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Notes
Dean Sameshima (b. 1971 in Torrance, California) lives and works in Berlin. In his* art he* explores the history of male* homosexuality, subcultures and the politics of desire through photography, painting, video, and installation. Sameshima received his* Bachelor’s degree from the California Institute of Arts in Valencia, California, and an MFA from the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California. He* is represented by Gavlak Gallery in Los Angeles/Palm Beach. For more information, see the artist’s website: http://www.deansameshima.com.
I start my analysis from the presentation of IBD(WY) which was part of the exhibition Art AIDS America (11/01/2016–04/02/2017) at the Alphawood Gallery in Chicago. I note that the series, which now consists of several editions, also included fewer and partly different photographs in previous publication contexts (exhibitions, artist books, etc.).
The fact that, to the best of my current knowledge, there are no comparable photographic (art) projects that depict L.A.’s baths for MSM from the inside during, or shortly after, the peak of the AIDS epidemic characterizes IBD(WY) as unique. The only two exceptions known to me are Frank Melleno’s polaroids taken during the spring and summer of 1978 at the Fairoaks Hotel (a San Francisco bathhouse) and a photograph by Michael Buitron from 2008 that depicts a private room of the Klyt Bathhouse in Los Angeles in homage to Sameshima’s IBD(WY) (Ode to Dean Sameshima; Room 15, Klyt Bathhouse).
For a short introduction, see John Beynon, “Bathhouses and Sex Clubs,” in Gay Histories and Cultures, ed. George E. Haggerty (New York: Taylor & Francis Inc, 2000), 155-59; Allan Bérubé, “The History of Gay Bathhouses,” in Policing Public Sex: Queer Politics and the Future of AIDS Activism, ed. Dangerous Bedfellows (Boston, MA: South End Pr, 1999), 187-220.
In the context of this article, I understand cruising as a deliberate, active, and usually mobile search for anonymous sex by homosexual men* in a social environment, which requires everyone involved to be able to decipher coded behavior or coded language. For the history of gay cruising and its political and cultural forces, see Alex Espinoza, CRUISING: An Intimate History of a Radical Pastime (North America: Unnamed Press, 2019).
In commercial LGBTIQ+ establishments (such as bars, nightclubs, baths or sex clubs), a darkroom can also be a cruising zone where anonymous sexual activities take place. The abbreviation LGBTIQ+ stands for lesbian, gay, trans, inter, queer and other sexual and/or gender identities that deviate from heteronormative ones. It should be noted that by choosing this acronym, I am not seeking to simplify things but rather to be open up to a plurality of sexualities and gender identities, thus hoping to contribute to the social and artistic recognition of the people who identify with and form these communities.
The “blank” is a basic concept of reception aesthetics introduced into literary theory by Wolfgang Iser, which refers to the punctual incompleteness of each picture. See Wolfgang Iser, Der Implizite Leser: Kommunikationsformen des Romans von Bunyan bis Beckett (München: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 1972). On the function of blanks in art, see Wolfgang Kemp, ed, Der Betrachter ist im Bild: Kunstwissenschaft und Rezeptionsästhetik (Berlin: Dietrich Reimer Verlag, 1992).
For an introduction to the studies on visual culture, see Sigrid Schade and Silke Wenk, Studien zur visuellen Kultur: Einführung in ein transdisziplinäres Forschungsfeld (Bielefeld: Transcript, 2011).
The fact that there is no simple connection between visual representation and political power for minoritarian subject positions has been pointed out by Peggy Phelan, Unmarked: The Politics of Performance (New York; London: Routledge, 1993) and Johanna Schaffer, Ambivalenzen der Sichtbarkeit: Über die visuellen Strukturen der Anerkennung (Bielefeld: Transcript, 2008) as well as others.
On the politicization of the gaze in queer communities as both a form of harm from intolerant, hegemonic authority figures and as an identifying mode of recognition, solidarity, and desire, see Caroline Evans and Lorraine Gamman, “The gaze revisited, or reviewing queer viewing,” in A Queer Romance: Lesbians, Gay Men and Popular Culture, ed. Paul Burston and Colin Richardson (New York: Routledge, 1995), 13-56.
