FOR 50+ YEARS THE YMCA & MOST SCHOOLS REQUIRED MALES TO SWIM NAKED!

According to my research males were once required to swim in the nude.

The American Public Health Association mandated nude swimming from 1926 until 1962, and thousands of high schools around the country enforced the tradition.

The first recreational indoor pool in America was a YMCA in Brooklyn New York in 1885. Because swimsuits back then were made of wool, and their fibers would clog the pool’s relatively filtration systems, nude swimming was enforced.

By the 1920s, there were other, more comfortable swimming alternatives but the naked swimming continued.

In 1922, The Sanitation of Bath Houses by William Paul Gerhard, explained that nude swimming is encouraged alongside a pre-swim 

“physical examination.”

Gerhard wrote nearly 100 years ago,

“Much can be done to keep the water in a swimming pool sanitary by an efficient supervision and management of the bathers. 

A physical examination of the bathers, while nude, to exclude the diseased, accomplishes much good, but it is difficult to enforce, except in YMCA buildings and in school or military baths.”

For 50+ years no one really seemed to question the nudity rule. For males anyway. Girls were required to wear bathing suits. 

But provincial attitudes started to prevail in the early 1960s. Parents started complaining and in 1961, in Menasha, Wisconsin, high school boys and their parents petitioned the school board to allow boys to wear swim trunks to swim practice.

A prudish mother said at the meeting,

“The boys were affected morally, physically and psychologically by forcing them to swim in the nude.” 

But the petition was voted down. The (all-male) board claimed swim trunks would be prohibitively expensive and that swimming nude would also build a man’s character.

The board’s director said,

“Physical education considers that this experience is a good one for later life, for example the armed services, where the disregard for privacy is real and serious.”

The YMCA had no national mandate, so each location had it’s own rules about MALE nude swimming. 

The tide supposedly began to shift in 1961 when Ervin Baugher, the general secretary of the Allentown, Pennsylvania, YMCA said the only rational reason to continue the tradition of nude swimming was 

“encouraging a proper attitude toward the body.”

By the mid-70s, nude swimming was being phased out. (Probably by the evil swimsuit industry!) 

The nude swimming tradition is the basis for several YouTube docs, like the one below one. The narrator says in one,

“Our society has so sexualized nudity, particularly child nudity, that we can’t conceive of a time when kids went naked without any sexual implications.” 

As a gay man, who grew up in the 70s in Texas all I can say of this phenomenon is, I was born at the wrong time, although neither my junior high or high school had a pool.

Watch.

(Photos, YMCA; via Vocativ)

ERIK HANSON'S "BLUTO" SERIES IS A “QUEER STRUGGLE WITH DEEP PSYCHIC ATTACHMENTS”, CARTOON “HYPER-MASCULINITY” & MORE!

New York magazine art critic, Jerry Saltz wrote on Facebook recently,

“Get to Work! Man-up! Woman-up! Stop Procrastinating big Babies!”

To which artist Erik Hanson responded,

“Just like Bluto, get to the gym and work those muscles so you can make some money at the Circus!!”

Hanson’s not been slacking. His multitude of Bluto paintings are currently installed in Two Years of Bluto at Marlbrough Contemporary gallery in NYC. 

(Do I need to explain who Bluto is? He’s Popeye‘s burly, bullying arch-nemesis always out to get his Olive Oil…)

Ramzi Fawaz is an Associate Professor in the Department of English at the University of Wisconsin at Madison is the author of The New Mutants: Superheroes and the Radical Imagination of American Comics and co-edited the Queer About Comics special issue of American Literature last June.

David Getsy is a Professor of Art History at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and editor of Queer for the Whitechapel Gallery’s Documents of Contemporary Art book series.

Here’s an excerpt of Fawaz and Getsy’s conversation, conducted over email in December, about Hanson’s Bluto series and their multiple variations of interpretations,

David Getsy: …I’ll dive in and say that — whatever else they do — Hanson’s paintings immediately jumped out at me as a queer struggle with deep psychic attachments. They pore attention and affection on the villainized figure of Bluto, and it’s hard to decide when looking at the paintings (especially all together) where the love ends and where the misgivings start. The erotic pull of Bluto’s exaggerations is evident throughout even the most abstracting of Hanson’s paintings. Interwoven with this, however, is a critical and skeptical understanding of the limits of Bluto’s overplayed and phobically clichéd performance of masculinity. But isn’t that already part of Bluto’s role in the Popeye cartoons? For all the antagonism of Bluto, he is always needed by Popeye as the foil for the different version of masculinity that Popeye is understood to perform. What do we make of this preening bully?

