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.
Movies
‘Leviticus’ demonizes homophobia for gripping queer horror yarn
A genuinely engaging and terrifying supernatural drama
There’s something about horror films that makes them particularly apt as a vehicle for allegory. Vampires, zombies, ghosts, or seemingly death-proof serial killers can all easily be seen as metaphors for some lurking threat from the “dark side” of our own collective psyche, and stories about them are almost always cautionary tales that remind us that it’s the “dark side” of our own nature that we must confront in order for the danger to be eliminated.
This subtext has always been present in the genre, of course; but with the so-called “renaissance” of horror cinema that has taken place across the past decade or so, modern filmmakers in the genre have made increasingly bold choices with regard to how “sub” it is. “Get Out” or “Sinners” need no explanation to get across their allegorical points about racism, nor does “The Substance” require an expert to recognize its satirical observations about the toxic cultural obsession with youth and beauty. These are movies that wear their proverbial hearts on their sleeves, instead of masking them behind layers of cliched and “coded” plot tropes.
The same can definitely be said of “Leviticus,” the debut feature from Australian writer/director Adrian Chiarella, which not only hinges on a conceit that has obvious associations with its not-so-hidden themes but tips off the whole thing by its very choice of title – a reference to the Old Testament book frequently cited by fundamentalist bigots as so-called proof of God’s condemnation of homosexuality, which sets up exactly what we are in for before the opening credits even begin to roll.
Set in a conservative rural town (in the Australian state of Victoria, though it will feel distinctly familiar to anyone who grew up in similar communities anywhere else in the world), it centers on Naim (Joe Bird), a teen boy newly transplanted by his mother (Mia Wasikowska) – who has ties to a fundamentalist Christian enclave there – after the death of his father. Their new life – like seemingly everything else in the community – is tied directly to the church, which makes it doubly inconvenient when Ryan (Stacy Clausen), son of the town’s presiding preacher, invites him for an after-school “hangout” which leads to a furtive make-out session in the town’s deserted mill.
Though the boys promise each other to keep it secret, they are both soon “outed” to their parents and subjected to a ritual performed by a mysterious “deliverance healer” (Nicholas Hope), intended to “protect” them from their “sinful” impulses. Soon after, a series of mysterious and violent encounters lead them to investigate local rumors around incidents involving other local teens – and the revelation that the ritual has summoned a malevolent entity, which appears to them as the person they are most attracted to (in this case, each other) and unleashes its murderous wrath when they give in to temptation. Their only chance of staying safe is to stay apart – unless they can find a way to defeat the supernatural force that has been turned loose against them.
Yes, it’s all very obvious. There is no attempt to mask what Chiarella’s movie is really about, though the word itself – like the biblical book with which it shares a title – is never spoken aloud in the film. It’s hardly a spoiler, though, to confirm that “Leviticus” is a story about homophobia. From its obvious evocation of real-life “conversion therapy” to its more subtle exploration of the secrecy and social shaming that surrounds same-sex love for so many teens growing up in an environment of fundamentalist religious tradition, every nuance of the film’s ingenious premise announces the clear intent of its messaging: homophobia is the true evil at work here, and its deadly power lies in its ability to make queer people afraid of being who they are.
While some might argue that presenting such an “on the nose” allegory in what is ostensibly “just” a horror film is a heavy-handed choice, we suggest – in this case, at least – that it’s exactly what makes the movie work so effectively.
From the very first scenes (after a prologue that ominously hints at the arcane evil that will soon come into play), we are invested in Naim and Ryan, whose tentative-but-joyous afternoon tryst is bound to trigger our own individual memories of adolescent sexual awakening, and whom we hope will be able to navigate their way through to the other side – even before the introduction of supernatural hate demons being summoned to kill them by using their own feelings for each other as a trap. They’re almost a definitive queer “coming of age” archetype, echoing generations of treasured “first time” memories and “what if“ fantasies about what might have been; we want them to be together, to overcome the otherworldly forces deployed to keep them apart – and when their romance is distorted, inverting their natural attraction into fear and mistrust, it’s their own inability to resist the pull they feel toward each other that continues to put them in danger.
That emotional stake is the anchor of “Leviticus,” which lends an imperative to what might otherwise be a campy B-movie thriller and turns it into a genuinely engaging – and therefore terrifying – supernatural drama that is all the more powerful for playing to our hearts. Much of this effect hinges on the chemistry between its two young stars (which hits just the right pitch between irresistible hormonal urge and inseparable soul connection), but it’s also underscored by the irony of their being immersed within a culture that would rather destroy them than allow them to exist outside its traditional norms.
