Richard Meyer & Patrick Moore - Outlaw Representation and the Abandoned History of Radical Gay Sexuality

Authors Richard Meyer and Patrick Moore will read from their books, Outlaw Representation: Censorship and Homosexuality in Twentieth-Century American Art and Beyond Shame: On the Abandoned History of Radical Gay Sexuality.

Outlaw Representation: From the U.S. Navy's confiscation in 1934 of a painting of sailors on shore leave to the ongoing culture wars over federal funding to the arts, conflicts surrounding homosexuality and creative freedom have shaped the history of modern art in America. Richard Meyer's "Outlaw Representation" illuminates this history through its careful analysis of the works of homosexual artists and the circumstances under which these works have been attacked, suppressed, or censored outright.

Beyond Shame: A talented novelist who for many years was director of the Estate Project for Artists with AIDS, Moore (This Every Night) offers a provocative defense of gay male sex culture in the 1970s as well as a jeremiad on the AIDS holocaust of the 1980s. The most exciting writing here details New York's provisional "theaters of pleasure" (sex clubs like The Mineshaft, dance clubs such as The Saint) with novelistic atmosphere and a canny ear for interview and synthesis, while Moore's portraits of artists lost to AIDS are also first-rate.