Ramzi Fawaz: I think what is revealed in this series is that the the love and the misgiving we have toward Bluto’s “phobically clichéd performance of masculinity” are precisely the same thing. In these paintings, Hanson puts his finger on a sort of melancholic attachment that both gay men and the society at large have to the figure of hyper-masculinity — that ideal that both magnetizes our desire and constantly hurts us, reminding us we are never enough (never big enough, powerful enough, strong enough to be “real” men or desirable to those men who seemingly fit the ideal). We (both the particular subculture of gay men, but also a patriarchal culture as a whole) “love” men—some of us pursue them erotically, others symbolically or behaviorally worship at their imputed power—but that love is often exactly what undermines our own self-image, promotes rigid gender norms, and reproduces patriarchy. 

Part of the brilliance of these pieces, to my mind, is that they capture both what is so erotically appealing about Bluto—his baldly brutish masculinity—but also what is so tragic about his version of manliness, while never feeling sorry for, or making Bluto into a martyr. Bluto is wounded throughout the series, beaten up, given a black eye, made vulnerable to the erotic gaze, but he is not merely an icon of wounded masculinity. Rather his form of masculinity is painful, these images tell us. It wounds us all. And yet, we keep looking. We keep replaying that version of manliness in countless iterations. What exactly is the effect of this endless repetition, the variation on a theme, or ceaseless unfolding of Bluto into a seemingly indefinite future?

DG: Repetition is the key to these paintings, and it’s no surprise that when Hanson started showing them to people he aimed for a sort of visual overload. He installed them all clustered and stacked together as a means to reinforce and demonstrate his serial practice of grappling with this image. Hanson has talked about how the character of Bluto was both fascinating and fear-inducing, and it became a capacitating image for homoerotic investment and for anxieties about the queer transgression of normativity. Bluto was a conflicted model for his desire and adolescent relationship to gender. Returning to this stereotype in adulthood, Hanson has wrestled with its continued power even as he recognizes all that there is to criticize about it. Repetition is the form that this agonism has taken.

RF: Hanson’s obsessive repetition of Bluto, and the minute variations in his appearance, speaks to that very singular or particular experience of a reader—perhaps a young boy who will develop an erotic attachment to other boys, or a tomboy (or perhaps transgender girl) who identifies with a powerful male physique, or a wife who projects her husband, or a fantasized lover, onto Bluto, and on and on. Hanson’s expansion of the series into a range of iconic comics scenarios, including the explosive battle clouds where stars, fists, arms, and legs fly outward from a ball of dust indicating a fight sequence, the beach scenes in which Popeye and Bluto lay out on the sand, at times relaxing, at other times displaying their bodies, reminds us of the countless images and icons that comics offered readers to which they might attach their expanding fantasies. 

As the tragic muscle queen Malone famously states in Andrew Holleran’s 1978 gay literary classic Dancer from the Dance, “given enough time, everyone will sleep with everyone else”; and so too, given enough space, a sequence can account for, or represent, every desiring possibility.

Hanson’s Two Years of Bluto runs through March 23, 2018 at Marlborough Contemporary in New York.

(Photos, courtesy Erik Hanson)

ARTIST, TREY SPEEGLE & ART CRITIC, JERRY SALTZ ON ANDY WARHOL & HIS DAZZLING WHITNEY RETROSPECTIVE

Two weeks ago I went to Andy Warhol: From A to B and Back Again at the Whitney and it’s effect is still dancing around inside my brain. 

A year and a half ago I made a big change, and moved upstate full-time, selling my NYC apartment to buy a former gas station for my art studio, archive, gallery and shop. My old apartment was just one block from the Whitney’s entrance, and seeing the Warhol show was the first time I REALLY missed living in that first floor apartment. With a street entrance and my Whitney membership, I could pop into the museum almost ANYTIME and I’d probably be in there every day during the 5 month run, if I still lived there, visiting and revisiting over a billion dollars worth Warhol’s life’s work.

