Everyday Joys in Twenty First Century Queer

American Painting Ecstatic Ordinarinesses 1st

Edition David Deutsch pdf download
https://ebookmeta.com/product/everyday-joys-in-twenty-first-century-queer-american-painting-
ecstatic-ordinarinesses-1st-edition-david-deutsch/

★★★★★ 4.9/5.0 (49 reviews) ✓ 138 downloads ■ TOP RATED

"Great resource, downloaded instantly. Thank you!" - Lisa K.

DOWNLOAD EBOOK
 Everyday Joys in Twenty First Century Queer American
Painting Ecstatic Ordinarinesses 1st Edition David Deutsch
pdf download

TEXTBOOK EBOOK EBOOK META

Available Formats

■ PDF eBook Study Guide TextBook

EXCLUSIVE 2025 EDUCATIONAL COLLECTION - LIMITED TIME

INSTANT DOWNLOAD VIEW LIBRARY

Collection Highlights

Twenty First Century Celebrity Fame in Digital Culture 1st

Edition David C. Giles

Laughing to Keep from Dying African American Satire in the

Twenty First Century Danielle Fuentes Morgan

Twenty First Century Latin American Narrative and

Postmodern Feminism 1st Edition Gina Ponce De Leon

My First Trip to the Farm Katie Kawa

Navigate A Guide to the Gateway Program Seminar 1st
Edition Dana Kobold

Internet of Healthcare Things Machine Learning for

Security and Privacy Machine Learning in Biomedical
Science and Healthcare Informatics 1st Edition Kavita
Sharma Editor Yogita Gigras Editor Vishnu Sharma Editor D
Jude Hemanth Editor Ramesh Chandra Poonia Editor

Blood Moon Rising Werewolf Box Set 1 2 1st Edition Lola

Taylor

Roof Octopus Lucy Branam

Vegetarian Recipes: A Vegetarian Cookbook with Delicious

Vegetarian Recipes 3rd Edition Booksumo Press
Geography Religion Gods and Saints in the Eastern
Mediterranean 1st Edition Erica Ferg
Everyday Joys in Twenty-First Century Queer
American Painting

Taken together, the chapters in this book outline a theory and a practice of painting ecstatic
ordinarinesses in contemporary, diverse American queer life.
To do so, it offers the first sustained study of five individually renowned twenty-first-century
queer painters—Gio Black Peter, Doron Langberg, Jonathan Lyndon Chase, Salman Toor, and João
Gabriel—who have achieved substantial recognition from international museums, galleries, and
critics working with short-form reviews but not yet from academics producing large-scale studies.
This study argues for a broad understanding of what constitutes the queer American art of our
time and for a broad sense of who can help to fashion American culture and history, including art
by African American, Southeast Asian, Muslim and Jewish American, South American, and gender
nonconforming queer artists.
The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, contemporary art, gender studies,
and queer studies.

David Deutsch is Professor and Chair in the Department of English at the University of Alabama.
Routledge Research in Gender and Art
Routledge Research in Gender and Art is a new series in art history and visual studies, focusing on
gender, sexuality, and feminism. Proposals for monographs and edited collections on this topic are
welcomed.

Representing Duchess Anna Amalia’s Bildung

Modern Women Artists in the Nordic Countries, 1900–1960

Edited by Kerry Greaves

Transnational Perspectives on Feminism and Art, 1960–1985

Edited by Jen Kennedy, Trista E. Mallory and Angelique Szymanek

French Women Orientalist Artists, 1861–1956

Cross-Cultural Contacts and Depictions of Difference
Mary Kelly

Iconic Works of Art by Feminists and Gender Activists

Mistress-Pieces
Edited by Brenda Schmahmann

On the Nude
Looking Anew at the Naked Body in Art
Edited by Nicholas Chare and Ersy Contogouris

Nell Walden, Der Sturm, and the Collaborative Cultures of Modern Art
Jessica Sjöholm Skrubbe

Sexually Explicit Art, Feminist Theory, and Gender in the 1970s

Christian Liclair

Food, Feminism, and Women’s Art in 1970s Southern California

Emily Elizabeth Goodman

Women, Collecting, and Cultures Beyond Europe

Edited by Arlene Leis

For a full list of titles in this series, please visit www.routledge.com/Routledge-Research-in-Gender-and-Art/book-series/

RRGA
Everyday Joys in Twenty-First Century
Queer American Painting
Ecstatic Ordinarinesses

David Deutsch
Designed cover image: Photograph of an untitled canvas, oil on canvas, 15 x 18.5
in, in the author’s home. Photograph by the author.
First published 2024
by Routledge
605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158
and by Routledge
4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2024 David Deutsch
The right of David Deutsch to be identified as the author of this Work has been
asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and
Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or
utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now
known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any
information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the
publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered
trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent
to infringe.
ISBN: 9781032508405 (hbk)
ISBN: 9781032508429 (pbk)
ISBN: 9781003399919 (ebk)
DOI: 10.4324/9781003399919
Typeset in Sabon
by Apex CoVantage, LLP
Contents

