Don't Forget to Remember

What is queer Australian art? Some might assume that LGBTQI+ practice only took off in the 1980s, at the height of the AIDS crisis when artists like David McDiarmid, Juan Davila and Peter Tully became household names. Some will have heard of expat painter Roy de Maistre, who, in London, back in the 1930s, influenced Francis Bacon, with whom he had an affair. De Maistre even painted a portrait of Bacon in 1935. Others may also recall Frances Phoenix’s crocheted, vulval doilies from the 1970s, but likely consider her a feminist artist, rather than a queer one. Her work with the Domestic Needlework Group in Sydney transformed so-called ‘feminine’ craft practices into powerful acts of resistance. Wikipedia currently lists only one artist in their ‘Australian Bisexual Artists’ category—Rosaleen Norton, the notorious Witch of Kings Cross. There have been no books published on the history of queer art on this continent.

Despite the lack of historical scholarship in the area, we are witnessing an explosion of exhibitions dedicated to queer art—from the NGV’s 2021 'QUEER: Stories from the NGV Collection', a project that revealed some unfortunate holes in the institution’s heteronormative collecting practices, to the visual arts programs of organisations like Midsumma or the plethora of exhibitions that kicked off in Sydney around Global Pride in 2023. Capitalising on the ‘pink dollar’, some of these projects have been criticised for their subsumption of the diversity of LGBTQI+ identities into singular categories. As Jade Muratore has written, “Everyone in the rainbow acronym has long been trying to dismantle the burden and false seduction of master narratives as a matter of survival, so why subsume us into yet another one (even if it is rainbow coloured)?” [1].

It’s an important point. One might even argue that ‘formalising’ histories of queerness is antithetical to the term’s political efficacy. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick put it beautifully, writing in 1993 that “that’s one of the things queer can refer to: the open mesh of possibilities, gaps, overlaps, dissonances, and resonances, lapses and excesses of meaning when the constituent elements of anyone's gender, of anyone's sexuality aren't made (or can't be made) to signify monolithically” [2]. The implication here is that the term ‘queer’ in itself needs to be continually queered, continually renewed, never allowing its meanings to congeal or become trapped as something that might be pinned down, capitalised on, located, controlled, or commodified. In a public response to Sedgwick’s work, Judith Butler argued similarly: “if the term "queer" is to be a site of collective contestation, the point of departure for a set of historical reflections and future imaginings, it will have to remain that which is, in the present, never fully owned, but always and only redeployed, twisted, queered from a prior usage and in the direction of urgent and expanding political purposes and perhaps also yielded in favor of terms that do that political work more effectively” [3].

There are artists featured on this site who would resonate with this understanding of queerness. There are also many who wouldn’t. It was not until 1990 that the term queer started taking the form that we know it as today, when the term “queer theory” was coined by Teresa de Lauretis at a conference of the same name hosted at The University of California, Santa Cruz [4]. Most of the historical artists featured in queeraustralianart.com would not, in their lifetimes, have applied the term ‘queer’ to themselves, or their art. Given the significant change in the use of language, the illegality of homosexuality for much of the 20th century and the ongoing, violent discrimination experienced by LGBTQI+ communities today, this is not surprising.

The wave of unmarried Australian women artists who found their way to Europe or to sapphic Paris in the 1920s or 1930s, for example—artists such as Grace Crowley, Agnes Goodsir, Anne Dangar, Mary Cockburn Mercer, and Bessie Gibson—did not refer to themselves as queer, despite their relationships with other women. For the men, perhaps, the language tended to be more explicit. The horde of Australian gay male artists who ended up in London in the middle years of the 20th century—including Roy de Maistre, Loudon Sainthill, William Dobell and Godfrey Miller—seemingly had less difficulty recognising or articulating their sexuality, perhaps because it was still classed as illegal [5].

There’s a beautiful little pastel by Janet Cumbrae Stewart in the Queensland Art Gallery collection of a sleepy, sultry female nude with her breasts exposed, gazing languidly at the painter who looks down at her from above the bed (Reclining Nude, 1922–39). It looks gay AF. But Cumbrae Stewart never characterised herself as a lesbian. The point, though, is not to ‘prove’ lesbian status for artists like Cumbrae Stewart. The point is to avoid their subsumption into a heteronormative patriarchy that overlooks or at worst suppresses significant elements of their practice and lives. Cumbrae Stewart’s painting is not only relevant to a history of queer art because of the intensity of queer desire portrayed in the scene, but also because of the artist’s biography. Her partner “Billy” Bellairs came to Australia with Cumbrae Stewart on a boat from Antwerp in 1937, and was described by one author as a “distinctive and enterprising woman of independent means who dressed in masculine attire” [6]. The pair lived together in their South Yarra house until Cumbrae Stewart’s death in 1960.

