Because we happened to walk directly up the stairs as we entered the Columbus Museum of Art, I first experienced Stonewall: 1969-1989 backwards. A vast hall with a dour character: black and white montage, a BDSM chair, a child trapped in a playpen. My friend and I furrowed our brows and settled in for some difficult works. Having made a quick round, I stopped in front of Martin Wong’s painting, Big Heat, of two husky firemen kissing in front of a post-apocalyptic New York tenement building. Although at first turned off by the pornographic machismo with which the two men ignore their desolate surroundings, I began to appreciate the piece for its grim wink at a certain sexual nihilism, even in the midst of the AIDS crisis: “The world’s burning, let’s fuck.” I saw myself within this bleak image of urban decay and grey neoliberal lust, much more than in the exuberant images of marches and camaraderie emphasized in the first half of the exhibit, which I would see later. Against the burnt-out squat house of the contemporary experience of sexuality in politics and art, the Stonewall Riots remain the sturdy mansion of Gay Pride: spontaneous, led by a black trans woman, (mostly) successful in its aims (some decades later) — or so the story goes. 

The main fault with the exhibit is that it presumes you subscribe to its version of the story. Its true starting point is thus not Stonewall, but our present moment’s memory of that event. This proved successful despite museum closures due to COVID, as the show was well received on the circuit: New York (Grey Art Gallery & Leslie-Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art) through Miami (Patricia & Phillip Frost Art Museum) to Columbus, clearly and self-consciously predicated on the progressive narrative of gay history. This results in an ambivalence which runs through the curation, presenting especially early works naively and reverently, but also updating them with contemporary criticism, and including marginal artists and house music for good measure. This is not to say that the art collected here is bad — far from it. It simply means that the blind faith in “progress,” which must be jettisoned from the start if we are to arrive at a coherent understanding of the reversals of the 70s and 80s, is surreptitiously brought in at every turn to foreclose the ambiguities latent in the artworks. The wide-eyed celebration of Stonewall obscures the general context of the late 60s, while the activist impulse to issue trigger warnings forecloses the possibility of thinking about the art. The entire corpus of exhibition commentary is a celebration of “how far we’ve come.”

This appears most grossly in the wall texts’ boilerplate apologetics for including works by “problematic” figures. Robert Morris’s infamous BDSM bad boy poster forLabyrinths—Voice—Blind Time, lampooning the already current vogue for gay art in the early 70s, is instead twisted into an exploitative gesture by someone who — despite participating in the New York art scene — had no connection to gays. Warhol’s print of Marsha P. Johnson from Ladies and Gentlemen is begrudgingly shown despite the series’ “objectification” of its subjects as “other”, since the individuals’ names weren’t provided at the original exhibition. Such self-seriousness permeates especially the treatment of lesbian eroticism, here accepted as mystical or otherworldly in unacknowledged echo of 60s black (sexual) separatist obfuscation, currently enjoying a resurgence in the era of #BLM. Lula Mae Blocton’s Summer Ease, a relatively late abstract expressionist work of 1974, is illuminated by the following non-sequitur: “Although paintings like Summer Ease don’t directly feature black women, the artist attributes the work’s glowing light interwoven quality to her elation at coming out…”

A reprieve from this constricting pre-digestion is Luis Frangella’s 1st Blow Job, shown unannotated, allowing the charcoal picture’s mixture of melancholy and titillation to remain unresolved. A limbless male torso recalling the marble statues of antiquity, a familiar image in Frangella’s work, here appears before a similarly sculptural male head. The two are closely spaced and the reference of the title presupposes a certain intimacy, but the ambivalent grimace on the sightless figure’s face as well as the lack of an erection lend a certain tension to the impending sexual act. The “dark center where procreation flare[s]” from Rilke’s Archaic Torso of Apollo, of the mute statue that looks at you, is here expounded as the simultaneous objectification and subjectification of eroticism. Indeed, it is unclear if the painter played the part of the torso or the head: whether the first experience of the title refers to the feeling of decapitation at the sight of cold stone or to the feeling of petrification at giving one’s body up to another. Sexual pleasure is barely allowed today and the fragmentation of the human body comes with an array of sexual subcultures and fetishes. Gay artists’ exploration of the erotic is thus hardly specific to homosexual acts or gay/lesbian cultural spheres, but are moments of reflection on human sexuality per se. 

