Public attention recently has addressed subject matter related to men of color who have relationships on the low with other men, but do not identify as “gay” or “bisexual”, along with the disproportionately high rates of new cases of HIV infection among communities of color, including Black and Latina women. The responses to this correlation has been fierce among African American writers, including Jason King and Keith Boykin, who have stressed that the media frenzy around the down low demonizes Black men as irresponsible sexual predators and characterizes their female partners as submissive, naïve victims. This is DL’s point of departure and return, its complicated phenomenon based on reality.

In a more inclusive way, this exhibition explores the multiple spaces between the public and the private; and presents works by contemporary artists who approach constructions and deconstructions of gender and sexuality within urban contexts, including hip-hop culture. The works in DL are brought together here through fluctuations of, in, and among traditional and contemporary modes of identity politics, including masculinity, transgenderism, femininism, hypermasculinity, hyperfeminitiy. For instance, it is no accident that many works in this exhibition deal with terminology such as “Thug,” for the discourses on the dl have also favored an interest in contemporary designations, including the now ubiquitous and seemingly contradictory but sensational “Homo Thug” and the media obsession with outing the “gay rapper.” Maybe the dl phenomenon, which has involved mainly communities of color, is an alternate to the traditionally white-dominated definitions of gay liberation in the U.S. that have been based on post-Stonewall sexual politics, coming out models of being “here, queer, get used to it”. Is the dl a silent revolution, a paradigm shift, or simply identity denial? Can the dl phenomenon be signaling new cultural forms of difference? These multifaceted considerations may just be expressed through the works in this exhibition. Using fashion, found objects, installation, mixed media, painting, performance, photography, public art, sculpture, text, and video, these artists consider interests in desire, representation, the body, and the limitations of and elaborations within gender and sexual categories. Artists include: Binga, Ricardo A. Bracho, Wolfgang Busch, Karlos Carcamo, Enrique Cruz, Alex Donis, e-mael, Ricardo Francis, Derek Jackson, Terence Koh (formerly asianpunkboy), Glenn Ligon, Ivan Monforte, Kori Newkirk, Luna Luis Ortiz and Shawn Atkins, Gigi Otálvaro-Hormillosa (aka Devil Bunny), Susan Smith-Pinelo, Steed Taylor, and Jorge Veras. For starters, the new essay written in response to the exhibition by Ricardo A. Bracho is titled “Ridin sidesaddle thru thug life” and critically examines the current racial and sexual discourse around the dl, offering up his own life’s lessons as advice to interacting and being with men on the dl.

Thug Passion.

For some in DL, the formal elements and new visual modes of identity politics speak for themselves.

Karlos Carcamo has regularly used the language and stylistic definitions used in hip hop to discuss and name his work. Thugging it out for his trio of self-portraits, Carcamo mixes car culture elements (tinted glass and chrome) with a performed unsmiling masculine stare. Depending on the angle you view these, Carcamo’s face is faintly there or disappears.

On the other hand, Kori Newkirk’s Take What You Can in white neon makes a brightly lit but quietly demonstrative statement on dl activity that may happen wherever and whenever. Originally made for a swap-meet-type benefit commemorating the L.A. riots, this conceptual work finds new meaning in another context.

Terence Koh (formerly asianpunkboy)’s Hershey chocolate sculpture Michael Jackson, Michael Jackson was produced specifically for this exhibition as the artist’s playful rendition of a thug war. Using dolls of the “King of Pop” purchased on ebay, Koh has the two MJs face each other not unlike the two gang leaders in Michael Jackson’s video for the song “Beat It.” In time, dark chocolate oxidizes and turns white, so this work projects the pop singer’s own insecurities with his skin and speaks to issues of self-loathing and, at the same time, vanity.

Each of the reconfigured plastic shopping-bag units in e-mael’s The “T”: 144 Hours, medi(t)ation pods took the artist an hour to cut and sew together. As evidence of the artist’s performance-based work, each unit also includes strands of the artist’s pubic hair inside, stressing the work’s relationship to the artist’s own body. Installed on the floor in the center of the main gallery, the T-shape configuration has many different connections and association from the “T” in the words truth, thug, or Q.T. to cruciforms and transverse crossings in traditional cathedral architecture.

Ivan Monforte’s three A-shirts, or misogynistically known as “wifebeaters,” with embroidered cursive text and sprayed daily with Ralph Lauren’s Safari fragrance for men reveal ways to refer to a significant other: “Baby’s Daddy”, “Man”, and “Boo.” In addition, Monforte’s You’re Beautiful… with its silkscreen text and incipient embroidery is described by the artist as a blushing painting that is slowly beginning to believe in itself. With stolen images of incarcerated men from websites like www.prisonInmates.com, Monforte produced a series of framed images each with the title of a popular R&B song from the past few decades that may have multiple readings such as “Touch of You” and “Didn’t I Blow Your Mind (This Time).” To continue the interest in R&B music and personal identity, Monforte made a digital music video loop in which he makes out with a man named “Shawn” to D’Angelo’s slow jam “Untitled (How Does It Feel).”

Glenn Ligon’s blood-red wallpaper repeats Tupac Shakur’s famous tattoo “Thug Life” that was on the late emcees torso as a manipulated version of the Everlast logo. Combining the tradition of decorative wall coverings with a hip-hop reference, this memorial wall loudly reinforces Shakur’s violent, unsolved murder and the real success of his posthumous musical career. For example, this November 2003, there will be a release of a new album by Shakur as well as a new film documentary titled “Tupac: Resurrection” to open at theaters nationwide.

