Cruising, freedom and fundamental joy.
“Black leather looks absurd at this time of day”
- Hal Fischer
I spend the short dead days between Christmas and New Year breaking in a pair of 1970s black leather cowboy boots. I have never been good at dressing myself and most days I leave the house feeling like a fraud or a clown. I enjoy the selective element of dressing but I’m always imagining the clothes on someone else’s body, someone who doesn’t have to tie their hair back and wear kitchen safe shoes five days a week. Despite this I walk through Glasgow with the cold seeping up through thin leather soles better suited to line dancing than wet December pavement. I probably look stupid. But I’d rather look stupid than boring.
I’m taking my friend Chris to see Hal Fischer, Gay Semiotics and other major works at the Glasgow Gallery of Modern Art. Chris is visiting from Berlin where he paints and plays mute extras in German television commercials, though he grew up working class in Dublin. Whenever we’re together we talk mostly about the gross junk food we ate growing up and how children raised on TV learn to navigate the complex and often discriminatory world of art and cultural capital that didn’t exist in the narrow front rooms they grew up in.
In a room at the back of the exhibition I find 18th near Castro St. x 24 (1978), a series of photographs depicting a popular bench at a bus stop in San Francisco’s Castro District, an area synonymous with the city’s rich historical gay culture. Fischer took these photographs from the same spot, which he outlined with chalk footprints for continuity, every hour for a full 24 hours. During its period under Fischer’s clockwork scrutiny the bench hosts old men, women commuting for groceries, topless queer sunbathers blasting portable radios, dope-smoking teenagers and twilight cruisers all of whom contribute their cigarette butts, empty cans and wrappers to the pile of garbage that grows steadily at their feet until dawn. Despite this abundance of characters, the series’ most telling point comes at 2:00 a.m. when the bench is empty for the first and only time. Inserting himself into the frames despite a lack of physical presence, a true cruising Castro Flâneur, Fischer writes beneath the image:
‘The bench is empty but Castro Street is filled with hundreds of men looking for a Saturday night trick. The sidewalks are almost impassable as the boys look each other over and try to find someone to spend the night with’.
If the idea of 18th near Castro St. is to make us feel that a municipal bench can be a universal space of relative safety and normalcy then its brief emptiness becomes ominous by comparison. Fischer shows us via the empty bench the presence of a thriving subculture that has formed in the shadows that it has been forced into. The attempted compartmentalization of society is spelled out in the rigidity of Fischer’s on-the-hour method of photographing his subjects.
This photographic subject matter that moves in and out of the frame reminded me of one of my favourite art books from last year: Carmen Winant’s Notes on Fundamental Joy, a collection of archival images from American lesbian separatist communities during the 1970s. Fischer’s use of photography as a means to address the relationship between physical space, community and identity throughout 18th near Castro St. echoes the way in which the women in Notes on Fundamental Joy use cameras as a tool for severing their bondage to the predatory male gaze. In an essay that runs like a delicate ticker tape throughout the barely opaque pages of Notes on Fundamental Joy, Winant describes the intention of the separatist communities to live outside of the vicious sexism and neglect of capitalist society as a force of radical optimism. Observing this glorious utopia made up of embracing female bodies, photographing themselves and each other untethered from the violence that once held them back, it’s difficult not to share in this optimism. Unlike Fischer’s subjects, who drift in and out of contextualization, becoming alien in the same space where mere hours before they were part of the scenery, the women in Notes on Fundamental Joy appear to have achieved something like autonomy, albeit at the cost of removing themselves from society.
from Notes on Fundamental Joy by Carmen Winant, 2019.
Despite working closely with the rich archive of photographic material from the lesbian separatist communities, Winant is careful to maintain a transparency around her relationship to the work, how as a straight woman who has never identified as queer she would not have been welcome amongst many of these communities. Unlike Fischer, whose identity is thoroughly embedded in his work, Winant attempts a studious distance from her subject despite the project’s implicit intimacy. She writes, ‘I do not technically belong to this history. I fell into these pictures because I found them to be beautiful.’ Though as a woman building on the history of this radical exclusion that bucked the violence of the mainstream, it is understandable why Winant is drawn to these women, their photographs and their valiant attempts at harnessing joy.
I often worry that I have an ugly habit of pushing myself into the frame of everything I consume. Am I doing it right now? Asserting identity in an otherwise neutral space. Near the end of her essay for Notes on Fundamental Joy Winant writes of the autonomous self-exclusion of the separatist communities: ‘There was power in escape, in differentiation, in essence’. Much like the late-night cruisers of the Castro, the lesbian separatists drew power from their difference, and their refusal to contort into the impossible shapes that a heteronormative society expected of them. There is a certain madness in this self-exclusion, a freedom so unimaginable and necessary that it can begin to look absurd, but those forced to live in the shadows will eventually claim the darkness as their own.