One notable aspect of the exhibition is its prudity around depictions of sex and nudity. Nowhere do we see the candidness of Cocteau’s illustrations for Genet’s Querelle de Brest, published two decades earlier. Even the two Tom of Finland drawings on display demonstrate the domestication of the artist’s spiciness: his smiling muscle-bound leather daddies, once verboten sexual fantasies of Wehrmacht officers, now appear as symbols of carefree sexual liberation.

Judging from the exhibit, photography is equivalent to documentation: from the joyful days of the Gay Liberation Front (Hujar) through the domestication of homosexual eroticism in intimate portraits (JEB), all the way to the grisly depictions of addicts (Goldin) and AIDS patients (Wojnarowicz), the “profound impact” of the gay rights movement on the art world reduplicates the narrative we already know. And yet the accumulation of historical images is not identical with artistic photography, which deals precisely with the mediation of the artist as an image-maker. 

The most striking work of photography in the show is, rather, Duane Michals’s Things Are Queer, which actively resists the formal presuppositions of photorealism, chronological narrative, and political meaning. The first of its nine panels, a domestic bathroom scene ominously supertitled in handwritten script, is the only one a viewer might mistake for reality. The flick of her eye to the next photo brings vertigo: Did the room shrink? Is this a giant’s foot? Through the telescopic rabbit hole of each subsequent scene, not only the preceding image but the relation of the images to each other are thrown into doubt, whereby the final panel’s repetition of the tranquil bathroom is anything but: the artist’s calling attention to the picture above the sink is a clever visual pun for the piece as a whole, which we now see for the first time. Puppetry, stagecraft, the printing press, genre painting, film, and obviously photography, are all implicated in the manipulation of reality (and time) through images. Michals’s indirectness is much more nuanced and historically aware than a focus on the thematic content of the piece (dysmorphia, domestic artificiality, claustrophobia, cruising) would allow. Against the assumed question of “What about the gay artist?,” Michals’s piece is a much-needed corrective in the form of “What about the gay artist?”

Besides the Stonewall moment and the AIDS crisis, what little historical material finds its way into the exhibit consists of mythological references to the 50s: the days of Harry Hays and The Ladder, that is, a substitution of political narrative for aesthetic development. This is faulty history to begin with, as the preoccupations of race, gender, and sexuality were opposed to the Old Left’s concerns about class; the political reversals which established the precondition for the present fantasy of gays as a unitary affinity group are never questioned. Besides, the context of the period treated is not only the conservative neoliberal consolidation of the gay lifestyle identity, but also the eclipse of the New York School by Pop Art, Neo-Dadaism, and post-modern aesthetics generally. This point, key to understanding the (gay) art world’s continuous integration into the commodity market, is never raised despite the ubiquity of its forms today: the snapshot aesthetic, (re-)branding, infinite reproducibility, interaction with mass media; are these reducible to sex or gender? Or have the techniques of a particular generation, as exemplified in Sontag’s theorization of camp as homosexual style, come to stand in for and overshadow the longue durée reaction against modernism underway since the early 20th century, thereby collapsing our understanding of both developments? 

The confusion of form and content, as well as of aesthetics and politics, has reached a point where the imposition of “radical” politics or queer cultural signifiers upon young artists’ work is a necessary part of their marketability. The hostility of the Pictures Generation to all-pervasive commodification, all too often reduced today to a smug sort of Instagram feminism (and perhaps already obsolete politically then) receives the last nail in its coffin from Adam Rolston’s calque on Kruger, I Am Out Therefore I Am, being taken at face value. 

