#but like i said framing it as a trans femme issue ONLY on part of tme folks is pretty fucking nasty
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I think some white trans people have a hard time coming to terms with the whole asian fetishization as a form of gender expression thing because I guess sometimes it's a source of idk "comfort" in a very confusing time but like it's not remotely a good excuse let alone a source of much empathy from me. Cause like as a poc who enjoys anime and frankly a lot of east asian media, I get how being presented with the idea that different gender expression than what we're used to in American culture can be very eye opening for a young trans person or even someone well into adulthood who's just coming to terms with their identity as a trans person, but I'm also conscious and try to remain conscious that that gender presentation, the perceived room to play with gender in a different way than what we know is different for people across cultures and even though I grew up in the US I've been made to feel very hyper conscious and conflicted about my own gender, both assigned and not, because of the way my ethnic culture's ideas of gender are perceived by white people.
Like take comfort from the idea that the option to express your gender in ways outside our own cultural pressures and presets exists, sure, but again, be conscious that the PEOPLE (and frankly, characters) you're seeing are rooted in a completely different set of cultural influences, rules, and standards within those societies that effect their gender presentation. Many times it may look gnc to you but to someone else who's actively living this sort of gender presentation or ease of playing with it, it may not be gnc at all and you reducing it to how you feel as someone outside that culture may end up being emasculating or forcing masculinity on someone who sees themselves as completely masculine or as feminine in a context outside of your western standards of either identity. Unless someone or even the material you're viewing within these respective cultures personally or actually notes that what they're doing is gender non conforming or experimentally challenging gender norms within their own cultural norm, then like yeah respecting that and acknowledging that is fine, but like don't be weird about it!!
And like same applies to characters, which I find ludicrous that y'all try to divorce so staunchly from their respective cultural origins. Like anime for example is like 90% of the time based in Japan or worlds very obviously based on Japan, or in Japanese stories/folklore/history, but the excuse is always "I think equating real people with anime characters is ridiculous cause Japanese people dont actually look like that". Like nobody is saying they do but they clearly are writing and creating things thoroughly through their respective Japanese lense and thus so much of it feels so inheritly Japanese. Only time I see white people acknowledge the Japanese root of something is if the damn anime or manga is a fucking period piece in like the Edo period or something, which is ridiculous.
Then to take it further and base your own sexual desirability of this western gaze of thinking all things Asian are inherently gnc is even weirder and yes, more racist. You're basing your sexual desirability on a fetishized and eroticized form of racism, more specifically a lense that always tries to frame Asian bodies as something purely for the sexual and submissive and not wholly human. Asian media isn't trying to like purposefully sell Asian fetishization to you, it's simply operating through it's own lense, even the sexual shit it is producing isn't like selling Asian fetishization, it's just selling the sexual through the lense of its respected culture (like what is popular in the sexual fantasy there for example); the racism on your part comes from viewing it as someone not Asian and thinking that just because its Asian it's either inherently sexual or if it is something sexual in nature, feeling entitled to Asian bodies; both in their purpose to you as sexual objects and as fetishizing them as something desirable for you to look like for the way you shittly perceive these bodies as inheritly feminine or androgynous.
White people as a whole have a massive problem with fetishizing Asian people but it is like alarming as a trans poc to see white trans people as a whole kind of turn that on its head as a form of gender goals or to make themselves feel sexy or whatever and the fact that y'all dont see anything wrong with that is even wilder. There is absolutely a huge difference in acknowledging and even appreciating a different perspective on what masculinity and feminity can look like in a different cultural context and thinking that anything that isn't what YOU'RE used to being inheritly gnc as a result.
I do think it's important to note that framing this problem as a trans femme mainly issue IS shitty and undoubtedly transmisogynist in nature, especially given that I've seen PLENTY of white trans masces doing the exact same shit with very little pushback. Like the amount of trans men I've seen basing their androgyny on idols or anime characters they label as "f*mb*ys" or even calling any remotely twinky asian guy (or hell not even, I've seen yall misgender Asian men of all shapes and sizes) a f*mb*y or labeling him with usually unwarranted or derogatory labels for feminine men (ie fruity, queen, diva) is fucking vile. White trans people as a whole need to be holding each other and themselves accountable for this shit.
