Gorgeousness: A Summer Pride Show

On February 24, 2022, in a speech by Vladimir Putin announcing his “rationale” for invading Ukraine, queer people made a surprising cameo. The West, he said, “sought to destroy our traditional values,” with attitudes, “that are directly leading to degradation and degeneration, because they are contrary to human nature.” There was little doubt as to whom he was referring. Thus, for the first time in history, the existence of queerness was cited as a casus belli in the struggle between world orders.

Queer communities in the US and around the world in the summer of 2024 find themselves squaring off against a series of ambient tensions singular in history. The long run of gradually expanding rights that began in the late 1970s and crested with the legalization of US gay marriage in 2015 has come to an end. More recent decisions by the Supreme Court, the legislatures of various states, community libraries and school boards have revealed an organized and persistent hostility to queer art, literature and identity.

Although we have seen counter movements to queer progress before, the piecemeal dismantling of just recently acquired rights is a new form of slow torture. There was a whiff of sadism in the multiple ironies of last year’s Supreme Court decision, 303 Creative v. Elenis, enshrining the constitutional right of a self-described artist not to provide services to queer clients. As with Obergefell, the decision came down at the end of June.

And we have never seen the constellation of illiberal agendas that are now making common cause, braiding together globally with malign efficiency to demonize queer communities. Right wing movements around the world may differ broadly in their specifics and texturally in their rhetoric, but they are identical in one particular: the weaponization of gender and sexuality.

In this context, with the US presidential election looming as a near totalizing event of world historical anxiety, I have assembled a show of works, all by queer artists, in celebration of Gorgeousness. This show is as much a wellness check on a community at the leading edge of the cultural headwinds as an incitement to consider the gravity of what may lie ahead.

Gorgeousness. What is it? A cumbersome word. It’s got those “few extra s’s” that would get “The Kids in the Hall’s” Buddy Cole in trouble. Impossible to pronounce without a hissing sibilance that causes us momentarily to metamorphose into serpents. And don’t you just know, if Disney had animated Genesis, they would have coded the serpent as menacingly queer? Like the source of queerness, there is uncertainty about the origin of the word “gorgeousness.” But must we define everything? Queerness is the freedom to reject the definitions that have never fully served us.

As ever, queer artists are studying and sanctifying the body. And why not? The human body contains the source code of all beauty and evil. Human bodies are the most deadly, compelling and sensuous things human beings have ever created. But the queer body is special: liberated from the expectation of reproduction, the queer body is free to become a site of adaptive reuse and aesthetic activism.

This Pride, we should also remember those in our global community who Western queer freedoms, as fragile as they are, have never reached. As if to underscore the urgency of the point, a contributor to Gorgeousness who lives outside the United States has asked not to be mailed the show catalog for fear its nude images could attract attention from the surveillance state under which he lives and covertly makes his erotic art.

Among the 78 works in the show, a pair of photograms by Derrick Woods-Morrow and printmaker Xander Fischer re-author Eadweard Muybridge’s equine locomotion studies in a light- sensitive emulsion of Woods-Morrow’s own semen. The anonymous Black jockey in Muybridge’s animation is thus re-christened in sperm, revealing what the writer Rebecca Solnit describes as “the erotics of motion.” The images critique the erasure of Black contributions both to the development of cinema and the origins of thoroughbred racing as an American sport. Typically, history has retained the name of the horse, Annie G., but not that of the rider.

Curated by Richard Renaldi

Opening reception: Thursday, June 20, 5–9 pm