On Thursday Heidi Stevens, the Chicago Tribune’s foolish lifestyle writer, wrote in glowing terms about a noxious new Gillette razor ad that features “trans” -activist “Samson” Bonkabantu Brown, a young woman who pretends to be a young man, getting a face-shaving tutorial from her father. Stevens views the science-denying ad that implicitly affirms the chemical sterilization and surgical mutilation of children as evolutionary, helpful, and powerful. And here I thought we were supposed to love our bodies just as they are.
On the very same day, arts and entertainment writer (the Trib uses the words “arts” and “entertainment” very loosely) Steve Johnson did his level best to intellectualize, sanitize, and elevate a perverse new art exhibit titled “About Face: Stonewall, Revolt and new Queer Art,” describing it as an “ambitious…. Sweeping survey of queer art curated with an eye toward the transgendered, the intersectional, the ways in which sexuality is being more widely recognized as fluid and complex rather than binary and rigid.” Maybe if he had tried just a wee bit harder, he could have packed in a tad more “progressive” jargon.
It’s a bit unclear what Johnson means when he refers to sexuality. If he’s referring to hardwired biological sex, then it remains stubbornly “binary and rigid” no matter what “trans”-alchemists are widely pretending, er I mean, “recognizing.”
If, however, he’s referring to “sexual orientation” or sexual appetites, he’s right. They’re fluid and complex—not binary or rigid. Due to the fall of man, the sexual appetites of men and women are diverse, fluid, complex, malformed, misshapen, misdirected, misoriented, and disordered by all sorts of environmental and biological factors. It’s been dogmatic homosexuals who have tried to convince the world that “sexual orientation” is (relatively) binary (i.e., heterosexual or homosexual) and rigid. Scripture has long informed those with eyes to see and ears to hear that sexual appetites are fluid. Remember reading about incest, homosexuality, cross-dressing, and bestiality? Remember reading that there’s nothing new under the sun? Remember reading that “such were some of you”?
The exhibit’s curator, Jonathan David Katz, has had a remarkable career proselytizing for sodomy. According to Wikipedia, Katz is the former executive coordinator of the Larry Kramer Initiative for Lesbian and Gay Studies at Yale University, former chair of the Department of Lesbian and Gay studies at the City College of San Francisco, first tenured faculty in gay and lesbian studies in the United States, founder of the Harvey Milk Institute (the largest queer studies institute in the world named in honor of the despicable ephebophile Harvey Milk), co-founder of Queer Nation in San Francisco, and first artistic director of the National Queer Arts Festival in San Francisco.
To quote Howlin’ Wolf, Great Googly Moogly!
Our culture has become debauched enough that Katz is bold enough to admit that “for a lot of queer people, the goal was never to create a separate and polar gay community… that stood in opposition to straightness. Rather, the goal was to get rid of sexuality as a defining term of human difference.” Word to queer people, if by “sexuality” you mean, biological sex, your goal is quixotic and futile. Biological sex is the most fixed defining term of difference within the sexually dimorphic humans species. If by “sexuality,” you mean homoeroticism, your goal is equally quixotic and futile. Though you may be able to fool some people–perhaps even many people–into believing homoerotic acts are moral, you will never be able to fool all of them because truths about sexual morality are written on men’s and women’s hearts.
Here are some details Johnson offers about the exhibit:
“Chicago imagist icon Roger Brown is represented here, including transgressive paintings depicting ‘the relationship between a youth and an adult man, in which the younger partner is hardly a victim.’” (This is likely the painting, which you can zoom in on to read the captions.)
“Colombian artist Carlos Motta shows himself naked in a video* [warning: full frontal nudity], dangling in an upside-down crucifix position, moaning in seeming pain, or is it pleasure?”
“In one, walk-in work called ‘Self Service,’ you’ll find a wooden sex toy mounted on a bathroom wall between metal grab bars…. If a visitor was not previously familiar with the range of male genitalia, this show will fix that.”
“Joan E. Biren’s photographs on display depict an early lesbian collective at work; there’s a… 1977 image of a topless woman sawing wood.”
“A highlight of the show is the top-floor suite of Jerome Caja works, paintings mostly in nail polish on, seemingly, whatever material was on hand for the late San Francisco artist…. The miniature works…. confront Catholic… iconography and drag queen tropes.” [If you’re curious about Caja, here’s his website, and here’s just one of his miniature works (obscenity warning): “Bozo Picks a Boyfriend”]
*Carlos Motta says this about Requiem: Mondo Invertito: “REQUIEM is based on a queer interpretation of the stories of the death and resurrection of Christ in an attempt to question their effect on the sustained exclusion of queer bodies and lives…. featuring bondage artists Stafano Laforgia and Andrea Ropes and Carlos Motta.”
Remember when kids would read newspapers for “current events” school assignments? Ah, those were the good old days. Now our newspapers should be wrapped in brown paper and sold in creepy stores in creepy urban neighborhoods frequented by creepy men in stained trench coats.
Steve Johnson and the Chicago Tribune should be ashamed, but shame is so yesterday.
Listen to this article read by Laurie:
Subscribe to the IFI YouTube channel
and never miss a video report or special program!
