QUEER IDOLS AND ICONS

These paintings explore personal experiences growing up gay in a conservative, religious environment–both domestic and societal.  

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When I was younger, I remember distinctly watching Phil Donahue while at home with my mother.  On that episode, Donahue was exploiting homosexuals as a daytime drama for bored housewives in the Midwest.  Highlighting their lurid, sexually alternative lifestyles, the audience gasped in shock as these men were unashamed to be true to themselves.  My mother was horrified.

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As I grew older, I knew it was not safe for me to be out and open; being gay was a secret thought and about and explored under an immense layer of guilt and shame.  By my teenage years, homosexuality had long been removed from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (1973), meaning I was at little risk of being imprisoned or sent to a psychiatric ward. Still, being gay was simply not something you should talk about: it was an issue to be kept private.

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With the ridiculous overturn of Roe v. Wade, the culture wars needed a new target: trans humans and drag queens.  In the post Obergefell v. Hodges world, many queer people sighed a bit of relief as the Bush-era social, evangelical conservatism seemed to have finally stalled.  Yet without the lure of making abortions illegal, pundits now revealed the abject terror that is drag queen story hour as the new get-to-the-polls-to-protect-our-children issue.

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To think, children, yes children, are being exposed to a person of one gender performing as another gender through the sinful art of reading and shake-and-go wigs.  We are re-legislating gender identity, free speech, navigating book bans, and once again shoving an entire population of beautiful people back into the closet.  Putting masculine symbols like apes, roosters, and snakes in a drag context is my way to saying “fuck you” to the ardent devotion of the gender binary.