See Gary T. Marx, “Surveillance,” in Encyclopedia of Privacy, Vol. 2, ed. William G. Staples (Westport, London: Greenwood, 2007), 534-535.
Andrea Mubi Brighenti, “Artveillance: At the Crossroads of Art and Surveillance,” in Surveillance & Society 7, no. 2 (2010): 175-186. Zac Blas, Kat Köppert, Jessica Lingel, and Magda Szcześniak have confirmed this thesis by looking at different phenomena of art and visual culture through the interdisciplinary lens of surveillance studies and queer theory. Zach Blas, ed, In Practice: Opacities. Camera Obscura: Feminism, Culture, and Media Studies 31, ((2 92)), September 2016; Katrin Köppert, “Feministische Kunst und Überwachung. Eine un-/heilvolle Liaison?,” Heinrich Böll Stiftung, April 1, 2019. https://www.gwi-boell.de/de/2019/04/01/feministische-kunst-und-ueberwachung-eine-un-heilvolle-liason <accessed on January 24, 2021>; Jessica Lingel, “Dazzle Camouflage as Queer Counter Conduct,” European Journal of Cultural Studies, (February 2020): 13; Magda Szcésniak, “Blending In and Standing Out – Camouflage and Masking as Queer Tactics of Negotiating Visibility,” View. Theories and Practices of Visual Culture 5, (2014): 1-28. For a discussion on what (philosophical) potentials the merger of surveillance studies and queer theory hold, see in particular Nadine Dannenberg, “Queer Surveillance Studies. Überlegungen zu der Schnittstelle von Queer Theory und Surveillance Studies,” GENDER 3, (2019): 26-40; Gary Kafer and Daniel Grinberg, “Editorial: Queer Surveillance,” Surveillance & Society 17, no. 5 (2019): 592-601.
Phelan, Unmarked, 6.
Lee Edelman, Homographesis: Essays in Gay Literary and Cultural Theory (London and New York: Routledge, 1994); Rosemary Hennessy, Profit and Pleasure: Sexual Identities in Late Capitalism (New York and London: Routledge, 2000).
Phelan, Unmarked, 6.
On the politics of visibility as a highly contested topic within queer theory and activism see, among others, Edelman, Homographesis; Hennessy, Profit and Pleasure; Peggy Phelan, Unmarked; Johanna Schaffer, Ambivalenzen der Sichtbarkeit.
See Susette Min, “The Mourning After: Art of Loss,” in The Morning After: Art of Loss (Brochure for the Exhibition of the Same Name in The Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery in Los Angeles 03/03/1999-04/18/1999), ed. Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery (Los Angeles, 1999), 4-18; Susette Min, “Remains to Be Seen: Reading the Works of Dean Sameshima and Khanh.” In Loss: The Politics of Mourning, edited by David L. Eng and David Kazanjian, 229-250. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002; Andy Campbell, Bound Together. Leather, Sex, Archives, and Contemporary Art (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2020), 112.
See Rock Hushka, “It’s an Image of Sex. It’s Not about AIDS. The Legacy of the AIDS Crisis on American Art (It’s Never Not about HIV),” GIA Reader 22, no. 3 (2011). https://www.giarts.org/article/it%E2%80%99s-image-sex-it%E2%80%99s-not-about-aids <accessed on June 12, 2020>; Paul Schulz and Christian Lütjens, eds, Positive Pictures: A Gay History (Berlin: Bruno Gmünder Verlag GmbH, 2013), 193; Rock Hushka: “Undetectable. The Presence of HIV in Contemporary American Art.” In Art AIDS America, edited by Rock Hushka and Jonathan David Katz (Seattle; London: University of Washington Press, 2015), 139; Campbell, Bound Together, 112.