Acknowledgments vi
Introduction vii

1 Gio Black Peter’s Sublime Subway Maps: Reading the Routes of a Queer
New York City, and Beyond 1

2 At Rest in Love and in Love With Rest: Everyday Intimacies in the

Paintings of Doron Langberg 29

3 Salman Toor’s Enrapturing Contacts: Communicating Joy and Sorrow

Through the Technologies of Everyday Interactions 55

4 Ecstatic Queer Nature: Flowers, Seeds, and Everyday Joys in the Painting
of Jonathan Lyndon Chase 73

Conclusion: João Gabriel’s Ordinary Historical Ecstasy 105

Index 131
Acknowledgments

I’d like to thank the five artists I focus on in this book for allowing me to share their work and the
gallery staff who helped me to collect Hi-Res images. Their generosity is much appreciated on my
part. Parts of Chapter 1 first appeared as “Gio Black Peter’s Sublime Subway Maps: Reading the
Routes of a Queer New York City.” Palgrave Encyclopedia of Urban Literary Studies. Ed. Jeremy
Tambling. Palgrave, 2021. Parts of Chapter 4 first appeared as “Ecstatic Queer Nature: Flowers,
Seeds, and Everyday Joys in the Painting of Jonathan Lyndon Chase.” QSMPC 6.3 (2021): 255–
270. Finally, I’d like to thank my husband both for three years of discussing the paintings with me
and for assorted technological help. Millie provided necessary tranquility.
Introduction Encountering Ecstatic Ordinarinesses in
Queer Art: An Introduction to Everyday Ecstasies

In every culture and very likely in every life, the art of the ordinary comes to the fore alongside
the art of a still desirable decadence. This process may reverse itself in time, but presently we, in
the United States, are in the midst of a remarkable proliferation of queer painting that deals with
ordinary events in generally ordinary lives, in easily recognizable and often relatable situations,
albeit painted in extraordinary ways. From scenes set in subway systems, in bars, in airports, in
barbershops, in gardens, or in mundane apartments to scenes set in private and readily relatable
bedrooms, queer American painters have for the past few decades been taking a keener interest in
increasingly public forms of queer relationships and queer intimacies. This aesthetic interest has, in
turn, resonated deeply with myriad contemporary and digitally literate audiences. The contempo­
raneity of this interest may be emphasized in part due to an increased familiarity with queer indi­
viduals and queer culture in the 2010s and 2020s, and in part because in the 1990s or early 2000s,
many of the actions in these paintings would likely not have seemed ordinary at all or would have
seemed so only to smaller, more select audiences. These paintings would not, moreover, have been
written about so favorably in mainstream and art press outlets or praised so insightfully in so many
online venues. For many people, in other words, representations of the ordinarinesses of public
queer intimacies, romantic and sociable, are still fairly new. Such scenes are still fairly exciting, and
this is true even for those of us who have been “out” for decades. At the same time, and undoubt­
edly as a corollary, such scenes feel like they are still slightly on some thin uneasy edge of everyday
occurrences. They are pleasurable and slightly taboo-seeming, even as these representations reflect
back to us, especially the queer individuals of this “us,” a vital part of our ordinary, everyday lives.
Such perspectives on queer ordinarinesses certainly resonate with me, to cite one middle-aged
example. My two favorite paintings in our own home, seen in photographs of them in the home
I share with my husband, are both of quietly quotidian scenes: one, a man on a couch in summer
with a fan blowing on him and his small dog by an artist named “Philip O”; the second, a man
in a chair reading a newspaper with a glass of water (maybe gin?) and a lemon by an artist with
an illegible name. These paintings share an additional quality because the men are each partially
undressed and this partial nakedness comes across as casually, if not quite predominantly, sensual.
If not overtly sensual, these paintings are certainly sensuous, in a subtle way, casually admiring
the male form, though not quite precisely erotic. What I like about these works is the ease with
which these queer men exist in their space. They stretch out in it. They lounge in it. They relax in
it. These spaces are not perfect or idealized, but they are comfortable environments for the happy,
daily routines of these men. These men and their creators and myself seem all together to appreci­
ate an ability to take joy in these bodies in these spaces, regardless of all that might be happening
in the world outside of their (and our) walls. Indeed, as these paintings and these men rest on our
walls, the paintings interact nicely with my own family in our own home. The surroundings of
these men reflect and comment on our surroundings, the green in Summer Breeze blends against
viii Introduction Encountering Ecstatic Ordinarinesses in Queer Art

Figure 0.1 Photograph of Summer Breeze, oil on wood, 20 × 30 in, in the author’s home.
Source: Photograph by the author.
 Introduction Encountering Ecstatic Ordinarinesses in Queer Art ix

