Endymion

Girodet, 1791. Endymion.

In classical mythology, Endymion was a handsome, young shepherd (sometimes king) from Elis or Caria. Selene (Phoebe, Artemis, Diana), the moon goddess, fell in love with him and consequently neglected her lunar responsibilities. As a result, Zeus offered Endymion a choice, death in whatever way he preferred or eternal sleep with perpetual youth. Endymion chose the latter. He slept in a cave on Mount Latmus where Selene continued to visit him. The Greek poet, Licymnius of Chios, however, suggests that it was the god Hypnos (Sleep) who loved Endymion and lulled him to sleep with his eyes open so that the god might forever gaze into them.

Whose World Is It?

George Segal, 1992. GLBT Monument. (Christopher Park, NYC)

“This sculpture by George Segal (1924–2000) honors the gay rights movement and commemorates the events at the Stonewall Inn opposite this park that gave rise to the movement. … On June 23, 1992, Mayor David N. Dinkins and Parks Commissioner Betsy Gotbaum helped unveil the monument in Christopher Park. The initial opposition and rancor which had greeted the project had subsided; the advent of AIDS, which had devastated the gay community in particular, added another poignant dimension to the monument and its mute figures’ impact. In March 2000, Stonewall Inn was designated a National Historic Landmark.”

Papillon

Rudolf Nureyev (1938-1993)

Happy is the lover who works out naked
And then goes home to sleep all day with a beautiful boy.

Theognis of Megara (fl. 6th century BC)

Vulgarity under Arrest

Pierre and Gilles, 1991. The Cosmonauts

 

“A sensibility (as distinct from an idea) is one of the hardest things to talk about; but there are special reasons why Camp, in particular, has never been discussed. It is not a natural mode of sensibility, if there be any such. Indeed the essence of Camp is its love of the unnatural: of artifice and exaggeration. And Camp is esoteric — something of a private code, a badge of identity even, among small urban cliques.”

Susan Sontag, 1964. Notes on “Camp”

ambiguity/hypocrisy

Roy Cohen [By Robert Mapplethorpe, 1981.]

Because of his quintessential ambiguity, Roy Cohn was one of the gayest icons in the US political history. He was a lifelong Republican who in the 1950s worked on the red-baiting McCarthy Hearings, using economic and even sexual blackmail to coerce testimony. As a lawyer he later represented mobsters such as Fat Tony Salerno and members of the Gambino crime family. He was eventually disbarred for unethical and unprofessional conduct. Although he had been “outed” decades before and made little effort to hide his lifestyle, he continued to officially deny his homosexuality until his death from AIDS in 1986. Far far beyond throwing judgment, is hypocrisy a gay thing?

Erastes/Eromenos

 

The Warren Cup, mid-1st century AD. British Museum

The scenes on each side shows two pairs of male lovers. On one side the erastes (older, active lover) is bearded and wears a wreath while the eromenos (younger ‘beloved’, passive) is a beardless youth. A servant tentatively comes through a door. In the background is a draped textile, and a kithara (lyre) resting on a chest. In the scene on the other side the erastes is beardless, while the eromenos is just a boy. Auloi (pipes) are suspended over the background textile, and folded textiles are lying on a chest. The surroundings suggest a cultured, Hellenized setting with music and entertainment. (From the British Museum’s Website)

Chippendale

 

Philip Johnson

That’s peculiar, isn’t it, because there’s nothing very strange about the building, do you think? I shouldn’t be asking you. It looks pretty ordinary to me. I put a funny top on it. But not funny, people call it the Chippendale top. I didn’t know about Chippendale at the time. I see now what people mean, but I didn’t know. It was just a way to end the building that people would notice and would decorate the building so you’d know it from other buildings, with a cut-off, like that. … They wanted a new way of looking at the world. I said, “Well this is different,” so we built it. [On AT&T building]

Heterotopia

 

Philip Johnson, 1996. Puerta de Europa (Madrid)

“Brothels and colonies are two extreme types of heterotopia, and if we think, after all, that the boat is a floating piece of space, a place without a place, that exists by itself, that is closed in on itself and at the same time is given over to the infinity of the sea and that, from port to port, from tack to tack, from brothel to brothel, it goes as far as the colonies in search of the most precious treasures they conceal in their gardens, you will understand why the boat has not only been for our civilization, from the sixteenth century until the present, the great instrument of economic development (I have not been speaking of that today), but has been simultaneously the greatest reserve of the imagination. The ship is the heterotopia par excellence. In civilizations without boats, dreams dry up, espionage takes the place of adventure, and the police take the place of pirates.”

Michel Foucault, 1967. “Of Other Spaces”

The Smouldering

Francisco Bosch

“I started flamenco dancing in Spain, which is considered to be quite a masculine form of dance and I didn’t really think about my sexuality in relation, and how it would affect it. Personally, I didn’t realise I was gay until quite late into my training as a ballet dancer, but I have been lucky to feel that people accept you for what you are and not whom you sleep with.”

Blistering

This picture is cropped; to see the full picture click on it.

Kurt Brown

Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate.
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer’s lease hath all too short a date.
Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And often is his gold complexion dimm’d;
And every fair from fair some time declines,
By chance, or nature’s changing course, untrimm’d;
But thy eternal summer shall not fade
Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow’st;
Nor shall Death brag thou wand’rest in his shade,
When in eternal lines to time thou grow’st:
So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.

William Shakespeare. Sonatas