#putting this under read more cause its kinda looonngg#anyway i think people also forget that op of that one post going around talking about this#is a white trans woman and she very obviously made that post to hold her community accountable#but i think tme people need to be careful about not taking that post and using it as an excuse to be transmisogynist#like acknowledging the type of racist shit at work there is absolutely important#but like i said framing it as a trans femme issue ONLY on part of tme folks is pretty fucking nasty#which i did see in the notes a few times
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What are your thoughts about 5x08 Ch Ch Changes episode? I was rewatching it recently and holy shit! I thought it was phenomenally written for an early 2000s TV show, especially when growing up and that just wasn’t a popular topic yet on the TV-scape. I really liked the ending scene that Grissom had in his office with a person from the transgender community about male oysters and how humans could’ve switched genders originally like nature and being one sex could be a mutation of evolution.
hi, anon!
thoughts after the "keep reading," if you're interested.
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for what it's worth, my personal take is that while i feel like there are some things that episode 05x08 "ch-ch-changes" does very, very nicely (and particularly considering that it first aired back in 2004), there are also some parts that, in retrospect, have not aged well at all.
in general, i'm happy that the episode advocates for the humanity and dignity of the victims and adopts a largely sympathetic view toward the trans community. that it seeks to provide some education on trans issues (such as, for example, the vicissitudes of the medical transition process) is likewise a positive thing.
like you, i am very much a fan of grissom's speech at the end, as well as of the respect for the trans community and its members that he displays throughout the episode. i'm also very pleased that sara insists on using the correct pronouns for everyone involved in the case and even corrects others whenever they misgender someone.
that said, i am also disappointed that the episode still subscribes to some harmful stereotypes and tropes re: trans people.
while of course many of these ideas have only been broadly recognized as pernicious more recently, some of them should have been evident just in terms of “writing sense”—i.e., even if the writers weren't educated on trans rep and certain notions about writing trans characters hadn't yet been articulated or at least were not widely known outside of the trans community, they still should have been able to look at the story elements (the same as they would any other component of a script) and go, “oh, hey, by framing things in this particular way, i'm sending a negative message. is that something i really want to do here? no.”
in particular, i don't like that the episode, whether intentionally or not, seems to set up a dichotomy where trans characters who have fully medically transitioned and are able to “pass” are presented as being morally superior to those who are either unwilling and/or unable to do so.
for example, wendy and mimosa, both of whom present as highly femme, have medically transitioned, and are played by cis actresses, are presented as being “good” and even heroic, while mercedes and pink, who are portrayed as being more androgynous/masculine, have either not medically transitioned or have only done so partially (“above the belt”), and are played by trans actresses, are presented as being if not outright “bad” then at least morally ambiguous and somewhat untrustworthy.
meanwhile, mona lavalle, who has not undergone any kind of gender affirmation surgery, is cast in the role of the villain (and despite being played by a cis actress, has her supposed “masculinity” highlighted time and time again throughout the episode).
another thing i don't like is that the episode seems to take a very “biological essentialist” view on gender overall. while grissom, sara, and a few of the minor characters featured throughout the episode individually demonstrate some understanding that there's more to a person's gender identity than just their chromosomes and genitals, beyond them, most of the other characters (including many of the csis, techs, and cops) seem pretty set on the idea that “dna = identity.”
of course, particularly given the temporal setting of the episode, that even many of the “good guys” would be ignorant on this topic and say some really backward-ass things about it isn't necessarily unrealistic, so those parts of the episode, while disappointing in the sense that we'd all like our favorite characters to be more enlightened, do (unfortunately) track in terms of veritas.
however, what is much more glaring is the fact that the episode itself largely seems to espouse the view that trans women are actually men, underneath it all—which is a point it reinforces time and time again by its insistence on referring to trans characters by their dead names once their “former identities” become known to the protagonists, by perseverating on the pre-transition identities of the two trans victims (as trans critic eleven groothuis of the review site unstrung nerves points out, “the sequence in which investigators use a computer to de-transition wendy's image... mark(s) wendy's identity as artifice”), by emphasizing the supposed masculinity of “unsavory” trans women, etc.
it's not just that certain characters seem to disbelieve the identities of the trans characters but that the narrative itself does.
while the episode does get some points for casting trans people in certain of the featured trans roles, that most of the prominent trans characters are played by cis actors speaks poorly of the underlying sensibilities of the storytelling.
so does the fact that the ultimate “bad guys” in the episode—mona and her husband francis—turn out to be members of the trans community themselves.
that's the easiest way to tell this story: by keeping the violence “self-contained” and not making it a comment on society at large; just on the “subculture” in question.
ditto for how the episode sometimes succumbs to its baser impulses and “monsterifies” the very people it’s supposedly advocating for.
that scene in the storage unit presents some of the most gratuitously and disturbingly graphic images in the entire history of the series, which is really saying something, given that this is csi; it's an absolute horror show, much more so than is necessary to advance the plot or elicit sympathy from the audience.
still.
despite these flaws (and some of the others i haven't touched on here), i think that while this story is one that may not always keep its eyes on the ball, its heart is generally in the right place.