See Michael Buitron, “From Laud Humphries to Dean Sameshima: An Ode to the Continuum of Desire (Part 1),” in Leap Into the Void (Blog), 10/07/2008. https://imoralist.blogspot.com/2008/10/from-laud-humphries-to-dean-sameshima.html <accessed on May 15, 2021>; Andy Campbell, “Dean Sameshima: Public Sex (Brochure for the Exhibition of the Same Name in the She Works Flexible gallery in Houston 05/05/2016-06/03/2016),” 2016, [no page].
See Jih-Fei Cheng, “Development is a Façade: Dean Sameshima’s In Between Days (Without You) and the Queer Ecologies of Downtown Los Angeles,” Lecture on March 11, 2017 in the context of the conference Viral Representation: On Aids and Art. A Conference (03/10/2017-03/11/2017) at Alphawood Gallery in Chicago. https://vimeo.com/210682462 <accessed on May 15, 2021>.
See Oliver Klaassen, “Fotografische Ambiguität & getarnte Queerness: Der Versuch einer exemplarischen Verhältnisbestimmung,” in Mehrdeutigkeit gestalten: Ambiguität und die Bildung demokratischer Haltungen in Kunst und Pädagogik, eds. Ansgar Schnurr, Sabine Dengel, Julia Hagenberg, and Linda Kelch (Bielefeld: Transcript, 2021), 253-271.
See Min, “The Mourning After,” 4-18; Min, “Remains to Be Seen,” 229-250.
Cheng, “Development is a Façade.”
See Andy Campbell, “Dean Sameshima,” [no page]; Campbell, Bound Together, 112; Hushka, “It’s an Image of Sex”; Hushka, “Undetectable,” 128-141; Klaassen, “Fotografische Ambiguität & getarnte Queerness,” 253-271.
See Buitron, “From Laud Humphries to Dean Sameshima”; Campbell, “Dean Sameshima,” [no page]; Campbell, Bound Together, 112.
Most of the research on IBD(WY) predominantly features incorrect information about the shooting locations. For example, Rock Hushka and Susette Min mistakenly refer to IBD(WY)’s recording locations as sex clubs (Hushka, “Undetectable,” 236). Christian Lütjens and Paul Schulz speak of “orphaned darkroom flatbeds” (Schulz and Lütjens, Positive Pictures, 193).
Following poststructuralist and deconstructivist approaches, which emphasize the performative and transformative potential of the visual, my analysis of Sameshima’s IBD(WY) is based on a broadened approach to representation, which combines semiotics, discourse analysis, and gender studies. The critique of representations aims not only to make visible formative and often unquestioned image patterns but also to deconstruct and, if possible, change them. More details on the topic of the critique of representation can be found—among others—in Stuart Hall, ed, Representation: Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices (London: Sage Publications Ltd., 1997).
I developed this notation together with my colleagues Cathérine Ludwig-Ockenfels, Jana Tiborra, and Katharina Wolf for the international conference Renegotiating Minoritarian In__Visibilities (11/12-11/14/2019, Justus Liebig University Giessen, Germany) to mark the relationship between visibility and invisibility as a potential reciprocal relationship.
For an introduction to the queer tactic of camouflage in art and visual culture, see Jonathan D. Katz and David C. Ward, Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution, 2010; Szcésniak, “Blending In and Standing Out.” For an introduction to the queer tactic of opacity in art and visual culture, see Blas, In Practice: Opacities.
What all of the following conceptualizations, with their focus on the illegible and unrecognizable, have in common is the success or failure of getting the (coded) message across: queer darkness (Jack Halberstam, The Queer Art of Failure (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011)), queer escape (José Esteban Muñoz, Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity (New York and London: New York University Press, 2009)), queer opacity (Blas, ed. In Practice: Opacities), queer camouflage (Katz and Ward, Hide/Seek; Szcésniak, “Blending In and Standing Out,” 1-28), poetic postmodernism (Jonathan D. Katz, “How AIDS Changed American Art,” in Art AIDS America, ed. Rock Hushka and Jonathan David Katz (Seattle; London: University of Washington Press, 2015). 24–45), queer silence and passivity (Jonathan D. Katz, “John Cage’s Queer Silence; or, how to Avoid Making Matters Worse,” GLQ 5, no. 2 (1999): 231-252), abstract drag (Renate Lorenz, Queer Art: A Freak Theory (Bielefeld: transcript, 2012)), queer abstraction (David Getsy, “Then Queer Theses on Abstraction,” in Queer Abstraction, ed. Jared Ledesma (Des Moines: Des Moines Art Center, 2019), 65-75).
