• Sexuality and Space //
  • A collection of images and artworks about sex, gender, sexuality and (mostly) urban space.

    This site contains sexual imagery. Obviously. //
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More from Anna Conlan on sexy spaces and/as museums. The above image is from the delightfully named, Miss Hattie’s Bordello Museum in Texas. Read Conlan’s work on twilight places and queer spaces: when brothels become museums here (especially the section on queering museums): http://www.columbia.edu/~sf2220/TT2007/web-content/Pages/anna2.html
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I have begun stalking Anna Conlan, a self-described ‘object ethnographer’. You can read about her work the absent heritage object: or the air inside the room of a brothel in kalgoorlie, australia here: http://www.columbia.edu/~sf2220/TT2007/web-content/Pages/anna1.html The above image is taken from her work on Langtrees 181: Historic Bordello and Museum of Prostitution (NB: I use the term ‘prostitution’ when quoting, but otherwise always refer to ‘sex work/ers’ - which is the preferred terminology of the sex worker rights movement in Australia). Langtrees 181 runs as a working brothel and a museum - drawing on the extensive and “colourful” (according to its founder) history of sex work in Kalgoorlie. The themed rooms of the museum / brothel chronicle the history of the local sex industry: from the tents of the goldfields (above), to the ‘French’ and ‘Japanese’ rooms (an homage to the immigrant women who worked in the area in the 19th century), to the Afghan room (in honour of the Afghan camel drivers), to the ‘Great Boulder Shaft Room’ (Kalgoorlie is primarily a mining town), right up to the millennium ‘madam’s’ suite. Whilst Conlan explains that these “mock-historical interiors bring in questions of authenticity, simulacra and the Disneyfication of the past,” what is primarily of interest to her is what is absent from the museum. Deploying the term ‘negative-space heritage,’ Conlan argues that despite the attention paid to presenting a host of visual, ‘historical’ stimuli, what is actually at the forefront of this museological experience is the absence of bodies: the visitor, she argues, is haunted (creeped out? turned on?) by the ghosts of ‘last century,’ ‘last night,’ and, paradoxically, ‘tonight’…
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I have been desperately seeking Tony Just’s 1994 series of photographs (untitled) of public toilets, to no avail. So I’m cheating, and using a generic photo of some urinals, because I want to mention his work. In 1994, Just selected run-down public toilets in New York - the kind of spaces that would have been tea rooms before the HIV / AIDS crisis resulted in their closure - and set about scrubbing, sanitizing and photographing them in loving close-up (the curve of a toilet, the shine of a tap…). Jose Esteban Munoz describes this work as attempting to capture the “ghosts of public sex.” It’s a queer little series of images, invoking the invisible presence of a multitude of spectres (acts, bodies, fluids) whilst making that which is leftover - the material space itself and the objects which define it - queer in and of itself. Anna Conlan writes (of Just’s work):  “it is not just that homosexual acts take place in these spaces, but it is the material things in those spaces that bear much of the work of defining them as queer. In this example, the space of the bathroom site is embodied and materially specific; tiled walls, ceramic bowls, metal taps, the sounds of water, and the folks who interact with this stuff in ways particular to this space and to the object’s material affordances.” What I like about Just’s work (even though I haven’t seen it), is the act of love, across time, I see him performing in his attentions to these neglected spaces - Carolyn Dinshaw writes that the desire for connections across history (inventing or ‘discovering’ gay ‘ancestors’; falling in love with the dead) constitutes a “queer touch across time,” and I like the attempt to connect - through vision and tactility and imagination - with the past. See Conlan’s article here: http://www.columbia.edu/~sf2220/TT2007/web-content/Pages/anna2.html And see Munoz’s chapter on Ghosts of Public Sex in his book Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity. Also, you should read Dinshaw’s Getting Medieval.
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The famous, fabulous Eagle Tavern in San Fran has shut its doors… From the (online) pages of Butt magazine: “Everyone was welcome at this nondescript building on the corner of 12th and Harrison. On any given night, you could be chatting with bikers, leather daddies, twinks, bears, businessmen, punks, circuit queens, straight swingers, trannies, hippies, addicts, hustlers and tourists from all over. By now, the walls have been stripped of their epic history. The amazing jockstrap collection, the vintage biker photos, an exhibit-worthy collection of fliers and posters documenting 30 years of macho gay history — artifacts of a bold sexual revolution on the verge of extinction — all of it, gone.” Sometimes what is ignored in debates and discussions about queer spaces/venues is what the writer here laments so beautifully: the loss, not just of a needed space for queers of the now to congregate, but of a living archive of queer history. In lieu of mainstream recognition of these ‘minor’ and subcultural places and practices and people, venues can become the sticky-floored museums of our culture. And when they are gone we lose a very specific, embodied, haunted and haunting connection to our past.
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From the fabulous magazine, Butt
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Queering Bathrooms: Gender, Sexuality and the Hygienic Imagination by Sheila Cavanagh (2010) University of Toronto Press Based on 100 interviews with queer, trans and intersex people, this book looks at the politicization of public bathrooms: from the campaigns for gender-neutral spaces, to the harassment experienced by intersex, sex and gender people when they are ‘caught’ using “the wrong bathroom”. Public toilets are sites of rigid gendering and strictly policed heteronormativity, and spaces where trans / queer folk are routinely ‘punished’ for their transgressions. Cavanagh argues that the “cultural politics of excretion” (YES. BEST PHRASE EVER) is linked to the regulation of gender / sexuality - and therefore a site of contestation for queer / trans communities. Click on the image to read a review by Syrus Marcus Ware.
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Pretty marvelous example of the subtext of the public toilet become more like… text.
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Unknown…
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Christer Stromholm, Place Blanche, 1960s
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Robert Giard, Del Martin and Phyllis Martin (at home in San Fran) 1989 I love Giard - who created a beautiful archive of portraits of gay and lesbian writers in the 80s (see the book Particular Voices) - and these are great subjects (founders of the Daughters of Bilitis)… still, lesbian couple all cozy and domestic is bit… familiar.
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Al Baltrop (c1975-86) The last few images are all Baltop’s work - which I first saw in the doco Gay Sex in the 70s which examines the communities formed in the social/sexual spaces in New York, pre-AIDS. All these images are from the crumbling, broken down piers, which were a popular cruising space, and its hard not to read them as prescient of the time about to follow the (now legendary) sex scenes of the 70s.
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Al Baltrop (c1975-86)
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Al Baltrop (c1975-86)
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Al Baltrop (c1975-86)
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Al Baltrop (c1975-86)
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