In the Life: Ep. 2106, "Revisiting Hidden Histories"

in the life is funded in part by the H man a meringue and foundation arcus foundation the estate of richard w island dewey & leboeuf and by the annual support of in the life members like you LGBT people often excavate a buried collective history so it may be celebrated and claimed as one's own this month on in the life a look back at the Smithsonian's hide seek exhibit which bully acknowledged for the first time ever signs of sexual difference an LGBT desire expressed in American art we've been looking at these images for in some instances over a century but we haven't talked about the specifically LGBT content of these works we also explore the controversy and censorship that ensued after the show opened now they start crucifix with an so let's pull that but they didn't know anything about the artist then the life and work of Samuel Stuart an openly gay tattoo artist and sexual renegade in the 1950s brought everybody together add up there is nothing Torian to hide make a ramen I just want to express the appreciation to all of you for coming out to celebrate with us what we honestly believe is a landmark exhibition in Washington for the portrait gallery certainly and and we think in the country everything in the exhibition is iconic we've been looking at these images for in some instances over a century but we haven't talked about the specifically LGBT content of these works and that's what this exhibition is trying to get out it's a brilliant way of investigating a whole field that hasn't been investigated which is the picture behind the picture and I like the title hide and seek because it's there in plain sight but not if you were not looking for it we began to talk about what was a tacit exclusion of the question of same-sex identity or the same sex relationship from the museum world this was a show whose time had come and we needed to make it happen portraiture is not just about brushstrokes it's about identity it's about what you reveal what you conceal it's about a whole question of human personality the history of LGBTQ art in america has been a game of hide-and-seek precisely lots of images of import to sexual minorities but never talked about and rarely acknowledged what we've tried to do by inflecting it through the lives of the artists and the lives of the sitters who are depicted is to give you a wholly new slant on portraiture from eighteen ninety or so coming through the year 2000 and contemporary artists working today I kind of enjoy creating something that's a bit ambiguous in the sense that it can be viewed or interpreted in different ways and I think that that's something that plays into identity and the coming out process Anthony Joe kaleia is remarkable photographer and I'm particularly compelled by two portraits by Jack Pearson and their remarkable because they're both labeled self-portrait and they're clearly if two different men he creates a drama of the man pining for the inaccessible object of desire essentially like Blanche DuBois and that young poet that she fell in love with so long ago in the Belle Reve days when I was doing the war whole project since I was inhabiting Andy Warhol's work I wanted to inhabit this representation which is why I did myself as Andy in different pieces like I did the camouflage self-portrait oh and I did this one porch but I called mine portrait of the artist as a young man because it was self portrait work like Deborah casas which import even Andy Warhol's which involves layers of camouflage and personation not simple portraits of what I really look like but complicated acts of seeming in some instances like the work of aikens the question of sexuality becomes extremely complicated because in the very word right homosexual was not in wide usage at the time that Aikens painted the image that were showing Sally etat it's an image of a boxer a young boy he's being applauded by an audience and the man who stands behind him is looking down at him almost as if to stare whereas other painters of boxing showed fisticuffs showed actual engagement with masculine aggression this picture takes that image of masculinity and turns it into occasion to celebrate the beauty of the young male body you know they had to lead a very different sort of life where they had to hide a lot of their personal preferences their sexuality and i would think even that works by DeMuth there's a watercolor of some sailors in the show and I would imagine he probably made that work for his own pleasure I find it troublesome that we can only talk about the sexuality of artists who forthrightly first claim it why can't we talk about the sexuality of artists who don't claim it who are core long deceased why did it take place as it did very very recently that the Metropolitan Museum of Art did an extensive exhibition of aikens ha's work covering every major historical theme and movement and moment covering all the scholarship except one kind of scholarship now 25 years of scholarship on sexual difference and Aikens that was struck from the show from the wall labels catalogue I don't believe as an intellectual there's any question you can't ask and I think it was a question that we wanted to ask about artists in in past time about what was the relationship between their private life and the artistic expressions that that they made and I've the case in point almost the signature for hide seek is is that of Marsden Hartley who's America's really first and still greatest abstraction is the man who invented a whole style of abstract portraiture precisely because he was unable to express himself openly as a gay American a gay artist marschner Hartley fell