Very much like what queer theory does, I see queer as a verb in the sense of queering normative knowledges, identities, and institutions. Queer theory is a theoretical approach that goes beyond queer studies to question the categories and assumptions on which current popular and academic understandings are based. Some unifying features of most queer theories are: resisting the categorization of people; challenging the idea of essential identities, questioning binaries; demonstrating how things are contextual, based on geography, history, culture, etc.; examining the power relations underlying certain understandings, categories, identities, etc. For an introduction to queer theory, see, among others, Annemarie Jagose, Queer Theory: An Introduction (New York: New York University Press, 1997); Donald E. Hall and Annamarie Jagose, eds, The Routledge Queer Studies Reader (London; New York: Routledge, 2012).
STEAM. A Quarterly Journal for Men, 3, no. 4 (Winter 1995/96). Sameshima’s photograph of the Alondra Park tearoom can be found on page 418, the other two photographs of the Dockweiler State Beach tearoom are on page 443.
See Aaron Betsky, Queer Space: Architecture and Same Sex Desire (New York: William Morrow, 1997), 164.
The atmosphere in 1350’s popular small rooms was described by David Haldane in 1986 as follows, “Some of the doors stand open, revealing single black-lighted beds upon which naked patrons rest in various attitudes of repose. Most doors stay shut, hiding from view what takes place within the tiny rooms they protect.” David Haldane, “Gay Bathhouse Under Pressure to Find Privacy for Sexual Acts,” Los Angeles Times, April 27, 1986. https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1986-04-27-hl-23919-story.html <accessed on October 13, 2019>
Lisa Richardson, “Zoning Board Rules That Bathhouse Is Sex Club: Regulation: Decision Mean Officials Will Seek to Close Wilmington Operation. Owner Denies Sex Was Allowed on the Premises and Blames Actions on Homophobia,” Los Angeles Times, November 18, 1993. https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1993-11-18-me-58196-story.html <accessed on July 1, 2020>
Sameshima, from an unpublished conversation with me recorded on September 9 in 2019 in his* Berlin studio.
Although, according to the artist, hundreds of photographs were taken in this context, he* selected only fifteen photographs for the series. Sameshima, unpublished conversation, 09/09/2019.
For a good introduction on the art history of the bed, see the catalog which was published on the occasion of the exhibition Sleepless – The Bed in History and Contemporary Art (30/01-06/7/2017) at the 21st Haus of the Belvedere in Vienna. Agnes Husslein-Arco and Mario Codognato, eds, Schlaflos – Das Bett in Geschichte und Gegenwartskunst / Sleepless – The Bed in History and Contemporary Art (Wien: Belvedere, 2015).
On the bed and its (photographic) reproduction as a sign of intimacy, see Thomas Jung and Stefan Müller-Dohm, “Kultur und Natur im Schlafraum,” in Kulturinszenierungen, eds. Klaus Neumann-Braun and Stefan Müller-Dohm (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1995), 239-261.
See Agnes Husslein-Arco, “Vorwort / Foreword,” in Schlaflos – Das Bett in Geschichte und Gegenwartskunst / Sleepless – The Bed in History and Contemporary Art, eds. Agnes Husslein-Arco and Mario Codognato (Wien: Belvedere, 2015), 8.
David Haldane, “Anti-AIDS Crusader Attacks Relocation of Gay Bathhouse,” Los Angeles Times, July 17, 1986. https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1986-07-17-cb-21512-story.html <accessed on October 13, 2019>
Sheryl Stolberg, “Bathhouse Near School Appeals Closure Order,” Los Angeles Times, July 7, 1988. https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1988-07-07-me-8099-story.html <accessed on May 25, 2020>.
