Dean Sameshima, Untitled (South Bay Tearooms), 1995, Silver gelatin print, 8 x 10 in, Courtesy the collection of Justin Izbinski and Jasmine Jones (Courtesy of the artist and the Museum of Sex)
Radical Perverts: Ecstasy and Activism in Queer Public Space, 1975-2000 at the Museum of Sex should come with its own scratch-and-sniff cards. Steal the patented Odorama technology used in John Waters’s Polyester–who gives a fuck. Dean Sameshima’s delightfully clinical series of four public restrooms, Untitled (South Bay Tearooms), which, much like Jimmy DeSana’s early series of suburban homes, remind me of crime scene photographs (though what happens inside is anything but sterile), should boast a bold odor of stale piss, daddy long-legs (spider or human), and rainy-day park mildew. Christian Walker’s (no, not that Christian Walker) whirlwind toilet love romance captured within a black and white photograph from his Theater Project series, depicting two men kissing in the flimsy stalls of a dinge Boston porn theater’s men’s bathroom, should garner a whiff of urinal cake and cum-crusted dusty seats. Jimmy Wright’s sketchily simple blue gouache and watercolor pencil drawing, Poppers: Club Baths, featuring two men embracing while one shoves a bottle of head cleaner up the other’s nostril should…well, perhaps that’s too obvious. And don’t even get me started on what smell should drift from Phyllis Christopher’s In Bed with Fairy Butch Club, SF, a straight-to-the-pussy crotch shot of a woman bent backward in leather boots, surrounded by dollar bills. That, I think, goes without saying.
Why would anyone want to hurriedly scritch and snort these stenches straight up their nasal passageways, you ask? Well, because Radical Perverts is a group exhibition specifically organized for those who want to wallow in filth. It even says so right there in the title—the perverts! Of course, this scentorium mania is my own fantasy, dreamed up after walking through the gleefully smutty show. That doesn’t mean that curator Alexis Heller doesn’t leave room for some potential sleazy audience participation for the brave exhibitionists among us (or for the pleasure of those of us who prefer to watch). The first work viewers see after huffing up the Museum of Sex’s dark stairwell (and post-staring at ancient dildos and more recent blow-up dolls in the museum’s collection galleries) is Nayland Blake’s Workroom 2. At first, Workroom 2 appears like an inventive curtain separating different areas of the two-room exhibition. Yet, upon closer inspection, all those O-ring holes and inclusively wide neon pink and orange diamond cut-outs (for any number of genitalia or other body parts for the imaginative) on that rope-tied shiny fabric encourage some impromptu sensual play. This is made even more user-friendly thanks to a long silver pillow, recalling a more sedentary Warhol silver cloud, thoughtfully plopped on the ground for easy kneeling for the weak jointed. Shouldn’t all exhibitions come with glory holes? (I should mention that Blake also bestowed a brightly colored glory hole—then installed in an office door—to an exhibition I co-curated way back in 2015 with Visual AIDS, Party Out of Bounds: Nightlife as Activism Since 1980 at La MaMa Galleria).
Installation view of “Radical Perverts: Ecstasy and Activism in Queer Public Space, 1975-2000” at the Museum of Sex (Photo: Jules Slutsky; Courtesy of the Museum of Sex)
Blake isn’t the only artist that provides museum visitors with cruising opportunities. Try making sultry googly eyes at other viewers while peeking around the corner of Tom Burr’s Oblong Box #2 and see if you can get any intrepid takers to follow you into its tight squeeze. Made of darkened wood like an oversized Goth casket, Oblong Box #2 offers a bit of privacy for any number of sordid adventures—or even more illicit these days, a covertly smoked cigarette ashed in one of the ashtrays placed on the backside of the sculpture. Suck it down quickly before a museum guard notices! Oblong Box #2 needs some nicotine too—in contrast to Blake’s punctured playground, Burr’s work felt a bit stiff. Nothing that a bit of stale cigarette smoke can’t fix!
With its bachelorette-pleasing erotic carnival games upstairs, the Museum of Sex needs interactivity in order to grab the attention of its typically woozy brunch-drunk visitors who blink at more conventional visual art with baffled confusion. An endlessly amusing reaction that has always been one of the reasons I enjoy the museum. Aside from Blake and Burr’s contributions, though, Radical Perverts: Ecstasy and Activism in Queer Public Space, 1975-2000 presents the freewheeling queer sexual cultures of the late-20th century through fairly traditional means: photographs, oral histories, paintings and drawings, illustrations for iconic leather bars like the Mineshaft and Man Country, videos, and a vitrine filled with ephemera. This ephemera ranges from activist pins and safe sex brochures to publications like Steam: A Quarterly Journal for Men with articles such as Michael Eastwick’s “New England Nites: Plymouth Rock-hard and other Historic Erections” to whips and leather caps from the Leather Archives & Museum. Taken together, the show reveals how these radical queer perverts transformed public and quasi-private spaces, from bathrooms to bathhouses, from sex clubs to porn theaters, into locations not just for sexual experimentation but activism, community, care, and, above all, play.
