TRACING
Picture a shoebox under a mattress. Or perhaps nestled in the closet or held in a dresser drawer. Somewhere hidden, tucked away from the eye, but still easily accessible, within arm’s reach. Picture this box as a vessel, holding within it fragments of distant memories and desires. The contents of this box are bound to an individual, little bits and pieces of experiences both banal and sacred, field notes, receipts, Polaroids of loved ones, found photographs, letters, and prints.
For two decades, I have cared for printed matter: fingerprint-stained drugstore prints, torn journal entries, dive bar photobooth scraps, and other ephemera. I have carried them with me from one dresser drawer into another, one odd box into another across Texas, Arkansas, New York, Colorado, and California. The prints tend to remain in dust and darkness, under the mattress, in the shadows. But there are days and nights that my fingers are drawn back to these vessels. The prints are unearthed, reencountered, and once again held. Illuminated.
Queerness and printed matter have long been entangled; ephemerality and desire are where they meet. Performance studies suggests that queerness exists in fleeting moments, positing a queer temporality where the ephemeral form is structurally necessary to queerness. Theorist José Esteban Muñoz stitched queerness to ephemerality; “the key to queering evidence, and by that, I mean ways in which we prove queerness and read queerness, is by suturing it to the concept of ephemera. Think of ephemera as a trace, the remains, the things that are left, hanging in the air like a rumor”.[i] Traces, remains, the things that are left, glimmers, residues, and stains are the windows into queerness. The stain is imbued with not only gay history, but also gay desire. Desire is instilled in the queer methodologies of fixation, compulsion, and eroticism marked in journals, prints, Polaroids, and notes.
What is the work of printed matter? A print or a photograph is an impression; an image or a text is captured, transferred, and impressed into paper or another substrate to be touched, held, and passed around to other hands, or perhaps kept safe, private in a box under a mattress. The pleasures and complexities of print culture are located in their own ephemeral nature; print processes are often grounded in a sense of immediacy and urgency. Over time, ink fades, paper crumples and tears, the oils of our fingertips stain the image.
Printed matter is any material that has been marked – imprinted – by hand or a machine, ranging from documents, fliers, and magazines to posters, xeroxes, print outs, and photographs. The term actually originates from our mailing systems; matter printed by various mechanical processes is eligible for mailing at a cheaper rate. Prints are intrinsically circulatory – from one hand to another or one mailbox to another. Throughout this writing, I will argue that printed matter’s circulatory nature has uniquely and consequentially served the processes of queer documentation and evidence-making.
It is my belief that my work is foregrounded by and dependent on a greater constellation of gay and queer artists. Much of my own process seeks out a queer lineage and draws connection to gay artists that came long before me. While the (partial and incomplete) recognition of queer rights by the U.S. federal government only began early into my short lifetime, there has long been a rich, prolific, and dynamic history of gay American artists creating queer print culture and homoerotic art.
Growing up in a conservative community in Houston, Texas, I did not encounter any education or discussion of HIV/AIDS, let alone queer culture. In fact, Texas remained a bastion for hyper-conservative anti-sodomy laws throughout my childhood, with the appeal of one Harris County case eventually leading to the landmark queer rights ruling in Lawrence v. Texas. It was not until I moved to New York City for university that I learned of HIV/AIDS. This was an informative and isolating experience. The AIDS crisis, a genocide of societal and governmental neglect, rose in 1981 and swiftly decimated the gay and queer community, leaving an incomprehensible, incalculable, irreversible loss. The moment was met with, and later perpetuated by, adversity, homophobia, discrimination, and state-sponsored death. The artist activist coalition, Gran Fury, asserted that the government had blood on its hands:
Since the beginning of the AIDS crisis, we’ve been reminded by historians and spiritual leaders that death by plague is the way of nature. But AIDS is not simply an act of nature, a fact of life. It is also the business of government, the media world of infotainment, the propaganda of religion and the industry of science.[ii]
This tremendous loss was a moment of rupture, a chasm of lost members of the queer community including elders, lovers, companions, chosen families. By tracing the relationship between printed matter and queer histories, we can see that printed matter emerges as an intrinsically gay and lesbian material. In moments of reckoning and emergency, such as the rise of the AIDS crisis in the 1980’s, queer artists have produced and circulated print as a strategy of social organizing and activism.
