Having recently watched Paris is Burning, seeking out the history behind RuPaul’s Drag (a show I love shamelessly), I was pleased that our visit to the Museum of the City of New York allowed me to reach even further into history. I loved how the exhibit captured the mundane and the extraordinary, lending a sense of “groundedness” to famous gay New Yorkers’ lives. This was particularly successful in the case of Andy Warhol. I was especially struck by his letter to a lover at Staten Island’s own Wagner College. It hinted at the fact that gay New York was and is so much more than a particular neighborhood in lower Manhattan.
And yet, though the exhibit gestured to gay life on the fringes, it did remain committed to walking pretty familiar paths. Gay Harlem had some light shone on it, but the exhibit’s attention remained fixed on the West Village, an atmosphere that could prove as elusive as it was inclusive. It is important to celebrate unity but focusing on some of the fractures within the gay community would have been illuminating. Race and class divisions are felt just as deeply within as without it. Further, the prominence given to Warhol, an artist well-covered at other cultural institutions, seemed like a wasted opportunity. I appreciated the coverage of figures like Greer Lankton and Harmony Hammond but it seemed like an afterthought when compared to the prominence given to Warhol and co. (This article does a good job breaking down the exhibition’s “universalization” of “man’s creativity,” and how it implies “that women’s creativity, when it can be found, is just a flash in the pan.”)
Jerome Krase
May 31, 2017 — 12:23 pm
Thanks for the link to “Unmet Promises: Gay Gotham at the Museum of the City of New York” by Cassandra Langer. It points out a universal issue of most attention being paid to the privileged in every, even nominally unprivileged group. As to the gender/sex dimension, until relatively recently much of the love/affection physical and otherwise between and among women was considered “normal” but not if exhibited by males. Ironically, in Anglo-American culture bias against females/feminine was strongest against men who publicly displayed such “tendencies.” Unfortunately not much has changed as to what once was considered as feminine traits such as tenderness are valued less than what once was considered masculine such as violence. Killing people still seems to be a higher calling then naturing them.