in love with a German officer in the daunting days of World War one in a series of remarkable portraits called portrait of a German officer marsena Hartley exposes his incredible love for this man by including his initials his age at death his unit hotly who could not in any direct sense expose his feelings instead was forced to invent a vocabulary in so doing there may be an awareness that certain artists who people hadn't known were gay are gay I'm thinking of grant wood for instance who you know one always thinks of as this Midwestern artist of a certain era until I heard about this exhibition I wasn't aware of his personal life at all here is a figure who is widely understood because of his painting American Gothic as one of the great originalist figures and a figure who comes to represent in some sense American painting of the period but Grant Wood was a completely self-identified gay figure and a number of works suggests this pictorially everybody thinks of American Gothic a poll Revere that these were celebrations of American history and of American types they weren't they were camp one of the most signature images for the show is a a remarkable photograph by Berenice Abbott and it shows janet planner who was a lesbian journalist in Paris the picture shows two masks and the masks are removed from the face she's clearly communicating gender nonconformity but she's also communicating in being unmasked a willingness to expose right that gender nonconformity and presumably sexual nonconformity these very queer pictures that Abbott does in Paris when she's an expatriate she utterly abandoned when she comes back to the United States to me it's part of the American dilemma I mean why do you think Gertrude Stein didn't want to live in the United States why did James Baldwin live in Paris why did all the you know black jazz musicians and the artists why did everybody want to leave here it's because of these underlying cultural problems having to do with dirt and repression of sexuality Harlan was remarkable because it really was conceived of in the context of racist America as a place apart another country and to cross the boundary into Harlem was to cross into another social universe in one of the pictures that were showing in the exhibition a beautiful portrait of the white writer of the Harlem Renaissance Carl Van Vechten a picture of him seated in a white suit and very subtly painted in the background a series of black male faces it bespeaks a number of important things one of which is that calma becton was sexually interested in young black men but also that he built his career in some sense on an African American community which nonetheless was behind him it's a portrait gallery of an elite and I think any of us looking at these pictures would kill to be in that company we'd kill to have somebody look at us with the idealizing gaze that Carl Van Vechten lavishes on these figures what makes an individual unique what is it about each person's personality values life experience that is revealed through a good portrait and to some extent what is not revealed but concealed in what way is portraiture a mask or a code that you need to study in order to better understand the person gasper johnson robert rauschenberg they had a relationship for a number of years and a number of the paintings that we think of his iconic images of American painting are in fact if you will encoded pictorial mrs. letters to one another responding to each other's art I saw the Jasper Johns retrospective at the Whitney in 1977 and I had never seen art like that in my life particularly in memory of my feelings which I recognized right away was an homage to my favorite frank O'Hara poem I felt that there was a triangulated love affair possible between me Jasper Johns and frank O'Hara the image is a kind of reversal of the first image that Jasper Johns made upon developing relationship which would last for seven or eight years with Robert Rauschenberg the most important relationship and either painters life one side of the picture shows a fork and a spoon wired together as if right spooning and on the other side of the picture the spoon in the fork are separated and indeed the picture is about the end of a relationship the end of their relationship the exhibition arcs forward from the 1890s with the the very definition of the category the homosexual through to 1969 with the Stonewall riot and the emergence of the modern gay liberation movement but then out of left field comes the AIDS epidemic circa nineteen eighty-three you have people robert mapplethorpe would be a good example Keith Haring would be another who are just beginning to experience the delights of freedom as they have to confront their own and others mortality the incredible series of mourning portraits that we think speak to the experience of a community in crisis a community that is being decimated those are the most painful portraits in the exhibition where you literally in a Bronson's portrait Felix of his artistic collaborator at the moment of his death a lot of the portraits in this show I think are involved in the construction of a gay canon gay and lesbian canon of taste I felt comforted looking at these images as if i were a Catholic going to st. Peters and looking at all my favorite Saints say oh there's you know sink Gertrude there st. Frank st. Langston he died for my sins wasn't he cute you know we didn't want to make an alternative American history we wanted to take the American history that everybody knew the American art history that is the story that every museum tells and show how profoundly it was cross cut with questions of sexual difference in sexual identity I mean