If Andy could see it all today, I think he’d say,

“Gee, I sure made a LOT of art, huh…?“

Pulitzer Prize-winning art critic, Jerry Saltz, summed up Warhol and his importance at the start of his article in the Nov. 12 issue of New York magazine, “This Too Is Andy WarholShunned and swooned over: The story of an American revolutionary in eight works“. Warhol is so intertwined with my idea of art that I don’t know where to begin. Mr. Saltz does, so eloquently, selecting 8 works, and using them to dissect the art and the man,

“Andy is in the air we breathe. Among the most revolutionary artists who ever lived, Warhol, in his work from the magical years of 1962 to 1964 — Coca-Cola bottles, Campbell’s soup cans, Brillo boxes, Marilyn, Jackie, Brando, Elvis, electric chairs, paint-by-number paintings, the fabulous dance-step diptych (once hung facing one another by Warhol, to be a couple), the Empire State Building film, flower paintings and superstars — gives us an artist in a state of creative grace feeding on, mirroring, doubling, and actually changing the culture he pictured. Willem de Kooning famously called him ‘a killer of beauty.’ I think he invented a new beauty. Warhol was a philosophical assassin and vampiric social figure ever interested in and hyperobservant of the culture around him.“

Of Andy’s process, Saltz says,

“The degrading of the silk-screen makes the process even more ever present. And strange. Warhol is showing us that the way we usually respond to repeating images — like advertisements, Coke cans, celebrities, the news — is to see these things and then stop seeing them. They all almost blend in and begin to go unnoticed. Warhol continually pulls you back to the image, the thing, its source, what it is, how it’s been deployed, and the way it’s been rendered. 

…the entire history of Western painting had always rested on the artist’s hand — the artist’s skill with paint and the brush. But Warhol forwent such institutional and historical approval. He made his pictures without any connection to traditional uses of paint, tools, materials, surfaces, subject matter, or even photography.“

In my new space Gallery 52 in Jeffersonville, NY, I mounted my own Andy Warhol Ephemerashow from my own collection this September, unaware of the timing of Warhol’s upcoming retrospective. The graphic for the invitation, catalogue and t-shirt was taken from a book-signing for his book Andy Warhol; Exposures in my hometown of Houston. I worked for my first magazine there, as a graphic designer, then art director at age 19, called Houston City Magazine (which was kind of patterned after New York magazine .) 

At another signing the year before, Michael von Helms, a freelance photographer, handed the first issue of City to Warhol and asked him what he thought of it? He responded,

“Nice graphics.“

We ran the photo as a full-page ad with the quote to promote the magazine, which, after art scion Francois de Menil bought it and hired fashion editor Kezia Keeble and husband Paul Cavaco, ended up getting me to New York and to Vogue at 21, and into the outer reaches of Andy’s orbit for 6 years, until his death in ’87. 

Andy was, as I, a gay man from a working class background, that came to New York and started out in publishing. Saltz writes about his early work;

“In one of those fabulous New York stories, on his second day in the city he went to see Tina Fredericks, art director of Glamour magazine. Not only did she buy one of his drawings for $10, she told him, ‘I need some drawings of shoes, Mr. Warhola … tomorrow morning at 10 a.m. Can you do them?’ He loved feet and shoes and fashion and deadlines and could draw anything.

Look closely at the work in this show from this period. These years are often dismissed as Warhol’s juvenilia, his commercial years, but almost everything he’d do for the rest of his life surfaced in that decade. There are pictures of people sleeping, advertising images, portraits of the famous and portraits of freaks, drawings of shoes. They are dedicated to Elvis, Mae West, and Christine Jorgensen — a man who became a woman who became a successful cabaret artist. There are images of money, soup cans, men in jeans, car crashes, flowers, newspaper headlines, and endless drawings of the male body in all states of dress, undress, relaxation, and having sex. Scores of drawings of penises too. As Pearlstein rightly put it, all “totally unacceptable” subjects in the art world of that time. So if you want the political revolutionary, look no further.“

Back in Houston, the first real artwork I ever coveted, really wanted to buy, had seen for sale with an actual price or had any access to, was at the art bookstore adjacent to The Texas Gallery in Houston. It was a black on purple double image of Jackie Kennedy in mourning by Warhol. It was $500. I should have sold my car to buy it. It’s not in the Whitney show, a more important Jackie on canvas (below) is. But it’s odd how much I still love it and regret not having bought it. 