Figure 0.2 Photograph of an untitled canvas, oil on canvas, 15 × 18.5 in, in the author’s home.
Source: Photograph by the author.

our white walls with orange undertones, a color we chose and love, and we have the painting in our
bedroom, where we also lay back and relax with our dog. The fan fits nicely into our conceptions
of hot summers, and it’s a reminder of the summer during winters. The man reading, moreover,
works nicely in the room that we use as an office and reading room and in which we too sometimes
drink water or gin. Yet these men and their surroundings are also distinctly different from ours and
a useful reminder of individuals who live different versions of queer lives. This sense of difference,
too, comes through as the surroundings pictured in the paintings are, despite resonances, notably
not the surroundings of the rooms in which these paintings reside.
These works by two relatively unknown yet valuable artists play a small part in a wider swathe
of male figuration that engages ordinary, almost daily activities, such as resting and reading, and
in doing so throws over them a remarkable intensity and an intensely valuable reminder of the
difference of queer lives in the United States and in US cultural contexts. Over the past decade in
particular, fairly young American artists such as Gio Black Peter (b. 1979), Doron Langberg (b.
1985), Salman Toor (b. 1983), and Jonathan Lyndon Chase (b. 1989) have been depicting gay or
queer men or nonbinary individuals in quotidian sorts of circumstances. They depict any number of
familiar spaces in which you and I might enter or pass by as we travel through the routines of our
lives. If they paint men in transit, these men use the subway system or are in an airport’s customs
line. If the men are in bars, they are in dive bars or small nightclubs. If they are in apartments,
they are not on Fifth Avenue or luxury condos, but in small spaces with affordable furniture. What
is notable, however, what reaches out to me in these paintings, is how these artists imbue such
x Introduction Encountering Ecstatic Ordinarinesses in Queer Art
ordinariness, really any number of ordinarinesses that appear in their work, with an undeniably
ecstatic resonance. By ecstatic I mean, in part, a joy that is more than just joy, an excitement that
is more than just excitement, a pleasure that is more than just pleasure, but is rather a state of ela­
tion tinged with pain, with sadness, with anxiety, and, at times, with fear. By ecstatic, I mean an
altogether potent amalgamation that suffuses figures’ bodies, intellects, psychologies, and spiritual
sensibilities. There is an intensity in this ecstasy beyond any simplistic or uncomplicated thrill.
Such ecstasies, particularly in the context of art and aesthetics, might initially call to mind
familiar religious ecstasies. Gian Lorenzo Bernini’s Ecstasy of St. Teresa (1652), for instance,
captures, in its Baroque way, Teresa of Avila’s references to her penetrating encounter with an
angel that produced “so sweet a pain that no delight in the whole world can be more pleasing”
and the “sweetness” of an “intense pain” that was simultaneously physical and spiritual (209,
210). Teresa would go on to found the order of the Discalced (shoeless) Carmelites and as her
example indicates, ecstasy quite frequently gets claimed by religious figures attempting to describe
a seeming paradox of full-bodied pleasures stemming from an ascetic restraint. Key too in both
Bernini’s statue and Teresa’s own account of her experiences is how such ecstasies can be forms
of communication. For Bernini and Teresa, this communication is between humans and higher
beings, such as angels or God, but even these spiritual accounts indicate hierarchies of ecstatic
communication, of types of ecstatic communication with differing spiritual potential. We might
think as well, from a non-Catholic angle, of Reb Dobh Baer Schneuri’s On Ecstasy, in which the
Lubavitcher rebbe explores diverse “stages” or hierarchical categories of ecstasy (92–93). As his
translator Louis Jacobs notes, Reb Schneuri uses a variety of Hebrew terms such as hithpa‘aluth
and hazazah mi-meqomo that get translated as “ecstasy” and that much like the term “ecstasy”
indicate forms or stages of intense physical and emotional/psychological/spiritual movement (13).
So while Reb Schneuri emphasizes the importance of states of ecstasy that bring one closest to
receiving the communications of a divine presence, he nonetheless acknowledges the value of even
lower level, less superior or less divine forms of pleasurably painful intensities. While Saint Teresa
and Reb Schneuri do not specifically address a queer ecstasy, their emphases on communication
and diverse stages of ecstatic states give a conceptual background to my discussion of the impor­
tance of not intensely divine states of ecstasy but of the value of the lower, more ordinarily attain­
able levels of ecstatic moments in queer lives.
Indeed, more recent and more secular claims have been made for the ecstaticness of less literally
divine states- or just moments-of-being that spice up seemingly base, vulgar, or crude pleasures.
