today, the Phall Palace, as ’s bee known, is crammed wh penis: not jt etchgs and patgs by Andy Warhol and Keh Harg and photographs by Stanley Stellar but the shape of salt and pepper shakers, vas, paperweights and bars of soap that were given to him over the s as gifts.