Lovett/Codagnone, After Eight, 1995, c-print, 10 × 13 1/2 inches (Courtesy of the Estate of Lovett/Codagnone and Participant Inc, New York)

Can ball gags be wholesome? Can an object stuffed into your gaping mouth, eyes watering as you struggle to slurp back a swallow, be family-friendly? Can that same ball gag, yanked into place by a leather harness with straps cutting sharp diagonals across your face, be a suitable accessory for a lovely, casual dinner with the parents? Most people, I assume, wouldn’t think so. But, Lovett/Codagnone’s 1995 photograph After Eight suggests otherwise, with one half of the collaborative duo, John Lovett’s blue eyes penetrating the camera’s lens, his mouth forced open with the aforementioned ball gag. Next to him, Alessandro Codagnone also faces the camera, wearing a matching leather shirt, petting an adorable doggie. Behind them, older family members appear content, not horrified by the leather-bound freaks in front of them that look as if they sauntered straight from The Anvil to Nona’s kitchen table (And I know this is Italian based on that tablecloth alone, which sent my Italian American spidey senses spinning). Logistical issues aside (it would be hard to properly appreciate Mom’s Sunday gravy with a ball gag rammed between your teeth), Lovett/Codagnone are right at home here—not alienated from the family, not glared at in judgment, not ordered to get right back to their room and change in case they upset Nona. Instead, the fam looks on with placid smiles, focusing more on the doggo than the leather men in the foreground.

After Eight isn’t the only adorable family snapshot currently on view in Lovett/Codagnone’s Greetings at Participant Inc, which highlights the art partners-in-crime’s early photographic works (they would later move on to performances, neons, and larger sculptural installations until Alessandro Codagnone’s death in 2019). In Persi, the same parents, recognizable from the background of After Eight, sit happily alongside Lovett/Codagnone and the same pup on a front porch with red flowers plunked in large vases. Dad smokes a pipe while Mama holds Codagnone’s leather-capped head in her lap. Standing above them is Lovett in a short-sleeved shirt, with his face half-covered by a leather mask, like a kink(ier) Batman. His cheery smile, though, is still visible. Lovett/Codagnone visit another set of relatives in Invite, standing on a suburban driveway lined with well-manicured hedges. Here, Codagnone is the one who sports the ball gag harness (are they trying to convey something about silencing yourself while visiting the in-laws?), while Lovett vamps for the camera in his Muir cap. His arms wrap around Dad, cloaked in an adorable, cozy cream knit sweater. Mom, however, is the true sartorial vision with her two-toned red and purple Chico’s sweater, matching red pants, and her teased dark hair that barely misses the camp extremity of Ginny Sacrimoni from The Sopranos. With Codagnone gripping the remote shutter, this is a disarmingly adorable and delightfully cheesy family photo like Tom of Finland went domestic. The sweet family photo vibes are further emphasized by Greetings’ curation, which displays the pics as loose, unframed prints as if ripped straight from a worn and treasured family album.

Lovett/Codagnone, The Mall, Allentown, PA, 1996, c-print, 15 × 15 inches (Courtesy of the Estate of Lovett/Codagnone and Participant Inc, New York)

Not all of the photos are so defiantly and deviantly homey; others take a trip to rural America with its gorgeous landscapes and mind-numbingly bland strip malls. For Peak, Lovett challenges Christian Girl Autumn Caitlyn Covington’s fall influencer dominance by crunching on a ripe, red apple under a lush tree. John Deere is a vacation photo right out of David Lynch’s masterpiece The Straight Story, with Lovett/Codagnone posing next to a tractor crossing sign with the identifiable green and yellow tractor in the background. Though tractor country is not often equated with out and proud queers, a haul from the Leather Man doesn’t feel all that far from farmland rawhide and Kenny Chesney tractor eroticism. Somehow, the duo feels more out of place in The Mall, Allentown, PA, in which the twosome loiter in the parking lot of a home center with both of their chests bare (or nearly, but I’m not sure Codagnone’s skimpy vest will pass the “No shirt, no shoes, no service” muster). Codagnone kneels, his mouth plugged with a gag. For fun, squint your eyes at the blurry man in the blue Jeep driving past them. Is he uncomfortable or turned on? You decide!

Though I spent a lot of time while writing this article mulling over whether home centers are actually ideal hubs for kink with all those screws, nuts and bolts, and latex (paint), the incongruousness of Lovett/Codagnone within these straight-coded environments is clearly the point. Their leather outfits stand as sartorial symbols of both queerness and sex. Even though most of the photos don’t depict anything more explicit than a kiss on some sort of sports field, the leather acts as a stand-in for BDSM, a subculture that is typically relegated to dark basement clubs at night and the privacy of a home with a sling rather than picking out window treatments at a home center, gabbing with the fam, or relaxing on a sunny beach in matching harnesses as seen in Palm Island Honeymooners (that’s going to leave an awkward tan!). Think of William Friedkin’s Cruising, which, sorry Vito Russo, is still one of my favorite macho man camp movies. The leather subculture, as depicted in that film, exists as a dimly lit West Side underworld set distinctly apart from straight society in New York City. So much so that Al Pacino’s undercover cop Steve Burns has to abandon his old life completely to immerse himself in it and loses himself in the process (Who can blame him?!). BDSM is only supposed to meet the harsh glare of daylight during the Folsom Street Fair or a Village People performance. Lovett/Codagnone challenge these restrictions, depicting joyful, fashionable perversion as an everyday activity, one to be shared with family, friends, and neighbors.

