Neil Bartlett, Ivan Cartwright, Duncan Roy and Robin Whitmore, polaroid images from Pornography: a spectacle ICA 1984
I become the gay man I am… not by expressing any innate sexual desire but by joining a particular culture, by learning a particular language. I’ve always thought we should be ‘going in,’ not ‘coming out’. At whatever point we choose, we enter a gay/queer culture which already exists, and in joining that culture we find ourselves amidst a variety of styles which our gay peers offer us. We define ourselves by adopting or refusing these styles.
Even though I had good reason to, I have only recently had the audacity to call myself an artist but have consistently loved, collected and connected to artists. Here are three young queer artists whose work touched me deeply… and explore similar themes.
I first discovered Ty Locke at the University for the Creative Arts in Canterbury in 2018. His degree show was utterly compelling.
Locke is currently enjoying a well deserved solo show at Commune in Vienna. As part of this show the spectator is drawn into a darkly lit basement past posters suggestive of adverts for drag performances mimicking past events of an imagined venue. Within the room they are met with a series of melted plastic chairs arranged as though in a sex club.
Prem Sahib was my visiting tutor at the RCA. Another well respected queer artist. Central to Prem Sahib’s earlier work are men only cruising clubs, where you can ‘lose yourself, escape societal constraints, or simply fuck’.
For ‘DESCENT I. People Come & Go’, held in November 2019 at Southard Reid gallery in Soho, London, Sahib reproduced the subterranean area of a cruising club. Viewers felt their way through immersive tunnels of steel where they met half-stripped men, abject and unresponsive.
Diogo Gama is a Portuguese artist who pushes for queer visibility. His show Teleny at the General Assembly gallery in London drew its name from a pornographic text he found as a boy in an abandoned house. These works by Teleny are attributed to Oscar Wilde. Gama’s show is a synthesis of borrowed images, words and media. In Before I forget, Teleny Sweats, Albeit Covertly, Elsewhere, Gama utilised a towel purloined from SweatBox, a gay sauna located in London’s Soho.
These three young artists among others revisit themes we were unpacking in 1982 during the making of our devised performance commissioned by the ICA, Pornography: A Spectacle. We too were reclaiming gay sex spaces: saunas, fetish clubs, drag bars… fearlessly talking about our sex lives, dragging up, getting naked on stage.
Walking into Prem’s show at Studio Voltaire in 2024 felt like walking into the ICA in 1984.
The space we created at the ICA 40 years ago directly connects us with Prem’s cruising club, Ty’s sex club… haunted by Teleny’s ghosts. We are in the same space! The vastness of this tunnel, this mineshaft set over decades, unchanging… the smell of cigarettes and rotten beer, sticky floors… voyeurs glimpsing the same cast of men pretending. Drugs muffling the thumping beat, my heart is beating. Listen, can you hear the distant, thudding music pierced only by the gasp and grunts of men penetrated, men cumming… undeniably the same… wearing leather drag… disco drag… I’m on my knees.
Time is the greatest distance between two sex clubs.
They came to see us naked. I must have handed a thousand fliers late night at Heaven, The White Swan, The Two Brewers and The Vauxhall Tavern as they were lining up to get in. They asked, Are you in it? Will we see your cock?
We packed the ICA with gay men and made a ton of money.
At first I was petrified, Neil Bartlett the director was scary and uncompromising. My voice was tiny. We opened the show with a dance routine, Hot Stuff by Donna Summer. We were almost naked. The audience were salacious, lascivious… then, after ten or so minutes I found my voicehe. The audience started to see themselves in all of us on stage and relaxed a little… then they laughed… then they cried.
One particularly gripping monologue, describing violent sex with a hook up. The details were shocking, a foil to the tenderness and vulnerability reached by the end of the scene: the two holding each other, sobbing. There is only one man to whom I say, ‘I love you’. My lover. “I love you” marks a status, not a feeling, therefore “love” becomes the most taboo of all words men say to each other.
For all our bravado the audience recognised how vulnerable we all were.
I’m assuming the word queer is more inclusive than the word gay. Apart from the rebranding… what else has changed? Prem, born 22 years after me, Ty Locke was born when I was 36 and Diogo… when I was 38. Yet, these artists are making sense of their gay/queer lives in much the same way Robin, Neil, Ivan and I were unpacking ours in 1984.
‘Pornography is quite wonderful, outrageous, intentionally shocking — but with real human beings stepping through the sensationalism at regular intervals to speak between the screams of cliché in normal conversational tones about who they are and how they really feel. The recurrent theme is one of intense pornographic description, which the actors suddenly stop, pause, and say, “of course that was merely a quotation,” or “but it really wasn’t like that.” Sky Gilbert
Using the language and locations of our gay lives as the springboard from which we leapt into something unimagined for the purpose of our devised spectacle. Using our experiences of the clubs, bars and saunas in London during the late 70’s early 1980’s. Wryly comparing the reality of our sex lives (we were all in our 20’s) with the fantasy of available paper/video pornography and the attributed pornographic work of Oscar Wilde who used the pseudonym Teleny for the purposes of his erotic writing.
All of this… against the looming spectre of an AIDS epidemic which had broken over London, was no longer an American ‘problem’… and, of course… the casual, often violent homophobia from the Police and the general public alike… whenever they could get away with manhandling us.
Sahib recreated interiors from The Back Street (1985-2022) an East End leather bar at Studio Voltaire in Clapham as we recreated scenes from similar leather bars and bath houses at the ICA.
The Back Street opened the year we made and toured our show.
