Gay Art Against the Alphabet Soup, -- Leslie-Lohman Museum and the Erasing of Gay Interest
An opportunity to get a dominate position in one area against Queer Inc. Going through the back doors and side doors.
Article follows picture. ALSO THIS HAS BEEN UPDATED.
I am thinking of trying to focus on where I can get engagement from the Gay community rather than trying to mobilize a group to compete directly with the Alphabet Soup organizations. I donât see us organizing an alternate Gay pride event in June or having a periodical soon. The British publication Lesbian & Gay didnât last long when the person subsidizing it was hit with a boycott of his own magazine.
So, I am thinking of what interests the Gay community has and develops Gay identity and most importantly, what directions are there that the Alphabet South canât or wonât follow.
Also, I donât think that we will draw many people from activist venues. Most have bought into the dominant ideology or are dependent on it. We need to appeal to Gays outside current organizations.
The direction of supporting Gay art is one direction. To have pages of links to art related information actually related to the interest of Gays rather than LGBTQXYZ is something that the Alphabet Soup (LGBTQXYZ) wonât do. This is an opening for us.
Look at this webpage for the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art.
In Dec. 2005 it was The Essential Leslie/Lohman Gay Art Foundation. Gay has been dropped since it started.
https://web.archive.org/web/20051229144447/https://www.leslielohman.org/
This is one webpage from the archive for the museum in 2005. Actual nude Gay men with sexual activity. You can see a penis actually.
https://web.archive.org/web/20051224113222/http://leslielohman.org/Painting2.htm
In 2022 the Leslie-Lohman Museum doesnât have that anymore.
https://www.leslielohman.org/exhibitions
It is another case where an institution built on the support of Gays has been captured by the Alphabet Soup.
I canât say that they have entirely excluded the depiction of a penis, since I am not going to open all these links.
Though in this Katz exhibit (link below) I think it might be seen, but in such a way that you are guessing and you can be entirely sure that no one will find it erotic.
https://www.leslielohman.org/exhibitions/making-history-making-art-the-work-of-jonathan-ned-katz
Also, Gay content is just a fraction of the exhibits. If they want to have a museum for a broad range of âqueerâ art that is their choice. However, meeting the art needs of the Gay community is just one of many of their focuses. That is a shift from being a âGay Artâ institution to an institution that doesnât have any reference to sexuality of any type in its name.
Also, I canât say that in the actual exhibitions they exclude frontal male nudity. This is the link to one exhibition for Sascha Schneider. They have no frontal nudity here, but perhaps in the physical exhibition they do.
You could instead of visiting their museum and go look for videos on the Internet such as this one. This shows a way to bypass and supplant Alphabet Soup art institutions. Find and collected the links to Gay artists and when possible uncensored Gay artists.
With the Leslie-Lohman Museum you can almost be assured in visiting their website today as opposed to 2005 you will not have erotic desire.
I canât say I am entirely sure what is driving their behavior. I think part of it is that they are worried what the general art community will think and want to show that they are this and that. The other thing is that they have so many agendas that the Gay community has been neglected.
I think though the reason it has changed is a generally repressive attitude. Probably other letters in the Alphabet Soup complained about seeing a penis, and it was too Gay focused.
UPDATE: Also, they likely receive funding from foundations and local government and want to be more acceptable to these sources of income.
I think they likely only get small audiences and donât draw popular interest.
However, now days, with the Internet we can provide easily an alternative. We donât need buildings, air condition, preservationists. Art is images and the Internet is an excellent medium to view and share images.
A lot of individual Gays acting outside the Alphabet Soup have continued to create for the Gay public. They have been previously acting alone and sharing perhaps at local galleries and on Facebook. They have developed YouTube videos and webpages, Facebook pages, Instagram pages, Etsy stores, and other venues to sell their art.
The links for these resources havenât been collected together. Even if an Alphabet Soup group tried to do it, they would add in a lot of stuff not of interest to Gays and also self-censor. Having webpages focused on Gay interest is simply something they canât do, but we can.
I think that by collecting links to different sources into Substack webpages we have an opportunity to be the primary area of focus for Gay art for the Gay community and displace the Alphabet Soup. We will be the primary voices speaking to the Gay art imagination.
For my Substack pages I am selecting images that the Alphabet Soup simply couldnât live with.
Once we have a position which gains the attention of the Gay community in one venue we have an a place in which to share other Gay centric ideas. Also, just by having this position, an alternate venue for art, we show the problems with the Alphabet Soup agenda visually and directly without some lengthy paper to read. Gays can just see it by comparing. They will understand it intuitively.
I am thinking of other topics in which we can do this. The post that Vaccination is a Gay Superpower is another opportunity. I donât think the Stonewall Democrats or other Alphabet Soup groups will want to be pursue this because they will think that it is divisive and might make someone upset. The neoliberals wonât want this since it is disruptive to their electoral strategies. Also, the Substack Page on Gays and vaccination can be posting in venues outside the LGBT dominated venues. I got real interest by posting it in the comments section of https://www.sorryantivaxxer.com/
The focus on STDâs is another area which I found the Alphabet Soup somewhat afraid of and even opposition to thinking that STDâs are an issue. My local LGBT+ Democratic Party group here has no focus on STDs and is the place where I got pushback.
I think if we focus, we can find other Gay areas of interest to be the dominating voice in regards to that interest and areas of interest the Alphabet Soup wonât or canât pursue.
This image here is so I can have thumbnail of interest.
