The Night Stand
Digital photograph
22 x 36”
2010
Edition 1 of 5
(Close-up and gallery view)

The Night Stand is from a series that uses portraiture and still life photography and its antecedents in the history of painting to project queer readings onto the artifacts of the 19th century, a period now —perhaps wrongly— stereotyped as wholly prudish and repressed. Social mores of the time proscribed public expression of sensuality and sexuality generally, but especially homosexuality, driving it underground and displacing it through sublimation into a highly visually erotic, sensual, and expressive material culture of libidinously decorated goods.

In the 19th century there was a robust and rich tradition (among society in general, but especially in nascent urban gay communities) of signaling overt and covert unspoken messages through possessions and appearances via posing, clothing, homes, furniture, decorative objects, and the frequenting of certain localities. This visual opulence of the era is now often negatively characterized as "gaudy," "flamboyant," and "decadent"; charges frequently leveled against queer people today. These techniques of visual ciphering have been and still play an important part of creating a shared LGBTQI culture. By putting a queer slant on the past's sexually covert, but subliminally erotic and opulent material culture, I hope to reveal how style, the objects that embody style, and the zeitgeist have an impact on how and what we experience as erotically charged.

-- Kyle McGuire