My first exhibit was called RePOP, a Warholian take on Houston celebrities including Marvin Zindler, Lynn Wyatt and Dominique de Menil (mother of Francois). My first big paintings were 3 x 4 foot gold, silver and bronze canvases silkscreened with an image from a cough syrup ad. One of my Houston “Superstars”, Carolyn Farb, later commissioned a portrait which I based on Warhol’s Gold Marilyn, called Gold Carolyn.

Shocking to imitate another artist? Look at most early work from even the greats, Picasso, Pollack even Warhol, they imitated their heroes’ work before they found their own voices. (Warhol’s keen sense of color comes from his idol, Matisse.) Saltz says,

“Warhol’s colors have been with us for millennia. It’s just that no one ever combined them this way in the history of art. Or anywhere, really. It’s like finding another note on the saxophone. This note has since been used to create whole visual cultures. With color, he is a rival to van Gogh and Matisse.”

Andy & Duchamp were my art gurus. My work, based on vintage paint by number, is pop conceptualism married with word art.

Andy did a few paint by number paintings too, early on, but they aren’t shown in this retrospective. I saw them in person for the first time at The Met Breuer in a show called Unfinished. 

Andy Warhol, Do It Yourself (Violin), 1962, from the Met Breuer’s “Unfinished”

Btw, my idea for using paint by number didn’t come from Andy, but he DID have something to do with it. Artists pals McDermott & McGough took me to meet SNL head writer and bon vivant Michael O’Donoghue at his 16th street brownstone at one of his famous salon Christmas parties. Wanting to impress, I pulled together a hasty, but memorable gift for Michael. At the time my ex, Philip Monaghan, was living with me in my Ave. B apartment overlooking Tompkins Square Park. I was working at Condé Nast and our company gift that year was a giant crystal Tiffany paperweight. I ended up with two somehow, so I wrapped the Tiffany box in a huge scrap of paper from a gift Andy had given Philip that year. (Andy made art as gifts as Xmas presents and Philip was lucky enough to get several because Andy always had a crush on him and would come to visit him at Fiorcci where he was art director.) Anyway, I wrapped the box in the paper with Andy’s signature on front and wrote above it,

“To Michael, From Trey Speegle &….” finishing with Andy Warhol’s signature. Michael & became fast friends until his untimely death in ’94. I inherited his paint by number collection after helping him mount a show in ’92 and as they say, the rest is herstory. 

As a young, gay artist my friends were friends with Andy and mixed in with the downtown scene of the 80s, it seemed out in the open and Andy kind of led the way, the most famous gay artist in the world. There’s so much gay material in Andy’s work and in this retrospective, it permeates. Unlike many critics who dismiss or revile Warhol’s work in general, if not specifically his gayness, Saltz understands how important homosexuality was in his work…

“He’d regularly ask any male visitor to his studio to draw his penis. Andy liked to look. As many have reported, sometimes he’d become turned on and flustered while making these drawings and retire to the bathroom to have what he called a ‘private organza.’ So beautiful. Here, a direct, disarming, sweet, strange, suggestive mode of loving, laughter, need, reticence, and immense focus doubles male genitals as cake candle, gift wrapped, tied in a pretty bow, and decorated with hearts and flowers.”

And…

From the series, “Ladies and Gentlemen” (Marsha P. Johnson is lower right)

The Lady Warhol

“One 1975 series stands out: ‘Ladies and Gentlemen’ — a set of drag queens, each of whom was paid $50 to sit for a photo session—particularly the portrait Marsha P. Johnson… on June 28, 1969, Johnson threw ‘the shot glass that was heard around the world.” She was, [Glen Ligon] writes, ‘an integral part of the uprising that followed a police raid at the Stonewall Inn … having thrown a shot glass into a mirror … while shouting ‘I got my civil rights.’ 

