Today in California, the ban on same-sex marriage was ruled unconstitutional by a federal appeals court. The news reminded us of “Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture,” the current exhibition up at the Brooklyn Museum. The show, on view through February 12th, explores the role of sexual identity in modern art through a variety of media, including photography. (On March 17th, “Hide/Seek” moves to the Tacoma Art Museum, in Washington—the next state where gay marriage is likely to become legal.) Here’s a selection of photographs, along with captions from the exhibition.
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Walt Whitman, by Thomas Eakins, 1891. When Walt Whitman first published “Leaves of Grass” in 1855, he found the source for American vitality in a democracy rooted in the connection between its people and nature. Whitman’s refusal to accept the existence of boundaries and limits on the body, as well as the mind, is the most radical statement ever of American individualism. Expansively omnisexual in his writings, Whitman spent the Civil War years and after with his lover, Peter Doyle, a Confederate deserter. Inspired by the comradeship engendered between men under fire, Whitman celebrated love and affection between men in poems he collected under the titles “Drum Taps” and “Calamus.” Just as society’s attitudes were consolidating into rigid division that outlawed the homosexual, Whitman’s poetry and his life proclaimed that the possibilities of desire were not so easily characterized and contained.
All photographs courtesy the Brooklyn Museum.