Although still in the margins of art history, Cumbrae Stewart is more well-known than some of the other artists featured on this database. Take the Australian sculptor and medallist Dora Ohlfsen, born in Ballarat in 1869. Her first celebrated work was a medallion called The Awakening of Australian Art (1907). It features a female nude standing with arms stretched upwards against a backdrop of radiant sunlight. Created while Ohlfsen was living in Italy, the piece was modelled on Alexandra Simpson, a 21 year old nurse who she had met in Rome. In 1948, Ohlfsen and her lifelong partner, the Russian countess Hélène (Elena) de Kuegelgen, were found dead in their Rome apartment in Rome as a result of a gas leak. Although ruled as an accidental death by the coroner, there were speculations that it was suicide, and the women were buried side by side in the city's non-Catholic cemetery [7].

The ethical, political and aesthetic questions generated by viewing historically significant artists through a contemporary queer lens must continually be negotiated. Artist Jeremy Eaton calls it the “conundrum of the closet”, rightly observing that “failing to acknowledge histories risks perpetuating a record of silence around LGBTQI+ experience but outing risks essentialising and erasing complexity and context, and so undercutting the diverse life experiences that have contributed to the development of an artist’s work” [8]. Eaton should know, as his doctoral research focuses on the work of the late Australian painter James Gleeson, an artist esteemed for his surrealist work but whose gay identity has rarely been addressed. As one of the few openly gay men working in Australia in the mid 20th century, Gleeson shared a home studio with his life partner Frank O’Keefe in Sydney for close to sixty years.

When KINK approached the Gleeson O’Keefe estate to seek permission to include one of Gleeson’s paintings in the database, our request was declined, on the grounds that Gleeson “would not have wanted to be part of such a group. He was private and discreet; his sexuality was not the main focus.” Gleeson was not only open about his sexuality despite its illegality for most of his life, but he also painted what are arguably some of the most unashamedly erotic male nudes of the 20th century (see here for one example). His partner Frank modelled for many of his works. In complying with the Estate’s restrictions, our database now hosts no images by Gleeson, but instead links outwards to works reproduced elsewhere online.  

The estate of Jeffrey Smart, an artist who said at one point in his life that he thought he might be “the only homosexual in Australia”, also declined our request for image reproductions, for reasons unknown [9]. Artist Anne Wallace, who wrote about Smart’s works for his 2021 survey at the National Gallery of Australia, noted that “Smart might not have painted unabashedly erotic male nudes as did Paul Cadmus (let alone George Quaintance) and his The Gymnasium 1962 is modest beside the brutal raw nerve of Bacon’s wrestling men, but he most certainly did not create scenes to convince anyone of the ‘naturalness’ or superiority of the heteronormative world” [10].

The history of queer First Nations art does not reveal itself in the same ways as that of settler artists, their queerness often veiled in complexity and intersectionality. The historic and sustained violence towards Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples has meant that for some queer-identifying artists, queer liberation and LGBTQI+ rights has been understandably positioned less urgently in comparison to more visible issues demanding representation and activism. In the context of this archive we have attempted to highlight contributions of both queer Aboriginal artists who have made overtly queer works alongside LGBTQI+ identifying First Nations artists whose work might not appear explicitly queer.

One of the first exhibitions of LGBTQI+ First Nations art occurred in 1994, with the group exhibition ‘Lookin’ Good’ at the Boomalli Aboriginal Artists Cooperative in Sydney. Queer artist Mathew Cook (Bundjalung) wrote to the Cooperative asking to host the exhibition during that year's Mardi Gras Festival. The exhibition presented works by Cook, Arone Meeks (Kuku Midigi), Brook Andrew (Wiradjuri, Ngunnawal), Destiny Deacon (KuKu, Erub/Mer), Nova Gina (Dunghutti) and r e a (Gamilaraay, Wailwan, Biripi) celebrating what Cook described as "a minority within a minority" [11]. A few years later, Andrew and r e a collaborated on another exhibition ‘bLAK bABE(z) & kWEER kAT(z)’ during the 1998 Mardi Gras Festival at Gitte Weise Gallery, Sydney. Reviewing the exhibition in Eyeline, Warren Coatsworth says: “In bLAK bABE(z) & kWEER kAT(z)’ Brook Andrew and r e a, who identify themselves as ‘blak’ and ‘kweer’, use new media to strategically counter the personal sense of invisibility engendered by their own embodiment of multiple differences—Aboriginality as well as homosexuality” [12]. Indicative of the growing intersectionality that was occurring in queer practice globally at the time, only a year later in 1999 José Esteban Muñoz published the now seminal book Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics which addressed the complicated practices of identification for queer people of colour.

