THIS PAST HALLOWEEN WEEKEND, you couldn’t get a hotel room in Washington for love or money. I wish I could say that the hordes descending on the country’s symbolic heart were heading for the posh Friday night opening of Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture at the National Portrait Gallery, the first-ever “gay show” of national significance. Instead, the biggest draw was the next day’s “Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear,” the brainchild of those conjoined twins of TV satire, Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert. They pushed no explicit political agenda, but their call for sanity sounded to most ears like a plea to counter the ignorant right-wing hysteria that has for so long kept GLBT images—and much else—out of the public eye.
As if that weren’t enough to keep the queer culturati busy, Sunday was Halloween—practically a national gay holiday—and the whole weekend was the final leg of the midterm elections. Talk about synchronicity. Talk about over-determined themes for a news feature. Talk about the challenge of packing a varied enough wardrobe for all these Big Events!
The opening reception for Hide/Seek fêted 500 invitees in the skylighted atrium of the National Portrait Gallery (NPG), amid potted palms and sideboards of miniature hors d’oeuvres so piss-elegant they came with nametags, like “Fig, Speck, and Monarch Ash Crostini.”
No such celebration is complete without speeches, whose congratulatory tone was set by NPG director Martin E. Sullivan: “This is a landmark exhibition in Washington, for the National Portrait Gallery certainly, and for the country: an honest look at same-sex desire and identity in American art.” Co-curator Jonathan D. Katz thanked the gallery staff for responding to his visionary proposal, lamenting with dry understatement that gay art “scholarship has been going apace, but the museum world has been less forthcoming” in acknowledging those discoveries. Standing next to me, sighing in agreement, was author–curator Steven Watson, who mounted a show here fifteen years ago about the 1950’s Beat Generation, when he was refused permission to display Larry Rivers’ portrait of gay poet Frank O’Hara, Nude with Boots. This time, Watson pointed out, that iconic image is at last out of the closet. The day’s mutual admiration society even had room for a little good-natured play with hoary stereotypes: David C. Ward, Katz’s in-house co-curator, confessed that “I’m dressing a lot better since I started working on this exhibition.”
For gays of my Stonewall generation, hearing some presumably straight, sartorially challenged public servant joke about the positive impact of exposure to gay co-workers and donors still raises a smile of marvel and delight. Not only has Ward hung O’Hara in full frontal view, he actually thinks such people have something to teach him. We’ve come a long way, baby. Not all the way, mind you—another trait of us grizzled survivors is the hard-earned awareness that every silver lining has a few lingering clouds. But today, the cultural weather is warm and balmy; we’ll save the climate-change warnings for later.
All that tasting and listening were only the sideshow to the exhibition itself—moments of communing with important pictures interrupted, in art-world fashion, by air-kissing and dishing by assorted bureaucrats, scholars, and wealthy donors. Historian Jonathan Ned Katz, who practically invented gay history in the 1970’s, was busy introducing himself as “the original Jonathan Katz” to avoid confusion with the co-curator, whose middle name is David. Jonathan the Gray’s critical reaction, like everyone’s, was awestruck: he pronounced himself “deeply moved” by what Jonathan the Still-Blondish hath wrought. Author Christopher Reed, as well known for his wardrobe as for his exposés of the omnisexual Bloomsbury circle, lived up to Ward’s little joke with a vest in a striking pattern of black-and-white acanthus leaves, which he confided came from a thrift shop in Illinois. Reed pronounced the show “fabulous”; then, realizing he was talking to the press, added: “Oh, that’s not a hot quote. It’s absolutely fabulous.”
It’s the fabulous first-hand experience of so many canonical images of gay history, gathered together in the flesh and in time, that creates the magic of this exhibition. The shared space and context, sort of an imaginary family reunion, prompts conversations between æsthetic and spiritual cousins who may not have seen each other in years, or discover family resemblances across generations. As a New Yorker, for instance, seeing works by so many queer or simpatico artists who enlivened my archetypal hometown in the early 20th century—Charles Demuth, Marsden Hartley, Marcel Duchamp, Stein and Toklas—made the proto-gay Jazz Age and Harlem Renaissance seem much more vivid and inspiring. It was as if a comforting fairy tale I’d cherished as a child came back to life for a few misty moments, whispering, “Yes, Virginia, there is a queer past, we are a gay clan, and here’s your inheritance.” A past which is, at least here, an integral segment of our larger national drama. By placing Hide/Seek next to another display titled The Struggle for Justice—celebrating the battle for black civil rights—the NPG sensitively located gay outsiders within what it labels “a major theme in American history: the struggle … so that people and groups can claim … America’s promise of equality, inclusion, and social dignity.”