Installation view of “Radical Perverts: Ecstasy and Activism in Queer Public Space, 1975-2000” at the Museum of Sex (Photo: Jules Slutsky; Courtesy of the Museum of Sex)
I’ll admit, at first, I rolled my eyes when confronted with the title of the exhibition, mostly because of the inclusion of the word, “radical.” I mean, how many exhibitions in the past decade or so have included that word? We Wanted a Revolution: Black Radical Women, 1965-85; Radical Women: Latin American Art, 1960-1985; Radical Love; Radical Seafaring; Radical Visions: The Art of Protest Posters; Radical Abstraction; Matisse: Radical Invention, 1913-1917; Ettore Sottsass: Design Radical; Jacques Louis David: Radical Draftsman…I could go on. These are just the first few that I found on a cursory Google search, but there are many, many, many more. When everything is radical, then nothing is. Yet, I’ll give Radical Perverts a break from my radical complaints as the phrase derived from Samois, a lesbian S/M organization that described themselves in 1978 as, “radical perverts, opposed to all social hierarchies based on sexual preference.” At the time, Samois firmly planted their flag with the radical perverts as a reaction to the pearl-clutching of a bunch of feminists upset at the “problematic” power dynamics inherent in BDSM. Though decades later, to be pro-sex is still quite, well, radical. We currently live in a time with both a younger generation of wee online Andrea Dworkins railing about sex scenes and kink at Pride and right-wing loonies triggered by drag brunches and hallucinating groomers around every corner. This makes the exhibition take on even more relevancy, particularly as many of the erotic locales on view have either disappeared or are majorly dwindling. As John Waters says, “I miss perverts!”
Luckily, the show provides enough fodder for our deviant nostalgia. And thankfully, Heller does so without retreading the same territory forged by previous exhibitions covering queer sexual cultures. This isn’t that surprising for a curator whose exhibitions have consistently exposed a depth of research such as 2019’s phenomenal On Our Backs: The Revolutionary Art of Queer Sex Work at Leslie-Lohman Museum. Much of the freshness in Radical Perverts can be attributed to an expansion of scope beyond the often deceptively provincial boundaries of New York City. Most New York-based exhibitions tend to be centered around NYC, whether or not it’s intentional. Here, though, it’s not the same old photographs of the Hudson River piers, the same old New St. Marks Baths posters, the same old Times Square porn theater imagery. This is not to say New York is absent in Radical Perverts. Yet even its inclusions feel a bit different than the usual go-to artwork. For instance, instead of yet another display of young men sporting a Rimbaud mask lurking around Times Square sleaze in David Wojnarowicz’s Arthur Rimbaud in New York series, Radical Perverts presents José Luis Cortés’s paintings of the Eros Theater’s illuminated marquee and neon adult video store signs on yellowing newspaper.
Installation view of “Radical Perverts: Ecstasy and Activism in Queer Public Space, 1975-2000” at the Museum of Sex (Photo: Jules Slutsky; Courtesy of the Museum of Sex)
This wider curatorial vision allows viewers, even seasoned degenerates like me, to come away learning something new. One of my favorite inclusions in the exhibition is the grouping of Frank Melleno’s late 70s Polaroid snapshots of San Francisco’s Fairoaks Hotel, a racially inclusive bathhouse that was, as the label details, “promoted as a party location.” Hung on tiles approximating bathhouse décor, these photographs not only represent some predictable ass-grabbing and jockstrap-wearing mutual masturbation, but they also portray beautiful men posing in elaborate costumes with painted faces, jeweled turbans, and feathered fans that look right out of a theatrical production or Jack Smith’s apartment. Many of these photographs would have been hung on a bulletin board in the lobby of the Fairoaks—a kind of chosen family photo scrapbook.
Of course, looking at the glory days of the late 70s, it’s hard not to filter these images through the impending onslaught of the AIDS pandemic—or, as the label poetically describes, “the storm clouds of drug abuse and disease that will soon overtake the community…” Quite predictably, that storm cloud looms over the entire exhibition. Sometimes the references to HIV/AIDS are overt, whether in newspaper clippings documenting the closure of the Mineshaft or Phyllis Christopher’s photographs of AIDS activist actions. Other times works feature lyrical nods to the voids left in the wake of the losses due to HIV/AIDS, as well as the subsequent effects of gentrification. This can be seen in Danny Jauregui’s series of paintings, including Misremembered #7, which traces gaps and absences through the ghostly remnants of hair on a bathhouse tile floor.
Danny Jauregui, Misremembered #7, 2016, Enamel and human hair on canvas, 15 x 18 in. (Courtesy the artist and the Museum of Sex)
The most electric engagement with HIV/AIDS, though, has to be a clip included in Viva Ruiz’s video Chloe Dzubilo: There is a Transolution, made for Visual AIDS’ 2019 Day With(out) Art. Chloe Dzubilo: There is a Transolution is a short portrait of the prolific HIV/AIDS, trans rights, antiracist, and harm reduction activist, artist, and musician Chloe Dzubilo through a series of Hi-8 videos shot by Kelly McGowan, which range from holding meetings for the Transgender Initiative at the Positive Health Project to speaking to trans women sex workers about their safety. The clip, though, that I would watch repeatedly is a segment from a performance at CBGB’s in 1997 with her punk band Transisters. Outshining Courtney Love with her platinum blonde hair, red lipstick, and slip dress, Chloe introduces a friend Arlene onstage who is dealing with Kaposi sarcoma or, as Chloe describes, is ‘giving Kaposi sarcoma realness.” With “fatal beauty” scrawled on her chest, Arlene acts as a writhing and energetic dancer for Transister’s song, “Kaposis Koverstick.” It’s a daring and thoroughly punk reclamation of the sick body. Ultimately, this moment encapsulates the ethos omnipresent in Radical Perverts, one that bears remembering as we deal with our contemporary bullshit—that lives can be at risk, that people can be marginalized, that sexuality can be repressed, but you can always slap a little lipstick on it, dance like crazy, and find a community of people who will cheer you on.