be looking at. Part of the argument that Catherine Lord and I made in Art and Queer Culture (Meyer and Lord 2013) is that you can’t chart the dialogue between those two categories if you just look at museum and gallery art. Queer culture is also a culture of everyday life, it’s a history of underground imagery, of anonymous things, of activist things, of scrapbooks. That’s where visual studies seemed so liberating to me—not only was it acknowledging that there are all these things that are left out, but it was also making me look at the relation between writing and images, and work through the discrepancy between those forms of communication. The theoretical grounding of visual studies in its emergent days (and here I’m thinking especially of Foucault and Barthes) allowed people to think differently about the relation between writing and looking, or writing and objects.
JON I think it’s really important that queer studies—or just queer people—are, basically, attuned to reading between the lines and understanding that not all the meaning of an image resides on the surface, that it’s something to be decoded. I feel like that’s another point of coming together between queer studies, visual studies, and art history. And I wonder, as queer artistic production happens now, in 2019, whether there’s still a sense of being in opposition to a dominant culture, or of having to speak in code or to work with irony or camp or these other historically queer reading strategies. I imagine that queer art will change a lot as a generation comes up that doesn’t necessarily think of itself as being outside, or abjected, or hated by mainstream society. So I wonder what it means to lose that ability to speak in code or to read code in the future, and how we may keep it alive in some way.
RICHARD There’s this beautiful passage in Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s writing where she questions why it is that she has always been so interested in the closeting of homosexuality in literature, Victorian literature more specifically, and not in later, full‐bodied affirmations of gay and lesbian identity. For Sedgwick, it was more interesting to think about layered and encoded meanings in nineteenth‐ and early twentieth‐century fiction than, let’s say, in post‐Stonewall gay literature. After reading that passage, I realized that I actually found (and still find) the visual and rhetorical devices of censorship compelling: erasure, partial obstruction of vision, the bar across the genitals, or the posing strap or G‐string worn by one of Mizer’s physique models. I’ve always been drawn, queerly I think, to visual images that have to struggle to be seen and to images that are structured by partial invisibility or necessary encoding.
JON I was thinking, again, about the Internet and the digital and how, in your recent “Fifty and Counting” article for Art in America, you quote the artist Zoe Leonard and you write that “powerful forces of desire were clarified by encounters with particular writings and films” (Meyer 2019, 84). I have this tendency to think that encountering, say, a queer historical image on Instagram or something like that is a degraded or less “authentic” way of encountering it, because there’s a kind of flattening in terms of scale and texture and context, but what you just said is making me think that maybe these digital platforms are more about a space of contestation or conflict. People assume that they have a high degree of freedom when it comes to expressing themselves and their identities, but then to have Instagram censor an image is a powerful reminder that representation is still contested. Just considering how the digital changes visual culture and how it’s consumed so thoroughly, I’m wondering what you think of these platforms, especially since, as art historians, we are very attuned to the object, and here the things we are dealing with aren’t really objects anymore.
RICHARD I remain nostalgic for objects. I wrote years ago about this exhibition called Queer and Kinky Danger (1998) at the Gay and Lesbian (now GLBT) Historical Society of San Francisco. That was the whole history that this amazing archivist named Willie Walker (now deceased) put together of leather culture, S&M (sadism and masochism), and kink subcultures; and it contained mostly 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s material. It included this tiny matchbook from the Tool Box (Figure 5.1), with George Washington in a leather jacket. And for some reason I really fixated on this idea of the father of our country as a leather daddy, and I thought it was both camp and not exactly sexy, but referring to a whole sexual subculture. But it was its smallness too: the fact that it was just a matchbook that no one would ever have thought was to become historical—it’s not like a painting. I wanted it to be published in its smallness, but on the Internet it’s just going to look like any other image. And so I feel things like the flimsiness of it, the fragility of it… once it’s an Internet image, it loses something. I think, for me, with both visual culture and queerness—and the connections between them—there is something important about fragile objects and fragile histories, you know, that these aren’t fully formed yet; let’s say, the history of gay bar matchbook covers or gay bars as things you might take seriously in your studies. I want not to be so suspicious of the Internet. This is our reality, you can’t say, “I’m not going to deal with the Internet.” I do think my students need to go to archives and museums, but I want them to understand the different experiences they are having, which is all part of visual culture.
Figure 5.1 Matchbook. The Tool Box, c. 1963.
Courtesy GLBT Historical Society, San Francisco.
JON I’m just thinking about Douglas Crimp’s (1999) article “Getting the Warhol We Deserve,” where he essentially says that cultural studies queers art history. There’s been a surge of interest among queer artists and scholars in queer archives specifically, and partly this is tied to their being, typically, a very tangible alternative to the digital. You wouldn’t have that kind of resurgence of interest if it weren’t for the digital; people wanting to have those experiences with fragile, tactile objects actually having to search through an uncatalogued box that’s covered in dust and found in a dark corner—all these things take on a renewed appeal. And at first I thought of the impact of queer archives as being more within queer studies or queer communities, but now I’m realizing that they have a particular lesson for art history and visual or cultural studies more broadly—in that it’s a completely different value system in terms of who is deemed worthy of being remembered, and what’s kept and what’s held on to.
RICHARD There’s a man named Tim Wood who was a Sears salesman in Oakland, and I ended up interviewing him because there are these beautiful scrapbooks in the GLBT Historical Society. The one I liked best had all these photos of men on nude beaches; they all had these decorative flourishes, like bits of fabric or wallpaper. And the frontispiece is this map of San Francisco that’s golden, with apertures floating in the water with these nude bathers, and each one is for a different nude beach. (One was “B.A. Beach” and I asked, “where is B.A. Beach?” And he said, “oh it’s Bare‐Ass Beach.”) I asked where he learned scrapbooking, and he said “oh, my grandmother had these scrapbooks full of cutouts of flowers and recipes and I inherited them.” And I thought it would be really cool if the queer archive accessioned his erotica, but also the grandmother’s scrapbooks, as a kind of queering of a scrapbooking tradition that was about femininity. And of course they didn’t, but I was really interested to hear that story—because you wouldn’t look at an early twentieth‐century scrapbook of flowers and recipes and think it would have anything to do with Bare‐Ass Beach; and yet in the life of Tim Wood it did. And he actually used his grandmother’s visual approach, and that’s why there were all these flourishes that you wouldn’t have expected if it had been just about the naked men. I’m sure those have been digitized, but in a digital image you can’t appreciate, let’s just say, the sheen of some of the wallpaper fragments that he’s pasted in, or the sheen of the bodies of the men.
JON The textures of those different components all index their different histories, and you lose that in a digital reproduction.
RICHARD