These layers of queerness operate in nuanced ways. Artists like Destiny Deacon and Karla Dickens employ blak humour to interrogate historical and contemporary injustices against Indigenous people. Peter Waples-Crowe’s Ngarigo Queen – Cloak of queer visibility (2018) champions the intersection of their Aboriginal heritage and queerness. D Harding’s work—in a similar vein to the late Cuban/American artist Felix Gonzalez-Torres—oscillates between explicit and quiet queerness. In an interview with Hilary Thurlow, Harding discusses the multiple meanings of fetish that runs in their work Body of Objects (2017): “there’s fetish as being sexual and being objectified and reduced to physical matter beyond being identified for who you might be or who you are. Instead just looked at and objectified and reduced in that way. Then fetish in the other sense to be possessing of spirit” [13]. Even from this brief snapshot of queer Aboriginal practice, the diversity of approaches to the intersections of queerness and Indigeneity is clear. In a recent review of Gary Lee’s exhibition ‘midling (Larrakia: Together)’, Tristen Harwood highlights these kinds of complexities, suggesting that “the history of Indigenous art is a queer and trans history in that Indigenous art is always elusive to—and in excess of—any normative definition” [14].

We have also had conversations with contemporary artists who reject the label of ‘queer’ altogether, either in favour of more specifically relevant identities (trans, lesbian, bisexual, trans-masculine, non-binary, among others), or because of concerns about the potential typecasting of their practice as ‘solely’ queer artists. These concerns resonate not only with the history of feminism—that famous ‘great art’ versus ‘great art by women’ debate—but also with numerous other artists from marginalised communities who have refused to be typecast or boxed in by any kind of label (as Tracey Moffatt once said, “if I bake a cake, is it Aboriginal?”) [15]. Artist James Barth, for example, has acknowledged that although “disclosures as a trans woman carry important affirmations of queerness, she remains deeply aware of the compromises, which range from lack of privacy to being fetishised as queer spectacle or sexualised as pornographic figure” [16].

When we made our request to feature Juan Davila’s work on this site, permission was granted solely on the condition that we include a disclaimer that reads “Juan Davila rejects the application of labels to his practice including “Queer”; a condition to which we happily agreed. We have also corresponded with artists who work across communities where their sexual identities remain unaccepted or still criminalised, where exposure could compromise their personal and cultural safety. These are the difficult, critical aspects of what writing a history, or histories, of queer art entails.

Talking to members of the community in town hall meetings in Brisbane and Melbourne also alerted us to blindspots and gaps, a reminder that the comparatively recent (out and proud) queer art history is also a history of gatekeepers, fraught with personal and professional narratives of who is in, and who is out. Many historically important queer exhibitions driven by independent curators and artists have been hosted by LGBTQI+ community festivals such as Mardi Gras and Midsumma. Some of these exhibitions, such as ‘Imaging AIDS’ held at ACCA and at Linden Gallery in 1989 or ‘Bad Gay Art’ in the 1997 Sydney Mardi Gras curated by Robert Schubert, resonate across time. Other exhibitions in artist-run initiatives, halls, pubs, cafes and bookstores play a more important local role, hosting projects underpinned by imperatives of self representation, advocacy and community building.

Queer artists’ work is not just found in gallery based practices but also has been channelled through queer ephemera like pamphlets, zines, posters, often campaigning for the political rights of the queer community but also playing an important role in health and social advocacy. The artist David McDiarmid’s graphic work for the AIDS Council of New South Wales, the 1992 HIV/AIDS awareness posters, is now a classic example of this, as is Bronwyn Bancroft’s 1992 poster The Prevention of AIDS. Arone Meeks spent years in Cairns working with community health organisations such as the Australian Federation of AIDS Organisations and the Queensland AIDS council, sharing skills, resources, knowledge and art through what he called a “whole of community” approach to healing and education [17]. Many of these artists have had to battle through waves of homophobic vitriol from both the public and institutions in order for their messages to be heard. When Susi Blackwell and Angela Bailey went to hang their HIV educational poster Dam Dykes in Brisbane City Hall Gallery in 1994, they were told by Brisbane City Council that the work was “offensive” and that it would “needlessly offend public taste”, a censoring that Elizabeth Ashburn described as “further example of society’s attempts to make lesbians and their culture invisible” [18].

This is why it is necessary not simply to reiterate institutionally-validated queer art in state collections but also highlight cultural production that emerges through more grassroot contexts—festivals, exhibitions, parties and protests, in the past and the present. This kind of production is most often resolutely collaborative, where countless creative hours are poured into costumes, choreographies and floats. The 1988 Black Bicentennial Boat People float was the first Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander float in the history of the Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras parade. The artist Martin Cole is now being celebrated in the 2024’s 24th Biennale of Sydney with his collaborator Panos Couros’ design and video documentation and William Yang’s photography. Banners, costumes and some Captain Cook drag are exhibited and celebrated as key examples of vernacular and communal practices that emerge from Cole’s work with Indigenous students and dancers from the Aboriginal and Islander Dance Theatre and the Tranby Aboriginal College in Glebe, Sydney. This cultural production and many examples like this that haven’t been framed by mainstream art history will find a home in queeraustralianart.com. Afterall, to reinforce the canon of the art world only affirms the dominant norms that have sought to reduce queer difference.