Glen Moering in Haldane, “Gay Bathhouse Under Pressure.”
Erwin J. Haeberle, “Die Schließung der Schwulenbäder in San Francisco,” in Sexualwissenschaft und Sexualpolitik. Spannungsverhältnisse in Europa, Amerika und Asien, eds. Rolf Gindorf and Erwin J. Haeberle (Berlin and New York: Walter de Gryter, 1992), 187-194.
Another example is the case of Bowers v. Hardwick. In 1986 Michael Hardwick was caught by a policeman* at home in bed with another man*, and this instance led to the landmark decision by the US Supreme Court to declare sexual intercourse between two adults of the same sex illegal. For more information see Ali Khan, “The Invasion of Sexual Privacy,” San Diego Law Review 23, 1986: 957-977.
Michel Foucault positions sexuality as the central hinge between the two spheres of the private and the public spheres, stating that their genesis is constitutively interdependent. See Michel Foucault, Der Wille zum Wissen. Sexualität und Wahrheit I (Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 1977).
See Marx, “Surveillance,” 534-535.
See Lauren Berlant and Michael Warner, “Sex in der Öffentlichkeit,” in Outside. Die Politik queerer Räume, eds. Matthais Hesse, Marc Siegel, and Michaela Wünsch (Berlin: b_books 2005 [2000]), 77-104.
See Carole Pateman, “Feminist Critiques of the Public/Private Dichotomy,” in Public and Private in Social Life, eds. Stanley I. Benn and Gerald F. Gaus (New York: St. Martin’s, 1983), 281-303; Karin Hausen, “Öffentlichkeit und Privatheit. Gesellschaftspolitische Konstruktionen und die Geschichte der Geschlechterbeziehungen,” in Frauengeschichte – Geschlechtergeschichte, eds. Karin Hausen and Heide Wunder (Frankfurt/Main, New York: Campus, 1992), 81-88; Elisabeth Klaus and Ricarda Drüeke, “Öffentlichkeit und Privatheit: Frauenöffentlichkeiten und feministische Öffentlichkeiten,” in Handbuch Frauen- und Geschlechterforschung, eds. Ruth Becker and Beate Kortendiek (Wiesbaden: VS Verlag, 2008), 237–244.
Tattelman, Ira, “The Meaning at the Wall: Tracing the Gay Bathhouse,” in Queers in Space: Communities/Public Spaces/Sites of Resistance, eds. Gordon Brent Ingram, Anne-Marie Bouthillette, and Yolanda Retter, (Seattle, Wash: Bay Press, 1997), 400.
This fact has also been demonstrated by other photographic art projects: Ryszard Kisiel travelled through Poland in the 1970s and -80s and photographed the cruising spots (bars, bathhouses, and parks) of cities such as Warsaw, Krakow, and Łódź as well as small towns such as Ploch, Radom, and Slupsk. Kaucyila Brooke has an ongoing documentary project entitled The Boy Mechanic (since 1996), which, among other things, consists of photographs of current and former lesbian bar locations in San Diego, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and at the East Bay. During the winter of 2014-15, and fifty years after an essential gay resource was published, Bob Damron’s Address Book (1965), Forster Rudolph visited and photographed 78 addresses of gay bars and social spaces in the United States indexed by Damron in his* guide.
Jeffrey Walkowiak, “Resisting Documentation: Public Parks and Sex Clubs with Dean Sameshima,” Pablo Internacional Magazine, (2006): 12.
For example, Min incorrectly assumes that all the photographs from IBD(WY) were taken in the same room. See Min, “Remains to Be Seen,” 236.