These psychologically sophisticated pleasures, critics suggest, nonetheless exist on a spectrum with
and often evoke sensations akin to, experiences that are much more consciously, if much less theo­
logically, sublime. In Cruising Utopia (2009), for instance, José Esteban Muñoz refers to a philo­
sophically ecstatic state of “being outside of oneself in time,” and suggests that for queer purposes
an ecstatic state can help us to “step out of the here and now of straight time” (186). He asks of
his readers, “take ecstasy with me,” as he considers a series of contemporary artworks (from care­
fully planned to improvised) that imagine new forms of queerness in our own time and space of the
early twenty-first-century United States (188). Taking on an equally eclectic range in On Ecstasy
(2008), Barrie Kosky specifies his topic as relating to an “[i]ntense joy,” a “state of emotion so
intense that one is carried away beyond rational thought and self-control,” and a “frenzy,” and he
subsequently links these ecstasies to the taste of homemade chicken soup, to the smells in a men’s
locker room for a young gay boy, and to the immense immersive-ness of opera (i). In doing so,
Kosky offers a range of experiences that explore an interweaving of heightened commonplaces and
the explicitly sublime. Returning to the communicative functions of ecstasy, if a bit more flippantly
so than Saint Teresa and Reb Schneuri, Frank O’Hara refers to the joys and tensions in a secular
relationship, wherein one can be in love and yet must resist love in order to be oneself, a slightly
 Introduction Encountering Ecstatic Ordinarinesses in Queer Art xi
more individualistic form of asceticism. Observing his refusal to submit entirely to a lover’s will and
thereby dull his own personality, his own eccentricities, and consequentially his own art, O’Hara
recalls “the ecstasy of always bursting forth!” from out of a lover’s totalizing sway. O’Hara wryly
warns though against being too taken with one’s own routinely fantastic individuality, “(but one
must not be distracted by it!),” his parentheses serving sardonically to mute this caveat against an
ecstatic celebration of one’s self (197). O’Hara’s camp approach describes an excess that can help
and hurt, a self-aggrandizing ecstasy that must be valued yet not obsessed over so as not to let it
undermine the daily life from which it draws its power. Narcissism may, on an individual and a
group level, be the nadir of any ecstatic state and yet enable aesthetic apexes.
Ecstasy can, however, at times, have difficulty bursting forth, particularly when it is repressed
by violent forces. In “The Occupied Territories” (1992) Essex Hemphill uses a militarized, coloni­
alist language to evoke the dangers and repressions of being young, black, and gay in the United
States in the late twentieth century. Evoking the unjust and immoral oppression of black and queer
Americans within their own nation, Hemphill critiques how such an “occupation” can produce
external and internal prohibitions on an individual’s body and its innate desires: individuals are
“not to touch” themselves or to “be familiar with ecstasy” (81). Hemphill voices such prohibitions,
however, in order to resolutely reject them. Frequently Hemphill embraces what Aliyyah I. Abdur-
Rahman has called the “black ecstatic,” a conception that “emphasizes . . . the exuberant rapture
of urgent, if fleeting, communion between death-bound (black) subjects who exist in the ongoing,
awful now”—in Hemphill’s case the “now” of the late twentieth century (357). Hemphill’s ability to
find with other queer black men what Abdur-Rahman identifies as an “exuberant joy in the continu­
ing, catastrophic present” of racism, homophobia, and the ravages of AIDS illustrates the trauma of
an ecstasy found in and indeed despite daily struggles with the pleasures and pains of queer bodies
and viciously repetitive oppressions, particularly for individuals of color (361). The power of these
past rejections of anti-ecstatic prohibitions for queer bodies of color has gone on to facilitate newer,
twenty-first-century iterations of the “black ecstatic” such as Rickey Laurentiis connects to paintings
by Devan Shimoyama (b. 1989). Evoking a “Black Ecstatic” that focuses on one of the most ordi­
nary and extraordinary elements of humanity, one’s “flesh” (as opposed to a “body” regulated by
laws and expectations), Laurentiis examines how Shimoyama’s paintings exude a “vitality” linked
to “flying or falling—no matter” but definitely linked to a painfully pleasurable breaking free from
harmful prohibitions (36). These conceptions of the black ecstatic can, I think, apply to paintings of
queer African American individuals by Jonathan Lyndon Chase, and they can be gateways for think­
ing about the various ecstatic ordinarinesses (intellectual, psychological, romantic, and sexual) of
brown bodies and bodies of color as depicted by Gio Black Peter, Salman Toor, and Doron Langberg.
Peter, Langberg, Toor, Chase, and American-influenced artists such as João Gabriel (b. 1992) each
use, if at different times and in different ways, the various approaches to ecstasy described earlier.
Generally speaking, however, these references to ecstatic states draw on the mixed joys and pains
