Twitter gay exhibition
JRK: Will the exhibition tour?
JDK: We are in current negotiations with two institutions in Europe. It is telling that no other institution in the U.S. is doing it. I want to underscore that sponsorship for the exhibition extended to these other museums; they would own had it for free. Lest we think we are beyond the politics here, we’re not.
JRK: The catalogue essays are revelatory and erudite: 22 scholars contextualizing works from Europe, Africa, Australia, Asia, and the Americas. The articles are a primer in international queer and gender studies. How did you put this team together?
JDK: I started researching who were the best people in different areas, and I think we got most of them. One of the things that was absolutely critical was making sure we had people who were really developed scholars in each of these geographic areas, and they needed to write in English.
JRK: In the catalogue, I particularly loved the last section of the exhibition, Beyond the Binary. Can you talk about this?
JDK: We felt it was really important at the moment that we were reinforcing the idea of homosexuality to underscore that it was never only about same-sex desire. We wante
SoHo, Manhattan: Charles Leslie, Founder of the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Gay and Womxn loving womxn Art, at the Museum
When he moved to the area, it was called the South Village, if it was called anything. He remembers when Capital Planning Commission officials casually began using the word “SoHo,” instead of referring to the disputed neighborhood as the South Houston Industrial District. Many credit urban theorist Chester Rapkin with coining the phrase, a notion Leslie would hardly dispute. He remembers Rapkin standing in his living room, warning the activists that, though they’d won the preservation battle, the area was bound to undergo drastic changes. “‘You think you acquire a tiger by the tail, and you reflect you’re going to hold this fly in amber?” Leslie recalled Rapkin asking rhetorically.
He credited Friends of Cast Iron Architecture with making the most persuasive argument for preservation, positing that the prefabricated cast-iron building method represented a distinctly American contribution to international architecture. In addition, he credited gays. “Wherever artists, creative people, or gays live, change is inevitable,’” he said, riffing on something he recalled Rapkin saying. “Gay
Queer Natural History
How gay is nature, really? Some estimates suggest 1,500 species of animals show some develop of homosexual behaviour: from Hawaiian orb weaver spiders to the Humbolt squid and brown bears. However, given these 1500 species span almost every branch on the tree of life, this figure is likely a massive underestimate – a gap in our knowledge not helped by the efforts of some science and scientists to cover up or ignore its existence.
In his book 'A Tiny Gay Natural History', Josh Davis, a science journalist for the Natural History Museum, highlights the sheer diversity of non-heteronormative biology and behaviours that occur in the natural nature.
Josh will share some favourite examples from his book, including the moral outrage around lesbian gulls, while explaining his motivations for telling this story, such as tackling brain on the astonishing diversity of sexual behaviour that exists in nature when it "appears to proceed against evolution?"
This event is one of the Spotlight Talks. Advance tickets possess opened for booking and there will also be drop-in spaces available on the Festival weekend.
Register now for the talk
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The Spotlight Talks c
Queer Havens
The Gay Space Agency by Mackenzie Calle
Left: An astronaut from the imaginary Gay Space Agency. Staged photograph taken at Obsidian Dome in Mono County, California, United States. Right: A printed and rephotographed NASA image of Dr. Sally Ride aboard the Space Shuttle Challenge in June 1983, when Dr. Sally Ride became the first American woman in space. Today, she is also recognized as the first known LGBTQI+ astronaut. Credit: Mackenzie Calle
A staged recreation of the original Mercury Seven crew from 1960 photographed in New York City, United States. Credit: Mackenzie Calle
Mackenzie Calle’s project The Gay Space Agency, awarded in the 2024 Planet Press Photo Contest, challenges the historical exclusion of LGBTQIA+ astronauts from the American space program. Inspired by the absence of queer contributions in NASA archives, Calle created a fictional, inclusive agency to celebrate this overlooked history, including figures like Dr. Sally Ride, whose sexuality remained hidden during her lifetime.
Jon and Alex by Mads Nissen
Jon (21) and Alex (25), a couple, share an intimate moment at Alex’s home in St. Petersberg,
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