it counts for a lot that wendy is portrayed sympathetically and that the audience is made to empathize with her and mimosa.
it counts for a lot that the episode includes not just one but many different trans people and trans experiences.
it counts for a lot that even if not all of the characters behave as we'd like them to, the main protagonist of the show, known for being a wise and exceptionally reasonable person, closes out the episode looking straight into the camera and saying what amounts to, “trans people are people. their identities are valid.”
back in 2004, there wasn't a lot of trans rep on primetime television period, let alone (mostly) sympathetic trans rep, so to have this kind of story told on what at the time was the biggest show airing was no small thing.
looking back, the story is outdated in some ways, but as a historical piece, it's still significant—and it's frankly rather remarkable how forward-thinking some parts of this episode were.
that's my take, anyway.
thanks for the question! please feel welcome to send another any time.
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why are you one of the Eve haters? Is it just because she's not a POC?
Lol, so the short answer is yes.
But if you feel like reading me rant, here’s my longer response. This is just gonna be about the casting and styling because I think that’s the part that most important in terms of this blog. I do have my own thoughts on characterization, but let me not get into that here, lol.
When the casting call went out, the show said it could be for a queer woman of any ethnicity. So maybe this was on me, but that alone sparked a hope that they would be casting a Woman of Color, particularly someone who was a Black stud/butch/tomboi/masc/etc. lesbian in that role. When I found out that they cast a skinty feminine white woman instead, it was extremely disheartening. There was literally no reason why they had to cast her as white. Even if she is Grace’s cousin that A) is a choice made by the showrunners and B) doesn’t rely on whiteness to be true. Multiracial families exist.
My issue is that someone’s ethnoracial identity absolutely cannot be thought of as a separate entity from their gender/sexuality.
Okay, so let me explain.
Every version of Eskild is not only vital to their Noora’s storyline, but to their Isak’s. And for me, that’s why Eve’s casting made no sense to me the most. Now, to be fair: we had a submission earlier that said it wasn’t right that no Eskild was getting the same scrutiny as Eve, and I think that’s a fair assessment (and the submission is worth reading). No other Eskild has gotten this kind of criticism for being a white cis guy.
But for me personally, when it came to the other remakes, my annoyance was always at the lack of diversity in the Isaks first and foremost. This is because it stood to reason that whomever was cast as Eskild would have to match up. I think at a certain point I was resigned to the idea that each remake would have cis white gay Eskilds for cis white gay Isaks. Would it have been really nice to have more gender/racial diversity? Yes, of course. To me though, it didn’t feel as pertinent for those remakes to cast diverse Eskilds. Both because of my resignation and also because… tbh this kind of matching made sense to me in terms of an intersectional lens - meaning the types of discrimination that Isak faced should match up with Eskild, in order to really make the Pride lecture make sense. Right or not, it’s how I felt. Obviously other folks, especially lgbtq+ MoC who don’t have any rep in the Skams, can and might feel differently.
Now, when I’m saying intersectional lens, I want to be clear. When Kimberlé Crenshaw first coined intersectionality (though ofc her focus was on Black women specifically, not all PoC) she wasn’t really talking about identity at all, she was talking about discrimination. it means that the oppression people with multiple marginalized identities face has to do with overlapping forms of discrimination.
Isak only has one marginalized identity. On the discrimination he faces from that alone, Eskild can wholeheartedly relate. That’s what make that mentorship/friendship so important and more equitable.
Shay on the other hand has multiple marginalized identities: woman, Black, lesbian. The discrimination she faces isn’t just because she’s Black, or just because she’s a woman, or just because she’s a lesbian. They all intersect, and the sexism, antiblack racism, and homophobia she will face are inextricably intertwined. There is no and never will be a white lgbtq+ person can ever, nor will ever, understand what it means to navigate the world as an lgbtq+ Person of Color.This is the heart of my disappointed with Eve’s casting.
Again - as a Black lesbian, Shay will have to deal with sexism/antiblackness/homophobia. All as one, all informing each other, and inseparable. This is something a white woman, even if she experiences sexism/homophobia, will never, ever be able to grasp. Even if Eve were butch, she wouldn’t ever be able to understand this experience. White women do not experience sexism the way a Black woman or an other WoC does. White lgbtq+ people do not experience homophobia or transphobia the way a Black person or an other PoC does. There is no possible way for them to know what we go through.
And so. The idea of having a white woman lecture Shay on Pride? On the discrimination she’s going to face? On the history of lgbtq+ liberation in the U.S? Specifically when it was started by trans women of color? It’s ugly to me.