RuPaul calls her ‘the true Drag Mother’ who “paved the way for all.‘”

And…

AIDS, Jeep, Bicycle, 1985-86

And…

“AIDS struck often and close to Andy; he knew many who died of the disease. The ramp-up to this was slow and terrifying. In 1984, his boyfriend of several years — Jon Gould, whom he photographed more than 400 times — was diagnosed with AIDS. He was hospitalized that year, twice. Two years later, Gould was dead from the disease; he weighed 70 pounds and was blind.“

Warhol portraits installation, From A to B and Back Again

Keith Haring & double Juan Dubose

Pat Hearn

Stephen Sprouse; Kenny & Zena Scharf

Jon Gould

Jed Johnson

Jon Gould (and a few friends of mine) were in the portrait section of the show which, I think was open to the public, as it was on the first floor behind the café. These portrait commissions were a big source of Andy’s income in the latter years and are often dismissed. Their impact together now though is undeniable. It’s like going to a party of the most interesting people of the day. The last four small portraits were of Andy’s boyfriend, Jed Johnson, who became a big time decorator. Jed died in ’96, in the TWA Flight 800explosion just over Long Island where he spent many summers in Montauk with Andy and the most interesting people of the day. Today would have been Jed’s 70th birthday. You can read about him in Stephen Rutledge‘s #BornThisDay column here.

Lots of death in this show from the Disaster Series and electric chair and suicide paintings, to gigantic skulls to an enormous gun over a small double Warhol with a skull in red. Saltz writes in terrifying detail about Andy being shot in ’68 by Valerie Solanis, and his own sad (unnecessary) end…

“On Saturday, February 14, 1987, Warhol complained of abdominal pain to his dermatologist. He spent the weekend in bed, not telling friends what was going on. On Tuesday, he kept an appointment so he could be photographed with Miles Davis. That same day, he told another doctor he’d been feeling ill for four weeks. The doctor diagnosed him with an acutely infected gallbladder and advised that it be removed as soon as possible. Warhol waited two more days to see what would happen. On Thursday, he caught a chill. The gallbladder had become severely inflamed with fluid and had to be removed at once. He went to New York Hospital, was scheduled for surgery on Saturday. He said, ‘Oh, I’m not going to make it’ and locked many of his valuables in his safe. After surgery, he was administered Cefoxitin — a drug very similar to penicillin, which he was allergic to; staff nurses failed to properly measure his fluids; a malfunctioning suction device that permitted the reduction in fluids was not replaced. Biographer Victor Bockris writes, ‘The chances of dying from complications of routine gallbladder surgery are thousands to one.’ Andy Warhol died at 6:31 a.m. early Sunday morning, February 22, 1987.“

Warhol’s final resting place is marked by a gravestone, accidentally designed by me, using his name taken from the New York Post. It’s part of art history, little known. That’s why I keep repeating it. I won’t repeat it again now, but you can read the story in Catherine Johnson‘s book, Thank You Andy Warhol and also here.

Memorial poster designed by Trey Speegle (produced with McDermott & McGough) 1987

Warhol’s gravestone rubbing, Trey Speegle

Andy Warhol — From A to B and Back Again is at the Whitney museum in NYC through March 31, 2019.

(Exhibit photos by Trey Speegle; via New York)

PETER HUJAR, DAVID WOJNAROWICZ & MARK MORRISROE (ALL TAKEN BY AIDS) ALL CAPTURED THEIR SHORT-LIVED TIMES

Photographer Peter Hujar, (1934–1987) who died of AIDS in 1987 at the age of fifty-three, has a new retrospective, Speed of Life, up now through May 20 at the Morgan Library & Museum. The works in the Morgan show range across the genres of portraiture, nudes and cityscape as well as some starting portraits, sometimes of the famous. 

Hujar met David Wojnarowicz as a young hustler in late 80s (and who died from AIDS himself in ’92) and became soul mates in art. According to Peter Schjeldahl in The New Yorker, Wojnarowicz said that Hujar, 

“was like the parent I never had, like the brother I never had.”

