Thank you for taking the time to look at my site. I'm an Australian photographic artist living in Brisbane, QLD; I'm in my mid forties. Most of the photographs on this site are selectively toned Silver Gelatin prints. I don't use pigments, only chemicals. It's an old fashioned, fussy process but that's the sort of guy I am.
20 years ago I began trying to understand who I am and my place in the world by making pictures. In the beginning my whole world was focussed on HIV. Things have changed since then, if you're under thirty you can only try to understand what it was like. Gay people and those with HIV were treated horribly, shamefully by straighty. We had supporters, our straight friends were as appalled as we were but those with the loudest voices were the cruellest and they were the ones the law supported. I don't care for apologies that cite ignorance or a lack of familiarity with gay people - bollocks! Caring religious types were worst, the best you got from them was condescension, and the worst was rabid, dangerous, violent ignorance. All people are not equal; some are vermin!
After a while I began to use historical allegories to represent western gay experience. The plague I talk about in my captions was one that visited Constantinople in the mid 6th Century. It killed one third to one half of the population and was blamed on gay men and transvestite entertainers. Men accused in this witch-hunt were dragged by horses through the streets by ropes secured to their genitals. They bled to death, mutilated, humiliated, listening to the cheers of their god fearing neighbours. I felt like I had heard these cheers before. Praise the lord!
Later in the body of work called, "….at first I was afraid, I was petrified", I tried to convey what it meant for those guys who had survived long enough for the new therapies to be effective in the second half of the nineties. People had quit their careers, cashed in their super and spent their life savings all in anticipation of an early death. The pills kicked in and they realised they might have a future again. It's optimistic work but necessarily sombre as a mark of respect for the guys who didn't make it and those who grieve for them still.
Next come the self-portraits as a clown, "Not with a Bang but a Whimper". This work celebrates the upgrading of gay men from perverts to figures of fun, sometime around the turn of the millennium (not sure of the date, I didn't receive the memo). Gay men are warm and cuddly now; everyone wants one as a best friend. It's because we're wise and kind, we know what fork to use for the fish course, we know what to wear and we care deeply if the boy gets the girl. We're acceptable but only if we're useful. Mostly I suppose this work is a rant about the way that consumer culture absorbs and standardises identity. It's the individuality police, if it sees anything distinct about a person or a group, it erases that characteristic and replaces it with something that's corporately sanctioned and bland.
My next preoccupation was trying to work out what I'd learned from this anti-climactic survival of HIV and the era when gay men were so despised; this roller coaster of a journey. I needed to understand ways that gay men had historically coped with straight hostility, otherwise I worried I was destined for bitterness, that I'd grow into a sour old man, (some argue it's too late).
From these thoughts "Oblivion" emerged, I think this is the most ambitious work I've attempted and I feel like I made some uncomfortable discoveries. Camp in its extended sense is a slippery fish. It's difficult to grasp and those who have written about it inevitably infuse it with their own agendas. It's a secret sensibility based on codes that change when the enemy breaks them. To understand it you have to wipe it clean of other people's politics. Nowadays it's smeared with a thick sticky layer of consumer capitalism, reduced to a vulgar tool for selling things. When people talk about Camp it's usually in defence or offence of gay sexual and cultural expression. I think it's much more than that. It's a strategy for negotiating hostile environments it arises almost organically out of a particular context, it's not necessarily dependant on sexuality. From the late 19th century, men who engaged in sexual activity with other men were corralled into an historical and social context from which Camp, (as a sensibility, negotiation strategy and a language of dissent) was bound to emerge. Mainstream disapproval of fledgling gay identities fertilised Camp, coalescing diverse or unconnected constituencies under a broad umbrella. It became our standard, our flag, our 'badge of identity', the maypole around which we all danced. Individuals used Camp to forge connections, adopting a sensibility as one's own meant that even isolated men could still make a claim to membership of a large, international, trans-cultural "club". Membership was not transmitted via the family or through class, or any other traditional means but through an individual's adoption of the codes and conventions of camp. Camp was our counter attack!
It requires a type of oppression against a subject whose transgression is not immediately discernible, at least visually. Gender and race can't be easily hidden but sexuality is a different issue. Most gay men have always been able to 'pass for straight' while they're at work or with an unsuspecting family but out on the town is a different matter. They're free to enjoy the benefits of rich commercial gay culture at their own bars, theatres, clubs and saunas etc, where they can develop, express, extend and collaboratively transmit an evolving repertoire of cultural particularities. The widespread disapproval of others alienates you from them, it ties you to your outsider brothers and dissolves your bonds to external ideologies or dogmas; it makes you question things. We were spies in the house of love and Camp was our cloaking mechanism complete with decoys to put the dogs off the scent. We were well aware that all social roles were performative long before Judith Butler was a glint in her grandfather's eye. So we had an advantage, a head start, we were seasoned performers before the rest of society even suspected they were in a play.
The stereotypes work for us as well as against us. It's important to remember that the construction of gay identity was an entirely collaborative process; we actively contributed to it. Flamboyant displays, overt effeminacy, etc are fun! Taunting the people who disapprove of you is a hoot, especially when you can butch it up when you cease to be amused, then you can become invisible again. The stereotype of gay men was calculated, despite our ubiquity, until recent decades most middle class suburban types thought we were a rarity. (Curse that Kinsey fellow for divulging our secrets). A common story recounted by gay men (again, until recently), is that in their youth before they came out, they felt isolated, like they were the only kids to ever feel that way. The story inevitably has a happy ending when they discover that seething under the surface, society is crawling with gay boys.
Camp is the set of strategies we developed to safely inhabit, the space just beneath our culture's shiny veneer. The crawl space, the basements, attics and cellars of western culture in the 20th Century and beyond were brim filled with Camp.