It’s true we don’t know what they will do in Shay’s season. But I can’t stop thinking about this. I’m not speaking for all lgbtq+ PoC, just from my experience. I honestly do know that there are lgbtq+ PoC who are really freaking excited about Eve. And that’s great for them, honestly. If other folks can still see themselves in Eve and feel represented, that’s a good thing.
But for many of us, we didn’t/don’t have any lgbtq+ characters of color to look up to. The majority of lgbtq+ characters in the U.S. media have been white. Even in 2018, 58% of lbpq+ characters in the media were white. And even when we do get lgbpq+ characters of color, most of them weren’t stud/butch/tomboi/masc/etc. or gender non-conforming. Rarely are they trans or nonbinary. They didn’t and don’t reflect a lot of the realities that we live in. This lack of visibility means something. When every lgbtq+ person you see on TV is white, it’s alienating. (See this Autostraddle survey for more on this data.)
But I can’t feel that way. Because I was a Shay, and in my experience, being lectured to by white people only served to push me deeper into the closet. It only made me think that being gay was for white people. Because their whiteness protected them and they got to be out in a way I thought I would never be. That is, until I met older lgbtq+ PoC. Who looked like me and shared my cultures and got it. And yes, she’s a TV character. But I’m devastated that from what we’ve seen, Shay won’t get this.
Fine, though, they cast who they cast. My biggest issue is in terms of presentation and style. First, it literally makes no sense to me why Eve isn’t a butch lesbian. Second, I HATE the way they styled her in hipster faux-poverty aesthetics.
We look at the role of Eskild and his characterization, his femininity is a huge part of who he is. It’s a massive part of the Pride lecture he gives Isak, especially because a large part of Isak’s internalized homophobia comes from just wanting to be “normal.” Eskild is not ashamed of being flamboyant/feminine because it’s who he is, and he said a big fuck you to gender roles and expectations. This is the same with the other Esikld remakes that we’ve seen. They show that being who you are is never a stereotype.
Binaries are fake and socially constructed, yes. BUT with Eskild’s femininity in mind, it would only make sense to make Eve butch. There is a massive stigma against GNC lesbians/queer women not only in general society but in lgbtq+ spaces. This is not to bash or police feminine/femme lgbtq+ women (I’m one of them!) but it’s also to acknowledge that the ways in which butch/stud/tomboi/masc/etc. women express themselves makes them extremely visible, and that’s not a privilege. Butch women face high rates of sexual violence and assault based on their appearance in the same way that feminine gay men do.
And even with the increase in lgbtq+ women in media (again see the Autostraddle survey) the majority of portrayals are NOT of butch/stud women. Which fucking sucks because that’s erasing a huge population within lgbtq+ communities. It’s not that having a butch white woman lecture Shay really makes it any better for me personally, but it would’ve made so much more sense to have Eve be butch. Because that’s the direct correlation to Eskild’s femininity.
Finally, once you cast someone you can style their character anyway you want. Just because Eve’s actress dresses/looks as she does doesn’t mean Eve has to. So why did the showrunners chose to style Eve the way they did? Rather than do something actual subversive, they styled her like every other 20-something middle class white hipster who relies on an aesthetic of poverty. (I know one of her defining character traits now is that she never has any money, but… something about that framing feels like it’s supposed to be kitschy and not because she’s literally impoverished. Could be wrong, but look at Grace in comparison.).
Personally, this stylization is especially hard to witness because of how many white lgbtq+ people I know who dress and act exactly like Eve. It’s not something that’s specific to white people - I’ve seen plenty of middle to upper class PoC aestheticize poverty too - but this kind of thing is often rooted in the junctions of class and whiteness. For more on this, I would really suggest reading this article. It really gets into this like… fetish that middle/upper class lgbtq+ people have for “looking” poor.
Anyway this is really long so let me wrap up. My issue here is mainly what my issues has consistently been with some of these shows. The showrunners want to include “diverse” issues and (for the most part) a “diverse” cast but it seems like they don’t have a crew that have strong race/gender/class analyses. Eve could’ve really been something but from casting and styling alone, her character already falls flatly for me.
So, yes. At the base of it is because she’s not a Black stud, but it goes deeper than that, too.
- mod Jennifer
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I’m gonna put this under a readmore bc it deals with like, unwanted advances/intimate contact, not sexual assault but just like men being gross, generally, also it’s really long
so this weekend I went to this party, I was invited by a dude I met on tinder. I didn’t know anyone there, I didn’t even really know him, we’d never met before. maybe I was a dumbass for just going with it, even though it was obvious he was interested in me and I wasn’t sure I was interested in him? but I thought, I’m an extrovert, I like meeting people, and I feel like I can’t really decide how I feel about tinder people just from a few texts back and forth, so I was sort of hoping I would be interested in him once I met him. idk.