The history of baths for MSM in the 1980s and -90s shows that—contrary to discriminatory, homophobic, and stereotypical accusations—the owners demonstrably tried to actively counteract the spread of HIV/AIDS through preventive measures. See for example Ralph Bolton, John Vincke, and Rudolf Mak, “Gay Baths Revisited: An Empirical Analysis,” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 1, no. 3 (1994): 255-73; and Diane Binson and William J. Woods, eds., Gay Bathhouses and Public Health Policy (New York: Routledge, 2003).
Tattelman, “The Meaning at the Wall,” 394.
Prior to the discovery of HIV/AIDS in 1982 there were approximately 160 baths for MSM located in most major cities in the US, in 1994 there were only 61 baths left. Tattelman, “The Meaning at the Wall,” 399.
Richardson, “Zoning Board Rules That Bathhouse Is Sex Club.”
Richardson, “Zoning Board Rules That Bathhouse Is Sex Club.”
Dean Sameshima [homosexuals_anonymous], “A very important Southern California institution for gay, bi, queer men has closed due…” [Instagram-Post, June 16, 2020], Instagram. https://www.instagram.com/p/CBgRxfcIZzn/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link <accessed on July 1, 2020>.
Jonathan Weinberg, Speaking for Vice: Homosexuality in the Art of Charles Demuth, Marsden Hartley, and the First American Avant-Garde (London: Yale Univ Press, 1995), 19.
Tattelman, “The Meaning at the Wall,” 403.
George Chauncey, New York: Gender Gay, Urban Culture – and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890-1940 (New York: Basic Books, 1995), 398.
In particular, see the artwork by Patrick Angus, Julien Ceccaldi, Madison Donnelly, Elmgreen & Dragset, John Burton Harter, Danny Jauregui, Rori Midhani, Oren Pinhassi, Prem Sahib, João Pedro Vale and Nuno Alexandre Ferreira, John Walter, and Michael Wyne.
For example, Leo Bersani describes them as “ruthlessly ranked, hierarchized, and competitive.” Leo Bersani, “Is the Rectum a Grave?,” October 43, (1987): 206.
Something Ira Tattelman also points out: “While the baths may have replayed power dynamics and mirrored the dominant masculine script of mainstream society, they also helped reconfigure and redefine that power. The erotics of gay sex use irony and simulation. The roles of top and bottom, even the divisions between heterosexuals and homosexuals were often mobile in the baths. These reversals began to subvert forms of domination. Acts of masculinity became eroticised so that they stopped being analogous with straight society and became something else.” Tattelman, “The Meaning at the Wall,” 405.
Hannah Rose Shell, Hide and Seek: Camouflage, Photography, and the Media of Reconnaissance (New York: Zone Books, 2012), 10.
Shell, Hide and Seek, 10.
Hardy Blechmann and Alex Newman, eds., DPM Disruptive Pattern Material. An Encyclopaedia of Camouflage: Nature, Military, Culture (London: DPM, 2004), 122, 124-150, 232, 248; Tim Newark, Camouflage (London: Thames & Hudson, 2007), 53-73, 84-85; Tim Newark, Quentin Newark and J. F. Borsarello, Brassey’s Book of Camouflage (London: Brassey’s, 2007), 15-20.
Jayne Wilkinson, “Art Documents: The Politics of Visibility in Contemporary Photography,” InVisible Culture: An Electronic Journal for Visual Culture 22, (2015). http://ivc.lib.rochester.edu/art-documents-the-politics-of-visibility-in-contemporary-photography/ <accessed on January 24, 2021>
Shell, Hide and Seek.
Campbell, “Dean Sameshima,” [no page].
In particular, see the artworks by Michael Buitron, Tom Burr or Dino Dinco.
Katz, “How AIDS Changed American Art,” 37. Poetic postmodernism as artistic strategy, hiding its real emotional intention by pretending not to express anything personal or private, would go against the premise of postmodernism, evoking the death of the author. Katz criticizes Roland Barthes’ 1967 text The Death of the Author, which emphasizes the responsibility of every reader in the process of constructing meaning in the context of art and thus locates the meaning of an artwork in the viewer. Katz, “How AIDS Changed American Art,” 35-36.
