LLGAF Museum of Queer Visual Culture at InterseXions, Nov. 2004. Photo by Stanne.

Charles Leslie
Sculpture Court

Fritz Lohman
Erotic Gallery

Con Artist and Zander Ferrari
Mary Ann Wilson

Pet Silvia
Thanks, Andy

Intersecting InterseXions
Comments by Charles Leslie on a Queer Visual Culture Event
by Lester Strong

Last November 12 and 13, over a hundred lesbian/ gay/bisexual/transgender (LGBT) artists and scholars interested in LGBT art attended InterseXions: Queer Visual Culture at the Crossroads, conference devoted to exploring all things visual related to the queer world. Participants hailed from as far away as Hawaii, California, New Mexico, Wisconsin, and Michigan in the U.S., Toronto and Montreal in Canada, and the U.K., France, Poland, and Austria in Europe, providing a far-flung perspective on the current and historical state of queer visual art around much of the globe.

The program statement for the conference read in part: What are the pleasures, perils, and politics attending queer visual cultures in the 21st century?...How can we claim, enjoy, and study sex, perversities, and pleasures as key features of the work that we do? What about further queering the visual studies archive? What traditional forms and objects can bear new queer perspectives? Are there other forms (ephemera, performance, the digital) that might be seen as queer or seen queerly.

Among the queer pleasures and perversities covered in the fourteen panel sessions and two films screened: the aesthetics of cruising; the queer aspects of ancient Egyptian, Greek, and Roman art; AIDS and queer art; old and new media in contemporary lesbian art; race, ethnicity, and geography in queer art; queer art of the Renaissance; the “alchemy” of gender; queering art and art history in the classroom; the queerness of masculinity in late Victorian Britain; alternative archival resources; and documentary tributes to New Mexico queer artist Delmas Howe and French lesbian self-photographer and World War II anti-Nazi queer resistance fighter Claude Cahun.

The conference was organized by the Queer Caucus for Art (QCA) of the College Art Association and the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies (CLAGS) of the City University of New York (CUNY), which hosted the event at the CUNY Graduate Center in midtown Manhattan. It was sponsored by the Steven J. Goldstein, M.D., Charitable Fund, the Ph.D. Program in Art History, CUNY Graduate Center, and the Leslie-Lohman Gay Art Foundation. After the conference, I caught up with Leslie-Lohman’s Charles Leslie, who offered the following comments on the event.

Lester Strong: Why did Leslie-Lohman participate in the InterseXions Conference?
Charles Leslie: Our friend, the scholar and academic Jim Saslow, first brought up the possibility. Even though we at the Foundation certainly aren’t academics, he thought it would be an interesting idea for all concerned. We talked it over among ourselves and decided yes, why not? It would be a new experience, and then we would know whether it was a good idea to do it again in the future.

LS: What do you think the significance of the conference was in terms of lesbian and gay art in general?
CL: I think it’s a wonderful way for academics concerned with lesbian and gay art to talk to each other. In terms of its impact in the larger gay world, it’s not easy for me to say. Some of the panels dealt with such arcane subject matter it was a little difficult for me to understand what they were talking about. One panel involved an hour and a half lecture on the epistemology and mimetics–whatever that means–of the spatial arrangements in which gay men cruise. I have to admit I was a bit bemused, and I’m not sure I pleased the speakers when I ended their session by asking, “But did you get any sex?”

LS: What was its significance in terms of Leslie-Lohman’s commitments and aims?
CL: It opened my eyes to a few manifestations of gay art which, really, had not even occurred to me before. One session was dedicated to a discussion of transgender issues, in this case specifically transitions from female to male. What was remarkable to me was the wonderful quality of the art work that many of these people showed. It opened a window for me.

LS: Anything else you came up against that you weren’t expecting?
CL: The panel on transgender issues and art was the most unexpected. Some of the topics that were quite expected were nonetheless for me the most enjoyable, like those sessions which dealt with historical discoveries concerning gay life and gay art from the past, even though it wasn’t called “gay art” at the time.

LS: In which you actually played a part yourself through your monograph on the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century German photographer Wilhelm von Gloeden, pretty much a forgotten figure until you rediscovered him.
CL: Yes.

LS: Could you comment on The Museum of Queer Visual Culture boxes that were created by people affiliated with Leslie-Lohman?
CL: I have to credit our director, Wayne Snellen, with that idea. It was generally felt that we should bring something to the conference that was a little special and might add some spice to the whole thing. Wayne came up with the idea of an imaginary gay museum–what would be your idea of a room in an imaginary gay museum? So the staff got a bunch of shoe box-sized boxes and passed them out to anyone interested in creating such a room, mostly artists but also a few nonartists. I found the results amazing, sometimes utterly astonishing. We displayed them in the main hall of the conference center at the CUNY Graduate Center.

I wasn’t sure how they would be received. But people seemed to find them very, very intriguing, walking all around them, looking carefully at each one, and commenting on them. Now we’re trying to figure out how we can store them. We brought them all back to the Foundation, slightly the worse for wear. But we’ve been encouraged to keep them for some future use.

LS: Didn’t you create some of them yourself?
CL: I did one and Fritz [Lohman] did one. I created a sculpture garden. I’m particularly fond of sculpture.
So I created a green room filled with sculpture. It has a fountain in it, and of course all the sculpture tended to be rather erotic. Fritz used as a jumping-off point the Foundation’s weekly gay men’s erotic drawing workshop. He took tiny cutouts of wonderful drawings and paintings from that workshop and made them the centerpiece of a very beautiful peach-colored room with two tall, red doors as entrance and exit areas.

LS: InterseXions was a mix of working artists and academics interested in lesbian and gay art. How do you think these two groups either interact now or should interact?
CL: I think that whether they actually intersect very consciously or very much during their lifetimes, it is ultimately critics and academics who somehow record for the future insights and perceptions concerning art that is going on in their world. So I think there’s a kind of natural, obvious intersection between these two groups even though they may not interact that much in reality on a day-to-day basis.

LS: The conference brought them together–
CL: Which I think was a very good reason for this conference to happen. And hopefully it’s going to happen again because there are plans afoot to make it a regular event now.

LS: Any other thoughts on the conference?
CL: In spite of the problems I had dealing with the “epistemology and mimetics of cruising,” I think the event was wonderfully worthwhile. The panels were marvelous, and I would recommend attending future conferences like it to anybody interested in lesbian and gay art.

To see the full installation go to The Museum of Queer Visual Culture