As we used the red flock wallpaper from the gay bar coat check… the tantalising space between the street and the promise of cheap beer and easy men. Prem appropriated the lockers from the changing rooms at Chariots bath house (1997-2016) they were dumped in the car park. The lockers were subsequently acquired for the Tate Gallery’s permanent collection.
By contemporary standards the spaces we inhabited in 1984 were neither inclusive nor safe. The bars were frequented by white gay/bi men, sexual assault was common place and I don’t know if we knew anything about consent.
I went to my first, late night gay bar in Margate 1976 and stumbled out into the morning light in New York City, 1997. The year I got sober.
I have always craved the right to be visible… yet in 2025 I still think twice before I hold my lovers hand in the street. For 40 years I have second guessed myself and recognise the same PDA editing in the work of these younger artists. Invisibility, shame, fear and isolation have figured in the work of all these artists and… this old artist. Both then and now I summon those ghosts who haunted the lives of my gay ancestors: Shame, Fear and Isolation.
Is this inevitably who we are? Is this why gay artists 4 decades apart continue to explore the same themes? The streets are dangerous, the right vilify us, we are robbed, assaulted or murdered in search of sex or comfort.
Why do I want my lover to choke me? To slap me? To piss on me? Insult me? Why do I demand my lover do to me what I fear most on the street? Treat me violently because I am familiar with a glancing blow. Call me names because nothing you can say will ever sting as much as a stranger recognising what I am and calling me a faggot.
I recoil when you know who I am.
Comfort me when the violence is over… kiss my wounds.
As we were touring our gay show about sex worldwide, espousing the sexual freedoms we thought we enjoyed in clubs, bars and bathhouses the AIDS epidemic was crashing into our community.
By December 1985 when we finished our tour, reprising the show at the ICA… 41,200 gay men had been killed by AIDS in NYC alone. Killed in one year. Imagine this. Please. A generation of mainly young gay men. Men like Prem, Ty and Diogo.
I move to NYC in 1985.
I recoil from gay sex. I save my ass. I didn’t die. Why?
Brad, a beautiful young bar man serves me a Long Island Iced Tea at Sip and Twirl on Fire Island… he has a huge smile and perfect abs. I’m going to extravagantly tip him and flirt like my life depends on it. Later that night we pass each other on the boardwalk. Just a kiss. Brad wants to get fucked under the moon in The Meat Rack wearing his black leather waistcoat.
That beautiful boy, and boys like him… after the summer season in the Pines, they’re chasing the dollar serving cocktails back in the city at my favourite bars: Area, Saint, Boy Bar. Those barmen are so fucking beautiful.
We didn’t know what was happening out on the meat rack, as Brad was getting fucked by multiple men hanging from the trees in a makeshift sling… we were unaware. We didn’t know our little community would become the epicenter of the East Coast AIDS epidemic.
October 25 1985: The New York State Public Health Council empowers local health officials to close gay bathhouses, bars, clubs and other places where “high-risk sexual activity takes place.”
As the epidemic worsened, whenever we could face it, my partner Joe and I would covertly visit St Vincent’s Hospital and sit with young men dying of AIDS. We lived opposite the main entrance of the hospital on 12th Street and 7th Avenue. It is gruelling to watch a young man die.
The next time I saw Brad… he’s in St Vincent’s hospital sweating, writhing, delirious on his sodden bed. He’s covered in disfiguring lesions… crying out… crying out he doesn’t want to die! We held him as best we could. A few days later another gay man is in Brad’s bed begging for his life.
Brad will die alone. His Christian family stay away from the city. They are too ashamed to hold his hand or comfort him, mop his brow… he is torn away from life, from his beautiful gay life, a life ended by AIDS… in shame, fear and isolation.
1984/85
January 11: The U.S. Center for Disease Control (CDC) revises the AIDS case definition to note that AIDS is caused by a newly identified virus.
March 2: The U.S Food and Drug Administration licenses the first commercial blood test to detect HIV.
April 15–17: The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and the World Health Organization host the first International AIDS Conference in Atlanta, Georgia.
April 22: AIDS activist Larry Kramer autobiographical play, The Normal Heart opens Off-Broadway at the Public Theater. The play covers the impact of the growing AIDS epidemic on the New York gay community between 1981-1984. The play’s protagonist, Ned Weeks (Kramer’s alter ego)who is desperately banging on the doors of government and science in an attempt to stave off the annihilation of gay men.
May 1: As Is the first play about AIDS to make it to Broadway opens. The play gets excellent reviews and runs for 285 performances.
July 25: Actor Rock Hudson who played leading roles in over 60 Hollywood films, announces he has AIDS the first major U.S. public figure to do so.
August 31: The Pentagon announces that it will begin testing all new military recruits for HIV infection and reject those who test positive.
September 17: President Ronald Reagan mentions AIDS publicly for the first time calling it “a top priority”.
October 2: Rock Hudson dies of AIDS-related illness at age 59.
October 2: The U.S. Congress allocates nearly $190 million for AIDS research.
October 25: The New York State Public Health Council empowers local health officials to close gay bathhouses, bars, clubs and other places where “high-risk sexual activity takes place.”
December 4: The Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors enacts strict regulations on local bathhouses to stop the spread of HIV.
December 19: A Los Angeles Times poll finds that a majority of Americans favor quarantining people who have AIDS. By year’s end, the United Nations states that at least one HIV case has been reported from each region of the world..
Do artists even talk about AIDS anymore?
Neil, Ivan, Duncan and Robin images from Pornography: a spectacle ICA 1984