Anyway, he was clearly flirting with me when we were texting and once I got there he was basically on me the entire time. like, hovering over me, had blatantly no interest in introducing me to other people at the party (also he was at least a foot taller than me). I guess I tried to push away my discomfort bc I’m used to feeling like I’m “colder” than i “should” be bc of my antidepressants and complicated relationship history that makes me not want to jump into things. and I don’t get many opportunities to feel like people are into me, being trans, and my friends thought he was good looking so. I just went with it. Even though he really didn’t present me with much evidence that he was actually an interesting person, and I probably should’ve picked up more on the fact that he couldn’t sense my discomfort.
well long story short I tried to keep him at bay, I left the party to go walk a dog and came back, (and I kind of didn’t want to go back but I did anyway bc he asked me to and I was like well alright I should try to put myself out there, be cool, have fun. why was I trying to convince myself this thing that obviously wasn’t fun was fun? why didn’t I trust myself. idk.) but I went back, and drank a bunch more, and eventually he started putting his hands all over me, I mean not sexually just like rubbing my arms and my back and sides. i felt conflicted about it bc on the one hand, like I said, I’m normally pretty isolated from romance and physical intimacy by being trans, and he wasn’t exactly coming on to me explicitly, but on the other hand I wasn’t actually comfortable with it. and I was really drunk. so I basically just sat there and did nothing and he kept it up (he was also super drunk, but that’s not relevant). and we were having a conversation (with some other people) about like, gender and sexuality and whatever and I think he sensed that this was like, kind of a heavy subject for me, so he was trying to be comforting? idk. but he definitely also just wanted to touch me.
Anyway, eventually it was late and I had to leave, and he offered to let me stay, and I declined, and he offered again as I was going out the door, and I declined, and he kissed me a couple times which I don’t remember very well bc I was very drunk but also just extremely tired. I never really rebuffed him. I was just ambivalent, and he just pushed ahead.
I was kind of vaguely uncomfortable with all this from the outset but it took me a day or two to really process it. but what’s getting to me is like, now I’m reading all these articles about sexual assault that people have been sharing and I’m struck by the fact that this very easily falls into that pattern. Like I said he didn’t actually do anything explicitly sexual, but it was on that path. he wasn’t paying attention to me or what I wanted. he didn’t really care, he only thought about me in relation to himself. it’s messed up.
But the thing that’s really really getting to me is like, these articles are always about women, and I’m not a woman. it says I’m trans very explicitly on tinder, I only have it set to men looking for men, this guy never would’ve met me under the guise of my presenting as female. but I know I look like one, and even beyond that, I’m just a generally small and effeminate person. and one of the things he said in the course of our convo about gender and sexuality was that he’s pan but he doesn’t actually like men that much. or, the way he framed it was that he “doesn’t prefer dicks” which, yikes. and all his previous relationships had been with cis women. idk, I don’t think he was a chaser, but even being super drunk and tired I was taken aback and it def made me uncomfortable.
so part of me wonders, was he acting that way bc he saw me as “basically a woman”? or is this just how he acts, with everybody? this is messing me up a lot because, I’m a nonbinary person, not a man, my masculinity really only feels relevant to me in the context of intimate relationships/sexual orientation, and yet I’ve been feeling so much pressure lately to “pick a political category” because I have to either fall on the side of oppressive/male or oppressed/female. and I know that not being a woman means benefiting from misogyny, etc etc, I don’t care about trying to avoid that, it’s just that in situations like this— where this guy’s behavior was still probably related to my not-maleness, even though he knew I wasn’t a woman so like it obviously wasn’t misogyny, idk. I already feel really alienated from maleness for a lot of reasons. but this wasn’t transphobia in the sense of him not seeing me as a “real man” because i’m not. this was its own weird mix of like, nonbinary/gnc-related transphobia and toxic masculinity, or something.
I’m just confused. because I know nb women (pretty much always AFAB tho) who get annoyed at the implication that you can be a nonbinary person and not a woman and still be oppressed by men. like, the idea that you would be part of a “political category” that maleness oppresses and yet not a woman is an oxymoron. but I just feel like idk how else to conceptualize this. how else do you describe this kind of predatory male behavior? the fact that he definitely didn’t see me as a man, and I’m not? this is why the separation of transphobia and misogyny as being like, totally unrelated axes of oppression feels lacking to me. Bc they’re very intertwined, even if they’re obviously two different things.