Nevertheless, while “Leviticus” succeeds by making us identify with its cult-crossed teenage lovers, it pays off by delivering not just a genuinely unsettling, profoundly disturbing, and unflinchingly brutal personification of religious bigotry at its most cruelly hateful, but by providing a tense and terrifying horror scenario that works on a pure “genre” level. Simply put, even setting aside any wider subtext about the deadly consequences of homophobia, it’s a creepy, nerve-wracking ride.
A critical hit as part of the Sundance Festival’s “Midnight” section earlier this year, “Leviticus” went into theatrical release on June 19, the latest in a continuing trend of fresh and inventive films that has elevated the horror movie to new levels of critical appreciation. For us, it’s worth singling out as a boldly original expression of queer experience, elegantly constructed from the reinterpreted formulas of a genre that has always had particular draw for those in our community who knew how to read between the lines.
The difference is, this time we don’t have to – the message is spelled out loud and clear, and that in itself is enough to make it feel a little bit like empowerment, at a time when we could all use as much of it as we can get.
Friday, June 26
Trans Discussion Group will be at 7 p.m. on Zoom. This event is intended to provide an emotionally and physically safe space for trans people and those who may be questioning their gender identity/expression to join together in community and learn from one another. For more details, email [email protected].
DC Bird Alliance will host “Second Annual Ride for Pride” at 9 a.m. at the Yards Marina. This event is for celebrating community, belonging, and our shared connection to nature. Together, we’ll enjoy a guided one-hour boat ride departing from The Yards Marina, exploring the river’s wildlife, history, and ongoing restoration. Along the way, participants may spot Ospreys, herons, egrets, cormorants, Bald Eagles, turtles, and other species that call the Anacostia home. For more details, visit Eventbrite.
Saturday, June 27
Go Gay DC will host “LGBTQ+ Community Brunch” at 11 a.m. at Freddie’s Beach Bar & Restaurant. This fun weekly event brings the DMV area LGBTQ community, including allies, together for delicious food and conversation. Attendance is free and more details are available on Eventbrite.
“Sunshine: A Sapphic Pride Day Party” will be at 1 p.m. at Spark Social. This is a patio party for queer women & sapphics 35+. For more details, visit Eventbrite.
Sunday, June 28
Trap Laughsss Pride Comedy Night will be at 7 p.m. at Sid’s Gold Request Room. This in-person event is where comedy meets Pride, bringing you hilarious performances that’ll have you rolling in the aisles. Whether you’re here to celebrate or just enjoy some fantastic jokes, this night is all about fun, community, and laughs. Don’t miss out on the best comedy bash around! More details are on Eventbrite.
Monday, June 29
“Center Aging: Monday Coffee Klatch” will be at 10 a.m. on Zoom. This is a social hour for older LGBTQ+ adults. Guests are encouraged to bring a beverage of choice. For more information, contact Adam ([email protected]).
Tuesday, June 30
The DC Center for the LGBTQ+ Community will host a screening of “Swann Queen” at 7 p.m. This is a short film by Lcedeño Miller inspired by the true story of William Dorsey Swann – considered one of the world’s first drag queens. Billy Swann and their brother Dan are preparing to host their third masquerade ball. When the police raid the party, Billy must decide whether to run or resist. Swann Queen is a story about community, survival, and the legacy of LGBTQ+ resistance in Washington, D.C. Screening followed by conversation. For more details, visit the Center’s website.
Wednesday, July 1
Job Club will be at 6 p.m. on Zoom upon request. This is a weekly job support program to help job entrants and seekers, including the long-term unemployed, improve self-confidence, motivation, resilience and productivity for effective job searches and networking — allowing participants to move away from being merely “applicants” toward being “candidates.” For more information, email [email protected] or visit www.thedccenter.org/careers.
Thursday, July 2
The DC Center for the LGBTQ+ Community’s Fresh Produce Program will be held all day at the Center. People will be informed on Wednesday at 5 p.m. if they are picked to receive a produce box. No proof of residency or income is required. For more information, email [email protected] or call 202-682-2245.
Virtual Yoga Class will be at 7 p.m. on Zoom. This free weekly class is a combination of yoga, breath work and meditation that allows LGBTQ+ community members to continue their healing journey with somatic and mindfulness practices. For more details, visit the The DC Center for the LGBTQ+ Community’s website.
The Baltimore Orioles will take on the Washington Nationals on Friday, June 26 at 7 p.m. for Pride Night at Oriole Park.
The first 15,000 fans will receive an exclusive Pride Night Orioles jersey. The Washington Blade is a media sponsor of this event.
To purchase tickets, visit Orioles.com/Tickets.
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PHOTOS: Capital Pride Festival and Concert