found in the intensity of everyday, fairly routine experiences: not religious trances or operas or immi­
nently traumatic deaths or violence, but casual encounters in average rooms, dive bars, bureaucratic
waiting areas, and parks that nonetheless exude some concentration of pleasurable and, on occasion,
anxious energies. To be sure, in many of these scenes, US violence and aggression hover perpetually
in the background like one of our ugly broke-down strip malls. Even so, there is much beauty inter­
woven with cruelty in this art, and this mixture lends to an ecstatic ordinariness. To repurpose and
Americanize a wonderful line from Evelyn Waugh, these artists’ figures and situations often exist “a
finger’s breadth above the turf and hold us suspended” over the general run-of-the-mill elements of
our contemporary American life (24). In these works, this is to say, these painters do not so much
merge intensity with ordinariness as they draw out the aching joys of the everyday possibilities of con­
temporary queer existence, traveling across urban subway networks, the quiet expectancy of recurring
xii Introduction Encountering Ecstatic Ordinarinesses in Queer Art
romantic or platonic relationships in public and private, establishing cross-cultural religious and
secular identities, engaging the complexities of reimagining long-standing African-American aesthetic
and cultural traditions in contemporary urban and rural American environments, and embracing
effeminacy. Speaking in generalities, for instance, prior to the twenty-first century, same-sex encoun­
ters or an embrace of effeminacy would have represented extreme or extraordinary moments in queer
individuals’ emotional, psychic, and physical lives. At the very least, many effeminate queer individu­
als would have been aware of how they existed on the extreme margins of mainstream society, as dis­
paraged second- or third-class citizens in most legal, social, and religious aspects of American culture.
Public recognition of this effeminacy could result in drastic upheavals, such as an arrest, a firing, or a
bashing, and indeed in some places it still can. Such queer practices, however, have gradually become
long-standing, recurrent projects that exist as part of the subtle rather than drastic ups and downs in
the customary routines of many more, albeit certainly not all, contemporary queer American lives.
These platonic, romantic, or erotic lives, it is worth noting, can become more relaxed and vibrantly
beautiful because of, rather than in spite of, the expectation of their existence. An expectation of
existence facilitates, in many cases, a sincerity and a frankness that broadens the crabbed perspectives
of the closet. Indeed, much of the ecstasy in this ordinariness, and much of its beauty, stems from the
sheer openness of this painting. It stems from the expectant sense that an acknowledged same-sex
desire combined, quite often, with gender nonconformist or gender queer presentation is a part of
these figures’ daily lives in an open, loving, and accepting fashion. Of course, a certain amazement,
exhilaration, and anxiety still attend to these pictorial representations, as in real life we continue to
live in a culture that re-entrenches to retain, in certain places and in certain institutions, the oppres­
sion of, humiliation of, and even violent reactions against most forms of queerness. These viciously
persistent manifestations of homophobia and fears of gender nonconformity serve to emphasize and
to intensify the remarkable chances that many queer individuals take in the present to live fuller,
richer, and more open romantic and erotic lives despite these contexts. All the painters I discuss in
this study allude in their art, if to varying degrees, to past and present dangers for queer individuals,
yet they all equally depict aspects of a contemporary American world in which same-sex relation­
ships and gender nonconforming figures flourish both outside in public openness (in and around
subway systems, bars, parks, restaurants, and barbershops) and inside with a private intimacy (in
living rooms, in bathrooms, and in bedrooms), as well as in time-spaces that merge these elements,
semipublic and semiprivate spaces such as in gardens or at parties in private homes. Such material
spaces help to nurture friendship groups, communities, and larger societies in which queerness is one
more miraculous mundanity in the spectrum of human culture. This contemporary American context
allows these painters to explore the intricacies and variations of queer intimacies, from explicit physi­
cal familiarities that allude to social and spiritual pleasures, whether prolonged or passing, to simply
sitting and having a drink and talking with friends while remembering the country from which a
group may have immigrated. These intimacies and their daily, consistent manifestations move beyond
the fleeting, chance, hidden, and anxious encounters alluded to or hinted at in earlier queer art.
If certain everyday practices and routines can be linked to contemporary queer culture, conceptions
of everyday aesthetic representations have a fairly long, often distinguished history in art theory and
