Jason Foumberg

Oh, why are you so weird boy?

"This is not a gay party!" reminds Justin Polera, co-curator of Queer Fest Midwest’s art exhibition, "The Cowboy and the Pegasus." It’s true, this will be a queer party, not a gay party, which is to say that it has nothing to do with being gay or straight or whether you are a penis or vagina kind of person, except that it has everything to do with that. But I’ll get back to that in a minute.

Queer Fest Midwest is also distinctly not a Pride Parade. Co-curator Gonia Rejnowska believes that Pride is an over-commercialized affair that is all about selling a fixed identity. In essence, at the Pride Parade, you know what’s going to happen. Rejnowska and Polera have rigged their exhibition so that viewers’ expectations will be purposefully played with. Queer Fest Midwest won’t be about promoting a safe self-image, but rather hopes to extend queerness beyond the gays, to make the strangeness of life all-inclusive and to make "queerness" a way of being, whether chosen or innate.

Artist Amanda Brandt is indicative of the sort of queering of the sexes that will be on stage here. Brandt, a male-to-female transsexual, enjoys wearing a strap-on dildo while performing and, one can assume, also while having sex. So, Brandt got rid of his penis, became a she, and now uses a strap-on. It’s not that Brandt changed her mind and misses her penis. No, this act is expansive (rather than purely shocking) because she can wear the strap-on, is both the man and the woman, and does it in public. It’s not only about physical pleasure but also about turning one’s sexualized body into a statement as a place where assumptions are overturned.

In a similar way Kean O’Brien’s videos explore being a man in a female’s body. O’Brien, unlike Brandt, was born with chromosomes XX (officially making him a woman), but he identifies more with the male gender. O’Brien also wears a fake penis. Made of porcelain, it will eventually be destroyed while inside the artist’s body.

Pain, it seems, is a common pre-condition for enacting queerness, as is the overcoming of pain. Regina Mamou’s photographs are autobiographic shots of her dealing with her inborn disease that has caused her much harm. By embracing that pain, and by turning it into a publicly lived experience, Mamou hopes to show that, although her pain is very personal, once displayed, it serves as a metaphor of common struggle. To live through pain, whether by taking hold of it in a form of masochism or if by shattering it to pieces, is of course a strength that can’t be denied. Illness, too, is a queer thing. Curator Rejnowska notes how people often express a curiosity about sickness with the strength of sexual curiosity. We check out the deformed and the deranged. In the end, though, it’s a push and a pull. There is so much attraction embedded in our repulsions.

Dylan Mira and Latham Zearfoss will show their documentary about Pilot TV, a now defunct collaborative warehouse space where art videos were produced. Polera says that the documentary will leave viewers feeling good about starting a community-based effort, which he says has inherent political residual effects. Polera also likens this sort of hush-hush, in-the-know artistic practice to being in the closet. In fact, he welcomes people back into the closet—this one, though, a free space, not a place for timidity or self-denial. The closet will be like a private club where the art of seduction will be re-animated. Now, one can relish in having a secret, but mostly because it lives in a society of secrets.

Humor is also a great force for promoting queerness. Being campy and ironic are indeed the domains of the twenty-first-century queer. Take, for instance, Brian Kenny, a self-proclaimed wigger. He equates a perversity of racial identifications with sexuality, becoming a deviant, and all the while welcoming laughter. He doesn’t necessarily fit any accepted notion of gayness that one would be happy to find in a thumping Boystown bar, yet somehow his costume is pretty hot. Again, it’s that attraction to repulsion.

The fact that the transformative nature of "queer" is centered on sexual acts is both its strength and its downfall. Sex is a starting point, and after it moves in a wider circle into the world at large, it actually comes full-circle back to being about sexual behaviors. Perhaps toying with the notion of sexual deviancy is a good way to get noticed, and if one is to take queerness as a political stance, as many surely do, then getting noticed is all part of the mission. But should everything that one does be classified as sexual? Perhaps all creative acts are inherently sexual, though, in that to produce something is to give birth to it. Art is like one’s offspring, a deranged thing of beauty that lives in the world but is its welcomed perversion of truths. Art is a queer thing indeed.

"The Cowboy and the Pegasus" is part of Queer Fest Midwest, an all-day performance, film and music festival, August 25, noon-10pm, at The Pulaski Park Field House, 1419 West Blackhawk, http://www.myspace.com/queerfestmidwest.

(2007-08-21)

Also by Jason Foumberg

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