THIS ISSUE marks a bit of a departure for The G&LR, as we crack open the bedroom door to explore the practices and paraphilias that interest or obsess some LGBT people, and the roots of their appeal. Several feature articles delve deeply into why certain kinks turn (some of) us on, and whether we can discern historical and æsthetic rationales behind these fixations.
For some, feet are highly eroticized extremities; for others they’re merely utilitarian or even repugnant. Sergio Interdonato turns to art history to argue that the foot has long held an erotic charge as the very foundation of the human body, supporting the weight of our desires and symbolizing strength and physicality.
One of the artists most associated with homoerotic æsthetics and with the separation of the (body) part from the whole is the late Robert Mapplethorpe, and Matthew Bamberg contends that he helped to mainstream BDSM by presenting it in a manner both lurid and classical. The famed photographer’s work helped bring bondage, leather daddies, and even “piss play” into the general conversation. Not even Mapplethorpe could have foreseen the profusion of kink that would follow in the 2010s, as young people in search of community and, ahem, inspiration turned to the online flea market of Tumblr to share their deepest and dirtiest fantasies. Casper Byrne writes that for members of Gen Z like himself, the platform presented an all-you-can-stomach buffet of sexual roles and gender identities.
Both Mapplethorpe’s work and this online profusion of pornography caused controversy, as there are always bulwarks of puritanism seeking to police the pleasure of others. Umar Ibrahim Agaie explores how some queer people are defying the prigs and seeking to reclaim pleasure and bodily autonomy through kink. Michael Quinn rounds out this lurid quintet with an Art Memo exploring the life and work of the libidinous Boyd McDonald.
Turning to matters that are more literally earthy, Patricia Ann Mathu and Taylor Hartson, co-recipients of The G&LR’s Charles S. Longcope Jr. Writers and Artists Grant, have documented how LGBT farmers are plowing their own fields and finding means for queer expression through agriculture. Vernon Rosario steps back a century from these contemporary cultivators to contrast three recent books on pioneering sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld that have divergent views on this seminal figure in LGBT liberation. In a History Memo that overlaps in location and era with Hirschfeld, Harlan Greene explains that the teenager scapegoated for Kristallnacht was almost certainly gay. Finally, Daniel Vaillancourt transports us ahead a couple of decades to mid-20th-century Iowa for a tale of gay oppression that turns into one of acceptance and empathy.