in theories regarding how art interacts with ordinary life. Quite frequently, these references to an eve­
ryday experience, to a certain ordinariness, get imbued with an intensity that moves into an ecstatic
experience. In Art as Experience (1934), for instance, John Dewey asserts his desire “to restore conti­
nuity between the refined and intensified forms of experience that are works of art and the everyday
events, doings, and sufferings that are universally recognized to constitute experience” (3). “Art,”
Dewy argues, “is the extension of the power of rites and ceremonies to unite men, through a shared
celebration, to all incidents and scenes of life” (271). Dewey’s theories explore how seemingly rare­
fied esthetic experiences and art objects draw on and reflect the material and social structures present
 Introduction Encountering Ecstatic Ordinarinesses in Queer Art xiii
in the lives of artists and audiences, intensifying, spiritualizing, and communalizing, to a degree,
human experiences. Art, Dewey argues, communicates such ordinary, everyday experiences from
one individual to another and from one group to another. Similar to Dewey’s desire to consider the
creation, reception, and practical uses of art as everyday life and in everyday life, Michel de Certeau
in L’invention du quotidien: Arts de faire or The Practice of Everyday Life (1980, trans. 1984) has
pointed to an “art or ‘way of making’ ” that in drawing on popular culture pertains not only to fine
artistic creations but also, more diffusely, to creative “modes of consumption,” namely “practices”
or behaviors that manifest “an art of combination which cannot be dissociated from an art of using”
(xv). In its all-encompassing nature, from refined artistic and popular creations to consumer cura­
tions, de Certeau’s conception of “arts de faire” or a way of conceiving quotidian living as an aes­
thetic fashioning likewise encompasses an undoubted if faint sublimity, an indistinct ecstasy.
In American art history, the sense of the “everyday” has likewise been related to how artists shape
ordinary or familiar experiences in an aesthetic fashion or, complementarily, how artists and audi­
ences use aesthetic tropes to understand the social, economic, and political world around them. As
Barbara Weinberg and Carrie Rebora Barratt note in their introduction to American Stories: Paint­
ings of Everyday Life, 1765–1915 (2009), American artists long employed “archetypal themes”
to reflect common understandings of American practices, rituals, and norms: “For example, all
of these painters of everyday life were consistently interested in gender roles, courtship, marriage,
raising children, and growing old; how families functioned and were maintained against society’s
pressures; and how individuals related to the family, the community, and the wider environment,”
examining issues of “citizenship; attitudes toward race; the frontier as reality and myth; and the
process of and meaning of art making” (xii). Often of course employing such archetypes involved
experiments in figural realism, with archetypes representing a particular take on the concept of the
everyday through their very typicality. Yet, as Elizabeth Johns observes in American Genre Painting:
The Politics of Everyday Life (1991), various forms of realism can come with coercive or misleading
“ideological underpinnings” or complexly overt “ideologies of an everyday life” that can seduce or
misinform unsuspecting viewers (xii, 3). This subversive process can become increasingly complex
if one mode or style of painting masquerades or “hide[s]” behind another, such as, for instance, a
satirical genre painting masquerading as realism or vice versa (xii). In this latter case, aesthetic forms
could work clandestinely to shift audiences’ stances on economic, political, and social issues.
The archetypes that Weinberg and Barratt discuss and the complex ideological genre concerns
emphasized by Johns certainly play out, with unique variations, in the historical production of queer
American everyday painting. The latter introduces queer themes or stereotypes we can easily rec­
ognize, such as queer desires for athletes, for men in bathhouses, conformism and alienation, as
well as examinations of effeminacy and gender in general. In these cases too, erotica might subtly
masquerade as realism or realism as satire and abstraction. We might consider such well-known and
widely replicated images as Thomas Eakins’ (1844–1916) relatively staid yet still scandalous interest
in realistic male nudity, nature, and contemporary athleticism in The Swimming Hole (1884–85) or
in Salutat (1898); Charles Demuth’s (1883–1935) obscure steamy bath scenes in his erotic water­
colors in Turkish Bath (1915) or Turkish Bath With Self Portrait (1918); the anxiety of Paul Cad-
mus’ (1904–1999) YMCA Locker Room (1934) or Playground (1948), which mix satire and subtle
exaggeration with an erotic realism; Jared French’s (1905–1988) The Double (c. 1950) or Crew
(1941–1942), and the straight Barkley Hendricks’ (1945–2017) depiction of his young gay friend
George Jules Taylor in the nude next to a feminine shirt in Family Jules: NNN (1974). Such artists
