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.
Iran and Egypt on Friday faced off during the World Cup’s “Pride Match” in Seattle.
Iran is among the handful of countries in which consensual same-sex sexual relations remain punishable by death. Discrimination and persecution based on sexual orientation and gender identity is commonplace in Egypt.
Friday’s match coincided with Pride weekend in Seattle. The Egyptian Football Association and the Football Federation Islamic Republic of Iran both objected to playing in the “Pride Match.”
Egypt and Iran tied 1-1.
FIFA, for its part, allowed Pride flags inside the stadium during the match.
“The FIFA World Cup 2026 is an inclusive event that welcomes people from all backgrounds,” a FIFA spokesperson told the Washington Blade in a statement. “Fans of all sexual orientations and gender identities are welcome at matches and events. General statements of human rights, including rainbow flags and other flags representing sexual orientation and gender identity, are permitted under the FIFA World Cup 2026™ Stadium Code of Conduct and may be displayed inside stadiums provided they are used in a manner consistent with the code.”
Human Rights Watch welcomed FIFA’s decision to allow Pride flags inside the stadium. Outright International, a global LGBTQ and intersex rights group, distributed Pride flags in Seattle on Friday, which was Pride Match Day.
“Visibility matters,” said Outright International Executive Director Maria Sjödin. “Pride is now being celebrated in more than 100 countries, including this weekend in Seattle. For many LGBTIQ people, seeing a Pride flag in public is a reminder that they are not alone, and that their rights and dignity are recognized.”
FIFA President Gianni Infantino earlier this year told Die Weltwoche, a Swiss magazine, that “there will be no ‘Pride Match’ at the (FIFA) World Cup.”
“There will be a FIFA World Cup match in Seattle, and on the same day, events organized by external organizations will be taking place in the city,” said Infantino. “But that has nothing to do with the match itself.”
Peter Tatchell, a long-time LGBTQ activist from the U.K. who is director of the Peter Tatchell Foundation, was among those who traveled to Seattle for Friday’s match. Tatchell accused FIFA of not vetting World Cup teams — specifically Iran, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Ghana, Senegal, Qatar, Tunisia, Morocco, Iraq, Uzbekistan, and Algeria — over whether they would allow gay players.
“FIFA is protecting LGBT+ visibility in the stands while failing to protect LGBT+ players on the pitch,” said Tatchell.
The second annual Frederick Pride Parade was held in the streets of downtown Frederick, Md. on Friday, June 26.
(Washington Blade photos by Michael Key)
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Theater
Carla Hall goes from ‘Top Chef’ to the stage
Solo show ‘Please Underestimate Me’ premieres at Olney
‘Please Underestimate Me’
Through July 12
Olney Theatre Center
at Mulitz-Gudelsky Theatre Lab
2001 Olney-Sandy Spring Rd.
Olney, Md.
$47-$101
Olneytheatre.org
Carla Hall gained celebrity status from Bravo TV’s “Top Chef.” She was funny and fun, and with her kooky signature catch phrase “Hooty hoo” and the southern-inspired recipes she lovingly cooked, Hall stood out in a kitchen crammed with contestants.
Now the D.C.-based Hall is taking revisiting her earliest love with the world premiere of her solo show “Please Underestimate Me,” currently running at Olney Theatre Center’s intimate and revamped Mulitz-Gudelsky Theatre Lab.
In the 90-minute piece (written by Hall, Lori Kaye, and Kaye’s partner Leslie Thomas; and directed by Lili-Anne Brown), Hall leads with food but quickly swerves into her personal and other aspects of her professional life. Built around an immersive fictional TV cooking show, her new play draws on experiences from her seven seasons (2011-2019) co-hosting cooking/chat show “The Chew”an ABC daytime proving ground, and her heady years on “Top Chef.” (2008, 2010).
Born and raised in Nashville, Hall wanted to attend Boston University to major in theater, but was rejected. Instead, she went to Howard University at her mother’s urging, where she ultimately majored in accounting. After graduating in 1986, she donned a bespoke business suit and briefly worked as a CPA for Price Waterhouse.
Business wasn’t for Hall. Tall and slender, she walked the runways in Paris for a while before ultimately finding her niche as a chef. Cooking seemed to come from her heart, something she learned from her grandmother who not incidentally bankrolled Hall’s way through culinary school.
Now she’s bringing the vibrancy and good humor that made her a “Top Chef” fan favorite and a popular TV host to the stage with “Please Underestimate Me.”
WASHINGTON BLADE: You seem a natural live performer. Were at all you nervous about doing this?
CARLA HALL: Anytime you step outside of what you’re known for you have to take a risk and make it happen. I’d been working on this the idea for seven years. I decided that I really wanted to do a variety show and really wanted to step back into my original love of theater.
I didn’t know what that looked like so I was asking a lot of people, actors and friends, about how to break into it. Can they see me as more than a chef? So, I told my agency to book me for voice overs, cameo roles. I got an acting coach and I was seeing a lot of single person shows. I literally embodied the thing that I wanted.
BLADE: Have you always been a vocal and public ally of the queer community?
HALL: For me, it’s natural. I came from the theater and dance world. I have a lot of gay and queer friends.
There’s something about people being gay and queer that goes with a need to be authentic to yourself. I think that’s why you find a lot of queer people in the arts. Dare to be you. Dare to be different, right? I like that.
BLADE: Long ago, I remember stopping by a Safeway in Wheaton to grab a sheet cake for a party. Your second or first episode of “Top Chef” had just aired. I wanted to yell “Hooty hoo” across the aisles, but was too shy.
CARLA HALL: My catering kitchen was near that Safeway.You should have yelled. I’d have given you a hug. I’ll hug almost anyone.
BLADE: Thanks. I think. You hear actors saying there’s nothing quite like TV fame because you’re invited into people’s living rooms. What were those days like when you started being recognized?
HALL: I like people. I tell Matthew [Matthew Lyons, Hall’s husband of 20 years], when fans say hello it’s my chance to get to learn about them. I owe them a lot; without them I wouldn’t be working.
BLADE: At Olney, Lauren M. Nichols’ surprise-filled set and Kelly Colburn’s projections of your personal snapshots from over the years are really wonderful.
HALL: It becomes really emotional. At the end of the show, I see 12-year-old me. I’m looking at that girl, and they did a put a little crown on my head, and I’m living her dream 50 years later.
BLADE: Is the pace hard?
HALL: Seven shows a week isn’t easy. I used to say “Top Chef” was my most grueling experience…well, that was before I did this.
BLADE: And is it gratifying?
HALL: At the end of the day, yes. Look, this play is filled with personal highs and lows and emotionally it’s exhausting. It’s also rewarding. Two weeks before the show started, I wasn’t sure I could do this.
BLADE: But of course, you are doing it. And you’re doing it so well.
HALL: A while back, I reached out to the executive producer of “The Chew” and thanked him for being the messenger of my lessons. Without those experiences I wouldn’t be here now doing “Please Underestimate Me.” My confidence has definitely grown. I’m a firm believer that everything that happens to you is for you.
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