Arts & Entertainment
Images and outrage
Controversy aside, ‘Hide/Seek’ is a groundbreaking show
A still from the video that caused controversy in the current "Hide/Seek" exhibit at the National Portrait Gallery.
Catcher Yogi Berra once famously called it “deja vu all over again.” But it was Karl Marx who perhaps defined it best as “when history repeats itself — the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.”
That was the feeling at least for a moment last week, when officials at the National Portrait Gallery censored a video component of its exhibit titled “Hide/Seek,” the show about gay and lesbian sexual love and its impact on American art. Complaints by right-wing Catholics over 11 seconds of a depiction of ants crawling on a crucifix was enough for NPG director Martin E. Sullivan to decide to turn tail and yank an entire half-hour-long 1987 video, titled “A Fire in My Belly” — a meditation on the ravages of AIDS by David Wojnarowicz, the gay artist who died from HIV-related causes in 1992.
Shades of Robert Mapplethorpe and the cancellation of an exhibit of his erotically charged photos by the Corcoran Gallery of Art in 1989. And now as then GOP politicians are on the attack under the banner of “no promo homo,” and also as before, another gallery — this time Flashpoint — courageously took up the challenge and began to show the offending video.
But what about the groundbreaking NPG show itself, which opened in October and runs through mid-February? It’s stunning with 105 pieces of art from the canon of America’s greatest artists of the past century and more, depicting the ways in which their sexual orientations expressed themselves — usually coded and concealed — visually on canvas and other surfaces and as images in motion.
The exhibit is titled as a playful reminder of the childhood game of hide-and-seek, when concealment is the first task for survival. “HIDE/SEEK — Difference and Desire in American Portraiture,” with its range and breadth of seeing and finding works of art that dare speak, however sotto voce, the name of taboo love, boldly snaps in two the several decades-long taboo, welded firmly in place after the Mapplethorpe fiasco, of acknowledging same-sex desire in major U.S. museums.
The range of artists begins with Thomas Eakins and his scenes of naked boys swimming and passes through other giants of American painting — John Singer Sargent, George Bellow, Georgia O’Keefe, Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, Andy Warhol and others — to our own new century. But as co-curator Jonathan D. Katz contends, “seeking and noticing” the sexual subtexts of their work “are two very different acts,” and this exhibit “seeks to turn such seeing into noticing.”
As with their work itself, nothing is as it seems at first. Therefore, “HIDE/SEEK” features, says Katz, “straight artists representing gay figures, gay artists representing straight figures, gay artists representing gay figures, and even straight artists representing straight figures, when of interest to gay people/culture.”
For Katz, considered the dean of academic study of gay and lesbian art history, this has been the curatorial work of more than 15 years. Katz shaped this exhibit with Smithsonian historian David C. Ward, who has openly called Katz “my camerado — per Walt (Whitman).”
Ward also says that Katz, who founded the gay and lesbian studies program at Yale University and is the first tenured professor in LGBT studies in the nation, “is a model of the engaged scholar” and as a result ran afoul of academic norms in the past for his avowed interest in these subjects.
“He’s someone who managed to be thrown out of two institutions, the University of Chicago and Johns Hopkins University,” Ward says, “for daring in the 1970s to want to write about gay and lesbian Americans.”
In the magisterial catalogue accompanying the exhibit, Katz confesses that their choice of subjects is “firmly canonical” and rooted in “the register of great American artists … within the American mainstream,” so that many artists, less well known, have been excluded. The key objective, says Katz, is to show that “the assumption that same-sex desire is at best tangential to the history of American art” is “utterly unsupportable.”
With “HIDE/SEEK,” and even with the Wojnarowicz censorship fresh at hand, it now seems safe to say, in Katz’s words, that the “pervasive silencing of same-sex desire in accounts of American portrait painting” is over.
Perhaps the most interesting feature of the exhibit comes in its revelation that American artists at the turn of the 20th century could in fact be much more open about their subject matter than those of the mid-20th century in a period haunted by sexual McCarthyism and the hunt for “reds and gays” in government, the schools and the clergy. During that era only on the fringes of the entertainment world, and there not always, could different sexual proclivities find open or even closeted refuge.
In other words, same-sex desire could be expressed more freely in the arts at that earlier time “prior to the advent of ‘homosexuality’ as an available category,” says Katz, even though same-sex desire acted upon was literally a crime. But this was before an explicit “homo/hetero binary” was established as the enforced norm, he says, and before “gay” and “straight” were paired as strict opposites instead of subtle inflection points on a spectrum of the sort spelled out by Alfred Kinsey in his scale of zero to six.