that layer of America which we can refer to as high culture it was developed and supported by gay Americans if you think about the Opera the ballet the theater the art museums not to mention the contributions of individual artists you just you wouldn't have it representing keith haring in this exhibition is his last work of art it's called unfinished painting it consists not simply of an unfinished painting but an unfinished tapestry there's only a corner of it and strings are hanging down where the worker was going to finish it and of course what that indicates is a life cut short a work of art that that was unable to be completed but I'd like in a way to look at it the other way that it's up to us to finish that painting it's up to us to complete American culture in a way that that's commensurate with our with our own great goals our own great ambitions and our own great dreams for equality and diversity and I want us to look again at how it is we came to be America and I think this exhibition does that I think it adds a strand to the unfinished tapestry the unfinished painting of Keith's hair to be a portrait gallery that represents the American people today we have to be many things we have to be about gender diversity age diversity ethnicity and sexual identity which is part of American life so we feel this is a step for the Portrait Gallery toward filling out the contours of what it means to be an American today one month after hide seek opened the Smithsonian stunned the art world by removing one of the works in the show a video called fire in my belly by the late artist David Warner ovitch someone from the press call them that the Smithsonian had pulled a piece and what do we think of it I was thinking why it didn't surprise me what surprised me was that that was the image the Christ on the cross with the hands the Smithsonian censored the video after complaint by Catholic League President Bill Donohue that fired my belly's depiction of a crucifix with ants on it was anti-catholic hate speech the federally funded Smithsonian is coming under fire this morning conservative lawmakers also began to attack the Smithsonian's funded and denounce the show/hide seat really perverted six toughie no game was right there's a queer excise it that's a politics of diminishing return so what they've done is they had to invent a red herring religious hate speech it was an interesting choice for a piece to be censored from that show that I think you know they still crucifix with ants I let's pull that but they didn't know anything about the artist like much of his work wanna ravitch made fire in my belly as a response to the AIDS epidemic one or ovitch himself died in 1992 from aids-related complications he wasn't just a painter he was a writer he was a photographer he was a doodler he would make things it was in his blood I mean I don't know you know it's not like somebody says oh maybe I'll become an artist you know he was an artist what's happened now is that the museums and the art world have broadly supported us and this film is being shown in venues all across the country and indeed throughout the world the show hide seek along with the video fire in my belly opens at the brooklyn museum in november two thousand eleven and travels to the Tacoma Art Museum in March 2012 the decision was always very clear in our minds that a fire in my belly started out as a piece in the show and that it needed to remain a piece in the show in brooklyn there's never any question that we would edit out a work when I apologized at the beginning of all of this to Tom David surviving partner and said I'm you know I'm so sorry that this has been a controversy all over again he said don't be stupid David would have loved this to be still relevant long after his death absolutely right on and I think in some sense that's exactly the case why have we given a free pass to our cultural institutions and not held them to a standard that they must include our lives or to put it another way stop editing us out of American history a man of his very own extraordinary invention samuel steward lived decades before the 1969 Stonewall Rebellion yet his sexual identity was never in question sex was central to his life and he had lots of it this is the stud file it's Sam's life long record of all of the people that he had sex with in the course of his life there's almost 900 cards in here and it's very carefully cross-referenced and indexed written in code pull it open Sam was changed as a librarian at Ohio State University with each of these cards he has the name of the person the activities they engaged in the dates they engaged in them penile dimensions so it's a very detailed and often quite humorous set of cards author Justin spring chronicles the life of samuel stewart professor tattoo artist and sexual renegade in his book secret historian secret historian as the biography about a man very few people have heard about and in that way it's sort of a unique biography so why was out at a bookstore called a different light there I found on the shelves just sitting there this series of novels by a person called Phil Andrews I recognized immediately that I was in the hands of a storyteller who just happened to write stories about men having sex with other men I took them home I collected them I shared them with people and they all agree that these were extraordinary tales but we didn't know who Phil Andrews was years later I came across this man Sam steward who was also friends with Gertrude Stein and Thornton Wilder and Alice toklas and lived a literary life then sure that he ran a tattoo parlor that's strange and then reading and reading I finally realized this will