The stereotypes of gay men exerted a sort of pressure forcing them into social spaces commonly regarded as trivial; the theatre, couture, the arts; in short, popular culture. In contemporary times it's unanimously agreed that popular culture and its parasite, advertising determine what we desire and how we script our lives. They direct our collective tastes, values and concerns, it's an immensely powerful force today and we've been behind its wheel for a long time.
Camp liberated us, Camp fuelled our cultural output by providing us with its shield, it connected us by valorising our difference and it gave us the common ground on which to build solidarity. It's a mixture of fatalism, stoicism, irony, self-deprecation, abjection, celebration and sadness that values wit and understanding. Wisdom is its necessary partner because things that rely on codes exploit the ignorance of the group from which it hides. Camp kept us one step ahead of the enemy, that's why my generation and those that preceded it like it so much. It makes them feel like they have an edge over their enemies and why Camp is always by its nature oriented in a position that's adversarial to the mainstream. If the mainstream adopts it, it evaporates. Legitimacy means that the context on which Camp is so dependant no longer exists. 'Gay' becomes a simple boring matter of sexual object choice not a complex, richly textured, colourful set of complimentary identities founded on histories, traditions and conventions developed over time and characterised by wit and inventiveness.
Gay identities break down into a myriad of individual subjectivities. I sometimes curse the collective delusion that it's the individual that matters, community isn't a bad thing either, and after all it's made up of individuals. It just assumes that we are all interconnected; responsible to and for each other, surely that's a better and more fulfilling and sustainable way to live.
"Oblivion" is about taking control, embellishing your sadness and disappointment and turning it from something squalid and steeped in regret or shame into something beautiful so it can't hurt as much. It's the experience of dissent, of a long fight from which we bare scars distilled into a something beautiful so it's never far from sadness.
It's about fighting, shaping up to a world that'll ultimately defeat you, resisting what is shoved down your throat, carving out an acceptable place to be and developing a sense of self worth in spite of your insignificance.
Like existentialism, Camp acknowledges that the construction of meaning is the responsibility of the individual. It declares reality a fiction or a performance and urges it's user to pick up a pen and contribute to the script. The world values appearances more than substance, can't argue with that; Camp says go with the flow and make the best of what you've got. Life is drag and everything can be a comedy if you look at it from the right angle. When so many jokes have been made at your expense you begin to realise that something doesn't have to be funny to qualify as a joke.
If I've got it right, then it's a very sad body of work but with all things camp, the sadness is swaddled in something pretty and only spoken about obliquely. The tragedy of things is left to tacit understanding. You guys will have to judge for yourselves.
My latest work clusters under the title of "Possession". I'm still working through its conceptual foundation but it's about blokes. I'm proposing that gay male identity and masculine identity are pretty much the same things. Cut from the same cloth, they're inseparable and entwined. One can't be defined unless it's against the other. The crisis that polarised them was an anomaly in part brought about by the various anxieties that accompanied the rise of the city and the new individual freedoms afforded by wage labour capitalism and economic specialisation. Gender constructs and society's moral prescriptions are not absolutes, they are historical phenomena, they bend and sway in the winds of context. They relate closely to ever changing social, moral and economic values found within any society at a specific time. (Check out David Dietcher's beautiful book, Dear Friends and George Chauncey's Gay New York).
Masculine identity is about the establishment and constant revision of hierarchies by a process of rivalry that is more likely than not to be affectionate and playful. It's an amazing thing really, it can be so tender but also brutal, we see it everywhere and all the time, so we often don't even notice it in action. Blokes love to play games. They assert their dominance and they yield to their top dogs using complex ritualised protocols. Watch a kid deliberately annoy his big brother and squeal delightedly when he's punished for it. Note the feigned annoyance masking the affection with which the punishment is dispensed.
All inter male relationships are founded on hierarchies and these are shaped through a performance that is tacitly charged with eroticism; male posturing. It's the complex cultural peculiarities of a society that draw the line between an affectionate gesture or practice and one that's erotic. That's why in some cultures an accusation of homosexuality will only stick to the bloke who takes the passive role in sex. Why kissing the cheek of another man is an acceptable greeting or gesture of respect in some cultures but is frowned on by others. None of this is set in concrete; it's always a process in flux. Footballers, because of their high position on the ladder of blokeyness are free to shower together, pat each other's arses, kiss, wear dresses, hug etc without drawing their masculinity into question. They attract no stigma from actions that would define lower placed men as downright poofy.
If I get this work right, I risk demolishing the house I grew up in. Gay culture has sheltered me but I find myself increasingly cranky with it. The bitter part of me wants to abandon it, to secede. I sometimes see gay people, especially the young as too lazy to learn about and value their history and traditions. Too quickly and easily we negotiated the terms of our new legitimacy; we neglected the fine print. I feel like they tossed us a character or two in a sitcom like pilchards to a performing seal, we scoff it down and do more tricks so we'll get some more. We embrace the stereotype we're issued with because we're laughed at now, not beaten up and we think that's enough, isn't it just tolerance not acceptance. But that's what my generation strived for, the rights of youngsters to express their sexual identities without the baggage of politics or even a second thought. After all it's everyone, not just gaysters that are regulated by the forces of popular culture and advertising. So good on 'em, bless their carefree little cotton socks. I'll just play grumpy old man for a while I purge the black bile from of my system, and hope they'll indulge me while I rant.
If you've read this far, I'm surprised but grateful, thanks for looking at my work. Feel free to drop me an email, concur or take me to task, call me a wanker, whatever.
I really enjoy meeting people over the web.
Cheers
Ray