Key to this transformation, Katz says, was when “sexual behavior evolve(d) into sexual identity, from what you did to what you were.” In the earlier era, after all, sexual identity was premised not on the gender of one’s sexual partner but rather on one’s own gendered role —insertive or receptive — in the sex act. As Katz notes, “it was socially acceptable to penetrate a queer” for sexual relief and as “tolerable stand-ins for women.”
Thus, Katz begins the exhibit catalogue with a searching exegesis of George Bellows’ print from 1917, “The Shower Bath,” where two naked men are depicted front and center – one thin and effeminate, looking seductively over his shoulder and thrusting his posterior provocatively at a second man, beefy of build, butch and masculine, whose towel barely conceals his sexual arousal. Opposites in every way, “they are made a pair,” says Katz, and what he calls “the odd couple” are “the focal point of this image.” But the forward homoeroticism of the Bellows print did not hamper its commercial success at the time. And Bellows himself was a man devoted to his wife and children.
There is, of course much more in this exhibit, with many works coded with layers of longing, that NPG director Sullivan — before the controversy erupted over the video — spoke of “with pride” as offering “a new lens with which to view the panorama of American life.” It is indeed, as he said earlier, “a sumptuous survey of more than a century of American portraiture,” asking “new questions and risking new interpretations.” It dares to be at once risky and risque.
With portraits such as these, we enter the lives of others, to explore how identities were forged in the past. With portraits such as these, we end up staring at ourselves.
Celebrity News
Debbie Allen shares on loss, love, and the power of speaking out
Actress directed groundbreaking ‘A Different World’ episode about HIV
For somebody like Debbie Allen, HIV advocacy lies at the heart of their life and career. In the 1980s, at a time when HIV/AIDS devastated the performing arts community, Allen witnessed friends, performers, directors, and choreographers alike disappear. This experience turned her personal grief into a decades-long commitment to advocacy. From directing a landmark “A Different World” episode about HIV at a time when even just saying the word on television could make networks sweat, to continuing her work today, Allen has continuously utilized the biggest stage available to her to ensure that the conversation stays alive.
Now the conversation has changed from four decades ago, yet Allen believes it still needs to get louder. Medical advances have transformed HIV from the crisis it was into a manageable condition for many folks. Yet stigma, social challenges, and the significant need for mental, emotional, and community support still persist. In our conversation, Allen opens up about the losses that influenced her activism, the power of media and the arts to change public perceptions, and why “whole health” means looking beyond the virus to the full human person living with it. Her message is simple and solid — no one should have to navigate HIV alone.
You have stood alongside the HIV community for four decades, and counting. When you look back to the start of that journey, what first got you involved and what has kept you connected and dedicated for all of this time?
My fight against HIV began in the ‘80s, when the epidemic devastated the performing arts community, and I lost my entire world — my friends, dancers, directors, and choreographers. That profound grief fueled my mission to use my voice for advocacy — from directing the groundbreaking HIV episode on “A Different World” to fight stigma to standing on stages today to continue to raise awareness.
This is a mission that continues to stay near and dear to my heart so that all people impacted by HIV — whether they are living with HIV or supporting someone living with HIV — have the resources and support they deserve.
How have those experiences with your own personal losses due to HIV impacted the way you understand the virus?
If we look back to 40 years ago, HIV impacted an entire generation. We experienced incredible loss and heartache that I will never forget. This experience made me realize how vulnerable we are as humans and how much support we truly need in our healthcare journeys. And while incredible progress has been made, I also understand so much more needs to be done — from combating stigma, providing additional resources, and ensuring ongoing support for people who are living with HIV today.
You’ve built an extraordinary career as a dancer, choreographer, director, producer, actor, educator, and advocate. How has each part of your career influenced the others? What have you learned about leadership from working with artists and performers?
Being a dancer, choreographer, director, producer, actor, and educator has helped shape the person I am today. Each experience has inspired another. What unifies each role is my ability to lead and learn from everyone I’m working with. It’s also these opportunities that have afforded me an incredible platform for my advocacy efforts. I strive to bring leadership approaches from my various stages — in a very literal sense — to a national stage as I support a variety of initiatives, such as HIV awareness.
The medical landscape around HIV has evolved dramatically since you first began your advocacy. What is one thing you wish younger folks understood about what the first years of the epidemic were really like?
