NEW DRAWING: FAG IN YOUR FACE (2020)

In an interview this year with Tim Kirk for his Two Zero Q: 20 Questions With Interesting People from the LGBT community and friends podcast (Jul 26, 2020) he asked me to describe a seemingly overwhelming task/a difficult situation I had to overcome in the past. Having realised I was gay in my mid-late teens in the mid 1990s, a personal challenge was stepping inside a gay bar for the first time. The Queens Arms on George Street (I always remember it was George Street because one of my biggest teen crushes was on a guy called George who I went to art school with in ‘96/’97) was my first time in a gay bar. A nervous yet emancipating experience of being in space of looking and being looked at. Of seeing and being seen. My feelings just before stepping inside echoed those that Tim previously shared himself in a prior podcast: ‘I wanted to experience the culture, the life, the very first pulse-stopping heart in my throat time in a gay bar, I couldn’t even tell one person in my life what I was doing or where I was going, I thought my head was going to explode. Outside, the indecision, repetitive actions that got me one inch closer, I watch the door open and close and open and close …. I would have the time of my life’. I had found my sanctuary and a whole lifetime of being interested in how gay men see, want to be seen and are seen began (as demonstrated in my drawing collage ‘Fag in Your Face’ (2020). Once inside the bar, no truer words than these could be found: ‘Gay men tend to be very ocular focused society: we look and when we like what we see we look again, we cruise strangers and the way we cruise might not be directly about having sex but we are cruising you to see if you cruise me back and if we are cruising each other then I know that I am desirable. I know that I (still ) have status in this community’ (taken from ‘Beauty Before Age Growing Older in Gay Culture’ (1997) by Johnny Symons).

FAG IN YOUR FACE (2020) Ink on paper 420x594mm