While the print is crucial to public uprising circulation and consumption, print and ephemera are very much knotted with the personal: desire, longing, and loss. Printed matter has acted as a facilitator, mediator, witness, and residue of gay and queer desire.
PRINT, SOCIAL ORGANIZING, AND AIDS: THE PASSION & RAGE OF GRAN FURY
Throughout history, print media has been instrumental to political resistance and change as it is intrinsically linked to our visibility and liberation as members of the queer community. I would be remiss not to situate the inextricable relationship between queerness and print in the aftermath of the 1969 Stonewall Riots. One year following the riots, a catalyst for the queer liberation movement, thousands of gay, lesbian, and transgender people took to the streets for the first Gay Liberation March in New York City. Among all the bodies gathering were picket signs and banners.
It is no mistake that queer art activists work specifically with print during moments of emergency or crisis. Printed matter is often produced through the use of accessible machines and materials like a xerox, ink, and paper. Print production processes have historically been more available to the public than other fine art processes and have enabled political activists and art world “outsiders” to gain access to the means of artistic production. Copy machines, for example, have long been available in local libraries and have enabled the production of political pamphlets, zines, and posters for relatively low cost. The egalitarian nature of printed matter underscores its potential to be used as a political tool for the liberation of oppressed groups including and expanding beyond queers. Paul Soulellis, founder of the publishing studio Queer Archive Work, claims, “this is queerness as an underground, alternative way of creating networks of care. Queerness in the scrappy ad hoc, and sometimes homemade designs that were directly related to the urgency of protest and activism and survival”[iii]. Print media can blend together aesthetic and educational content, and incorporate, for example, information graphics into a seductive call to political action. But what makes print exceptionally unique in its form is its handheld-ness, its ability to be disseminated. You pass around photographs, hand out flyers, and circulate prints. The connection of print and queer culture also quickly gave rise to the production and circulation of zines, like artist Joey Terrill’s Homeboy Beautiful.[iv] Zines, posters, and flyers allowed queer people to articulate their desires, sufferings, and calls for public action. In fact, even before Stonewall, one of the earliest federal rulings in favor of queer civil rights was in connection with the attempted censure of ONE magazine, a queer magazine featuring poems about lesbian romance and gay cruising published by a spin-off of the Mattachine Society. Printed matter enables concrete praxis and allows queer artists to form and emerge with an identity and political position.
Since the beginnings of the AIDS crisis, queer artists have produced and circulated print as a means of social organizing, political activism, and resistance. Artists like David Wojnarowicz, Keith Haring, and Zoe Leonard confronted the suffering and discrimination of the queer community in the workings of their studio and on the streets. The work of artist Tom of Finland played an important role in the public space, specifically for gay men and gay bar culture. His prints and drawings are emblematic for their depiction of homoerotic sexual fantasies often involving beautiful, strong, leather men. The work presented men engaging in graphic, carefree sex without any itch of shame. His work can be found in prints and murals at gay bars and clubs like the Eagle all over the country. Following the rise of AIDS, he shifted his prints to involve and emphasize safe sex, illustrating men using condoms. His print Untitled (Use a Rubber), 1987 was distributed to over 700 gay bars and organizations.[v] Additionally, his entire oeuvre shared a sense of strength to the community, representing chiseled, built, powerful men entranced in the joys of fucking.