Thanks to medical advancements, we can now look at so much more than HIV status and this is a tremendous step forward. As someone who has always believed in the power of mind, body, and spirit, I want today’s generation to understand that people living with HIV need integrated support for their mental, emotional, physical, and social well-being because all these elements are deeply connected.
We need to broaden the discussion around HIV management, and that’s why I’m proud to work with Merck on “Your Hive of Whole Health,” which addresses factors such as managing one’s mental wellness, co-occurring conditions, social drivers, and other life challenges.
Your Hive of Whole Health is built around the idea that health doesn’t happen in isolation. What does “whole health” mean to you in your own life?
Health doesn’t happen in isolation. People living with HIV need comprehensive support systems around them — whether that’s family, chosen family, neighbors, community or religious leaders, or care team members; they are a part of the whole health journey.
To me, whole health means looking beyond the virus to truly understand the unique challenges that people face so they have the full support they need. Having supported loved ones on their health journeys and managing my own well-being, I know that comprehensive support is key.
That’s the beauty of “Your Hive of Whole Health.” In fact, the idea behind the program is simple. Just as a hive depends on the strength of many bees working together, people living with HIV often rely on a network of support that includes healthcare providers, advocates, family, friends, and peers. “Your Hive of Whole Health” provides tools and resources to help individuals build and strengthen those connections.
For someone living with HIV, what kinds of support beyond medical treatment do you think can make the most significant difference in their lives?
As people are living longer with HIV and managing additional health conditions, like high blood pressure, high cholesterol, and diabetes, having the right support system in place can play an increasingly important role.
Understanding these other conditions, as well as navigating social challenges and other life challenges such as not having access to affordable or healthy food, not having support from family or friends, struggling with stable housing, or facing misconceptions about HIV is critical. It’s awareness, understanding, and a “Hive” of support that can make a difference.
People can go to HiveofWholeHealth.com to learn more, access resources, and build their own Hive.
Many folks tend to talk about the HIV epidemic as if it is something of the past. What do you think we risk losing when we stop talking about HIV and the people whose lives have been affected by it?
This journey began for all of us in a time of intense fear, isolation, and crisis. As I reflect back to the early ‘90s, it was an honor to create the first network television show on “A Different World” to address the epidemic at a time when people were afraid to even say the word. The network and advertisers were very hesitant about talking about HIV on TV in this way at that time. It really hadn’t been done before. But I stood my ground and pushed forward. As a result, we were able to bring the epidemic into living rooms, confronting fear, stigma, and misinformation. It changed the conversation, especially in Black communities, where the impact was deeply felt. It also spotlighted how HIV impacted women, which was not formally recognized by health agencies until years later.
Today, we can truly celebrate the united and unbreakable spirit of 45 years of the HIV movement and champion a new era of whole health. But there is still so much more to be done. We must continue shining a light on issues that matter most. We must spotlight these across all forms of entertainment, media, and digital storytelling to drive awareness, understanding, and support. That’s why programs like Merck’s “Your Hive of Whole Health” are so important — we keep the community and their needs at the center and provide much-needed support.
If nothing else, what is one message you’d like for our readers to take away from this interview?
I want people living with HIV and the community around them to know they are not alone. There’s a whole community of support — a Hive — that can help them on their journeys with HIV.
Go to HiveofWholeHealth.com to learn more about the emotional, physical, social, and mental aspects of living with HIV. Build that Hive around you because whole health is better together.
The Human Rights Campaign National Dinner was held at the Washington Hilton on Saturday, Sept. 26. Gov. Gretchen Whitmer (D-Mich.) was the keynote speaker. Awards were presented to Marcia Gay Hardin, Junior LaBeija and André De Shields. Nina West of ‘RuPaul’s Drag Race’ performed.
(Washington Blade photos by Michael Key)
View on Threads
View on Threads
View on Threads
Theater
What’s frightening is also funny in ‘Venus’
Don’t miss spectacular Woolly Mammoth production from out director
‘Venus’
Through Oct. 4
Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company
641 D St., NW
$20– $105
Woollymommoth.net
Meet Beth. She’s an art-house film projectionist. Cocky yet awkward, and a bit of a player, she’s exceedingly fond of international cinema and women. Her current interest is Nicole, a pretty librarian with an obsession for order and safety. Romance seems unlikely.
Written by Los Angeles-based playwright Steve Yockey, “Venus” pits odd against odder, and similar to some of his past works, what’s frightening is also funny.
When Beth (Kimberly Gilbert) crashes a “not fun” book club (currently reading Faulkner’s “As I Lay Dying”), she succeeds in bagging a date with the group’s poised, and –according to Beth – “imminently fuckable” member Nicole (Regina Aquino).
