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Saslow, James M. Pictures and Passions: A History of Homosexuality in the Visual Arts. New York, NY: Viking, 2000. 146-147.
Perseus Digital Library.” Classical Tyrannicides (Sculpture). Accessed August, 2017. http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/artifact?name=Classical%2BTyrannicides&object=Sculpture. Even though there are a few more LGBTQ+ stories (love and otherwise) represented in mainstream media, I’m still left extrapolating from centuries of heteronormative art and history. For the most part, our histories remain hidden. Since getting my MFA, I’ve used my paintings to rewrite history through an LGBTQ+ lens. I’ve done that through my World War II cross sections as well as my Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas series.Significance to Queer Art History: Le Sommeil was commissioned by the Turkish Ambassador to Paris for his private collection. This painting was catered to the male gaze in this way and for the fact that men at this time were indeed, interested in looking into the romantic lives of women who loved women for their own pleasure. While this is, one can see that the women’s bodies are realistic and curved instead of (to put this plainly for the times) “photoshopped” into magazine figures. This shows Courbet’s eye for realism. The strewn objects (pearls, hair clips, and blankets) are also in a fashion that shows prior activity and lust after one another between the women. Let's consider the process of queering the sailor in art and its function. To be a mariner, or more explicitly to escape the societal conventions of life on the land was powerful indeed and recognised by queer audiences historically. Same-sex desire and affection was a facet of life at sea – in single-sex environments freedom of movement and access to different cultures afforded more options. Gay bars in ports around the world mirrored this, as did the spread of the queer language Polari (a way to speak openly and in code without overtly incriminating yourself). For years, nobody, except close friends, have seen my gay works. There is still a lot of prejudices in Russia, so it's impossible to publish them officially. Nevertheless last year I printed my first gay calendar with a circulation of 30 copies. One Emerging is a hybrid fictional documentary. It’s a collaborative portrait of two women whose paths crossed in Lesvos a couple years ago. One is a photojournalist who was documenting the refugee crisis on the island and the other is a young transgender refugee from Morocco who was in a camp there. Together we created parallel fantasy worlds that overlap through the narrative and projected image. You were previously involved in community organizing. How has that affected your artistic process?
Think of the horrible view we have of sex, even though we’re the most overly sexualized country in the world,” Leslie mused. “Scratch the surface and there is this Puritanism that goes on and on and on.” That “American prudishness,” he said, was absent in European culture. He recalled going to a government-sponsored gay bar in Amsterdam: “The first thing you saw when you walked in was this huge, long bar with a gigantic picture of Queen Juliana smiling out at her gay subjects.”
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What’s more, Laaksonen developed his distinctive aesthetic – a homoerotic fantasy world populated by gay men who epitomised physical fitness and male desirability – as a corrective response to the particular, reductive way in which gay men were portrayed at the time. Even if Laaksonen’s drawings now seem to perpetuate the stereotype of gay men as inherently sexual and supremely body-conscious, they were once groundbreaking for this very reason. Each had a “discreet collection” of their own, so joining forces “was another thing that bonded us.” They developed minimal criteria for their buying. It’s a misconception that their collection only features work by gay artists. “You don’t have to be gay,” he clarified. “The art has to resonate with gay people.” Otherwise, a work has “to at least be good,” Leslie said, “unless it’s such horrible junk that it becomes a ding an sich, a thing unto itself”—erotic camp, in other words. Mostly, the pair collected what they liked. (“Every time I hear about someone collecting something as an investment, it makes me almost vomit,” Leslie added.) Both figures are nude. Nudity in Greek sculpture was reserved for gods/ goddesses, warriors, and athletes.
Statues at this time were no longer static and archaic. Instead, they showed idealized realism and movement in posture as the figures place their feet forward and stand in contraposto (meaning, that weight is shifted to one side of the figure.)Presumed or weaponised homoeroticism for comedic effect masks a deeper and more nuanced experience of gay male life that contemporary audiences expect today – one that includes homo-affectionate friendship, romantic connection, and intersectional identity. Representation of non-normative bodies and identities within artworks and institutions is incredibly important, but I think that’s just the beginning of what we need to be thinking about. As a transgender artist, I am thinking more about the ways that we can refuse these forms of naming, taxonomizing, and classifying bodies. I look to art—both making it and viewing it—as a method for relearning how to perceive bodies in ways that are more expansive, unstable, and consensual. Such objects clarify that centuries of erotic art have existed out in the open, barely concealed through evocations of antiquity and other allegorical guises. How does he go about finding them? “Once we were established as collectors,” Leslie explained, “we’d get these calls from people we’d never heard of.” Dealers and artists came out of the woodwork. “There simply were not other avenues to publicly show this work,” he said.
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