Peter Hujar, self-portrait, 1977

Peter Hujar, Christopher Street Pier, 1976

Peter Hujar, Gary Schneider in contortion, 1979

Peter Hujar, Boys in car, Halloween, 1978

Peter Hujar, Gary Indiana, 1981

Peter Hujar, Susan Sontag, 1975

Peter Hujar, Candy Darling on her deathbed, 1973

Peter Hujar, David Wojnarowicz

David Wojnarowicz (1954–1992) has an upcoming show, History Keeps Me Awake at Nightopening this summer at New York’s Whitney museum. It’s the first major exhibit of his fiercely political and highly personal and work in over decade.

When I was designing a 40 Anniversary Issue of the photography magazine, Aperture (filling in for the great photo book art director, my pal, Yolanda Cuomo) I made one of the best two-page spreads of my design career, simply due to the remarkable photographs I was given to work with. One was the powerful Wojnarowicz self-portrait, his face half-covered with dirt, taken in ’91 shortly before his death, which I paired with Shomei Tomatsu‘s 1961 photograph of a watch face stopped by the bomb at Nagasaki. Both still haunting to this day.

An upcoming documentary on Wojnarowicz is being directed by Chris McKim (Out of Iraq) and produced by World of Wonder‘s Fenton Bailey and Randy Barbato.

40th anniversary issue of Aperture spread. Design, Trey Speegle

David Wojnarowicz, self-portrait

David Wojnarowicz, Arthur Rimbaud in New York, 1978-1979

David Wojnarowicz, Arthur Rimbaud in New York, 1978-1979

David Wojnarowicz, ‘Untitled (Buffaloes)’ 1988-89, sold at auction for a record $125,000

David Wojnarowicz, Peter Hujar

Mark Morrisroe (1959-1989) had a not dissimilar background to Wojnarowicz, coming to the East Village in the 80s and also working as a hustler. I met all of these three talents, but knew Morrisroe the best. I was introduced to him by gallerist Pat Hearn, when I designed a fold-out poster to announce his first show with her in ’86. After we became friends, he shot me with my dog, Spot, below. 

His solo exhibition of photographs Boy Next Door (Beautiful But Dumb), is up through March 24 at Clamp Art in NYC. Morrisroe grew up, north of Boston, and went to the School of the Museum of Fine Arts with artists like Doug and Mike Starn, Jack Pierson & Pat Hearn. (Hearn & Pierson are pictured below.) ClampArt’s show comes from photographs acquired from Hearn before her death at 45 in 2000. Sadly, Mark died of AIDS a decade before at age 30 in 1989.

All three photographers are worth exploring further in these exhibits and all are an amazing record of their time, exciting, inspiring, as well as a sad reminder of the great talent lost what now seems like long ago.

Exhibition invitation/ poster, 1986. Design, Trey Speegle

Mark Morrisroe, Untitled (Trey with Spot)

Mark Morrisroe, self-portrait (bed)

Mark Morrisroe, Pat Hearn

Mark Morrisroe, Jack Pierson

Mark Morrisroe, Untitled (Nathan Shapiro)

Mark Morrisroe, Boy Next Door (Beautiful But Dumb)

KEITH HARING'S GAYEST MURAL IS HIDDEN IN A TOILET

New York City’s LGBT Community Centeron West 13th Street in downtown Manhattan contains a mural by the late Keith Haring, Once Upon a Time, 1989. But it’s hidden, sort of.

Haringwas active in the 1980s LGBT rights movement and made lots of artworks over the years advocating for safe sex, awareness, and research around HIV and AIDS. 

The Center invited Haring in 1989 to create a mural, he chose to do it in the building’s second-floor men’s bathroom. Glennda Testone, the LGBTQ Community Center’s Executive Director says,

“The work really powerfully captures a time and an energy when our community was fighting for our lives— trying to stay resistant, and celebrating what we could.”

Haring was fighting his own battle with AIDS at the time, being diagnosed just a year before. But despite the climate of fear and anxiety, Haring’s painting was a celebration. As Testone says, it was his 

“vision of a world before AIDS—a celebration of gay male sexuality and resiliency at a time when mainstream America was quite terrified of gay male sexuality.”

The mural was restored and opened to the public in 2012 and anyone who wishes can see it. The space is now more of a monument than a working bathroom —the sinks and stalls were removed in the ’80s. People come daily to sit, dance, and even do their homework under Haring’s explicit iconography.

