Local historian, Legacy Project co-founder and LGBTQ Hall of Fame board member Owen Keehnen hosted a panel about the impact of art and culture on Chicago's LGBTQ history at the Harold Washington Library on Dec. 7. Introduced by library staff, Keehnen thanked CPL's Pride Committee and LGBT staff members, and called the LGBTQ Hall of Fame—currently exhibited on the library's main floor—a great tool for visibility and awareness.
Panelist Jennifer Brier, a UIC academic in women and gender studies, introduced herself by relating her curatorial experience with the Chicago History Museum's Out In Chicago exhibit. She recalled learning to collaborate with non-historians and challenging herself to understand what history meant to the community. Her experience at the North Side museum also made her reflect on the city's issues with segregation, inspiring her current project, History Moves, which focuses on HIV-positive women and is scheduled to travel to various cultural spaces in Chicago.
Christopher Audain works with the Alphawood Foundation, which just opened Art AIDS America Exhibit at its gallery space in Lincoln Park. He called art "a safe haven" for gay people, and pointed out that often LGBTQ history is not found in books. The AIDS epidemic, he said, created a gap in the nation's artistic energy that can never be filled.
"When I go through the gallery, I see these incredible artists, and they're gone," he said.
Audain also mentioned how much he valued working for gay bosses throughout his art career. "Seeing and having role models who work in art has been a boon for me," he said. "It shows people like me, and anyone, what can be possible."
David Zak, director of Pride Films and Plays, has been in Chicago theaterfor decades, and recalled putting on one of the first Chicago productions involving a character with AIDS with Bailiwick Theatre in the '80s. "There wasn't a place for that kind of entertainment," he said, and explained that once the epidemic hit, people weren't planning for the future. Currently, he worried about whether audiences really cared about LGBTQ history, based on the reception of some of his company's recent, less glitzy works such as a play about a Black lesbian couple in the 1890s.
Keehnen kept the conversation on AIDS, wondering what made the disease's connection to art unique. Audain brought up both the frightening, unknown nature of AIDS when it first appeared and the protest culture it inspired. He pointed out that Chicago's own Danny Sotomayor, whose art is included in Art AIDS America, was the first openly gay syndicated cartoonist and a founding member of ACT UP. From an art history standpoint, Audain explained that AIDS coincided with both newfound appreciation of photography as an art form and the culture war battle over arts funding, from which, he said, arts funding has never fully recovered.
Brier had a different take, calling the idea of AIDS exceptionalism "dangerous" since it takes away the epidemic's larger historical context. She offered examples of other afflictions—such as women and mental illness—that had inspired similarly large bodies of work.
Audain's observation about funding prompted Keehnen to inquire about the role of LGBTQ art in, as he put it, a less accepting climate. The audience chuckled darkly. "I wasn't planning to bring up Trump..." Keehnen said.
"I'm an optimist. I wouldn't have survived in the arts if I wasn't," said Zak, who said it was an audience's job to go see queer works, while acknowledging that there's never been a consensus in what the community wants to see. Audain again brought up activism and how AIDS activists were successful in building a coalition across barriers of race. "It's really important for the left to build communities together," he said.
Keehnen concluded by asking the panel if Chicago was special when it comes to queer art and history. Brier offered a variety of explanations, from the idea of urban space creating possibility to the observation that the first Chicago law against crossdressing was passed in 1851.
"Something happens in the powerful, explosive mix in Chicago," she said. She mentioned the city's role as the "birthplace of sociology" as integral to its queer history, highlighted its reputation as a "lesbian feminist town" with a radical youth culture, and recalled that local queer academic historians like Allan Berube used to travel around with projectors on their backs, introducing audiences to queer history via slide show. Zak pointed out that as the only city in the world with a Gay and Lesbian Hall of Fame, we don't hide our queer history: we display the Leather Museum openly and the Legacy Project is, as he put it, "impossible to avoid."
The audience was curious about queer history: how they could both preserve and see more of it. Brier explained that often we feel divorced from earlier queer history because, as she said, until recently we were convinced things were getting better. Keehnen, the historian, said his love of the social history of LGBTQ culture made him more inquisitive. Zak talked about elevating queer products in everyday conversation, such as the new gay movie, Moonlight, and Audain agreed that consuming and sharing queer art helped preserve it. And Brier exhorted listening as a valuable skill for both academics and casual observers interested in LGBTQ history and art.
"Engage what you're consuming." she said.