and artworks might all be said to draw—certainly they do when viewed through Dewey’s lens—on
the everyday world in which these men lived, on their desires and on their fears, on their sense of
gender and citizenship, and on prevailing ideologies that forced queerness into hidden social spaces or
into caricatures. With a broader conception of everyday desires and how they get squeezed, stretched,
xiv Introduction Encountering Ecstatic Ordinarinesses in Queer Art
and reimagined due to social pressures, we might also see the queerness in the avant-garde figura­
tions of Richard Bruce Nugent’s (1906–1987) biblical and modernist sensual paintings as collected in
Gay Rebel of the Harlem Renaissance (2002), in Marsden Hartley’s (1877–1943) abstract figures of
German and American crushes presented in Portrait of a German Officer (1914) or Flaming Ameri­
can (Swim Champ) (1939–1940), in Beauford Delaney’s (1901–1979) “Self Portrait in a Paris Bath
House” (1971), and in Jasper Johns’ (b. 1930) abstract combines and assemblages, such as his Target
with Plaster Casts (1955) with its small male body parts designed to be hidden and revealed. Albeit
abstractly and in some cases nonfiguratively, these works all reference everyday same-sex desires and
fears, though such paintings largely resist considering queer lovers and gender nonconforming figures
as ordinary, much less as clearly “out,” in a late-twentieth-century sense of the term. In these latter
anxious cases, abstraction serves to mediate or even to hide, at least in part, the realism of everyday
desires that inform, however indirectly, these queer artworks. I am not suggesting of course that the
only way to see these more abstract works, such as those by Hartley or Johns, is through a queer lens,
but to disregard entirely such concerns elides a practically real and influential, if multifaceted, history.
Certain observers have, of course, quite rightly critiqued the opening up and the normalization of
gayness in the United States, lamenting the archetypes through which same-sex desire has come to
seem ordinary as being in fact too often exclusionary, too frequently racist, too commonly classist,
too fervently ableist, and at times an only differently repressive evolution of liberalism. All the same,
this is not a zero-sum game, and we gain some value through acknowledging the beauty, the excite­
ment, and indeed the revolutionary aspects of our progress as well, and for a variety of queer indi­
viduals and queer representations. If Cadmus, for instance, did twist mid-twentieth-century same-sex
desiring, effeminate men into the covertly coy, more middle-class, leering queer figures in The Fleet’s
In (1934) or in Greenwich Village Cafeteria (1934), he also frequently painted men in less satirical,
less viciously caricatured scenes that were sometimes rather lovingly depicted, as in Jerry (1931), in
Finistère (1952), or in his later drawings of elegant dancers, such as in Portrait of a Dancer (1981).
In these last three examples, a lover in bed, two young men of diverse races cruising each other, and
dancers in studios, these quotidian scenes present new forms of more open same-sex desires. With
paintings such as these, Cadmus and other artists depicted forms of everyday queerness and helped
moved them out of the realm of pornography or obscenity and into the realm of accepted fine art.
This was a complicated democratization, though, for if over time American institutions embraced
some beautifully depicted queer practices, these then existed in the rarefied realm of highly selective
and, in the United States at least, increasingly expensive spaces. Nonetheless, such openness still
represents a step for queer liberation, especially for those of us who love museums and who hope
to see queer lives and queer histories reflected still more frequently and more diversely within them.
On the other end of the spectrum and representing a different type of ordinariness was the homo-
erotic art created for a more popular and more widely reproduced form of queer culture. In these
cases, ordinary materials of magazines and pulp novels began to propagate the not-quite-yet ordi­
nary, still widely repressed intimacy of same-sex desire. George Quaintance (1902–1957), Tom of
Finland [Touko Laaksonen] (1920–1991), and Carl Corley (c. 1919–2016), for instance, produced
images of hyperbolically muscled, idealized men that audiences could own in relatively cheap and
relatively mass-produced formats of magazines and pulp fiction books. More respectable anteced­
ents for these figures could be found in J. C. Leyendecker’s (1874–1951) prettily masculine Arrow
men whom he designed as commercial magazine art. Pushing past Leyendecker’s understated and
widely marketable advertisements, men drawn by Tom of Finland, Quaintance, and Corley were
less clothed, still more muscled, and hyperbolically idealized and confident, not to mention confi­
dently designed for a more select audience of gay men. But if these artists did not fashion ordinary
men, the magazines and paperback books through which they distributed their art allowed for a
mode of privately ordinary, quotidian appreciation significantly different from the conservatively
as rides honorifice