“I wish Keith were alive to see how the community interacts with this mural, because people are so inspired and in awe. I really see the mural as a motivation to keep fighting and keep going forward.”

(Photos, LGBT Community Center National History Archive; via Arnet News)

ELDERLY GAY WIDOWER FACES EVICTION FROM HOME OF 55 YEARS BECAUSE HE WASN'T LEGALLY MARRIED

An elderly gay man might lose the home he shared with his partner for 55 years. Tom Doyle was bequeathed a West Village townhouse by his partner Bill Cornwell, but because they weren’t legally married and Cornwell’s will wasn’t properly witnessed, an army of nieces and nephews are battling him in court.

Doyle was left the building in Cornwell’s will when he died at 88, two years ago. They had lived there for over five decades, but were never married. It wasn’t legal until recently and by the time it was, both men were quite elderly and Cornwell was not well. They bought wedding rings, but apparently never got around to making it official.

On top of not being married, Cornwell mistakenly had only one person witness the signing of his will, not two, as New York law requires. So, the building legally falls to his next of kin, which is several nieces and nephews. One of them, Carole DeMaio, said to the Times that maybe Cornwell didn’t really want to leave the building to his partner. DeMaio said her uncle never took the necessary steps to make sure everything went to Mr. Doyle, including marrying him, because he didn’t want to.

“He had 50 years to put Tom’s name on any of these papers. The will was never a valid will.”

Ms. DeMaio says maybe they were just ‘friends’ or ‘great companions.’ She has proposed that they let him stay in the building for five more years and to give him $250,000 from its eventual sale. A lawyer for the family, Peter Gray, also questioned the point of Doyle’s lawsuit, 

“given the likelihood that he has few remaining years.”

This building is on my block at 69 Horatio Street (my address is 92). I walked my dog past the building all the time and yesterday when I did Mr. Doyle was coming out of the building with a cane. He’s 85 now. I almost went to talk with him but a couple walked by with a dog, so I just kept going.

Cornwell was a neighborhood activist and the local papers have been writing about the situation since last spring. Arthur Z. Schwartz, ann attorney, wrote an editorial in the West Village News calling the nieces and nephews “greedy.” Schwartz is helping Doyle assert his legal claims in court, which include arguing that the couple were common-law married in Pennsylvania, where they sometimes vacationed.

“I have made Tom Doyle’s rightful claim to 69 Horatio Street. It is a claim born of love and the cruel refusal of New York to recognize gay marriage for so many years.”

The red brick building was built in 1905 and believe me, it’s worth a LOT. Townhouses like this on a beautiful block in the West Village are worth around $7 million or more, so those nieces and nephews are seeing dollar signs. This seems particularly cruel to do this to an elderly gay couple, but if they were straight, the relatives would still be trying to grab the money.

A terrible example of why legalizing same-sex marriage is such an important achievement for the gay community. I really hope this works out in Mr, Doyle’s favor, don’t you?

(via Jezebel)

ASSUME VIVID ASTRO FOCUS UPDATES TOM OF FINLAND

Tom of Finland is an icon of gay culture. Now, in a new unprecedented collaboration, the Tom of Finland estate has granted internationally acclaimed artists, Eli Sudbrack and Christophe Hamaide Pierson – who go by Assume Vivid Astro Focus(AVAF) –access to its archives for an update of Touko Laaksonen’s work. This collage is part of a larger series of works and offers a continuation of AVAF’s application of cultural references and artifacts as participants in their work, and is the most “vivid” adaptation of the TOF’s drawings to date.

A print is available in an edition of just 75, for $200 on Artspace. The collaboration was JUST announced so jump on it, if you want this in YOUR collection. Go here to order.

RAQUEL WELCH'S 1980 GAY SUBWAY FANTASY

Raquel Welch‘s TV Special Raquel With Love was filmed in 1980 and it’s vintage trip. About 4:15, is the start of a very gay, Mine Shaft, Tom of Finland-inspired sequence shot on the subway which then lapses into a disco free-for-all. Watch.