The pair climbs into Beth’s beloved vintage gold Mercedes (or “sort of rust colored,” says Nicole) and head into the night. They reach an isolated hilltop to star gaze and share a Thermos of spiced rum. Charmed by the surprise outing, Nicole warms up to her new friend, but that soon changes when Beth corrects Nicole on some planetary specifics, and lets it slip that she’s taken other women on this same exact date.
Away from age (40 or so), the pair couldn’t be more ill matched. Whether it’s personal style, temperament, approach to dating, they’re chalk and cheese. Beth’s romantic M.O. is spontaneous, whereas Nicole’s dating app profile is “always clean, organized, and up to date with recent pictures and current information.” And she never makes the first move.
“Venus” is perceptively staged by out director Reggie D. White who specifically selected Yockey’s newest play for his directorial debut as Woolly’s new artistic director, and it’s a spectacular launch. The out playwright and director, and the terrific two-person cast, successfully lean into the work’s dark comedy without denying past heartbreaks.
The actors play off each other compellingly, capturing precisely what’s both disturbing and funny about Yockey’s creations. Nicole (Aquino) isn’t particularly concerned about the horrors she visits upon her date, and while Gilbert’s Beth might fall into the most dreadful situations, she handles them with detached wit. It’s hilarious.
The dialogue is spoken to each other, to us, to themselves. Words might switch from conversational to rapidly delivered monologues about varied things like well-meant instructions that Nicole once received from her father on how to box and bury things that upset her.
Costume designer Danielle Preston captures the women’s carefully chosen attire. Nicole is dressed boho prep with a conservative silhouette, flat shoes, and interesting artisanal jewelry. Beth is a bit hit or miss: wide-legged pants, black thick-soled, black boots, and on trend frames– all the sort of things that might look cool.
After the date, Beth drops Nicole at her immaculate, meticulously mid-century curated house. Beth tells us that she’s not averse to a clean home, but other than Susanna, a goldfish in the kitchen, this house with its collection of precisely placed handstitched pillows, looks entirely unlived in; other than the alarming contents of a mysterious drawer, it might be a show home.
And while Beth has made a few moves that her date didn’t entirely dodge, the evening has come to an end. Nicole has a Scholastic book fair in the morning, so she gives Beth the old heave-ho. Nicole likes a clean exit.
What ensues is a one-sided obsession with grand floral gestures, incessant texts, and some stalking. Just when you think one couldn’t grow any madder and that the other is the voice of reason, the script flips. They take turns at being the most neurotic or easily triggered.
Also, each in turn encounters an unseen woman wearing a red raincoat, a sort of physical manifestation of fear. How said interactions work differently for each of the daters, explains a lot.
But to say more would be a spoiler. With its myriad twists and turns, there are so many possible spoilers, scores of them, that might ruin the experience of an absolutely glorious 90-minute uninterrupted traipse through the madly unexpected.
So ably written and acted, you’ll leave believing that you’ve seen the vintage car, been inside a pristine house, and visited a hilltop. But you didn’t.
Giselda Esstrada’s scenic design includes a raised black platform backed by a dark circle broken into segments, above hang lanterns, globes, pendant lights, and lamps raised and lowered to great effect by lighting designer Nic Vincent. One of the more significant orbs is singled out as a green-hued celestial body. The ground is a blanket of clunky gray gravel.
Even with its two, or maybe three, particularly (and personally) dreaded scenarios, it’s unstoppably pleasing. There’s nothing not to like about “Venus.”
Trump asks Supreme Court to allow restrictions on gender-affirming care in prisons
Education Department rolls back protections for LGBTQ students under Title IX
Debbie Allen shares on loss, love, and the power of speaking out
Baltimore’s oldest gay bar to reopen this week
Dr. Fauci ‘honored to be part of’ LGBTQ history
Colombia withdraws from Equal Rights Coalition
Trump-appointed judge restores White House TV pool access
Writing a play about Lincoln leads down a rabbit hole to a closet
Philadelphia event to launch 2026 LGBT History Month
Being a female firefighter comes with unique risks, and rewards
-
Colombia5 days agoColombia withdraws from Equal Rights Coalition
-
White House5 days ago
Trump-appointed judge restores White House TV pool access
-
a&e features5 days ago
Writing a play about Lincoln leads down a rabbit hole to a closet
-
National5 days ago
Philadelphia event to launch 2026 LGBT History Month