Activist coalitions such as ACT UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power), General Idea, and The Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence emerged on the front lines in the fight to end the AIDS pandemic. A group of artists, including Marlene McCarty, Avram Finkelstein, Tom Kalin, John Lindell, and Donald Moffett, organized the collective Gran Fury, “united in anger and dedicated to exploiting the power of art to end the AIDS crisis”[vi]. As artists that understood the power and tools necessary to confront cis-heteronormative and otherwise homophobic culture, they utilized visual guerilla dissemination tactics as their strategy. The collective worked across posters, billboards, and flyers posted in the streets of New York City to demand reforms that changed public policy and saved lives:
Gran Fury's work raised public awareness of AIDS and put pressure on politicians, while sparking debate in sites ranging from the Illinois Senate to the tabloid press of Italy. Bridging the gap between Situationist site-specific art strategies, post-modern appropriation and the Queer activist movement, Gran Fury has been influential to later practitioners. Their work opens up a broader spectrum of understanding about the political and collective art practices that flourished in downtown New York during the Eighties and Nineties.[vii]
ALL PEOPLE WITH AIDS ARE INNOCENT, the 1988 photocopy that also took other lives such as a cloth banner suspended across Grand Street in New York City, directly addressed the stigmatization and persecution those with AIDS experienced. For centuries, religious and conservative figures have cast homosexuality as other, as sinful, and ‘against nature’. This homophobic moral posturing only increased during the AIDS crisis as the disease was positioned as a natural punishment. With this declaration, Gran Fury fought back, denouncing any concept that AIDS is deserved or justified. The group also took the erasure of women from the AIDS crisis directly into the streets. As a result of systemic sexism, women were often deemed as solely the caretakers of young men dying from AIDS. WOMEN DON’T GET AIDS, THEY JUST DIE FROM IT was a 1991 public poster and billboard appropriating a photograph of women in swimsuits from the Miss USA pageant. Here, the punchline and graphic serve as a confrontation to this erasure, reading, “65% of HIV positive women get sick and die from chronic infections that don’t fit the Centers for Disease Control’s definitions of AIDS”.
Critical to their political project, every artwork by Gran Fury was placed in the public domain – on street corners, billboards, wheat pastes, subway stations, newspapers, and gatherings such as their famous ‘kiss-ins’ – in order to contest the stability of dominant culture. Through direct actions pushing print beyond the printed page and out into the streets, their work educated, changed public policy, and destigmatized living with HIV. “Even if the images didn’t have the power to solve the crisis, they focused attention on it, and acted as a rallying cry, a point of identification for those inside the movement”.[viii] Gran Fury’s passion and rage forced the AIDS crisis into the public consciousness, in large part, through printed matter.
“Can art save lives? Not directly. But it can help the rest of us live”.[ix] Printed matter helps the rest of us live. At the height of the AIDS crisis, the print served as a tool for queer collectivity and liberation. At the same time, many artists worked across print media in a more private, intimate, process to document their own individual experiences of loss, longing, and desire.
PRINT, DESIRE, AND AIDS: THE INTIMACY OF LYLE ASHTON HARRIS
Printed matter acts as a facilitator, a mediator, a witness, and a residue of gay desire.
In holding and looking through prints, one ruminates on the boundless relationship between memory and desire. Roland Barthes noted, “it is true that a photograph is a witness, but a witness of something that is no more”.[x] A photograph – a print – may represent someone, something, somewhere lost – something that is no more. The seduction of nostalgia begins to emerge to the surface of prints as a longing for the past, a moment that did not belong to us but was nevertheless captured.
Images are inseparable from desire. The punctum, the prickling elements of the image, wounds the viewer. When an image is printed, sublimated into material form, it becomes an object of desire. There is an erotic relationship between the eyes and the image, our looking, our cruising, our touching of the print. We become attached to a print, say a Polaroid of a lover, as we may feel it is a residue, a trace, a fact of our desire. Evidence of queer love and desire acts as a revolt against a hegemonic culture that scratches out and eliminates queer existence. Gran Fury’s revolt took place in the town square, but some artists’ revolts occurred in the intimate spaces of their homes and studios.
Visual artist Richard Hawkins suggests that one cannot separate desire and collage, that they are inherently intertwined; “rather than making a world from scratch that reflects your desires, maybe you’re finding desires out in the real world and rearranging them like Dr. Frankenstein to make your own kind of fantasy”.[xi] Collage is a process of looking, seeking, collecting, and subsequently subverting, layering, cutting, and rearranging and constructing a new, fresh, sometimes impossible image – an image that reflects one’s desires, fantasies, and potentialities.
