Brooklyn Artist Louis Frato Is Depictg Gay Male Sex and Intimacy the More Chill Gen Z Era of PrEP

Contents:

• THE GAY FIGURE ARTISTS ARE REIMAGG THE MALE GAZE
• BROOKLYN ARTIST LOUIS FRATO IS DEPICTG GAY MALE SEX AND INTIMACY THE MORE CHILL GEN Z ERA OF PREP
• GAY MEN POSTERS AND ART PRTS
• "GAY"/ FE ART PRTS ▼
• GAY VTAGE ART

THE GAY FIGURE ARTISTS ARE REIMAGG THE MALE GAZE

Summary of Queer ArtAny art that n be nsired "queer" refers to the re-appropriatn of the term the 1980s, when was snatched back om the homophob and opprsors to bee a powerful polil and celebratory term to scribe the experience of gay, lbian, bisexual, transgenr, and tersex people. Key Ias & Acplishments Bee of the early crimalizatn of homosexual acts and the social stigma nnected to homosexualy, much Queer Art employs d visual language that would not aroe spicn among the general public but would allow those faiar wh the trop of the subculture to glean the hidn the rise of activism the wake of the Civil Rights protts and the AIDS epimic, Queer Art beme more ank and polil s subject matter, forcg the viewers to regnize queer culture and to unrsre the stutnal equi and hypocrisy that fueled Inty Polics surroundg Queer Art has sparked much bate, wh some artists embracg Inty Polics and other chewg as not important for their work. Mapplethorpe's photography pictg still lif of flowers, celebry and Royal Fay portraure, and pictur of children are well-loved, but his powerful and subversive imag of homoerotic subjects are most notable their power to dramatilly alter perceptns and ph boundari.

BROOKLYN ARTIST LOUIS FRATO IS DEPICTG GAY MALE SEX AND INTIMACY THE MORE CHILL GEN Z ERA OF PREP

"A discsn of the queer experience relatn to art history n beg 1870 when for the first time a paper by German psychiatrist Carl Friedrich Otto Wtphal nsired the experience of "ntrary sexual feelg" which two people were alg wh what would later e to be known as homosexualy.

He wrote the History of Sexualy (1976), "The sodome had been a temporary aberratn; the homosexual was now a speci, " htg at a future where the queer experience would bee an important branch of Inty s later, 1895, the Brish thor and playwright Osr Wil was sent to prison for two years after he was nvicted of sodomy, and the trials helped shape an emergent inty of the homosexual artist.

"Murals, Graffi, and the Public Space Sculpture provid a way for the queer experience to be lerally brought out of the closet and to the street, as the work of Gee Segal's Gay Liberatn, which was stalled across the street om the old Stonewall Inn Greenwich Village. Today, more than 48, 000 people have add panels honorg the nam of their lost iends, and has germated to different rnatns around the world, won a Nobel Peace Prize nomatn, and raised $3 ln for AIDS service the face of centuri of reprsn, the public space beme an important new venue for gay artists to display their work.

GAY MEN POSTERS AND ART PRTS

AdvertisementSKIP ADVERTISEMENTWorkg largely outsi the gallery system, a group of illtrators is revivg the disciple and refg how queer bodi are reprented MacConnell, “Ernie” 2014, waterlor and pen on paperLAST FALL, IN a ty apartment downtown New York, a 30-year-old gay physique mol named Matthew Williams stood naked agast a whe backdrop ont of the gay artist John MacConnell. Over the next 2, 000 years, pturg the naked male form beme an sential artistic skill, one that reached s apotheosis Wtern culture durg the Italian Renaissance, when homosexual sire was subtly exprsed Donatello’s bronze “David” (cir 1440) and Caravagg’s patg “The Micians” (1597), where the tradnal female me is replaced wh a band of boys, partially robed togas, referencg a Greek and Roman perd which homoeroti was a part of society. Classics profsor Andrew Lear, 59, who now ns Osr Wil Tours, a pany that offers excursns foced on implicly gay art and history major while some old masters fetishized the male body barely d ways, the ia of an openly queer artist exprsg his sir om a queer perspective was only born the last century.

) Frato, “Tangere” 2016, lored pencil on paper, urty of the artist and Antoe Levi, Paris; Jordan Mejias, “Dare Me, ” 2017, monochromatic waterlor on paper, om the book “Of Art and Men” (Photograph: Hans-Ge Pospischil) © Jordan MejiasIN THE YEARS after Cadm, other gay perspectiv on the male body found their way to visual culture, though they’ve typilly been nsired taboo or hypersexual. And spe the “queer enlightenment” of the 1970s and ’80s, when Robert Mapplethorpe, the photographer Rotimi Fani-Kayo and others brought man-on-man sex to the mm, there rema few celebratory imag of openly gay men Wtern visual art. Williams’s afternoon ssn wh MacConnell, fact, is part of a recent revival of male figure drawg among ntemporary gay artists — cludg Kou Shou, Mart Bedolla and Stephen McDermott — who all specialize stripped-down reprentatns of largely young whe men.

In this, Frato and the other ntemporary gay figure artists share a philosophy, spe their different athetics: They’re all mted to reflectg the mostly unseen terr liv of the men they admire, and to celebratg a diverse set of subjects who, taken together, stand opposn to a nonil history of art that has long ignored an openly gay view of the male body. 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.

"GAY"/ FE ART PRTS ▼

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. 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.

GAY VTAGE ART

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.