Jonathan Kemp
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“Closet Cases: Queers on What to Wear” reviewed by Jonathan Kemp
Sartorial innovation has become something of a trademark, even a cliché or stereotype, of the (in)famous ‘homosexual sensibility’ (think Queer Eye). In Susan Sontag’s 1964 essay, ‘Notes on Camp’, she writes: “A sensibility (as distinct from an idea) is one of the hardest things to talk about.” Better, perhaps, to show rather than tell,…
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Golnoosh Nour: The Ministry of Guidance & other stories ‘queer in the truest & most profound sense’
As this book’s dedication asserts, these stories are “for all the queers”, and a queerer collection of short stories you’re unlikely to encounter this year. These tales are queer in the truest and most profound sense, existing at the dangerous and fertile intersection of gender, ethnicity, class and sexuality. In the first story, set in…
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The Cockettes: Acid Drag & Sexual Anarchy : reviewed by Jonathan Kemp
Like many others, I discovered the Cockettes through David Weismann and Bill Weber’s wonderful eponymous 2002 documentary (frockumentary?), and like that film, this book is an essential monument to the countercultural force of nature that was the Cockettes, the late 60s/early 70s San Francisco queer drag troupe who took on the tedious establishment of mainstream…
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Masculinities: Liberation Through Photography
Masculinities: Liberation Through Photography (3.5 stars) Barbican, London til May 17th Despite its title, there’s little in the way of liberation on display in this exhibition, leaving the subtitle hanging there like a question. But perhaps that’s the point: to generate questions, debate on that complex subject of the significantly pluralized ‘masculinities’. What makes…