I’m just tired of feeling confused and like a bad person. like being nonbinary and trans is an empty statement and not something that I live every day that impacts my life. I’m tired of cis-adjacent nonbinary people, who aren’t trans and are aligned with the binary gender they were assigned, dictating the terms of how nonbinary ID relates to gender as a political construct. of feeling like i’m a bad person for thinking of incidents like this as relating to a larger pattern of oppression by cis men because what else is it? transphobia, yes, but a particular type of transphobia that’s bound up in maleness vs. my lack of conformity to maleness. that reinforces a distrust and fear of men, not just cis people. I’m tired of feeling like this means I’m not really trans and should just go back to IDing as a woman or woman-aligned.
basically, I’m tired of having to deal with binary trans people’s lack of empathy for nonbinary trans people, and non-trans nb people’s presumptuousness. I’m tired of my experience not making any sense and feeling like I don’t fit into anything.
I legit don’t know what to do. I don’t feel like I have any of the right answers. the idea of talking about the oppressive behavior of men in terms of “women and nonbinary people” feels dangerously close to the preposterous “women and femmes” thing. and there are obviously issues women have that I don’t. but like, how am I supposed to deal with the emotional fallout of being preyed upon by men if I’m alienated from every gender-based social grouping in the course of these discussions?
#about ari#my head hurts and i wanna die#i hate that i can't even attribute this to cis nonsense bc it's mostly non-trans AGAB-aligned nb people who give me shit about this#we can acknowledge that being AGAB-aligned nb isn't the same as being cis#but suddenly for nb trans people that's not relevant? we're basically binary if not more so?
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When Resistance Became Too Loud to Ignore
At times the fight for civil rights is a straight road pocked with speed bumps; at other times a maddening spiral of detours. It was a battlefield in the early hours of June 28, 1969, when a small group of gay, lesbian and transgender people, herded by police out of a Greenwich Village bar called the Stonewall Inn, just said no: shoved back; threw bricks, bottles, punches. As the police defensively barricaded themselves inside the bar, the fight — since variously termed a riot, an uprising, a rebellion — spread through the Village, then through the country, then through history.
It’s still spreading, expanding the way the term “gay” has expanded to include lesbian, bisexual, transgender, queer and other categories of identity. And for this summer’s half-century Stonewall anniversary, substantial displays of art produced in the long wake of the uprising are filling some New York City museums and public spaces.
The largest of them is the two-part “Art After Stonewall, 1969-1989” shared by Grey Art Gallery, New York University, and the Leslie-Lohman Museum in Soho. A trio of small archival shows at the New-York Historical Society adds background depth to the story. And at the Brooklyn Museum, “Nobody Promised You Tomorrow: Art 50 Years After Stonewall,” 28 young queer and transgender artists, most born after 1980, carry the buzz of resistance into the present.
Grey Art Gallery and Leslie-Lohman Museum
‘Art After Stonewall, 1969-1989’
This survey, organized by the Columbus Museum of Art in Ohio, where it will later appear, is split into two rough chunks defined by decades, with material from the ’70s mostly at Leslie-Lohman and from the ’80s at Grey. Unsurprisingly, the Leslie-Lohman half is livelier. A lot of what’s in it was hot off the political burner when made, responsive to crisis conditions. The modest scale of the gallery spaces makes the hanging feel tight and combustible. And as a time of many “firsts,” the early years had a built-in excitement.
There was, of course, the thrill of the uprising itself, captured by the Village Voice beat photographer Fred W. McDarrah in an on-the-spot nighttime shot of protesters grinning and vamping outside the Stonewall. (One of them, the mixed-media artist Thomas Lanigan-Schmidt has sparkling, tabletop-size sculptures in both sections of the show.) Activist groups quickly formed, and a way of life that had once been discreetly underground pushed out into the open.
The Gay Liberation Front, aligning itself with antiwar and international human rights struggles, coalesced within days after Stonewall, soon followed by the Gay Activists Alliance, which focused specifically on gay and lesbian issues. It was clear pretty fast that both were predominantly male, white and middle class — misogyny, racism and classism have plagued L.G.B.T. politics from the start — and further groups splintered off: Radicalesbians, Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries (STAR), and later, the Salsa Soul Sisters. All the energy produced, among other things, the first Christopher Street Liberation Day March (now the NYC Pride March).
Many of the Stonewall-era trailblazers, like Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera — one black, the other Latinx, both self-identified drag queens — were longtime veterans of the West Village gay scene. But for many other people the event prompted a first full public coming out, which was no light matter.
In 1969, even mild affectional acts between same-sex couples were illegal in much of the United States, as was cross-dressing. An arrest — and there were many — could instantly end a career, destroy a family, shut down a future. Bullying gay men was considered normal; violence was acceptable.
