When I was at grad school one of my professors gave me an old book that described homosexual life in the late 1950s and early 1960s. The book was an example of ethnographic research whereby the author/researcher immersed herself into the world of gay people (mostly men) to understand the subculture from within. The hardcover book had a drab brown dust-jacket which was frayed at the edges. It didn’t look promising but it turned out to be a fascinating read, an interesting illustration of queer life before Stonewall and subsequent markers of LGBT history.
A passage in the book that has always stayed with me was a section where the author visited a gay man at his tiny studio apartment in New York City. The author describes the cautious but flamboyant man and the run down tenement that was his home. She describes his life and the circumstances he had to navigate in order to exist in the big homophobic city. Then she describes his apartment. The only part I recall after all these years is the bathroom. As the author describes it the room is alive with masses of leafy green plants growing everywhere: out of the toilet tank, in pots on the windowsill, hanging from the ceiling. My memory is five square feet of Amazon jungle. I imagined the gay man who had conceived and decorated this space. I wondered about whom he was and what motivated him to decorate to such excess. The realities of the time must have forced him to constrain all his queerness when he was out on the street. But his essential inner creativity had to explode into full expression somewhere, and so it did in the privacy of his home, in and around his toilet no less.
Why am I telling you this? Well, I am an artist who goes to galleries and receptions and is aware of the clearly calibrated industry that art and art-making has become. I hear about the same celebrated artists (local and international) again and again and recognize their/my clear ambition. We artists rely on exhibition for exposure and gratification. Some make their living this way. Others crave fame, honestly earned or generated out of some new variation of that old adage: the shock of the new.
Yet, because of that book I think about gay folks, gay creators, who make work in the privacy of their own home, largely for their own pleasure. They are out there in the community, these artists, and it is refreshing to know this. They don’t fuss about galleries and press releases. They don’t care if they have an audience or not. They don’t aim to make a financial killing, although help-with-the-rent wouldn’t hurt. I am always curious about humble artists who make art in the privacy of their own home because it pleases them and that’s all there is to it.
Now don’t get me wrong, the humble homosexual artist doesn’t need to be a shrinking violet; after all rhododendrons blooming in a commode in a 1950s New York studio is hardly discrete. Take “Chandalier” for example. Mario Marchiaro had a long career as a dancer, and then he retired. He settled into a nice suburban house in La Mesa with Ken his partner of 16 years. Sounds tranquil, right? Not so fast. At least four times a year Mario becomes “Chandalier” and he turns his spacious backyard into a theater with a spotlight and a stage, puts an invite on Meet Up and then choreographs and performs a highbrow one wo/man show for straight soccer mom neighbors, an assortment of friends and a loyal fan base of those “in the know” (i.e. on his mailing list).
I’ve only attended one Chandalier show so far and even though I was extremely impressed by Mario’s thoughtful, even intellectual variation on the drag tradition I marveled just as much at the fact that I was watching his show (with lights and a sophisticated video projection pairing film clips with his performances) in a backyard in La Mesa.
Sadly, I missed Sodom & Gomorrah, back in the spring. But the show I attended was just as compelling. Burlesque was a meditation upon women and work. A clip of the spanking scene from the movie Secretary played during one intermission, and then Chandalier performed a perfect synchronization of a rapid, intricately timed typing scene that he found on YouTube. In yet another piece he simply screamed and ranted like a demonic Phyllis Diller for about five minutes. Yes, there was Cher singing the title song from the movie Burlesque but Mario’s queer gene had made the occasion so much more.
Dan Uhler has been an acquaintance of mine for many years. I knew he worked in HIV prevention. I knew he worked with the recovery community too. And, for some inexplicable reason I knew he made stained glass art. I’d always known this but I had never seen him or his work at local art events or on display at galleries. When someone told me that he made all his stained glass in a workshop at his home I became even more intrigued.
I visited Dan at his home (which feels like a sprawling Mission-style bungalow squeezed into an urban intersection in Hillcrest) and I was immediately enchanted by his studio, a bedroom turned into a workshop.
“This looks like Geppetto’s studio!” I blurted out as soon as I arrived.
Dan laughed, his gaze directing me to a dark gray house shape sitting before him on his work bench. It’s a bird house he said. He sipped some coffee from a large homemade swirly-shaped coffee mug.
“I thought you made stained glass?” I asked back. “I work with clay too.” He said. “I was throwing pots to begin with but because of a back issue I started hand building with clay.”
As it turns out Dan Uhler isn’t quite as discrete with his art as I had imagined. He has gallery representation on the East Coast where he did an internship in Rochester long ago and he has generated a healthy word of mouth following. A lot of his stained glass work and the new bird houses are built on a commission basis. It keeps him busy and brings in some spending money for occasional trips.
What struck me most about Dan and what ties him to the man with the plants in his New York City bathroom and to Mario Marchiaro is what he finds himself needing to make out of clay and glass. Dan is a big guy. He is big-hearted and devotes time to community concerns but he can come across a little bit intimidating upon first impression. Yet the stained glass work that I saw in his home was a colorful expression of graceful spiritual figures. On top of that he maintains one of the tidiest patio gardens I have ever seen, he spoke about making jam and his clay creations are not brute type objects about masculinity but Disney-like homes designed for small birds. There was something striking and interesting about these choices and an essentially gay spirit that motivates them.
If space weren’t a limitation I would tell you about many more artists working from home; bears who knit, gay Marines who write erotic comic books, LGBT folks working with gold leaf (maybe this should be a series). Alas, I only have room for one more. And who better to illustrate my point than Alex Arshansky, a Russian painter who works from home, wielding a brush full of acrylic color while he translates insurance and medical conversations through a Madonna-like headset.
Alex isn’t painting just anything, mind you; he isn’t absentmindedly filling canvases with blocks of red or blue. No, Alex is translating settlement issues and medical matters while constructing extremely intricate and amazingly sophisticated surreal images. He works 4 days a week in 10 hour shifts so this is a lot of interpreting and a lot of painting. Alex is prolific. His bedroom walls are covered with vivid, strange, gorgeous paintings. There are more in a warehouse somewhere in Arizona, and at least one is hanging on a wall at the home of Margaret Cho.
Like Mario Marchiaro Alex Arshansky explains his motivation and his artistry in a thick accent. Where Mario’s was fast, musical and Italian Alex’s accent is intense, bubbly and Russian. He comes across as nervous but incredibly enthusiastic about what he is doing. He is driven to paint, paint, paint but he admits to being a procrastinator when it comes to doing something with all of his work. Oh, and he reads palms (really well by the way). He is introspective and he is very much a Leo. Alex recently relocated to San Diego from Tucson and at the moment his interest in showing his work is not as intense as his drive to make the images.
“The time to put energy into marketing will come,” he says with resignation. “Right now I need to paint.” And he does. A lot!
None of these artists are exactly like the anonymous gay man who cultivated his own Amazonian jungle in his tiny tenement bathroom. We live in a different age.
What unites that fellow traveler, who lived five decades ago with these three artists however, is that they are all motivated to make things, to express themselves, to create works of art at home, because of an inner drive. Like kids in a castle made out of bed sheets, each of these artists (and maybe you too) has orchestrated their own world of make believe, a place that provides comfort and calm, where they do what they want and where they can express who they are.
More on Mario at partydrag.com
More on Dan Uhler at druhler13@gmail.com
