Gay Artists in Modern American Culture

Gay Artists in Modern American Culture PDF Author: Michael S. Sherry
Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press
ISBN: 9780807885895
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 304

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Book Description
Today it is widely recognized that gay men played a prominent role in defining the culture of mid-twentieth-century America, with such icons as Tennessee Williams, Edward Albee, Aaron Copland, Samuel Barber, Montgomery Clift, and Rock Hudson defining much of what seemed distinctly "American" on the stage and screen. Even though few gay artists were "out," their sexuality caused significant anxiety during a time of rampant antihomosexual attitudes. Michael Sherry offers a sophisticated analysis of the tension between the nation's simultaneous dependence on and fear of the cultural influence of gay artists. Sherry places conspiracy theories about the "homintern" (homosexual international) taking control and debasing American culture within the paranoia of the time that included anticommunism, anti-Semitism, and racism. Gay artists, he argues, helped shape a lyrical, often nationalist version of American modernism that served the nation's ambitions to create a cultural empire and win the Cold War. Their success made them valuable to the country's cultural empire but also exposed them to rising antigay sentiment voiced even at the highest levels of power (for example, by President Richard Nixon). Only late in the twentieth century, Sherry concludes, did suspicion slowly give way to an uneasy accommodation of gay artists' place in American life.

Gay Artists in Modern American Culture

Gay Artists in Modern American Culture PDF Author: Michael S. Sherry
Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press
ISBN: 9780807885895
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 304

Get Book

Book Description
Today it is widely recognized that gay men played a prominent role in defining the culture of mid-twentieth-century America, with such icons as Tennessee Williams, Edward Albee, Aaron Copland, Samuel Barber, Montgomery Clift, and Rock Hudson defining much of what seemed distinctly "American" on the stage and screen. Even though few gay artists were "out," their sexuality caused significant anxiety during a time of rampant antihomosexual attitudes. Michael Sherry offers a sophisticated analysis of the tension between the nation's simultaneous dependence on and fear of the cultural influence of gay artists. Sherry places conspiracy theories about the "homintern" (homosexual international) taking control and debasing American culture within the paranoia of the time that included anticommunism, anti-Semitism, and racism. Gay artists, he argues, helped shape a lyrical, often nationalist version of American modernism that served the nation's ambitions to create a cultural empire and win the Cold War. Their success made them valuable to the country's cultural empire but also exposed them to rising antigay sentiment voiced even at the highest levels of power (for example, by President Richard Nixon). Only late in the twentieth century, Sherry concludes, did suspicion slowly give way to an uneasy accommodation of gay artists' place in American life.

Art and Queer Culture

Art and Queer Culture PDF Author: Catherine Lord
Publisher: Phaidon Press
ISBN: 9780714849355
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 412

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Book Description


Outlaw Representation

Outlaw Representation PDF Author: Richard Meyer
Publisher: Beacon Press
ISBN: 9780807079355
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 390

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Book Description
Outlaw Representation is a Beacon Press publication.

Queer in Black and White

Queer in Black and White PDF Author: Stefanie K. Dunning
Publisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 0253221099
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 153

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Book Description
This book analyzes representative works of African American fiction, film, and music in which interracial desire appears in the context of same sex desire. In close readings of these "texts," Stefanie K. Dunning explores the ways in which the interracial intersects with queerness, blackness, whiteness, class, and black national identity. She shows that representations of interracial desire do not follow the logic of racial exclusion. Instead they are metaphorical and anti-biological. Rather than diluting race, interracial desire makes race visible. By invoking the interracial, black gay and lesbian artists can remake our conception of blackness.

Homintern

Homintern PDF Author: Gregory Woods
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300219563
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 455

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Book Description
In a hugely ambitious study which crosses continents, languages, and almost a century, Gregory Woods identifies the ways in which homosexuality has helped shape Western culture. Extending from the trials of Oscar Wilde to the gay liberation era, this book examines a period in which increased visibility made acceptance of homosexuality one of the measures of modernity. Woods shines a revealing light on the diverse, informal networks of gay people in the arts and other creative fields. Uneasily called “the Homintern” (an echo of Lenin’s “Comintern”) by those suspicious of an international homosexual conspiracy, such networks connected gay writers, actors, artists, musicians, dancers, filmmakers, politicians, and spies. While providing some defense against dominant heterosexual exclusion, the grouping brought solidarity, celebrated talent, and, in doing so, invigorated the majority culture. Woods introduces an enormous cast of gifted and extraordinary characters, most of them operating with surprising openness; but also explores such issues as artistic influence, the coping strategies of minorities, the hypocrisies of conservatism, and the effects of positive and negative discrimination. Traveling from Harlem in the 1910s to 1920s Paris, 1930s Berlin, 1950s New York and beyond, this sharply observed, warm-spirited book presents a surpassing portrait of twentieth-century gay culture and the men and women who both redefined themselves and changed history.

