 By Alex GarnerEditor-at-Large |
A groundbreaking, queer pop-up art village comes to West Hollywood this weekend in the form of Install: WeHo. Install: WeHo is an interactive exhibition that showcases the works of queer artist in Los Angeles. This innovative event provides an opportunity for emerging queer artists to showcase their works in the heart of West Hollywood, which allows the community to engage with art and artists like never before.
Each exhibit will be constructed inside a U-hall truck and when parked together the trucks will create a pop-up “art city”. This interactive “art city “will feature a diverse group of queer artists who use a variety of mediums to express the rich and complicated stories of who we are.
I had the opportunity to talk with one of the very talented artists, Ben Cuevas. Ben is an interdisciplinary artist who has created stunning works in various mediums. This is how Ben described his piece for Install: WeHo:
It’s my intention to create an installation that takes advantage of a truck’s uniquely charged site-specificity while exploring an underrepresented aspect of queer history: specifically, the gay truck-sex culture of 1970’s New York. The piece will incorporate sound and photography. The sound will be a recording of a group of men having sex inside the truck prior to Install:WeHo. During the exhibition, this audio will then be played back on concealed speakers, invoking auditory phantoms of the men who participated in the truck-sex culture that arose at the height of gay liberation. A photograph by Leonard Fink featuring men cruising the trucks along the West Side Highway will be blown up, cut apart, and printed on gauzy fabric panels suspended inside the exhibition truck, as if a ghostly after-image of a moment in queer culture lost to AIDS and gentrification.
Positive Frontiers: Your description of the piece mentions, “auditory phantoms” and “ghostly after-images.” How has gay sexual subculture died? How has it evolved?
Ben Cuevas: Certain aspects of gay sexual subculture have died, particularly public cruising. First the AIDS epidemic devastated our community and later gentrification and a shift back toward more conservative values made cruising in public increasingly more difficult. But gay sexual subculture is hardly dead. Men love to fuck and will always find ways to do it. Now instead of the piers, the parks, and the trucks, we have the internet and private parties.
Positive Frontiers: There’s still a great deal of stigma around gay sex and sexual culture, how might queer artists work to combat that stigma?
Ben Cuevas: One of the best ways to reduce stigma is to increase visibility. The more queer artists aren’t afraid to infuse their work with sex, the more conversations we get to have about these aspects of our lives. By not hiding in the shadows, by being proud of the ways we fuck and love, we’re helping nullify that shame and stigma by facing it head on.
Positive Frontiers: Why did you choose a historical piece about gay sexual culture? How would you describe current gay sexual subculture?
Ben Cuevas: Having the opportunity to do an installation inside a truck, I really wanted to do something site specific. So I guess you could say that, for this piece, the format of Install: WeHo is what lead me to explore the history of truck-sex in gay culture. Queer histories are often ignored, overlooked, and erased; and it’s important to counter this by honoring, celebrating, and learning from those who have come before us.
As for current gay sexual subculture, I see it as a constantly evolving thing, as new advances in technology and medicine change our relationships with our bodies and the ways we connect with each other sexual beings.
Positive Frontiers: How has HIV prevention and thoughts around safe sex impacted your discussion of this piece?
Ben Cuevas: This piece is about a time in our history before AIDS, before HIV, and before prevention was even a concept. One could look back at how the AIDS epidemic eradicated the gay sexual subculture that I’m exploring here and view it as a cautionary tale, but I really don’t see it that way. The men who had sex in the trucks didn’t know HIV was already in their community in the late 70’s; they didn’t know what risks they were signing up for. You can’t make informed decisions about your health and safety if your not informed. That’s why today, it’s so important to be educated about HIV and get tested regularly. You need to know your status and evaluate for yourself what risks you’re willing to take to have the kinds of sex you want to have.
Positive Frontiers: The gay male body has been politicized for some time now. How might your piece be seen from a political perspective?
Ben Cuevas: Truck-sex culture rose out of the climate of sexual freedom that was made possible by Stonewall and gay liberation. Without political action, this part of our queer history never could have happened.
I think one of the most interesting aspects of this culture was that it gave political activists a means of reaching out to the gay community. Members of the Gay Liberation Front and other gay political groups would flier around the trucks where guys were cruising and let them know about upcoming demonstrations and activist meetings. As queer people we always have to fight for the ability to do what we want with our bodies, for the right the to be who we are.
Positive Frontiers: Some claim that gay sexual culture has moved online. How might one find contemporary photos or depictions of men cruising, particularly in public?
Ben Cuevas: I’d agree that a lot of gay sexual culture has moved from the streets to the internet, but you have to bear in mind that the internet has radically changed our notion of public vs. private. A man sitting at a bus stop on his iPhone could be cruising in public. By having a profile on a gay cruising site, you have a public sexual presence. An x-rated picture a guy sends you on Scruff could in some ways be considered a photo of a guy cruising in public.
Positive Frontiers:What kind of research did you do to get a sense of the experience of cruising trucks back then? Did you speak with actual participants?
Ben Cuevas: I wish I could have talked to some actual participants! In the past I’ve had some conversations with guys who knew people who cruised the trucks. For this piece though, most of my research was done online. There are a few good blogs about gay history and politics that had a couple of first hand accounts. The One Archives in LA and The National Archive of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual & Transgender History in New York were also very helpful in researching potential images to use for this piece.
Positive Frontiers: What, if anything, would you like people to take away from your piece?
Ben Cuevas: I’d like them to have an expanded awareness of this aspect of gay history. There are a lot of people, particularly in my generation, who have no idea truck-sex culture even existed. It enriches the queer community when we know more about our own past.
To learn more about Ben’s work you can visit his website or Facebook page. Install: WeHo is Sunday September 16th from 12-5pm behind the West Hollywood Library. Visit their website for all the details.
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