Charting another trajectory of desire in and through printed matter, artist Lyle Ashton Harris employs eroticism, fixation, and compulsion as modes of mark-making and trace. Through printing, layering, repeating, overlapping, and collating images, Harris composes prints and installations permeated with rawness, desire, loss, and longing. While the work is intimate in nature and process, dissecting selfhood, sex, and experience, the work binds the personal to the political.
The intimacy of Lyle Ashton Harris is felt most in his unique Polaroids of the artist’s notes, ephemera, studios, pictures, journals, and collages. In queer history, the Polaroid acts as private ephemera of sex, depicting nudes and blurring bodies, frequently hidden in dresser drawers or nightstands. Queer artists such as Genesis Breyer P-ORRIDGE and Mark Morrisroe, among others, have used the instant photographic process as an instrument of desire. The process is a rather compulsive one; an artist is compelled to snap a shot and receive instant gratification. But here, Harris photographs the work, his process, his fleeting, momentary thoughts captured in his journal and studio. Harris’ Polaroids (1989 – 1995) delineate modes of fixation and compulsion that are imbued within the workings of his studio.
Harris’ prints feel so in-progress – instincts, urges, stains – and offer a glimpse of the inner workings and processes of desire and fixation within the artist’s methodology. In Easter Break ’89, NY, List of lovers and one-night stands with Polaroids, Harris captures his journal and a pile of other Polaroids splayed out on a bed or comforter. We see a list of names thrown together in different colored marks, suggesting a period of time, as well as collaged or found prints in the other Polaroids. There is a feeling of immediacy to the print, names are sometimes written over or crossed out. Among the Journal Entry Polaroids, Harris captures a scattering of notes, reminders, names, post-it notes, and addresses. One page, in bold large writing, reads “porn in the morning”. There is a banality to the journal entry, an everydayness to the encounter, or haze of momentary desire. The Polaroids, Silverlake Blvd. and Open House from the Whitney Independent Study Program convey how Harris handles and treats printed matter that illuminates his later large-scale installations and blow-ups. In Silverlake Blvd., we can make out repeating portraits of men’s faces, one after another. At the ISP, among piles of pictures and prints, is written perhaps with ink on his fingertips, “His cum and blood, My hair” on the walls.
The scatter and repetition that appear in these Polaroids are emblematic of Harris’ larger practice. Layering, emphasizing, and accumulating are strategies of compulsion Harris used to construct constellations that explore eroticism, sex, love, and social networks. This mode of fixation, layering images abjectly (attraction, repulsion), is an inherently queer one, and Harris’ own desire is transmitted through the process.
What compels Harris to make a photograph? While the Polaroids do not overtly address the AIDS crisis and the effects the virus would have on Harris’ life, the viewer can discern a blurring of the boundary between desire and violence, exposing the proximity between sex and death. With the privacy and intimacy of the Polaroid, a viewer cannot help but ask, to whom is the work addressed? Is Harris recording these notes and mockups in the studio to remember? What exactly is it he is trying to preserve? In an era of so much loss, disintegration, and dissolution, Harris’ Polaroids of the workings of his studio and desires constitute the preservation of the self.
THE AIDS CRISIS IS STILL BEGINNING
Suspended above the entrance to MoMA PS1 in 2021, a yellow and red banner read, “THE AIDS CRISIS IS STILL BEGINNING”. Gregg Bordowitz’s exhibition, I Wanna Be Well “traces connections between Bordowitz’s intimate depictions of living with AIDS and the continuing global AIDS crisis”[xii]. The printed declaration serves to underscore another critical moment: measuring the past through the lens of the present Covid-19 pandemic and envisioning the future. The AIDS crisis is only beginning; there is more to be done – de-stigmatization, prevention, a vaccine, a cure. Over the years, Bordowitz’s artistic practice has prompted both direct actions and longings for intimacy. Ingrained in his work is the so gloriously human desire for both survival and togetherness.
