I was sitting at one of the long wooden tables at the Fales archives in front of a pile of forgotten bills, birthday cards, and letters when I found the envelope addressed to 101 Stanton. For a decade, I’d endured unreliable heat and potentially murderous landlords at 101 stanton. So it seemed had Zoe Leonard of “I Want a President” fame.
Like Zoe, I want a person with no health insurance for president. Someone who has been gaybashed. Someone who has wondered how they are going to afford the antiretrovirals that will keep them alive. Someone who has been gaybashed, or denied an abortion. Someone who has been deported.
Because the personal and the political are forever intertwined.
Sometimes I like to imagine eavesdropping on David Wojnarowicz and Zoe Leonard, a fly on the wall in an old tenement building on the Lower East Side, hidden in a crevice formed by the crumbling brick wall. I imagine the two of them: barely out of their teens, stalked by a plague, frightened to pick up the phone, knowing it will signal another death. One, recently diagnosed, mourning his mentor and former lover. The other, devastated by her childhood best friend’s fatal diagnosis, invigorated by the ACT-UP meeting they’d just attended. Both determined to make a change in the world before death intervened, christening their new group of troublemaking creatives the Candelabras.
Candelabra. A multiarmed tool, intended to shine a light in dark places even if a single light goes out.
Is that what we are? With our depictions of sex acts that are still illegal in parts of the globe? With our many-limbed tributes to aphrodite and the nameless goddesses before her? Peering dimly into hidden places? Prodding secret orifices with paintbrush and camera lens?
I love gay art. Not just sexy photos of sun-kissed twinks, but the pieces that hurt too: Gonzalez-Torres’ Portrait of Ross, disappearing a pound at a time. Or Wojnarowicz’s photos of Peter Hujar’s corpse, snapped moments after his death. Or even sad/mad Hadrian, building a temple to the boy he loved–and undoubtedly exploited.
I love it all for the way it forces the individual life lived before millions of eyeballs, forces us to confront our humanity.