One of the most resonant works for this location was David Hockney’s painting We Two Boys Together Clinging (1961). The title quotes Walt Whitman, whose pioneering love poems to men, the “Calamus” series, threw a mental lifeline to British-born Hockney, who came out before the UK repealed its sodomy law. Hockney’s perky illustration of two men hugging also provides a link to the show’s broader historical framework. As our national bard, Whitman is omnipresent in Washington, albeit mainly for the ecstasy of his utopian patriotism, not for his sex life. Etched over the entrance to the Dupont Circle subway station, center of DC’s gay ghetto, are verses from “The Wound-Dresser” recounting his Civil-War hospital service in this city: “The hurt and the wounded I pacify with soothing hand…”
There’s even a long quote adorning Washington National Airport’s main concourse, which husband Stevie and I discovered the next day as we headed to New Orleans for a Halloween birthday party for GLR columnist Allen Ellenzweig. The verse invokes Whitman’s optimistic vision of the American future with its pavilions “high-rising tier on tier with glass and iron facades,” and where “all that forwards towards perfect human life [may]be started… [and]visibly exhibited.” A fitting send-off for a show that visibly exhibits more gay Americana than ever before, in a prestigious glass and iron temple, and might just forward our nation toward a more perfect inclusion of its gay citizens.
Some parts of the country, thankfully, have already arrived there. Halloween, as you’d expect in the anything-goes, jazz-soundtracked “Big Easy,” is just like Mardi Gras, only shorter. Parades and pre-parties in the legendary French Quarter lubricate revelers for the culminating evening, when Bourbon Street and its neon-splashed neighbors are roped off for a pansexual outdoor costume-ball cum love-in cum cruise-bar. This year, yours truly went as a gray-bearded flamenco queen, with an orange ruffled skirt, sequined bodice, and ostrich-plumed wig. My drag alter ego was, if I do say so myself, the belle of the ball—or at least one of many belles, who dressed as everybody from Dorothy’s Wicked Witch to Miss Fellatio 2011. N’Awlins being the only U.S. city that allows open booze in the streets, the sidewalks got a bit sloshy, but once again the reviews, like the outfits, were unanimously fabulous.
Except from the little band of fundamentalist Christians with placards and megaphones, local avatars of the right-wing hysteria so mocked at the DC rally. They pitched their camp in mid-block, struggling to make their dire prophecies against all the sex, drugs, and gender-bending heard above the music and the noisy, oblivious crowds. They struck most passersby as laughably futile, but like all True Believers, they’re indefatigable, and they’ll stop at nothing to shame the heathen into obedience. Catching sight of this reporter as I flounced over to investigate, one barked into his bullhorn, “You’re too old to be dressing like that!” Can you believe that bitch?
Inevitably, as I said, there were a few clouds looming over the sunny events of this epochal weekend. The long-range forecast for more shows like Hide/Seek, and more queer consciousness in the national imagination, is not so clear. The NPG exhibit may be a minor miracle, but it’s not the Second Coming. I’m not so naïve as to believe that everyone involved just swallowed Katz’s hot-potato pitch whole in an epiphany of enlightenment. During the opening I asked art historian André Dombrowski, Katz’s partner, how was it living with Jonathan during the two years of persistent nagging and endless begging for money that he had to put into this epic show? André’s discreet reply: “Better than having a root canal.”
I don’t want to be a party pooper, but it isn’t always Halloween, we can’t always be partying in New Orleans, and most of our country is far away from the national museum, both geographically and culturally. Whitman’s unsinkable optimism notwithstanding, the sadly self-evident truth is that the integration of queerdom remains for many people a specter scarier than root canal.
First is the yawning gap between high culture and mass culture, rich and poor. It’s deeply discouraging how slowly, and how little, sympathetic knowledge of sexual minorities trickles down from the creative elite to the average citizen. A week before Hide/Seek debuted, eighteen-year-old Tyler Clementi, caught necking with his boyfriend via webcam, threw himself off the George Washington Bridge. My guess is, neither he nor his vicious roommate had learned in school about Hockney’s upbeat ode to two similarly affectionate young men. And I doubt that Whitman was a familiar role model for the Latin Kings gang members indicted on the morning of the opening for torturing and sodomizing three gay youths in the Bronx. Our society is breaking in two: on the top, a wealthy crust of those lucky few who own tuxedos, graze on exotic canapés, and name a major gay sponsor to Hide/Seek the Calamus Foundation; underneath, everyone from the increasingly squeezed middle-class on down to those whose cultural diet is more McDonald’s than monarch ash crostini, and wouldn’t know, or care, what “Calamus” stands for.
Multiply that splintering by the bizarre polarization, volatility, and media exploitation of our political civil war, which was the target of Stewart and Colbert’s rally. As one poster there aptly observed, “It’s a sad day when our politicians are comical and I have to take our comedians seriously.” We may laugh at Sarah Palin or the Bourbon Street bullhorn, but outside the French Quarter and Dupont Circle, they’re the majority, and with the Tea Party boiling over in the recent election, gay life may become more hide and less seek. Even if relative sanity is restored, it will be a cold day in New Orleans before the DC Transit Authority completes its quotation of Whitman’s poem, which eroticizes his physical attentiveness to young war victims by revealing that “many a soldier’s kiss dwells on these bearded lips.”
The landing of this exhibit has won us a fragile beachhead on the shores of the national cultural stage. How far our invasion might advance into America’s mental heartland remains to be seen.
James M. Saslow, professor of art history at City University of New York, is author of Pictures and Passions: A History of Homosexuality and the Visual Arts.