I WENT OVER THE RAINBOW AT SCOPE, VOLTA & SPRING BREAK

As an artist, perhaps I look at art fairs differently than non-artists, art dealers and critics. The last several days have seen multiple fairs in New York City during what is know as Armory week. The Armory Show is the main fair with its sister fair Volta, but there’s also Art on Paper,Scope, Pulse, Spring Break and others. To amuse myself I often take a spin through the first fair and see a recurring theme, medium artist or idea to focus on. Here is my VERY loose theme of rainbow inspired work. The human eye uses the full spectrum of colors to see the world, so you could argue that ALL art uses s a rainbow, but look through these and you’ll get my drift. In any event, we're not in Kansas...

JACK EARLY ON GROWING UP GAY, AVOIDING "THE ODD COUPLE" & CRUSHING ON DAVID LACHAPELLE

I met Jack Early decades ago when he was part of the art duo Pruitt-Early. He split with Rob Pruitt who is an art star on his own and stopped making work but he’s been back in the last several years with some powerful new work. His latest show just opened at New York’s Fergus McCaffrey gallery. He was born in Raleigh, North Carolina and his current work goes back to the early days with a focus on his own storytelling. Early has an eye for icons, both old and new and a fascination with popular culture of his period. Most of the large scale works are painted on canvas that were silk screened with a reworking an old photo of his childhood bedroom. (He altered it slightly by have the toy soldiers hold hands.) There are photo-realist paintings of Popsicles, breakfast cereal, and gay porn with freestanding sculptures of family members and household objects, backed with the same wallpaper design on bean bags. 

I had a chat with Jack about his early years and growing up gay in the south.

Jack (right) and his partner, Geoff

So, were you ever bullied in our out of school?
I was bullied once but not because I was gay but because I was cute. I tell it on my life story recording. But I was super-aware all the time as a kid that the bullying thing could happen. I was so aware of it in fact that I think I became a master of keeping it at bay. I knew what acting fem looked like and I was, or so I thought, super careful not to act that way. I don’t think people had great gaydar back then, even I didn’t really know what gay was.

I skipped school, smoked cigarettes, threw rocks, started fires – that gave me some clout as to not get bullied. I was never outed. I had friends on both sides of the fence, the really bright kids liked me but so did the tough bad kids.

Did your parents know…?
Well, I was very careful for my parents not to catch me watching ‘The Odd Couple’ and I tried to casually leave the room when Gay marches were on the news and my parents were watching TV. It made me a loner in a lot of ways. I’d rather be shut in my room, than have to hear a comment about gays… my dad had a book and there was a chapter about homosexuals sticking light bulbs up their asses. It was hateful really. I saw it mostly as gay porn but it was also traumatizing.

When did you have your first gay experience?
…I stole ‘Looking Good’ from the bookstore. I learned later Bruce Weber took the pics… it was like the fist thing I jerked off to. Funny, years later I dated one of the models.

My first sex was with girls. It was hard for me. So, I had sex for the first time with this weird guy that played the organ. I was like, 18, 19…

Anyway, I was grasping to know what gay was… I finally figured that the men that owned Flowers of Henry (a hometown florist) were. So, I had fantasies of them on the table that they made bouquets on.

I did have a crush on David LaChapelle. We were at NCSA high school together and I fell in love with him. He liked me too, but he was so worldly, even in high school. He had lived in New York. I didn’t even know what a bagel was.

So, no one called you fag?
I learned early on that people were nice, but if you got into it they could say some really awful things about gays and blacks. I knew that very well. We had a cook who was my second mother. She was a friend. We knew this truth together and we loved each other and looked after each other. She was black I was a gay boy. We had a unpoken understanding for each other and we knew we both were navigating in a world that was not really built for us.

Does she figure into this show in any work?
She gave me a lot of faith in how to love the people that just did not know any better. She is in my life story in the show…

I guess I meant visually…
Ha! She used to dish out the Popsicles!

Jack asked if I REALLY liked the show, and I said yes… do you know how I know? I was jealous –but in a good way. You can see more of Jack’s work here. The works are musically accompanied by a Victrola playing Early’s own performance of his autobiographical Jack Early’s Life Story in Just Under 20 Minutes, on SoundCloud here. Listen, it’s good. The work is on view at Fergus McCaffrey through April 9, 2016.

(Installation photos, courtesy Scott Rudd, Fergus McCaffrey)