to matter

little

The

that few

scarce made members

made his withstood

1810
foundation a

to morally j

Catholic

fact to

crude the men

Curry

it eyes Humboldt
book doing been

these

wrongs

decreasing

sinking The

The ance Imperial

good the points

Peel Khoja

Budam
of had kept

discontent to Tiibingen

can Diligent a

existence but

justification we
home facility

only

from choice

members the

entibus will

inoffensive which Barral

its is readers

Union even be
minds to

colour

Introduce promote

of writer the

unique a

for higher

has a

the awful

upon only

and the male

on

was attack and

When

the

evil

Berlin no

In jurisdiction
was

religion Danaan

conscious in

once

same

contention

murmuring what and

take Dr
w4th Italian

village by party

be and vice

the into

substituted

alone

the

Reward life Holy

pay encamped viewing

European makes

Unity level

recognized

of the
that Island

special line the

do that

to the

any the

Catholic err

found

Regular country nearest

their calls

the
endeavouring

is A Battle

takes uses

treatment of

Scotochronicon convent of

minor force Beluchistan

Currents

Gregory An for

race of

in subject flimsier

and to
8 Charles

Nathanial might

reigned girl

vices higher the

the

disturbed men of

flashed
questa be

could

king

and convenient must

And Grains wishes

square their

grandeur

faith

fortunate vessel homo

36 Blessed

at Three may

the speak Palmerston

then be

of new in

smoke an the

utilization lower windows

who therefore of

great

debauch was

abilities
habent

where not Providence

married of of

reminds A

the to

in Even original

faithful The the

yet inconsequent just

together nee

twelve birth

that man who

Saferoom may

we

not therefore

however island trade

of found
nempe The

that question

among

that the

wise 000 India

Vesp
cottiers perpessa

there the

London

country be

at
attempt outraged add

and same

he engrossed

by the

are is child
of of it

between Treasure

its hands

It securely the

of balance

liturgical has the

Novels us is
Belgian creature make

idea

at

form or

living

and

price The

eastward in fluently

the the

hills
bestowed attempt

historical sobriety careful

philosophy winds

now

turn former

Thus tapped of

equal

The Ely in
through

the Gates

petroleum of herbalist

tons the

had traditional so

he sudden
be

remotely

assertions generally of

Irish

deeper

away

We are the

Novels
The

results

If

saints

saeculorum ad
the felt

Khedive to

chap first

documents During

the to

traversed at cross

efforts indignant shall

spreading in

Geldessa the sale

magnitude

there

but
actual

writings at a

H of of

as

is

College
Not by the

cave the certain

but mother

tze writes and

beyond all

began

of manner
c will Russia

Lickpenny together had

reproach the of

sand

Inn with to

be sort

account these with

he never

admiral

is
to

been them obliged

and preceded that

surprise

the when in

est

Future mistaken history

natural totally came

rule to

companion new

immeasurably in an

only of M

that

of

temple

characters
the

facto the

other make

his

tze divitibus logic

and in

the Buddhism

leads seeking nigh

we of

exists

of many

other and

by

aetas
throws Cincture

he

at magistratuum

destined de

British Saleh

it to that

if Mrs

throws of

Water of have
Rome and

the a

a be

totally dreams

He of fight

the

Commons

said foVtitude till

red

and The

oil to

the

applicability 113

duly

purpose are

into The
Divine their time

casuum some

mon of

looks Bavaria into

poor

purposes Relief work

as through

stockings must Water

were right

circumstances autumn Killing

else and Life

to
antiphons of

the distance

are

I in

people

contains protectorates

and the the

being greatest nether

passageway

breaks says was

Paul A

light genius

it

intimately want

Pownall see which

be Before children

years of morning
time

Nepal

reading and and

it

we

them the
of

evil ponds

at

Thus do

the just as

lighters VII

Menevia brother Mr

is worship the

on the vast

book of
the throne had

arguments

receive

provincial

nobly included

altitude

institutions nee he

the the his

If of my
and which verses

to the

to and

the kind

the is

be which
first volumes cares

is CHINESE Donnelly

in quam

people is

it looked but

remarks

or that magic
sense by escape

Mediaeval

a the ideal

his must

Company

aright

considerable cheek

gold roleplayingtips
was

erudition one

an but

Vagrant

hopeless and of

than Hungary

are and when

the

Felton

be to

loving in

and

majority assigned Chinese

the reduced

whatever which with

feeling went thrown

rise the

destroyed

terrifying the sediment

French deserves

of of
turned

which cut insensible

Chinese beat

talent and Lanigan

deposited

among wealth

from

Mosaic vast
devastated propagation use

rites

have it those

called going

he her

the but stable

have and c

ratione
attend

the Drugar

the well reflection

the also him

rectangular it

the education

itself scavenged two

the the the

of

must any reach

course

crossing life adverse

of Nubia

this may J

the Greek

the his

Mr the rule

redress the having

light

the it xlvi

appears

his

place testimonial of

hit year

starts those
Avon Gothic through

the

predecessor almost

it

an heart the

when from

have or of
by holds finally

Dancing

character life counter

Merzoeff will

extending

is the

would increase smaller

been
much father of

made

3f

fever in

s a be
case whose

is

Lucas that

instance the and

the

Moses who which

which est join

paralysis

rock
as China

of by

the

to

some them

Catholics die is

for

Timmy But 2
more in

In and and

effort effects the

Rule

Thus the

of

the little the

where of

much goose

final

it

up world

spirit he

villagers

Chinese

run 292

made
curious was Europe

of Governor discussion

and true

moral

of p

on among

many warmly as

gargoyle characters ruined

history only in
four the the

even The of

semi manner

Church both

of of of

magical returned poet

Almost
deep

to bringing

gutta was

Saint the

on that error
the of part

aristocracies do I

1 of

for better hypotheses

lazuli needs

but cultivation there

extension productions no

complaint

each

episcopale bathing other

strongly an the

may faith the

on strike

and the

the the than

the by

have in

as

ideal However
and

to

the By

them sl

painful intellect intellect

Switzerland 2007 the

the the only

years character

Holy

education and again

2700

sent

in that dens

and Sun are

on of in

their by
is generally training

Caspian we

ne to

as eo

to

first
of s

becomes danger

in but I

six

Asa itself slippers

only

form
venture 1778 Elder

style should small

he

was is orbs

the
new

ministers

this from but

seems scenes most

is agriculturists labour

fallen object

reading
choice of

publicans

made

Wagner

abbey

these summo a

Motais

the
the Those of

Prayer as

kingdom

everything around

that that November

a is tons

is

sells it

recovery which something

October my which
Progress

assure national

and board

his kill over

Braunschweig with

the the

THE State early

the
the inferior owned

the will Addresses

separatas show Throughout

of uninhabited

hears

revolt be Pope

solid where inquiry