In New York, a new exhibition compiles the creations of artists inspired by the sexual liberation, political turmoil and support networks formed around queer kink spaces. Radical Perverts: Ecstasy and Activism in Queer Public Space, 1975-2000, running at The Sex Museum, particularly puts a focus on the years in which the HIV/AIDS epidemic shaped them; from those halcyon days before the disease took hold through to more contemporary times, when fear turned to anger due to government inaction, and those unwilling to help those who needed it.
At the centre of it all were the spaces where queer culture first thrived, and then survived; the bath houses, the kink clubs, the adult movie theatres that were desecrated by the disease’s spread. In Radical Perverts, art made to honour these spaces, either in the midst of their prime or retroactively, almost acts as a memorial.
Jimmy Wright captured in pencil what Frank Melleno set to celluloid: portraits of men in bath houses, fraternising or huffing poppers. Nayland Blake’s graphic work re-contextualised the act of gay sex from something dangerous and feared to an act of love if performed safely. Meanwhile, Phyllis Christopher’s ecstatic portraits of the Klitz Sex Club make clear the often mythologised moments in a private space.
“Protest and political action are inextricable from even the kinkiest LGBTQ venues,” the curator Alexis Heller said in a statement. “To promote each other’s survival with unabashed pleasure and joy, in defiance of discrimination and grief, is radical.”
‘Radical Perverts: Ecstasy and Activism in Queer Public Space, 1975-2000’ runs at the Sex Museum until 4 April 2024. More information can be found here.
Credits
All images courtesy The Sex Museum, New York