REVOLT

REVOLT

The mainstream Gay Rights movement that developed in the wake of the Stonewall Uprising, and from similar acts of resistance in the 1960s, achieved marked gains for the LGBTQ+ civil rights. Nevertheless, many of the foundational concerns that motivated Stonewall participants to revolt in the summer of 1969 remain unresolved. The realities of aggressive gentrification, police violence, and mass incarceration continue to disproportionately affect LGBTQ+ communities, especially people of color and trans and gender-nonconforming people.

The works in this section are anti-assimilationist in approach, and many draw direct connections between today and the resistance, violence, and vandalism that played out at Stonewall in 1969. Looking to history, Tourmaline and Sasha Wortzel imagine how Marsha P. Johnson spent the hours before the revolt, while Tuesday Smillie traces connections between the activism of the 1970s Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries (STAR) organization and the ongoing queer and trans activism of recent years. Elektra KB transforms banners she uses in protests and marches into artworks that riff on activist legacies, and Juliana Huxtable remixes the vitriol of online political commentary to reveal mainstream feminism’s external and internal contradictions. Hugo Gyrl’s wheatpasted screenprint makes direct reference to the bricks taken up by protestors at the Stonewall Uprising.

THE STONEWALL UPRISING

In 1969, police raids were an expected, near-weekly occurrence at the Stonewall Inn. At the time, there was not a single U.S. law protecting LGBTQ+ workplace or housing rights, and sodomy laws, policing of clothing and self-presentation, and vague charges of “indecency” could upend lives seemingly at any moment. As a result, LGBTQ+ nightlife was an illegal enterprise and members of the Mafia ran spaces like the Stonewall Inn, where bar patrons from diverse backgrounds intermingled.

In the early hours of Saturday, June 28, 1969, a routine raid by the New York Police Department on the Stonewall Inn escalated into an uprising against police brutality and widespread oppression. Ignited and sustained by trans and gender-nonconforming people—primarily of color—the protest extended into six days of conflicts and demonstrations in the nearby streets of Greenwich Village.

The initial clash that started the Stonewall Uprising is a contested history, only partially recorded in divergent eyewitness accounts. After police entered the bar, the crowd outside began to jeer and chant, and officers barricaded themselves inside the bar after protestors threw stones and bottles. As Mafia members, bar employees, and gender-nonconforming patrons were removed to police vans, a collective resistance formed. Witnesses remember people such as Stormé DeLarverie, Jackie Hormona, Miss Major, Marsha P. Johnson, and Zazu Nova shouting incitements to the crowd. When the Tactical Patrol Force arrive, the crowd became impossible to control in the Village’s winding streets. By dawn, the protestors had dispersed, only to reconvene later in the day for a demonstration of public displays of affection amid chanting. Throughout the following nights, intermittent bursts of action flared, escalating again on Wednesday after insulting coverage in the local press. The Uprising’s visibility marked a turning point in many LGBTQ+ communities, who began to advocate for their rights with greater militancy.

For some, the Stonewall Uprising heralded the birth of the Gay Rights movement in the United States. Other see the progress of these mainstream efforts as favoring assimilationist goals of marriage equality and military-service inclusion, neglecting the Uprising’s radical roots in opposition to police violence.

Juliana Huxtable is known as much for her boundary-pushing work as a DJ and nightlife host as for her incisive performances, poetry, and mixed-media artworks. These dizzying, digitally collaged satires of political posters and DIY buttons, overlaid on images of the artist’s paintings, parody the language of oversaturated conversations about identity politics and conspiracy theories. One transforms the title of a transphobic book by controversial white radical feminist Janice Raymond, The Transsexual Empire: The Making of the She-Male (1979), into a rallying cry affirming trans womanhood. In these works, Huxtable excerpts and remixes right-wing radio talk shows, YouTube comments on channels dedicated to Black masculinity, and more into what she terms an “aesthetics of conspiracy,” pointing to an endlessly rich, if chaotic, range of identities and interpretations.

Elektra KB’s hybrid banner-artworks combine her activism with her interdisciplinary art practice. She is particularly interested in how global dynamics of power and surveillance impact individual lives. Taking signs initially created for marches and protests, KB repairs, cleans, and displays them following their public use, recontextualizing them as textile works.