The summer I graduated from New York University, I organized an exhibition by artist Pacifico Silano at Stellar Projects in the Lower East Side. The 2018 exhibition, titled After Silence, presented a new series of photographs, which evoked the emotional and physical voids felt as a result of the AIDS pandemic. Through fragmenting, obscuring, layering, reassembling, and finally re-photographing, Silano recontextualized gay erotica from the 1970’s pre-AIDS era, such as the Richard Marshall Collection of Gay Pornography at NYU’s Fales Library. Images found within the Disco-era magazines such as Blueboy, Honcho, and Drummer were saturated with innocence and naiveté, euphoric colors, and an aura of total liberation. Questions on loss, longing, masculinity, and American identity permeate the pictures. Today, we access this archive with the knowledge of the devastation experienced by an entire generation of the queer community, as well as those of us still living in its wake. After Silence was a clear and direct reference to the AIDS activist artist collective Gran Fury and their Pink Triangle SILENCE = DEATH graphic. The show offered quiet meditations on queer ephemera, identity, and our evolving relationship to the archive. Silano’s prints were framed, notably without glass, to allow the viewer’s eye to get up close to the texture of the photograph and witness the image fall apart into halftones, ink bleeds, and folds. The prints themselves depict gestures of the body, minute details of the scene, and fragments of the photographs from the archive. The shadow of two bodies blending into one. Popping up the hood of a pick-up somewhere way out west. A collection of whips and belts. The prints simultaneously reveal and conceal elements of desire. All these questions, concerns, and moments unearthed in a fragment. After Silence, in many ways, demonstrates a greater preoccupation with the relationship of art, specifically printed matter, to AIDS.
Artists of the AIDS crisis worked relentlessly and put their bodies on the line because their community and own lives were at stake. This relentlessness, persistence, and creative production contributed a significant amount of artwork and brought queer visibility, desire, and loss to the centerfold in an unprecedented, historic moment.
Even though I have suggested printed matter as an ephemeral entity, prints sometimes outlast our own lives. The ink may fade, but the prints in our boxes may be unearthed. Over the past few years, we have witnessed a growing preoccupation with the gay and queer archive. But due to our often-invisible history and the AIDS pandemic, this archive is dislocated and dismembered. This incomprehensible loss, this rupture, and this chasm continue to reverberate across the queer community today. Gay history is fragmentary. Printed matter contains vestiges of loss, intimacy, and melancholy. To touch the queer archive, flip through it, handle it, and embrace it is to encounter stains of memory and desire.
WORKS CITED
[i] Muñoz José Esteban. “Gesture, Ephemera, and Queer Feeling.” Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity, New York University Press, New York, 2019.
[ii] Cohen, Michael, and Gran Fury. READ MY LIPS. 80WSE Press, NYU Steinhardt, 2011.
[iii] Soulellis, Paul. “What Is Queer Typography?” Soulellis.com, 2021, https://soulellis.com/writing/tdc2021/.
[iv] Segade, Alexandro. “Alexandro Segade on Queer Chicanx Zines.” The Online Edition of Artforum International Magazine, 30 Nov. -1, https://www.artforum.com/print/201808/alexandro-segade-on-queer-chicanx-zines-7672
[v] Daniels, Champ. “What We Needed.” Tom of Finland Foundation, 2 Dec. 2022, https://www.tomoffinland.org/what-we-needed/.
[vi] Meyer, Richard. Outlaw Representation : Censorship & Homosexuality in Twentieth-Century American Art. Boston, Beacon Press, 2002.
[vii] Cohen, Michael, and Gran Fury. READ MY LIPS. 80WSE Press, NYU Steinhardt, 2011.
[viii] Ibid.
[ix] Atkins, Robert, and Thomas W. Sokolowski. From Media to Metaphor: Art about Aids. Independent Curators Inc., 1991.
[x] Harris, Lyle Ashton. 2022 Medium Festival of Photography Keynote Lecture by Lyle Ashton Harris, 7 May 2022, San Diego.
[xi] Bloch-Réalisateur, Stef. Portrait of an Artist - RICHARD HAWKINS, 2014, https://vimeo.com/77327802.
[xii] "Gregg Bordowitz: I Wanna Be Well." MoMA PS1, 3 May 2021,
www.moma.org/calendar/exhibitions/5207?
LYLE ASHTON HARRIS, EASTER BREAK ‘89, 1989.