About the Curator
Curatorial Statement
Hello! It’s a surreal feeling to be wrapping up this exhibit, as it’s been a labor of love for the past few months. As a queer man working in an archive and hoping to continue doing so, this is a topic near and dear to my heart. Also, for the first time in my life, I’ve had the opportunity this year to create a home with my partner, which opened my eyes to the intricacies of queer domesticity and its interactions with heteronormative ideals. To put it lightly, creating this exhibit has been an emotional yet deeply rewarding process.
My initial goal for this exhibit was to illuminate the queer people absent from our archives and the stories we’ve lost to the mistreatment of archival materials. It turns out, however, that it’s fairly difficult to make an exhibit when your items no longer exist. Working around this speedbump, I instead pivoted to focus on what home means to the queer community, especially in regards to physical spaces. Through this topic, I am still able to confront the gap in the archive while showcasing the archival materials that do remain in a meaningful way.
The central goal of this exhibit is to express the diversity within the queer community, beyond categories of gender, race, and social class to diversity of thought and perception. Intertwined with this goal is another of highlighting the humanity captured in archival photographs, ephemera, and art installations. For my non-queer audience, I hope to provide a space of education, and for my queer audience, I hope to provide a space of hope. The people depicted in this exhibit are real – some dead, some alive, but all real. Their stories are not fabricated nor are their appearances, and despite a world of unexpected circumstances, they all found home. Isn’t that incredible?
At the barest minimum, I hope to convey that queer people are just as deserving of love, safety, comfort, and home as their cisgender-heterosexual counterparts. Beyond that, I hope my audience understands that queer people have always existed and have always been as diverse as they are now. Our history is not a monolith of despair. The challenges we’ve faced have shaped our identities, but they have not defined them.
Most of the objects included in the exhibit are photographs from the 1980s and 90s, some from famous queer photographers and others by random New Yorkers. This is intentional and part of my exploration of how ephemera is linked to the queer community. With historically little space reserved for queer people in official archives, many queer people started their own, saving brochures, photos, and even notes on napkins to preserve the lives of the overlooked. While few archives today would accept a napkin into their collections, photos have a much greater chance of being respected, preserved, and displayed, as evidenced by those included in this exhibit. The few objects within the exhibit that are not photographs come from contemporary queer artists. These are included with the aim of decentering a voyeuristic perspective into queer life and allowing those artists to present their own stories with agency.
The exhibit is divided into five sections, all available under the Home tab. They are, in order: Home Is Where I Live, Home Is My Loved One, Home Is Community, A Home’s Walls, and Home Is (Not) My Body. Each section connects several of the exhibit’s objects to a more specific subtheme related to home and physical space.
In the first section, Home Is Where I Live, I discuss four photos from three photographers and their depictions of the home as a typical house. This section is more dependent than the others on the curator’s interpretation, as the objects included were not accompanied by much context from their creators. Through these images, I focus on the effects of gender and sexuality on one’s physical space, finding that there is less of an obvious reflection of one’s identity and more of an intentional ascribing of identity to space through select items (such as Felicity’s family portrait or Allen Ginsberg’s poetry collections). This was heavily influenced by Max Andrucki’s “Trans Objects: Materializing Queer Time in U.S. Transmasculine Homes”, in which he interprets the queer home as a construction of sentimental objects that reinforce one’s identity.
The following section, Home Is My Loved One, is less object-focused, decentering location to instead focus on people. I pair four photographs taken by Nancy Andrews, a gay woman who documented queer people across the United States through photography in the 1980s and 90s. Andrews’ photos are beautifully intimate and diverse, and I highly recommend exploring more of her work. (As of December 2023, Family: A Portrait of Gay and Lesbian America is accessible through Internet Archive.) I chose these four photos because, even before getting the chance to access their associated stories, they struck me as authentically human. The loving embraces between partners project a comfort so tangible that they translate through albumen print, computer screen, and several decades into the present. I focus more on the stories of those pictured in this section and allow the audience to form their own emotional connections to the content rather than explaining it away. The goal here, however, is to demonstrate that some homes are not necessarily physical spaces, and that some are more central to one’s surrounding loved ones. This section was my greatest attempt at showcasing that queer stories can be joyful: Even though these individuals faced challenges to their identities, they found love and ultimately, home.
To explore less common expressions of home, in Home Is Community, I use five photographs from four photographers (including Nancy Andrews) to portray some of the physical spaces associated with home that are not the stereotypical house. I discuss a pride parade, drag club, queer prom, lesbian bar, and church to demonstrate the range of possible spaces available to members of the queer community. These spaces are queer not only because of their queer visitors but also because of their queer creators, people who identified gaps in the spaces available to them and fought to fill them. Some of these sites couldn’t be more different from the stereotypical house, yet they are so deeply felt as homes to the queer community. By acknowledging the diversity of physical space that constitute home for this community, the definition of “home” can be expanded from a house to any place that provides a sense of belonging.
I felt it important to acknowledge some of the barriers to home that queer people face, both from without and within their community. In A Home’s Walls, I diverge slightly from the archival format with one archival photograph and two photographic artworks. This section focuses specifically on the complexities of being closeted in a family home, anti-LGBTQ+ legislation, and exclusion by other queer groups. While there are certainly many more barriers to queer home and belonging, these three were chosen to represent the nuance often necessary to interpret queer home. Additionally, the inclusion of artworks by queer artists like Williams and Gupta allows for the voices of queer artists to speak directly into the exhibit rather than solely through the curator.
In the final section, Home Is (Not) My Body, I’ve included two archival photographs by two photographers and two art installations by Felix Gonzalez-Torres. This section is centered on the AIDS Crisis and its effects on how queer people perceive home, especially in regards to physicality and physical touch. I spent much time deliberating on whether or not to include a discussion of AIDS in this exhibit, as I feel that exhibits can very easily depict the queer community in its entirety as victims of disease and death. While I wanted to avoid this depiction as much as possible, it felt disingenuous to entirely circumvent the topic, especially as it has had such a large impact on the queer community. To prevent my exhibit from realizing my fears, I included Gonzalez-Torres’ art installations in the hopes that they would provide first-hand perspectives of the crisis that I cannot. I also included the photo of the AIDS quilt at the National Mall to incorporate some hope into the story: Our community befell a tragedy and we still made art out of it.
There were times during the creation of this exhibit that I questioned if it was necessary or worthwhile for a young queer audience. Gean Harwood and Bruhs Mero’s story of 65 years together, in sickness and in health, reassured me that this was exactly what I wanted to give to a young queer audience. There’s hope for us. And there’s a home for us too, no matter what home means to you.
— Max Schrader, author and curator
Biography
Max Schrader is a junior at Northern Arizona University (Class of 2025). He is currently pursuing a Bachelor of Arts in Anthropology, with a secondary major in Comparative Cultural Studies and a minor in Museum Studies. He currently works in the university’s Special Collections and Archives and plans to continue working with material collections throughout his professional career.