Protest Sign II expands the slogan of the radical advocacy group AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP, founded 1987), who, for their thirtieth-anniversary march, invited KB to create a contemporary call to action in support of people living with AIDS. Nearby, a banner reading “I WAS NEVER YOURS” features a woman’s silhouette, borrowed from Soviet avant-garde design, skewering a group of Ku Klux Klan figures. Carried in May Day and Women’s Strike actions in New York in 2017, KB’s banner rejects renewed state support for white supremacy and patriarchy.

Elektra KB’s hybrid banner-artworks combine her activism with her interdisciplinary art practice. She is particularly interested in how global dynamics of power and surveillance impact individual lives. Taking signs initially created for marches and protests, KB repairs, cleans, and displays them following their public use, recontextualizing them as textile works.

These three works, from the series FREE OUR SIBLINGS///FREE OURSELVES, explore two eras of the fight for transgender justice in New York City. These collages represent the early 1970s Christopher Street Liberation Day protests—the radical precursors to today’s popular NYC Pride—alongside the more recent Trans Day of Action organized against the unjust sentencing and incarceration of hate-crime survivor and trans activist CeCe McDonald.

Best known for writing “YOU GO GIRL” accompanied by green witch hands throughout New York City and major cities around the world, Hugo Gyrl uses graffiti to celebrate and affirm queer women, femmes, and girls. As one of the most visible queer graffiti writers, Gyrl uses their work to subvert the male-dominated, often homophobic graffiti community. Their graffiti, illegal in practice, honors the acts of resistance and vandalism that made today’s pride celebrations possible. In Know Your Power, Gyrl refers to the bricks used by protestors in the Stonewall Uprising and critiques the normative goals of the Gay Rights movement, such as marriage equality and military rights.

This piece is a part of a practice I have around naming the names of folks who have been murdered, killed by police, white supremacist, etc. Naming to honor, remember, learn of these people and their history, naming to have these people next to us, gathered with us, naming to call in our ancestors, naming to call in our friends. I keep a list but I also say these names to get used to the ways they sound in my mouth, sometimes it feels too hard and I have to stop and yet I let this overwhelming feeling also become part of the work. These names specifically are the names of Transgender folks, centering folks of color, who were murdered from January to October 2019. The list felt and still feels too long and so it became clearer and clearer that the full canvas space needed to be for these names. With spill over and continuation onto the billboard structure. The large wooden panel started with bright colors, in honor of remembering these names in the fullest ways and then I used matte black to define the letter forms and bring out the names. In the center of the painting, is a strip of black on black paint, a pause, an ode to the list form, the continuing line of murders, the edge of a page, the starting of a new line. The names continue onto a billboard structure, half the structure is painted in bright colors and the other half is left black or blank. The abrupt ending of the list of names is to call out a demand to work for the protection, survival, care, prioritization, love, centering of Black, Indigenous and trans folks of color in our lives, communities and beyond.

THIS IS BETWEEN JANUARY AND OCTOBER 2019, THE LIST HAS GOTTEN TOO LONG, IT MUST STOP NOW. ASHE AFTER EVERY NAME, WE WILL NOT FORGET YOUR NAME

Right as I think I understand what it says

it cuts off and I search for the next letter

the next symbol that will maybe help me figure out what it all means

Right when I think I’ve memorized all their names

when I say ASHE after every name

at my altar

I learn that one more name has been added to the list

Right when I feel out of breath and out of energy

I remember that we must treasure our breaths and hold them close

because the list has gotten too long

there are too many trans lives that have been murdered

Right as I see them smile

I want them to shine bright forever and feel supported in a world that is hard to live in

A new line has begun and it continues the story

our queer legacy story

our survival legacy story 

We listen closely

We cherish deeply

In Marcel Alcalá’s paintings, whimsically surreal vignettes of city life create parables of personal and cultural reconciliation. Adopting a tone of mischievous satire, the artist creates introspective allegories of their Mexican-American heritage, conjuring a landscape in which markers of commerce and gentrification encroach upon a fantastical natural world. Embracing a lineage of queer utopian mythmaking, the artist draws from references that collapse art history with contemporary visual culture, making allusions to Huichol arts, Toulouse-Lautrec, and the Surrealists, among others. Within these exuberant compositions is a seething indictment of colonization and an earnest celebration of cultural endurance and reinvention.

- Jack Levinson