Queering home

JAMES RUSSELL. | Contributing Writer
James.Journo@gmail.com

Fun Home is Alison Bechdel’s acclaimed 2006 graphic novel about her childhood and her relationship with her father — before and after he commits suicide. The memoir opens in her childhood home, an old Victorian house in rural Pennsylvania which is also a funeral home. The family calls it “fun home” for short. Her father, Bruce, is obsessed with restoring the place, and he puts more effort into it than he did in raising and being around his family.
Fun it was not.

As Bechdel later realized, her father was a closeted gay man. And the “restoration” was a metaphor for the closet and a way to distract himself from his true identity. The writer — who also through the memoir struggles with her sexuality — eventually holds contempt for what this “home” represents.

“I developed a contempt for useless ornament. … If anything, they obscured function. They were embellishments in the worst sense,” she wrote. “They were lies. My father … used his skillful artifice not to make things, but to make things appear to be what they were not.”

Queering traditions
For many queer people, “home” may very well be as dark as a funeral home, as messy as that old Victorian house and a place where the best and worst place is a closet.

In his brilliant book The Queerness of Home, historian Stephen Vider writes that the fight for LGBTQ recognition has taken place in public spaces, such as courthouses, plazas, parks and clubs. Even with the countercultural revolutions of the 1970s — when many activists turned heteronormative concepts like the white-picket-fence, one-story house for a white, two-parent heterosexual family on their heads — “the home largely remained a protected, sentimentalized space for personal reflection, family life, romantic and sexual intimacy and communal connection.”

“From the start of the modern LGBTQ rights movement through the emergence of the HIV/AIDS epidemic in the 1980s, LGBTQ activists mobilized home as a site of creative tension between integration and resistance,” Vider writes. “They adapted, challenged and reshaped domestic conventions at the same time they reaffirmed the home as a privileged site of intimate, communal and national belonging.”

Two recent exhibitions, including one in Fort Worth, looked at how queer artists perceive and portray “home.”

Dreaming of Home (A group exhibition at New York’s Leslie-Lohman Museum that opened last Sept. 7 and ran through Jan. 7 this year) and Diaries of Home (which ran at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth from last Nov. 7 through Feb. 2) both focused on the topics of home, family and struggle.

Among the strongest photographs at the Leslie-Lohman was Catherine Opie’s Self-Portrait/Cutting (1993), a sordid self-portrait with her naked back to the camera. Freshly carved into her skin and still bleeding is a happy lesbian couple standing in front of an idyllic house.

At the Modern, nonbinary artist Jess Dugan portrays three generations of their family through photographs, long their preferred medium, and video. The work on display showed their journey through parenthood as part of their Family Picture series. It culminated in the video Letter to My Daughter about the distinct journey queer families must make to have children and belong.

Queer domesticity was the subject of Lauren Hope Walker’s As for me and my house, which ran April 2-13 as part of her 2024 thesis toward her master of fine arts degree in painting from Texas Christian University.

That show featured grotesque yet colorful canvases and sculptures that bleed, hide, haunt and giggle. They take the form of a Tiffany lamp, a pack of beer, a clawfoot tub with blood drops and other domestic items. It’s a trippy house of horrors and safe place to explore of queer identity, gender roles and the grotesque.

Domesticity frequently appears in Walker’s work, whether in a physical setting or as an ethereal concept. “I think that that was a way for me to work out like a lot of religious trauma,” the artist explained. She recalled that, when she came out as queer, she wanted to reject every traditional family trait she could.

“I was like, okay, marriage, family— I don’t have to have those things,” she said. Then she met her partner.

“I’m like, ‘Okay, I can have all of those things and be in a relationship while exploring gender roles with my partner,” she said. (They may pass on sharing bonds about one of Walker’s favorite fascinations, however: “I’m so fascinated where something that’s amusing or inviting can then turn sinister and a little bit too dark,” she said. “As my practice evolves, I really want to turn up more disturbing aspects.”)

Find a place for us
“Home” is sometimes discreet but understood, like the color of the handkerchief in one’s back pocket. In the musical West Side Story, queer creators Leonard Bernstein and Stephen Sondheim include songs like “Somewhere,” sung by the lead characters Tony and Maria, who are engaged in a forbidden romance and who yearn for “a place for each of us/And we must try to pursue this place/Where love is like a passion that burns like a fire.”

Queer homes are not a concept. When designed and constructed by a queer person, the physical properties serve as simple safe spaces.

One of the most confident structures representing queer freedom is Azurest South near the Virginia State University campus. Built in 1939 by Amaza Lee Meredith, one the earliest Black female architects and founder of VSU’s fine arts department, it stands out for its color (white), material (concrete and stucco) and style (International).

But it was also a place where Meredith and her longtime partner, Edna Meade Colson, could safely live.

As Jacqueline Taylor writes in her book Amaza Lee Meredith Imagines Herself Modern (MIT Press), it was “a more certain way of finding true security and stability in a life otherwise tormented by the dangers of discrimination, segregation, and racism.”

But it was also a place to be home. As writer Pierce Brown, author of the Red Rising trilogy and the Iron Gold trilogy, writes: “Home is where you find light when all grows dark.” And the LGBTQ community has always been about finding light inside the darkness.