Time passes on my face, as mirrors remind me, but it is portraits — photographs and paintings — that make this fact unmistakeable. Our representations, preserved in time, are reminders of who we once were. But such depictions have importance outside of our own life histories since they also come to stand in for our identities. Images can answer questions that reverberate within me constantly: how did men perform in the past and, for men like me, how was their queerness marked?
The self-portrait by Paul Cadmus in Mallorca affords me some answers. The mirror reveals someone quite unlike me physically. I have dark hair, dark eyes, and have a markedly scruffier appearance. Yet the divergence in our appearance is not the part that matters. What I see is a gay artist to my gay art historian. Quite literally I, working within my field, look back to him.
I also look beyond the canvas to his life, however. He too had sex with men and he had a lover, Jerry, whom he painted reading a copy of Ulysses quite like the copy sitting on my bookshelf.
Knowing that he was gay (and what I would now call queer), I read into the image what I feel myself.
What role is a gay man allowed to have other than artist? Can a man paint a man on a canvas? Is the mirroring of the Narcissus myth the only way he can showcase eroticism of the male form? Why is he set apart from the building behind him? Who is excluded here? What lover lies beyond the canvas?
I ask these questions and conclude that the space is queered! That there is an intentional distortion of receding linear perspective. The lines from the windows do not align with the hallway, nor with the angled tiles. Is not this whole thing, perhaps, a dreamscape — like a de Chirico work — and if so, is it a dream or a nightmare? In the mirror, Cadmus frames himself apart from the unfair rules of society around him, of heterosexuality, of desiring women, of living in civilization. This is, perhaps, the ideal space he envision.
Yet this same ideal could be entirely unattainable. It may only exist as a fiction on the canvas. One one hand, his private shaving mirror may transport him to his private, homosexual life, thereby declaring his happiness. On the other hand, the mirror may also confine him, suggesting his happiness can only exist there, only exist apart from reality which will inevitably always be there to confine.
Dreams and Freudian analysis lurked in the public imagination in the 1930s, but "queering space" is anachronistic. Something is queer here but "queer as in strange." But "to queer" is unfathomable as a named goal of the artist. And would he even identify as queer? A man who had sex with men and had a male partner married to a woman would still be fairly non-normative (even among queer people today).
Perhaps these labels are irrelevant. He lived non-normatively, something we'd say is "queer" today. He distorted space, perhaps to make social commentary. Is this not the same as "queering space"?
Examining this painting reveals a number of methodological challenges inherent in queer studies and art history. As always, there is an issue of academic language that needs to be historicized and regulated when applied retroactively. I work to challenge my language in each paper, yet for me these words live beyond the page: I hear shouts of "queer that space!" at most parties. In a way, the vocabulary I've developed to read these works springs from peer-reviewed articles and inhabiting LGBTQ spaces.
Glances are as much a part of queer vocabulary as terms like "heteronormativity" or "homonationalism." In fact, terms change — homosexual, gay men, queer men amidst a slew of epithets all mean the same thing — but I read the encoded gestures that express hidden desire across time. Academia is slowly undergoing one of its greatest transformations in that subjectivity is increasingly valued. The "text" of my life has increasing validity as the groups we study expand to capture the true diversity of human experiences.
And if I look back to Cadmus and see myself, that's ultimately a good thing for the identities I inhabit. Someday, my selfie may co-exist with Paul Cadmus' self-portrait, no longer recording a person's aging, but generational circumstances for queer men (or gay men or men who like men, whatever label we apply). It is the reclamation of these histories that we require and it is through these existent (or yet unformed) labels that we shall find these sources. And when labels fail, we look to the glance or the queered space and hope to find glimmers of own experiences — since isn't that part of the great appeal of art?