Queer Australian Art and KINK acknowledge the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples as the traditional owners and custodians of the lands and waters of this continent. KINK conducts its work on the unceded lands of the Wurundjeri Woi Wurrung and Bunurong peoples of the Kulin Nation in Naarm Melbourne, the Turrbal and Jagera peoples in Meanjin Brisbane and the Gadigal lands of the Eora Nation, Sydney. We pay respect to elders past, present, and emerging. Sovereignty was never ceded.

(X)

Don't Forget to Remember by Amelia Barikin, Courtney Coombs, Callum McGrath, Spiros Panigirakis, and Tim Riley Walsh, published 02.05.2024

(X)
Birthplace (City)
Birthplace (State)
Based in (City)
Based in (State)
Gender
Birthplace (City)
Birthplace (State)
Based in (City)
Based in (State)
Year
Decade
Artwork type
Collection
Exhibition type
Year
Venue
State
Year
Category
(artwork)

Gay Beauty Myth

1992
Lex Middleton
Lex Middleton, **Gay Beauty Myth**, gelatin silver photographs, 1992, 40 x 30cm
Image courtesy of the artist.

Description

Ted Gott on Lex Middleton’s 1992 image 'Gay Beauty Myth' writes that the image "reconsiders Bruce Weber’s luscious photography of the naked male body for Calvin Klein’s celebrated underwear advertising campaigns of the early 1980s. The proliferation of Weber / Klein glistening pectorals and smouldering body tone across the billboards of the United States was reaching its crescendo at the same time as the gay male ‘body’ came under threat from a ‘new’ disease not yet identified as HIV/AIDS. In opposing the rippling musculature and perfect visage of an athlete with the fragmented image of a Calvin Klein Y-fronted ‘ordinary’ man, Middleton questions the ‘gay beauty myth’, both as it touches gay men who do not fit the ‘look’ that advertising has decreed applicable to their sexuality, and from the projected perspective of HIV positive gay men who face the reality of the daily decay of their bodies.” Ted Gott

Medium

Gelatin Silver Photographs

Dimensions

40 x 30cm

Resources

Further reading

Included within these exhibitions

Included within these publications

Subscribe