The spotlight falls this month on a number of new queer art publications that open up fresh avenues in a burgeoning canon, covering areas such as trans history, queer photographic culture and the places that shaped LGBTQ+ pioneers. We asked the authors of three new publications about their influences and how their respective books contribute to queer thinking and theory.
Photography: A Queer History by Flora Dunster and Theo Gordon,
Widening the photography focus
“When we began to research the book, we realised that there aren’t many publications which approach the idea of ‘queer photography’ through a wide lens,” say the academics Flora Dunster and Theo Gordon about why it was important to write Photography: A Queer History. “We wanted to offer a cross-section of work from across time and space to allow a broader picture to come into focus.”
The publication is divided into ten chapters, analysing topics such as photography’s relationship to performance, fantasy and archives, while others centre on genres like documentary, landscape and portraiture. “We explore how LGBTQ+ photographers have used the medium to explore sexuality and gender, picture queer subjectivity and chart queer histories,” they say. Crucially, the entire texture of the book is informed by feminism: “It is not a standalone focus, but something woven into its fabric through work ranging from historical images like Diana Davies’s portrait of Lavender Menace (1970), to contemporary practitioners such as A.L. Steiner.”
Younger photographers and lesser known names also feature alongside “canonical” figures like Robert Mapplethorpe, Nan Goldin and Peter Hujar. “In a chapter on portraiture, Cecil Beaton sits alongside Laurence Philomene and Lorenzo Triburgo, both of whom are part of a new generation of queer artists and are making work from a trans/non-binary perspective,” say the authors. Other practitioners, such as Rotimi Fani-Kayode and Honey Lee Cottrell, are well known within lesbian and gay circles, but have not received the same level of art-world attention as, for example, the 20th-century artist Claude Cahun, say the authors.
“This book contributes to the field by presenting a deliberately intergenerational and transnational history. We don’t offer a linear story, but rather explore the uneven ways in which LGBTQ+ sexuality and politics have appeared in photographic cultures across time and around the world.”
• Flora Dunster and Theo Gordon, Photography: A Queer History, Ilex Press, 256pp, £40 (hb)
About Face: Stonewall, Revolt, and New Queer Art by Jonathan D. Katz
Where queer and trans intersect
About Face: Stonewall, Revolt, and New Queer Art by Jonathan Katz also attempts to present a different historical perspective. The publication follows on from a 2019 show of the same name at the Wrightwood 659 space in Chicago. The artist selection is identical but the book allows a more expansive reading of individual works, Katz says.
“The [featured] artists are trans, female, male and intersex, as well as African or of African descent, Indigenous, Asian, white and Latinx, and/or some combination of all of the above,” according to a publisher’s statement. Zanele Muholi, Greer Lankton, Keioui Keijaun Thomas and Jerome Caja are among the artists featured.
“We have unfortunately tended to think of queer history and trans history as separate entities, but the book instead aims to underscore how they are continuously mutually implicated. Since queerness turns on the idea of same-gender attraction, the very question of gender, what it is and how it’s constituted stand at the centre of both trans and queer,” Katz says.
The author adds: “Thus gender, its social codes and constructions, loom for both even in instances when the subject or artist is not explicitly trans. We aim not to erase trans specificity, for there is admittedly a separate, fraught trans history, but to imbricate queer and trans such that each can be thought a subset of the other.”
Every work in About Face seeks to push the viewer out of the familiar, Katz says. Does this mean it moves beyond the usual LGBTQ+ categorisation? “I mean quite explicitly that the book seeks to push the reader beyond thinking that same-sex desire is self-evident or obvious. In addressing the imbrication of queer in trans and vice versa, we are questioning what sex/gender is and whether there are in fact many more ways to cut the sex/gender pie than we’ve allowed,” he says.
• Jonathan D. Katz, About Face: Stonewall, Revolt, and New Queer Art, Monacelli Press, 256pp, £45 (hb)
Nothing Ever Just Disappears: Seven Hidden Queer Histories by Diarmuid Hester
Uncovering hidden histories
Meanwhile, the cultural historian Diarmuid Hester explains how important place is to queer history in Nothing Ever Just Disappears: Seven Hidden Queer Histories. “Some of the queer figures I talk about are well known, like the novelist E.M. Forster [in Cambridge] and some are little known, like the film-maker Jack Smith [in New York], but in every case the ‘hidden history’ I uncover has never been told before. These are wholly new histories, uniquely attentive to how life, art and sexuality are deeply enmeshed with a sense of place,” he says.
His research has uncovered new aspects of queer scholarship including the queer suffragettes who were integral to the early 20th-century activist women’s organisation. “Radical women like Vera Holme, Edith Craig, Cicely Hamilton and others make brief cameos in the work of lesbian historians like Emily Hamer and Martha Vicinus, but this is really the first time that their stories take centre stage,” Hester says.
He wanted to find proof that queerness has a place in a world that often seemed so inhospitable. “Much of the world seems to be made by and for straights, and as a result LGBTQ+ people are often made to feel like we don’t belong,” Hester says. “This book is full of stories of people defiantly creating artworks, and communities, and homes, which show we have an inalienable right to be here—and queer!”
• Diarmuid Hester, Nothing Ever Just Disappears: Seven Hidden Queer Histories, Pegasus Books, 368pp, £25 (hb)