Peter Flinsch opening, 1977. Courtesy of the Leslie Lohman Museum.
A bouquet of dildos greets visitors at the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art in New York City. Variously constructed in glass, stone, wood, and ivory at both gargantuan and miniscule scales, the phalluses mark the beginning of Male Gaze: Life, Legend, Legacy, an exhibition that celebrates the fiftieth anniversary of Charles Leslie and Fritz Lohman’s first exhibition of gay art in 1969. That seminal exhibition, which opened the month before the Stonewall riots, was held in Leslie and Lohman’s SoHo loft just a few blocks away from where the museum now stands.
The apartment exhibition, meant to be an intimate affair, attracted over 300 visitors over the short period that it was on view. This initial success prompted the couple to open a commercial gallery in 1972, where they continued to exhibit work with explicitly gay subject matter. At the time, it was an unprecedented endeavour. Though significant gay and lesbian networks existed long before Stonewall, queer visual culture was either obliquely coded or circulated through the mail and the backrooms of bookstores. The post office routinely confiscated “offensive” material and sometimes pressed charges for obscenity.
Publicly exhibiting gay and lesbian art in SoHo not only provided exposure and access, it also situated this work at the epicentre of the New York art world. Only blocks away, gallerists Paula Cooper, Illeana Sonnabend, and Leo Castelli were introducing the world to minimalism and conceptual art. They too were exhibiting gay artists, but neither the galleries nor the artists would have called anything they were doing “gay art.” And they certainly weren’t showing figurative painting.
As the SoHo scene waned in the 1980s, the couple closed their commercial gallery and filed to incorporate the Leslie-Lohman Gay Art Foundation in 1987. Prompted in part by the enormous losses of the AIDS epidemic, particularly among artists, the duo began focusing their energy on collecting and preserving work that might otherwise be lost. In the almost three decades since then, the Foundation has institutionalised Leslie and Lohman’s collecting practice, becoming accredited as a museum in 2011 with a collection of over 30,000 objects. (Fritz Lohman passed away in 2009.)
Charles Leslie in his loft in the 1980s. Courtesy of the Leslie Lohman Museum.
After the Foundation was incorporated, the couple continued to collect work privately, amassing thousands more pieces of unambiguously gay art in their apartment. Known affectionately as the “phallus palace,” the apartment is hung floor to ceiling, with homoerotic work crowded on every available surface.
In celebration of Leslie and Lohman’s private collection, Male Gaze is hung to mimic the “phallus palace”—a couch at the start of the exhibition strikes a domestic note; above it, a 1974 painting by Marion Pinto greets visitors with a full frontal view of the museum’s founders, nude and recumbent. On one side is the cornucopia of dildos and on the other, a display of phallic figurines from around the world. There are no pretentions of museological propriety here, just unabashed and unambiguous sexuality. A photograph of Charles Leslie hangs nearby, beautifully evoking the collector’s impenitence. Seated in his apartment, ensconced by framed artworks, Leslie smirks mischievously at the camera. To his left, a nude model is frozen in contrapposto, his well-defined body transformed into living sculpture. Leslie is smug in his glut; he makes no effort to hide the libidinous desire that structures his collection.
Alex Geana, Portrait of Charles Leslie with Model, 2015.Digital print, 22 x 17 in.Photograph© Alex Geana.
The show continues with penis aplenty. Hundreds of paintings, photographs, and drawings are hung salon-style throughout the museum, arranged into loosely thematic groups. On one wall, drawings by notable fashion designers betray their penchants for penises; on another are works by artists who died of AIDS-related complications, saved from destruction by Leslie and Lohman. An adjacent wall displays the blue chip artists in the collection: an Andy Warhol drawing, a Robert Mapplethorpe photograph, a painting by Keith Haring. The museum’s impressive collection of nineteenth-century prints and glass negatives by German photographer Wilhelm von Gloeden is also on view, as is Charles Leslie’s pioneering monograph on the photographer, whose nude portraits masked homoeroticism with classical and pastoral motifs.
In its quest to evoke the “phallus palace,” the museum has even hung a massive painting by Casey Herrick from its ceiling: a dozen nude boys gently intertwined in slumber, post-pubescent cherubim demarking a heavenly space of worship. (A different painting hangs from the ceiling of Charles Leslie’s home, but one can only assume it features a similar theme.)
Casey Herrick, Herndon Climb, 2016, courtesy of the artist and the Leslie Lohman Museum
At its best, Male Gaze gleefully interrupts the pretensions of the museum and revels in the impropriety of uninhibited sexuality as only a queer institution can. Perhaps the greatest contribution of Leslie and Lohman is their unapologetic disregard of “good taste” as peddled by other collectors and connoisseurs. What other museum owns a nude portrait of its founders?
Nonetheless, one can’t help but notice the phallocentric monotony of Male Gaze. What does it mean for an institution of gay and lesbian art to exclusively exhibit images of the male nude? Where are the lesbians and people of colour? Beyond concerns for representational equity lies a deeper question that has always plagued identity-based exhibitions and institutions—what is the difference between “gay art” and “gay artists”? How do you carve out a minoritarian space without consolidating difference or conflating identity with sensibility? Must one paint a nude to make it into Leslie and Lohman’s collection, or its associated museum?
Male Gaze seems to suggest so, and makes little distinction between the museum and its founders or their respective understandings of “gay art.” The show’s subtitle, “50 Years of Leslie-Lohman,” does little to disambiguate between the founder’s collection, their commercial endeavors, and the museum’s activities. But in conflating the space of the gallery with the domestic space of its founder, the Leslie-Lohman Museum risks confusing its mission with its founders’ propensity for a specific image of queerness: white, well-endowed nude men.
Broom Gallery, 1982. Courtesy of the Leslie Lohman Museum.
To be sure, the museum has committed itself in recent years to bolstering its holdings of work by women, trans artists, and artists of colour, demonstrating the full breadth of its collection in the 2017 exhibition Expanded Visions. (With Haptic Tactics in 2018, the museum even forayed into abstraction, seeking to expand queerness “beyond same-sex object choice.”) Though Male Gaze names the libidinous foundations of its collection, it neglects to note how the museum’s mandate has evolved since its inception. Leslie and Lohman’s remarkable collection should be understood as an artefact in and of itself, one that speaks to a specific and historical conceptualisation of what “gay art” looks like. An opening salvo to what looks to be an impending flood of exhibitions and programs marking fifty years since the Stonewall riots, Male Gaze serves as a reminder that anniversaries shouldn’t be occasions for rote celebration, but rather prompts for critical viewing.
MALE GAZE: Life, Legend, Legacy, is up until 31 March 2019 at the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art, New York