fill Andros this man was the same person I began trying to figure out everything I possibly could about this man it took me a couple of years but I finally found the man who was the executor of the Sam Stewart estate and it turned out that he had just boxed up everything after Sam died and he invited me to come out and look through it and when I got there I realized I'd hit the jackpot you know just this incredible these are like a alibaba's cave of 1930s 40s and 50s sexuality Sam was a literary man from the very earliest his poetry collection and his first novel were well received he was going to go on and become a novelist like so many of his literary heroes he was also working and living as a university professor teaching English literature and he got sidetracked first by alcoholism and then after he was able to get sober his sex life kind of blossomed and became very central to his life in a way that also sidetracked his literary adventures in late nineteen forty nine Sam met pioneering sex researcher Alfred Kinsey and became an unofficial collaborator stewards highly detailed documentation of his sexual experiences underscored and supported Kinsey's controversial findings about men having sex with other men so a lot of Sam's literary talent was poured into diaries that were meant expressly for Kinsey and Sam's diaries are amazing they're over a thousand pages typewritten of his sexual adventures experiences his thoughts about his sexuality and really turns it into something more like a novel but Sam was an unbelievably truthful man in these Diaries and journals um because he felt like he was creating a testament not only for himself but for Kinsey and for sex researchers of the future for people who really wanted to know what was going on in society by the early 1950s Sam had transformed his life he chose what was then a socially objectionable profession with a clientele limited to hustlers sailors bikers and street thugs for Sam it presented a perfect medley of sexual prospects Sam Stewart became phil sparrow tattoo artist there was a creative element in him that was just very powerful and very exciting to be around because he created these wonderful things when he really made that break and became a tattoo artist and began doing his illustrations and decorating his apartment in his outlandish way it was as if his entire life became this artwork and even if he couldn't share that artwork with anybody he would live in the center of it it it became a kind of private world in 1966 one young man entered Sam's private world in oakland california where Sam had a tattoo parlor he would become one of the most commercially successful tattoo artists in the United States his name Don Hardy later known as ed hardy he knew Sam Stewart as Phil sparrow of course impressed me was Sam the entire setup of the shop the first time I saw that this guy is coming from somewhere different it was much more like an art studio at classical music playing and all the flash was hand-painted it was obviously created you know buzz for the South shop which was kind of unique in those days in those days tattooing was so underground I was such a closed shop I did my first probably five or six tattoos in his shop under his tutelage on art school friends and put the first one on myself as was traditional with him looking over my shoulders ok so don here's um some of what I came across when I found the steward archive this annoys cracks me up because it looks like one of those peasant blouses that were popular than anybody for gals yeah and here's your motorcycle guy Jack tattoos with the motorcycle boots and that means typical tattoos zapanta crawling back Black Panther Panther head and stinky the skunk I mean all these things are so iconic for that era San hated stinky he just because he had to put on so many of the is a lot of us said became just this thing you're like not another way a car but it paid the rent so Sam would speak laughing from wherever he is about the fact that tattooing which he saw as really a dying folk art you know and his interest course was largely sociological anthropological sexual and as well as artistic now the revival even of interest in those classic corny sort of Americana designs is huge you see young people walking around they look like they were tattooed in like nineteen forty Oh images on them in the classic the chest Eagle which is remained a class and here's one of the sweetest images ever say I made this one he made his change over from being a professor it's a tattoo artist he opened his tattoo parlor and he sent greetings from Phil sparrow to all his friends with a reindeer putting a Merry Christmas tattoo on Santa it's great with Santa's beard you know draped it draped over the other so I couldn't otherwise head to the chest yeah and of course they have the exam the big sexy boots are part of Santa's sure Santa fashion statement right and there was a whole history of generations two or three generations of gay men who we knew that they existed but we didn't have any day to day awareness of what their life was like quite apart from the sensational nature of Sam's life for me to reconstruct that life in painstaking detail was also to reconstruct what it was like to be a gay person in 1925 1935 1945 1955 1965 Samuel stuard died in obscurity on New Year's Eve in 1993 he was 84 thank you for watching in the life to watch more historical coverage from the last 20 years have in the life visit our website at ITL media org right in the life is funded in part by the H van a meringue and foundation arcus foundation the estate of richard w Wyland dewey & leboeuf and by the annual support of in the life members like you you