AT A SMALL but select Walt Whitman exhibition mounted by the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery in 2006, a tender photograph of Whitman with his partner Peter Doyle was matter-of-factly labeled as such; and my jaw dropped. It was the first time I’d ever seen an American museum correctly name this relationship, announcing in effect that Whitman, arguably our greatest poet, was emotionally involved with another man. I approached the curator, David Ward, and asked if he’d caught hell for this label. He looked at me quizzically and answered no, the label was accurate, and moreover scholars have known about Doyle for many decades.
After many years of trying, and failing, to interest an American museum in a show about glbt art and artists, I realized that here was a museum and a curator who saw things as I did. Thus began a four-year relationship with the National Portrait Gallery and with David Ward as my co-curator in Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture, the first national museum exhibit to examine the history of glbt art. Designed to lend our history a literal face, the show features some of the defining icons of American art—singularly important works from the late 19th through to the 21st centuries. So well known are some of these paintings and artists that their inclusion in this exhibition should engender a national conversation about the gay and lesbian presence in American art.
The first attempt at such a discussion took place in 1989 with the Mapplethorpe brouhaha, which caused same-sex sexuality to become blacklisted in the American museum world, a blacklist that remains in effect to this day. Brilliantly exploited by the Christian Right as a wedge issue, openly glbt art and artists became pariahs, their very existence so politicized that a virtual “no promo homo” clause was brought into NEA grant deliberations. The result has been the virtual erasure of sexual difference from American museums—and at the very same moment that gay people were revolutionizing American art history. The sole, glorious exception was the landmark 1994 exhibition at the New York Public Library marking the 25th anniversary of the Stonewall riots.
Even today, the Museum of Modern Art feels free to show the white-hot activist art of a figure like David Wojnarowicz but purge it of any queer social or political context, not even mentioning aids. And this situation governs art of the distant past as well. The Met’s curator of Classical Art reinstalled the classical galleries, and despite the fact that same-sex desire was everywhere on display, no wall label addresses it. When that same museum, which is funded in part by New York tax dollars, mounted an extensive Eakins retrospective in 2002, twenty years of scholarship on Eakins’ sexuality was ignored entirely on the walls and almost entirely in the catalog. The same thing held true for the Met’s recent Rauschenberg retrospective and its Jasper Johns: Gray show. Very occasionally, an openly glbt artist like Catherine Opie will get a show that addresses sexuality, but only because the subject herself has authorized that disclosure. Do American museums still view homosexuality as so shameful a secret that only artists who actively label themselves as gay can be presented as such?
Three years ago, the National Gay & Lesbian Task Force received a grant to commission a study of the representation of sexuality in eight of Manhattan’s largest museums over the last ten years. According to Weena Perry, author of the study, some museums, such as the New York Historical Society, have never once mentioned same-sex sexuality in its catalogs, wall labels, or publicity materials. Nationally, she found that only one to three percent of exhibitions make reference to different sexualities.
The decision by the National Portrait Gallery of the Smithsonian—the resting place of countless iconic Presidential portraits from Gilbert Stuart on down—to host Hide/Seek is thus a momentous one. The exhibit builds on the Portrait Gallery’s recent commitment to chronicling the expansion of civil liberties in America (previous exhibitions have looked at civil rights for African Americans and women). As the defining repository of national citizenship, having such a show can act as a spur to other, less progressive institutions, for if a federal institution can acknowledge our lives, surely private and municipal museums can too.
Hide/Seek is unapologetically a masterpiece show, for we felt that the first truly national glbt exhibition should include images that people already know, so that the defining centrality of sexual difference to the development of American art could be understood at once. The installation begins with late 19th-century works by Thomas Eakins and John Singer Sargent and charts 20th-century portraiture with 105 major works by masters like Romaine Brooks, Berenice Abbott, George Bellows, Charles Demuth, Marsden Hartley, and Georgia O’Keeffe. It continues through the postwar period with works by Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, Larry Rivers, Agnes Martin, Ellsworth Kelly, and Andy Warhol. The exhibition addresses the impact of the Stonewall Riots of 1969, the aids epidemic, and the advent of postmodernist attention to identities, indicating how portraiture repeatedly negotiated seismic shifts in American culture and society. The show continues through to the end of the 20th century with major works by Keith Haring, Glenn Ligon, Nan Goldin, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, David Wojnarowicz, Catherine Opie, among others.
Hide/Seek is neither gay nor straight in its selection of artist and sitters, for the very terms of this polarity would not be established until mid-century, decades after Eakins had died. Rather, it reveals the American art world to be a remarkably fluid place with regard to sexual differences, a place where straight artists could depict gay culture and vice versa. Of course, not every work we wanted is in the show, and certain institutions and private collectors were transparently hostile to the exhibition and its theme. That said, many world-class museums like the Philadelphia Museum went out of their way to be helpful and offered us every image we sought to borrow.
One small, rather unassuming work in the show can help explicate its governing theme. It’s a 1917 etching entitled The Shower Bath by the great American social realist George Bellows—who was, as far as we can ascertain, straight. Yet Shower Bath, a scene set inside a men’s bathhouse (the hygiene kind, not the sex kind), features front-and-center two men in a sexual posture, one an effeminate figure thrusting out his buttocks, while a beefy man approaches his rear, a towel hiding his erection. The print was so popular, it went through three different editions. In the early 20th century, only one of the two men in the print would have been deemed queer—the effeminate one—while the other man, though obviously turned on, was just doing what men do, which is to play the dominant role in sex. As a social realist, Bellows was interested in this relationship, as he was in class dynamics and immigrant families. Like other artists of the day, this work reveals a more relaxed commingling of different sexualities than we have today.
Amid the historical avant-garde’s rejection of all forms of social constraint, one defining social taboo—the one about same-sex desire—has remained in place. Why have we given our museums a free pass to distort and rewrite our history according to this ancient prejudice? Let us hope this tradition is coming to an end.
Jonathan D. Katz chairs the visual studies doctoral program at SUNY, Buffalo.