What does it take to change the shape of history? It might start with David McDiarmid’s call: “Don’t Forget to Remember.” The development of our project so far has involved research into the lives and works of hundreds of Australian artists, with many more to come. Work on the queer archive will never be finished, and neither should it be. KINK is conscious that queeraustralianart.com is an ongoing project. The perpetually expanding and shifting scope of the archive will develop over time alongside consultation with LGBTQI+ communities and practitioners across Australia.

[1] Jade Muratore, “Braving Time: Contemporary Art in Queer Australia,” Memo Review, 18 March 2023, https://memoreview.net/reviews/braving-time-contemporary-art-in-queer-australia-by-jade-muratore

[2] Eve Kosofky Sedgwick, Tendencies (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993), 8.

[3] Judith Butler, “Critically Queer”, QLQ Vol 1. Issue 1. (November 1993): 19.

[4] Hannah McCann and Whitney Monaghan, Queer Theory Now: From Foundations to Futures (London,UK: Macmillan Education UK, 2019).

[5] Rex Butler and ADS Donaldson, “The Myth of Heterosexuality: Queer Australian Artists, Art Historians and Gallerists in London, 1930-196”, Journal of Australian Studies (forthcoming). Our thanks to Butler for sharing the unpublished manuscript.

[6] Peter Di Sciasco, "Australian Lesbian Artists of the Early Twentieth Century", in Yorik Smaal and Graham Willit, Out Here: Gay and Lesbian Perspectives IV, Monash University Publishing, Melbourne 2011, p. 12.

[7] Claire Hunter, “Dora Ohlfsen: In Eternal Remembrance”, Australian War Memorial, 22 April 2023 https://www.awm.gov.au/articles/blog/sculptor-dora-ohlfsen-and-the-anzac-medallion

[8] Jeremy Eaton, “QUEER: Stories from the NGV Collection,” Memo Review, 13 August 2022, https://memoreview.net/reviews/queer-stories-from-the-ngv-collection-at-ngv-by-jeremy-eaton.

[9] James Gleeson in “From Loneliness to Iconic Status: Gleeson reflects on his formative years”, ABC News, 3 July 2008 https://www.abc.net.au/news/2008-07-03/from-loneliness-to-iconic-status-jeffrey-smart/2492200?utm_campaign=abc_news_web&utm_content=link&utm_medium=content_shared&utm_source=abc_news_web. See also Peter McNeil, “The First Homosexuals: Connecting Queer Australian Art and Design to the World”, Australian Academy of Humanities, 24 January 2024 https://humanities.org.au/power-of-the-humanities/australian-queer-art-and-design-pre-1930/

[10] Anne Wallace, correspondence with the authors, 3 April 2023.

[11] Mia Hull, “Lookin' Good was Australia's first LGBTQIA+ First Nations exhibition, held at Sydney's Boomalli co-operative”, ABC News, April 03, 2024: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-04-03/lookin-good-exhibition-boomalli-mardi-gras/103638600

[12] Warren Coatsworth, “brook andrew and r e a, bLAK bABE(z) and kWEER kAT(z)”, Eyeline, 36 (Autumn/Winter 1998): 38.

[13] D Harding, in “D Harding in Conversation with Hilary Thurlow”, Eyeline, vol. 90, 2019: 32–3.

[14] Tristan Harwood, “Gary Lee: midling (Larrakia: Together) and Heat”, Artlink, 43.3 (December 2003) https://www.artlink.com.au/articles/5137/gary-lee-midling-larrakia-together-and-heat/

[15] See https://m.facebook.com/TweedRegionalMuseum/videos/190675399544758/?locale=ar_AR

[16] James Gatt, "James Barth on what we reveal to the world, and what we don’t", ArtGuide 6 March 2024 https://artguide.com.au/james-barth-on-what-we-reveal-to-the-world-and-what-we-dont/ . See also Spence Messih and Archie Barry, Clear Expectations: Guidelines for institutions, galleries and curators working with trans, non-binary and gender diverse artists in Australia, NAVA, 2019.

[17] Arone Meeks, “True words … true story: my journey through the visual arts and working with communities”, HIV Australia, 12.3 (December 2014), https://healthequitymatters.org.au/article/true-words-true-story-journey-visual-arts-working-communities/

[18] Elizabeth Ashburn, Lesbian Art: An Encounter With Power, Art and Australia and Craftsman House, NSW, 1996, p. 39.