As a gay person, you went through the world watching your movements, monitoring your speech, worrying about how much of yourself, just by being yourself, you were giving away. This could make for a lonely life. If, for some reason, you were heedless, or incapable, of acting straight, good luck to you.
So when safety arrived in the form of an army of out-and-proud lovers and protesters, the relief was tremendous. And you can feel the rush of at Leslie-Lohman, in photographs of the first marches in New York and Los Angeles taken by participants like Cathy Cade, Leonard Fink, Diana Davies, Kay Tobin Lahusen (who, in a wall label, is credited as being the first openly gay American woman photojournalist).
Particularly strong among these images is Bettye Lane’s shot of a raging Sylvia Rivera confronting a jeering gay crowd — they had just been applauding an anti-trans speech by the lesbian feminist leader Jean O’Leary — at the 1973 New York march. But no picture can compare in gut-level impact with the short glitchy surviving video of Rivera in action that day. (You can find it on YouTube. I urge you to watch it.)
Women and transgender people are the heart of the Leslie-Lohman half of the show, not only in its documentary components but in the art chosen by the curator Jonathan Weinberg, working with Tyler Cann of the Columbus Museum of Art and Drew Sawyer of the Brooklyn Museum.
Standouts include a Tee A. Corinne-designed coloring book consisting of exquisite line drawings of vulvae; Harmony Hammond’s sculpture of two clothbound ladderlike forms leaning protectively together; and Louise Fishman’s 1973 “Angry Paintings,” acts of controlled gestural chaos that name heroic lesbian names (the critic Jill Johnston, the anthropologist Esther Newton, Ms. Fishman’s partner at the time) and speak of emotions once suppressed, now released.
The Grey Gallery half of the show, which brings us into the 1980s, makes a quieter impression. Partly this is because of a more spacious installation spread over two floors, and to the more polished-and-framed look of much of the work. Political content is, with vivid exceptions, subtle, indirect, which is not in itself a bad thing, though an earlier charge of communal energy is diminished. We’re basically now in a different, more market-conscious, canon-shaping art world, one closer to the museum than to the street.
And though we’re in the era of AIDS, the sense of urgency that absolutely defined that time is missing. This is not to say there’s a shortage of good work. The show would be valuable if it did nothing more than showcase artists like Laura Aguilar, Luis Cruz Azaceta, Jerome Caja, Lenore Chinn, Maxine Fine, Luis Frangella and Marc Lida, all seldom, if ever, seen in New York now.
Here again photography opens a window on cultural histories that would otherwise be lost to memory. Dona Ann McAdams’ shots of performances at the lesbian-feminist W.O.W. (Women’s One World) Café, and other East Village clubs, are reminders of the radical talents — John Bernd, Karen Finley, Ishmael Houston-Jones, Holly Hughes, Tim Miller — that this brief time and vanished environment nurtured.
In the end, though, it was two text-pieces, familiar but reverberant, that stayed in my mind. One, a 1989 print by Felix Gonzalez-Torres, was originally enlarged to billboard size and installed on Christopher Street, near where the Stonewall Inn still stands. It’s plain black field is empty except for two unpunctuated lines of small white type read, as if floating up from delirium: “People With AIDS Coalition 1985 Police Harassment 1969 Oscar Wilde 1895 Supreme Court 1986 Harvey Milk 1977 March on Washington 1987 Stonewall Rebellion 1969.”
The other piece is a 1988 poster designed by the AIDS activist collective Gran Fury. In large letters it commands us to “Take Collective Direct Action to End the AIDS crisis.” In smaller type it acknowledges that, “With 42,000 dead, art is not enough.”
In an ethically pressurized political present, it’s a message I find myself carrying away from a lot of recent contemporary shows.
New York University Bobst Library
‘Violet Holdings: LGBTQ+ Highlights From the N.Y.U. Special Collections’
With the Stonewall Inn — now a national monument (and a bar again; it was a bagel shop in the 1980s) — in its neighborhood, New York University has scheduled several additional events around the anniversary, among them a homegrown archival exhibition called “Violet Holdings: LGBTQ+ Highlights from the N.Y.U. Special Collections,” on view at Bobst Library, across the park from Grey Art Gallery.
Organized by Hugh Ryan, it tracks the history of queer identity back to the 19th century with documents related to Elizabeth Robins (1862-1952), an American actor, suffragist and friend of Virginia Woolf, forward with material on pathbreaking organizations like the Mattachine Society and the Daughters of Bilitis, and close to the present in the form of ephemera associated with the musician and drag king Johnny Science (1955-2007), and the D.J. Larry Levan (1954-1992), who, in the 1980s, presided godlike at the gay disco called the Paradise Garage, then a short walk from the N.Y.U. campus.