Schulz and Lütjens, Positive Pictures, 190; translated by O. K.
Schulz and Lütjens, Positive Pictures, 193; translated by O. K.
Schulz and Lütjens, Positive Pictures, 189; translated by O. K.
Hushka, “It’s an Image of Sex.”
Édouard Glissant, Philosophie de la Relation, trans. O. K. (Paris: Gallimard, 2009, 69); Édouard Glissant, Poétique de la Relation (Paris: Gallimard, 1990), 203-209.
Glissant, Poétique de la Relation, 125-134, 204.
In short, an attitude towards the world that Glissant associates with the dazzling process of creolization. Édouard Glissant, Kultur und Identität. Ansätze zu einer Poetik der Vielheit, trans. by B. Thill (Heidelberg: Wunderhorn, [1996] 2005), 7-22.
Nicholas de Villiers, Opacity and the Closet: Queer Tactics in Foucault, Barthes, and Warhol (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014), 22.
Nicholas de Villiers, “Afterthoughts on Queer Opacity,” InVisible Culture: An Electronic Journal of Visual Culture 22, (2015). https://ivc.lib.rochester.edu/afterthoughts-on-queer-opacity/ <accessed on January 24, 2021>.
De Villiers, “Afterthoughts on Queer Opacity.”
See, among others, Blas, In Practice; Köppert, “Feministische Kunst und Überwachung”; Anna T., Opacity – Minority – Improvisation: An Exploration of the Closet Through Queer Slangs and Postcolonial Theory (Bielefeld: transcript, 2020).
Zac Blas interviewed by Alicia Eler, “The Faceless of Tomorrow Begins Today,” Hyperallergic, June 24, 2013. https://hyperallergic.com/73888/the-facelessness-of-tomorrow-begins-today/ <accessed on January 24, 2021>
Lingel, “Dazzle Camouflage,” 13.
Lingel, “Dazzle Camouflage,” 13.
E.g. affiliations between different groups affected by AIDS, such as gay men*, other MSM, sex workers, friends, family, etc.
It was the mass media reporting, especially with its victimizing and stigmatizing images of emaciated dying men*, which repeatedly marked the bed as a place of illness, suffering, and death. For example, one campaign published in 1992 by the Benetton company, in collaboration with the photographer Oliviero Toscani, shows the dying David Kirby, infected with HIV, being photographed in bed surrounded by his* desperate relatives.
In chronological order: Dangerous Bedfellows, eds., Policing Public Sex: Queer Politics and the Future of AIDS Activism (Boston, MA: South End Pr, 1996); Joel Sanders, ed., Stud: Architectures of Masculinity (New York Princeton Architectural Press, 1996); Betsky, Queer Space; William L. Leap, ed, Public Sex/Gay Space (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999).
For example, members of the organization Gay and Lesbian HIV Prevention Activists (GALHPA) (formed in 1995) have used the mainstream press to defame baths for MSM and gay promiscuity. Beynon, “Bathhouses and Sex Clubs,” 159.
The activist group SexPanic!, founded in New York in 1997, not only condemned the curtailment of sexual freedom for homosexuals, but also tried to undermine the problematic equation of public sex and unsafe sex.
Douglas Crimp, “How to Have Promiscuity in an Epidemic,” October 43, (1987): 270.
Betsky describes the hardly visible and ephemeral character of cruising as follows: “The space of cruising is difficult to see […]. Its most fundamental characteristic is its ephemerality: it is a space that appears for a moment, then is gone, only to reappear when the circumstances are right. This queer space appears through an act of transformation that turns separation into its opposite, which is connection.” Betsky, Queer Space, 142.
Walkowiak, “Resisting Documentation,” 12.
John Paul Ricco describes cruising as a form of negligence that is resistant to a goal and a finality. John Paul Ricco, The Logic of the Lure (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 11.
José Esteban Muñoz, “Ephemera as Evidence: Introductory Notes to Queer Acts,” Women & Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory 8, no. 2 (1996): 6.
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