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Disabled gay rights contingent at the 1977 San Francisco Gay Freedom Day Parade; photo by Marie Ueda
Disabled gay rights contingent at the 1977 San Francisco Gay Freedom Day Parade. Photograph: Courtesy of the GLBT Historical Society
Disabled gay rights contingent at the 1977 San Francisco Gay Freedom Day Parade. Photograph: Courtesy of the GLBT Historical Society

The best online LGBT exhibitions for pride month

This article is more than 3 years old

With museums still closed, a string of diverse digital exhibitions aim to educate and entertain with LGBT history and art

With the Covid-19 pandemic still ongoing, hundreds of pride events have been cancelled across America. But the celebrations will continue online. There will be digital parties but also a range of online exhibitions that trace the history of pride, beyond the parade and rainbow flags.  

Performance, Protest & Politics: the Art of Gilbert Baker

One of the original eight-color rainbow flags flying at United Nations Plaza during San Francisco Gay Freedom Day 1978. Photograph: Photograph by Crawford Wayne Barton, collection of the GLBT Historical Society

We’re all familiar with the rainbow flag, but where did this beacon of pride come from? It was designed by Kansas-born artist Gilbert Baker, who created the flag as a symbol of hope in 1978. Baker’s rainbow flag led to the mile-long rainbow flag used for New York City’s pride parade in 1994, then became an iconic political symbol. This online exhibition is part of the GLBT Historical Society Museum’s exhibition in San Francisco, co-curated by Joanna Black and Jeremy Prince, and features a short film by Vincent Guzzone called Love Gilbert, which documents Baker’s efforts for gay rights activism. As Gilbert once said: “When all else fails, art is the ultimate weapon.” 

Robert Gober: Sculpture, Photographs, and Works on Paper 1976–2019

Page 12 1978-2000. Photograph: Robert Gober, Courtesy Matthew Marks Gallery

As part of an exhibition with the Matthew Marks Gallery, the work of New York artist Robert Gober over the past 40 years is being shared. Among the many artworks, there is banality (a bag of cat litter), political upheaval (bundled newspapers from the 1990s) and sexuality (drawings of body parts). Many of his pieces are both intimate and yet, emotionally distant. “I couldn’t take Gober’s work, not at first,” Hilton Als, the writer, once said. “The coolness of his palette, the clinical nature of his creations, only made it harder to recover from. The beauty of his line confused me; did it express a distance from or a triumph over the chaos of the times?”

50 Years of Pride

Rise, Resist, Unite, 2017; photograph by Lenore Chinn. Photograph: Lenore Chinn

Last year was the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall uprising and this year, the GLBT Historical Society in San Francisco has a 50 Years of Pride exhibition, featuring roughly 50 photos from the city’s pride parades from the 1970s onward, as well as highlights from the legalization of gay marriage. It’s what Terry Beswick, the society’s executive director, says is a way to “examine the evolution of our LGBTQ rights and freedoms, as well as our awareness of how our movement intersects with other social justice movements”.

Salman Toor: How Will I Know

Salman Toor, Bar Boy. Photograph: Courtesty of the Whitney and the artist

The Whitney Museum of American Art is hosting an online exhibition showcasing the works of the Pakistan-born, New York-based artist Salman Toor. The artist paints young gay men hanging out in nightclubs, downtown apartments and in bars, often tinged with a green-hued palette (which calls to mind the works of French artist Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec). Toor paints intimate portraits of men taking selfies in bed, zoning out in social gatherings and staring blankly at phone chargers, too. As Ambika Trasi notes in the exhibition essay, the paintings are ruminations on queer south Asian men living in the diaspora, and that his work “acknowledges the precariousness of relying on aspirational beauty – and the accumulation of likes or hearts – for self-love”.

Can You Save Superman?

Jordan Eagles – American Carnage. Photograph: Courtesy of the Leslie Lohman Museum

An online exhibition on the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art features a project by New York artist Jordan Eagles, who uses blood as an artistic medium. Ahead of World Blood Donor Day on 14 June, it taps into the timeliness of a global blood shortage. Queer men, who have wanted to donate blood during the pandemic, were banned from doing so until April, when the US Food and Drug Administration updated their policy to allow gay and bisexual men to donate blood – if they are celibate for three months. The artist has taken a vintage Superman comic book from the 1970s and repainted it to tell the story of a Superman who needs to be saved with a mass blood transfusion. In addition to this online exhibit, the museum will host a virtual pride party called Lockdown Loft on 28 June, which will feature an array of live performances, screenings and artworks.

Mien

Work by Naima Green. Photograph: Courtesy of TRNK

TRNK, a New York design studio is featuring queer artists of color as part of their online pride exhibition, Mien, to help benefit the Ali Forney Center, which helps LGBTQ homeless youth. The exhibit, curated by the studio’s co-founder Tariq Dixon, features color photos by Dorian Ulises López Macías and Elliott Jerome Brown Jr, among others, and photo prints will be sold through their website until 30 June. It taps into what Dixon calls: “The fury over society’s attempt to erase individual experiences, but the fulfillment earned by inspiring others who see themselves in you,” he said. “The artworks are strong assertions of their undeniable individuality, but they all join together in celebration of a shared queer identity.”

Time-Sensitive

Jared McGriff – A Passing Ritual II. Photograph: Courtesy of the artist

The Miami gallery Spinello Projects is hosting an Instagram exhibition which features different artists each week, and will be curated in real time, in response to time-sensitive issues. The gallery director, Anthony Spinello, says it’s “open to our represented artists and extended family who identify as LGBTQ+, minority, or allies”. Some of the works included is My Little Brother’s Casket, by Reginald O’Neal, an up-and-coming black painter based in Miami, as well as paintings of black figures by Jared McGriff and a piece by Eddie Arroyo, which depicts a street scene with a sign that reads: End Police Brutality. “Another day, another hashtag, another soul gone at the hands of police brutality and white supremacy,” said Spinello. “If black lives don’t matter, no lives matter. This show is a virtual rallying cry for justice in solidarity with our black brothers and sisters, and for all those who are deemed other.”

Illegal to Be You: Gay History Beyond Stonewall

A ‘Gay is Good’ button from 1968 from the collection of Frank Kameny. Photograph: Courtesy of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History

An ongoing online exhibition with the National Museum of American History in Washington traces the history of gay rights and activism. Though the exhibition opened last summer to commemorate the 50th anniversary of Stonewall, the digital component includes artefacts from the 19th century onward, including protest signs, the first trans pride flag, Aids-related lab equipment, oral histories, Billie Jean King’s tennis dress and ephemera from the collection of Frank Kameny, who staged the first gay rights protest outside the White House.

“There is no one, unified gay history; what all gay people have shared across time is the struggle for the right to be themselves and the museum has been documenting these stories for decades,” said the museum’s curator, Katherine Ott. “Today, gay Americans have achieved so much, yet many people are unaware of how it happened.”

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