New-York Historical Society
‘Stonewall 50’
The Paradise Garage, or “Gay-rage,” has high visibility in “Letting Loose and Fighting Back: LGBTQ Nightlife Before and After Stonewall,” one of a cluster of dense micro-show at New-York Historical Society. The club’s metal street sign is here, along with some theme-dance fliers, and a mash-note drawing of Levan by Keith Haring. A matchbook from working-class lesbian bar called the Sea Colony, is a souvenir of 50s butch-femme culture in New York. A key fob and a flip-top lighter are relics of gay male sex clubs, like the Anvil and the Ramrod, that sizzled in the ’70s. So plentiful were such pleasure emporia that some activists feared they were sapping the strength of goal-oriented gay politics.
Yet activism is the essence of a second show, “By the Force of Our Presence: Highlights from the Lesbian Herstory Archives,” which documents the founding in 1974 — by Joan Nestle, Deborah Edel, Sahli Cavallaro, Pamela Olin, and Julia Stanley — of a compendious and still-growing register of lesbian history. The items on view represent a small part of the whole but still suggest the arc of a larger story driven by charismatic personalities.
And personality-plus is what you get in a set of separate solo homages to such out-and-proud imperishables as Stormé DeLarverie (1920-2014); Mother Flawless Sabrina/Jack Doroshow (1939-2017); and Rollerena Fairy Godmother (born 1948). All three, for decades and in different ways, served the L.G.B.T.Q.+ community, as guardian angels (Ms. DeLarverie, a biracial male impersonator, worked as a bouncer at lesbian bars); style models (Ms. Flawless was impresaria of countless drag pageants); and cheerleaders (who could forget the delight, in the ’70s, of seeing Rollerena, purse in hand, whizz by?).
Brooklyn Museum
‘Nobody Promised You Tomorrow: Art 50 Years After Stonewall’
As it happens, Ms. DeLarverie is stage center in this notably youthful and history-conscious — and history-correcting — survey at the Brooklyn Museum. The museum commissioned the artist L.J. Roberts, self-identified as genderqueer, to create a Stonewall monument for the occasion. Ms. DeLarverie is the subject the artist chose to honor, both as a power of example and as a figure whose role at Stonewall — some accounts have her landing the first punch on intruding police — has been obscured. In the sculpture, a construction of light boxes on bricks, her image appears repeatedly, along with those of Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera. (A monument commemorating both will be placed in the vicinity of the Stonewall Inn.)
Rivera, who died of cancer at 50 in 2002, and Johnson, who was found dead in the Hudson River in 1992 (her death, ruled suicide at the time, is still under investigation), are further saluted in a video docudrama by Sasha Wortzel and the artist Tourmaline, and in a bannerlike sequined hanging by Tuesday Smillie.
Friends in life, the two historical figures are tutelary spirits of an exhibition in which a trans presence, long marginalized by mainstream gay politics, is pronounced.
It’s here in the work of the queer graffiti artist Hugo Gyrl, in the diarylike photographs of Elle Perez (a participant in the current Whitney Biennial), in the vivid memorial portraits of murdered trans women by the painter David Antonio Cruz, in the songs of Linda LaBeija, in the internet-based work of Mark Aguhar, a femme-identified transgender artist who died in 2012; and in the hand-sewn textile protest signs of Elektra KB.
For many reasons, protest is a logical direction for art right now. There is still no federal law prohibiting discrimination against L.G.B.T.Q.+ people on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity (although some states and cities have enacted laws prohibiting it). Trans women continue to be victims of violence. The rate of new H.I.V./AIDS transmission among gay black men remains high. And the impulse within the gay mainstream to accommodate and assimilate is by now deeply ingrained. The time has come to hear Sylvia Rivera calling us out again.
Art After Stonewall, 1969-1989
Through July 21 at the Leslie-Lohman Museum, 26 Wooster Street; 212-431-2609, leslielohman.org, and through July 20, at Grey Art Gallery, New York University, 100 Washington Square East; 212-998-6780, greyartgallery.nyu.edu.
Violet Holdings: LGBTQ+ Highlights from the N.Y.U. Special Collections
Through Dec. 31, New York University Bobst Library, 70 Washington Square South; 212-998-2500, library.nyu.edu.
Stonewall 50 at New-York Historical Society
Through Sept. 22 at the New-York Historical Society, 170 Central Park West; 212-873-3400, www.nyhistory.org .
Nobody Promised You Tomorrow: 50 Years After Stonewall
Through Dec. 8 at the Brooklyn Museum, 200 Eastern Parkway; 718-638-5000, brooklynmuseum.org,.
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