As a result of these facile explanations, what’s hardest to grasp are the ways in which gays and lesbians in the past might have enjoyed greater freedom than they do today: no longer does the pre-AIDS world exist, the Hudson River piers and other post-industrial cruising spots captured beautifully, even romantically, by Alvin Baltrop. Rather, its transmogrification into the costly and international party circuit has only narrowed the horizons of public sexual freedom. The exhibit is unable to acknowledge the idea that one could define oneself other than through sexual identity. Alice Neel’s double portrait of David Bourdon and Gregory Battcock, for example, preserves an older generation’s waning but by no means extinct nostalgia for the closet, when men and women could have public personas and enjoy their spicy sex lives in the private comfort of their own home. In the wall text, however, the manifold tension of the piece between traditionally-clad Bourdon in profile and bare-thighed Battcock in direct repose is reduced to their semi-closeted professional lives as art critics. The collapse of the public/private distinction prosecuted by the politics of visibility begot a new surveillance apparatus, “Come out or else,” which the curators reproduce here in the name of sexual liberation. This Faustian bargain, of defining oneself through sexuality in order to be integrated into society, has meant a debasement of everyone’s life, regardless of sexual preference.

The abandonment of formal aesthetics generally in favor of thematic or identitarian concerns entails a debasement of our understanding of artistic complexity. The most successful (gay or lesbian) art, in the sense of provoking thought, is not reducible to its thematic preoccupations. As we proceed chronologically, the lack of clarity around what gay art was in the first place becomes all the more apparent. The works that have shown themselves to be long-lasting, like General Idea’s Imagevirus, remain multivalent and aesthetically productive, while Wojnarowicz’s Untitled (One Day This Kid…) is a historical artifact of anger and resentment. It should not be controversial to say that the majority of activist art produced during the AIDS crisis is designed to foreclose aesthetic consideration. SILENCE = DEATH, whose perverse reference through the pink triangle to Nazi persecution of homosexuals was questionable from the outset, should not be celebrated for inspiring a lineage of propaganda that leads to Paris Hilton’s VOTE OR DIE shirt.

What is most missed, then, is a critical evaluation of the interrelation of art and the social-political sphere, precisely because the show assumes such a relation in positive terms. Until the gay identity is stripped of its pseudo-liberatory pretensions and understood in light of the transformations of capitalism and art from the 70s on, the repetition of postmodern tropes will not cease, and our historical understanding will continue to suffer. It would be more honest to admit our confusion: Gonzalez-Torres’s first billboard work, a non-chronological list of dates central to a certain narrative of gay history, is as much about the instability of this selective historical thread as it is about the “open ended — and ongoing — potential for the work to be interpreted anew by each viewer” as the exhibit, in endless pomo handwringing, dubiously claims. Standing before the screenprint miniature and observing my reflection in the glass darkened by the mass of black ink which spared only these two lines of text as white space, I felt the swoon of jumbled history hanging like a stormcloud over the inhabitants of manufactured identities.

As the memory of Stonewall displaced earlier political events to become a focal point of our historical understanding, so has contemporary culture ossified the previous six decades into a justification for our present views of homosexuality and aesthetics. Art proceeds by rupturing previously held associations, negating reality in its attempt to wrestle possibilities into existence. At every moment, it must resist repeating a previous notion of the future, even as the accumulated force of these past failures works against it, and renders it kitsch. And what of our critical apparatus, when the past has pressed on the present with such force and duration that it has disfigured itself ? There it appears most simple, progressive, and linear: “Art After Stonewall: 1969-1989”.

There is a double movement taking place in the overdue closing of the neoliberal era: Trump’s irreverent call for gays, blacks, Hispanics, and women to join the Republicans has both intensified Democratic identity mongering and made the treatment of these groups as homogenous blocs untenable. Amidst the present turmoil of politics and bad-faith political art, including and perhaps despite censorship by institutions and fellow artists, the husks of obsolete identity formations are finally falling away. Good riddance. Gay and lesbian artists would be best served by curators and gallery-goers taking their work seriously as art, and rejecting the sexualized promotional copy which today passes for queer aesthetics.