Queering Art Before, After and During the Sexual Revolution (1960-1980): A Study of Aesthetics and Subversion

Works produced by the queer artists in 1970s America is oftentimes not considered to be an integral part of the sexual revolution’s narrative. Not only is this problematic in that it demonstrates the heteronormative discourse that permeated liberatory pro-sex rhetoric of the time, but this exclusion also makes the LGBTQ struggle for visibility ahistorical. In this paper, I argue that notable artists who self-identified as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender or queer created art that fostered gradual acceptance of the queer community before, during and after the sexual revolution, explaining that resistance to dominant paradigms were rendered unseen due to the intertwined nature of various social movements of the time, such as second-wave feminism, a reaction that would eventually lead to LGBTQ artists being marginalized again until the AIDS epidemic of the 1980s

Nos ancêtres, les pervers: Reading Queerly and Constructing the Homosexual Before the Closet (1810-1830)

Homosexuality is, popularly imagined, a twentieth-century phenomenon wherein medicine created homosexual identity and society worked to stigmatize it. Yet the proto-homosexual role can be traced to several notable historical figures before the rise of medicine at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century, especially through literature, and this is most apparent in France, which had been the first country to decriminalize same-sex relations in private after the adoption of the Napoleonic Code. But how do we understand same-sex desire and homosexuality before the homosexual existed as such while respecting the oftentimes-unclear nuances of human sexuality? In this paper, I argue that in the case of the Marquis de Custine and the literature that his unconventional life inspired, ambiguity or secrecy does not indicate impotence or homosexuality, and that attempts to decode and demystify these secrets by nineteenth-century and contemporary analysts alike reflects an anxiety towards sexual ambiguity, as well as changing notions of gender representation. Finding comfort and accepting this sexual ambiguity, then, mark the practice of reading queerly