Lovett/Codagnone, Prada, 1997, c-print, 10 × 10 inches (Courtesy of the Estate of Lovett/Codagnone and Participant Inc, New York)

Mostly made in the mid to late 1990s, these photographs take on additional meaning given two overlapping events occurring during their production: the ongoing HIV/AIDS pandemic and increasing assimilation of particularly white gay cis men. Starting with the former, the HIV/AIDS crisis saw the targeted closing of leather bars like The Mineshaft, which was shuttered in 1985 by the New York City Health Department out of fear of transmission, as well as the concurrent closure of The Anvil. With these closures, leather men became homophobic panic realized, the representation of the infected body, a view that would shift through the creation of this series after the breakthrough of antiretroviral therapy in 1995. Antiretroviral therapy is also a part of the story of assimilation as some activists turned from screaming with bloody hands in front of City Hall and tossing loved one’s ashes on the White House lawn toward fighting for a wedding cake, a military pension, and a seat at the table that would eventually bring us our first gay Cabinet secretary Pete Buttigieg and later Treasury Secretary/stiff hedge fund bro Scott Bessent. Leather and BDSM, too, like all subcultures, eventually got usurped by pop and consumer culture, from Madonna’s still-subversive Sex book to fashions plastering the walls of mall goth mecca Hot Topic to, of course, Fifty Shades of Grey.

Lovett/Codagnone clearly provides a cheeky critique of assimilation and commercialization here. Take, for instance, Prada, in which the duo strike a pose in front of a Prada store. Their black leather matches the pricey little black dresses in the window displays, foreshadowing BDSM as fashion inspo. In fact, the two blend so much into the sales environment that even the tiny elderly nun stomping into frame with her (again, matchy-matchy) black umbrella doesn’t even bother to clutch her rosary. Of course, nobody does kink like the Catholics, so why should she care?! Even so, Lovett/Codagnone’s subtle critique of gay assimilation is much more entertaining than plucking your dusty copy of Michael Warner’s preachy The Trouble with Normal off the shelf yet again.

Lovett/Codagnone, John Deere, 1995, c-print, 16 × 19 1/2 inches (Courtesy of the Estate of Lovett/Codagnone and Participant Inc, New York)

The importance of the refreshing playfulness of Lovett/Codagnone’s Greetings shouldn’t be undersold. Whether giggling in a crib in The Baby and the Clown I and II or lounging with a gaggle of taxidermized forest creatures in In Bed with the Animals, these photos clearly were as enjoyable to make as to view. This clashes with the uber-seriousness with which other gay photographers took BDSM imagery, like Robert Mapplethorpe, who somehow made a whip shoved in an asshole seem grim. This isn’t to say that there aren’t some dark undertones in Lovett/Codagnone’s exhibition. The collaborators point guns at each other in the large prints of the duel diptych Blind Date I and II, and Codagnone has a noose around his neck hanging from a cherry tree while standing on a crouching Lovett in One Kiss is Not Enough. The most unsettling of the lot is the latest work, 2001’s 12 AM, which forces the viewer into a voyeuristic leer from the outside of a bougie windowed house, recalling Brian DePalma’s Body Double more than Rear Window due to the expanse of windows alone. After admiring the lush indoor plants and sculptures, the sudden recognition of a body provides a shock—Codagnone with his mouth gagged on a chair. Maybe I’ve been watching too much of Monster: Ed Gein, but he resembles a sawed-in-half torso. 12 AM recalls Jimmy DeSana’s Submission series, yet even this shocker is much more playful. Sure, the Submission series is silly to an extent: crouching in a toilet and popping an egg in your butthole certainly is some kind of deranged folly. But that series comes off more as a set of photos found in a serial killer’s dresser drawer than one errant private photo mistakenly stuffed in a pile of family keepsakes.

Still, playfulness can only go so far to maintain relevancy thirty years on. However, nothing about Lovett/Codagnone’s Greetings feels dated. Some of this may have to do with the fact that Greetings joins several other NYC exhibitions this fall with a leather/BDSM theme, from Tiona Nekkia McClodden’s formalist leather and metal abstractions at White Cube to Anne Buckwalter’s delightfully deviant quilt gouaches at Uffner & Liu, which feature spread-eagle and high heel licker patterns stitched together with subtly filthy fabrics, and Nayland Blake’s new installation as a part of their two-gallery show at Matthew Marks, which provides a therapeutic respite through which to pour your guilty sinful heart out, alongside a series of monumental charm bracelets, strung with leather bunny masks, goblin-like vulvas, and an assortment of other phallic and yonic objects on which to project wild Freudian fantasies. Yet, taken alone, Greetings also feels fresh because, well…couldn’t 2025 use more everyday perverts? Perverts at brunch? Perverts at the shopping plaza? Perverts at the mall? Perverts at Walmart? Perverts in the community garden? Perverts at the family reunion? Maybe then, we could once and for all put a stop to the annual online kink at Pride debates with the neuters.