The Queer Composition of America's Sound

The Queer Composition of America's Sound PDF Author: Nadine Hubbs
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520937953
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 295

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Book Description
In this vibrant and pioneering book, Nadine Hubbs shows how a gifted group of Manhattan-based gay composers were pivotal in creating a distinctive "American sound" and in the process served as architects of modern American identity. Focusing on a talented circle that included Aaron Copland, Virgil Thomson, Leonard Bernstein, Marc Blitzstein, Paul Bowles, David Diamond, and Ned Rorem, The Queer Composition of America's Sound homes in on the role of these artists' self-identification—especially with tonal music, French culture, and homosexuality—in the creation of a musical idiom that even today signifies "America" in commercials, movies, radio and television, and the concert hall.

Art and Homosexuality

Art and Homosexuality PDF Author: Christopher Reed
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0195399072
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 298

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Book Description
A comprehensive and lavishly illustrated exploration of the relationship between art and homosexuality. This is the first book of its kind, a provocative, globe-spanning narrative history that considers the fascinating reciprocity between gay sexuality and art from the ancient world to today.

Outlooks

Outlooks PDF Author: Peter Horne
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134803087
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 209

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Book Description
A comprehensive exploration of what constitutes a lesbian and gay artist and what differentiates them from their audience.

Outlooks

Outlooks PDF Author: Peter Horne
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134803079
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 317

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Book Description
Outlook explores the relationship of lesbian and gay sexualities to visual representation. It reflects the richness of lesbian and gay ways of producing and reading visual cultures, at the same time as it tackles such burning issues as the advantage of adopting a queer perspective on past art, the responses of lesbian and gay artists to the AIDS crisis, and society's attempts to censor homosexual art. This volume provides a space for lesbian and gay artists to exhibit their work and discuss its relationship to sexuality. It allows for a wide ranging theoretical and historical discussion of the place of lesbian and gay men within visual cultures and shows how much has been missed by a heterosexist approach to art history and the study of culture. Richly illustrated, this book includes statements by contemporary lesbian and gay artists, photographers and performers as well as articles by art historians, cultural theorists and lesbians and gay activists.

Hide/Seek

Hide/Seek PDF Author: Jonathan D. Katz
Publisher: Smithsonian Institution
ISBN: 1588342999
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 296

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Book Description
An entirely new interpretation of modern American portraiture based on the history of sexual difference. Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture, companion volume to an exhibition of the same name at the National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, traces the defining presence of same-sex desire in American portraiture through a seductive selection of more than 140 full-color illustrations, drawings, and portraits from leading American artists. Arcing from the turn of the twentieth century, through the emergence of the modern gay liberation movement in 1969, the tragedies of the AIDS epidemic, and to the present, Hide/Seek openly considers what has long been suppressed or tacitly ignored, even by the most progressive sectors of our society: the influence of gay and lesbian artists in creating American modernism. Hide/Seek shows how questions of gender and sexual identity dramatically shaped the artistic practices of influential American artists such as Thomas Eakins, Romaine Brooks, Marsden Hartley, Georgia O'Keeffe, Charles Demuth, Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, Andrew Wyeth, Andy Warhol, Robert Mapplethorpe, and many more—in addition to artists of more recent works such as Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Glenn Ligon, Catherine Opie, and Cass Bird. The authors argue that despite the late-nineteenth-century definition and legal codification of the “homosexual,” in reality, questions of sexuality always remained fluid and continually redefined by artists concerned with the act of portrayal. In particular, gay and lesbian artists—of but not fully in the society they portrayed—occupied a position of influential marginality, from which vantage point they crafted innovative and revolutionary ways of painting portraits. Their resistance to society's attempt to proscribe them forced them to develop new visual vocabularies by which to code, disguise, and thereby express their subjects' identities—and also their own. Bringing together for the first time new scholarship in the history of American sexuality and new research in American portraiture, Hide/Seek charts the heretofore hidden impact of gay and lesbian artists on American art and portraiture and creates the basis for the necessary reassessment of the careers of major American artists—both gay and straight—as well as of portraiture itself.