PDN Photo of the Day

The Art of Sexual Outlaws

Presented by ClampArt and Ward 5B, the exhibition “Sex Crimes” explores underground imagery that was made in response to western countries’ draconian laws outlawing sexual relations between consenting adults of the same gender. Known as Crimes Against Nature, Unnatural Acts, and Sex Crimes, the laws have led to mass incarceration, institutionalization, conversion therapy, public shaming, familial rejection, and the “wholesale death of gay people,” states the press release.

The images in “Sex Crimes,” aimed primarily at gay men, were often produced in the shadow of illegality. Creators faced harassment, arrest or imprisonment if caught. Many artists in the show were punished by authorities for their sexual preference. Once produced the artworks became part of a subterranean art circle and were passed clandestinely from person to person.

The Stonewall riots in 1969 mark one of the first times gay people collectively –– and publicly –– organized in resistance to repression and discrimination. Yet it wasn’t until 2003 that the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that (noncommercial) sex between consenting adults in private was protected by the Constitution. 

Specifically, the exhibition features ephemera such as early mimeographs of erotic stories written on typewriters by gay men to be passed from hand to hand, illustrated stories from the 1950s and 60s circulated as pornography, and pre-Stonewall photographic portraits of gay men. As a whole, explains the press release, “the body of work presented in ‘Sex Crimes’ provides a window into the camaraderie and defiant response of sexual outlaws to government, religious, and cultural homophobia that his historically criminalized them.”

“Sex Crimes”
Co-curated by Greg Ellis and Brian Paul Clamp
ClampArt
Through September 28, 2019

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