For a long time, Steed Taylor was unable to produce his public projects titled Road Tattoos in New York City until now. Based on composite designs of Celtic knots and black-ink work, many of his large-scale tattoos are painted with hi-gloss latex directly onto a public road as memorials to individuals and/or groups who have died from AIDS-related causes. Identifying the area near the local neighborhood just within the Bronx Terminal Market and east of the Major Deegan Freeway as a location where seroconversion may occur, Taylor painted the Carnal Bend on the dead-end street of Cromwell Avenue above 150th Street that is frequented by prostitutes and the homeless as well as situated next to a NYC Detention Center. The two large almost touching curved arcs of the reverse S-shape of this particular Road Tattoo make up the artist’s tag and also speak to the reality of sexual encounters in public spaces. Also included in this exhibition and on view for the first time are tattoo designs on paper from the artist’s series Blood Prints that were produced with blood from HIV+ men.

Many works in DL play with, respond to, remix and sample representation.

Susan Smith-Pinelo’s video construction Part III: The Hiphoprisy Series (2003) turns the table on the straight, misogynist gaze of popular hip-hop videos with a silent, eight-minute loop of mostly faceless, half-naked men of color in jeans with their underwear waistbands hanging out and standing awkwardly in their poses. Shot from the neck down, the focus on their shirtless bodies inverts the sexist, voyeuristic strategies in film and video used to emphasize the breasts and crotch areas of women’s bodies. Another reading may suggest that these men are wallflowers showing off their bodies, cruising and beckoning passers-by. As some of the men shift and fidget more and more, the viewer may come to wonder what the artist did to keep the impatient men from walking away from their vulnerable, frontal stance.

The excerpts from three of Bronx artist Enrique Cruz’s adult videos present an oppositional gaze to the traditionally white-dominated porn industry. Cruz’s videos are thoughtfully scripted and staged producing a mise en scene complete with montages of New York City where the actors play out fictional narratives, for instance, of gay rappers in the hip-hop industry and the personal lives of working-class people of color. For instance, Hardcore: Thug Passion One opens with scenes that jump from two young African American men playing poolside and sharing a “shotgun” inhale to scenes between an unnamed hip hop celebrity, who wants to get “his freak on”, and celebrity drag queen Harmonica Sunbeam. In addition, in the series Off Da Hook, viewers are introduced to characters such as a struggling hip-hop emcee Kaos who offers up his own studio rhymes and industry negotiations.

Gigi Otalvaro-Hormillosa (aka Devil Bunny)’s video Inverted Minstrel (2000) explores cultural appropriation and assimilation in hip hop among Asian Pacific Americans and Latinos. Otalvaro-Hormillosa takes on multiple characters including a vato (Chicano homeboy stereotype) and a verbose cultural critic to produce queer, feminist perspectives poking fun at hip hop’s investment in sexism, homophobia, black/white essentialism, and patriarchy. Check out the monkey hand puppet sidekick played by e-mael. The complete version and the excerpt of this video may also be viewed online at www.devilbunny.org.

Derek Jackson’s two photographic series Thug Life (2001) and Homo Thugs: The Down Low (2002) present the artist’s interest in both documenting and expanding the knowledge what it means to be a thug. For Thug Life, Jackson photographed his “cousin’s baby’s daddy and his girlfriend” hanging out and posing at their home in Houston, Texas, while Homo Thugs inverts the popular image of homo thugs as hypermasculine gay men with a series of photographs of two lesbians of color getting ready for a date.

Binga (aka Richard L. Mack)’s series of greeting cards were originally marketed for men on the dl over the age of 40. Unavailable for exhibition in New York City until now, these digitally manipulated photographs of men of color are, at times, paired with text based on various ways to express feelings between men. For example, one of the covers has a portrait of an African American man in a suggestive pose with the text “Can We Keep This on the DL?”

Gender and ambiguity are subjects of the photographs by Luna Luis Ortiz and Jorge Veras. Ortiz, who is the mother of the House of Khan, has been taking photographs of his friends and family in the ballroom community for many years. In the selection of photographs here, Ortiz titled the line of small pictures The Original DLs: Butch Queens and Fem Queens Series to stress his opinion that the dl mode is an arena of visually performed identities. Veras responded to the dl subject and produced black-and-white photographs, some blurred, that offer a disjunctive narrative of transsexuals, cops, and a clear-day view of an empty tropical beach. For the video lounge, Wolfgang Busch’s three-minute excerpt from his video How Do I Look? (2003) on New York’s ballroom communities peeks into the stellar and glamorous life of Octavia St. Laurent Manolo Blahnik who starred in Jennie Livingston’s film Paris is Burning (1991). Also included in the video lounge are three public service announcements by Ortiz and Shawn Atkins who combined collagist animation with safer sex awareness.

The dancing-to-kissing youth depicted in Alex Donis’s light-box work Young Crip, Young Blood speak about reconciliation as well as teenage sexual identity. This work had been part of the exhibition War that was censored from showing at Watts Towers Arts Center in Los Angeles in 2001 before showing at Frumkin/Duval Gallery in Santa Monica. The other works in this series are painted images of policemen and gang members in provocative dance poses.

In Endurance, Ricardo Francis produced a self-portrait with a large painted image of his hands surrounded by collaged elements that hint at his own cultural and sexual identities. The other two paintings Juan’s Perfect High and G and the Pussycat provide a varied glimpse at Francis’s ongoing interests in depicting the male figure based on his imagination and influences from popular culture. For instance, porn star Kaos is one inspiration for G, and Juan wears his bandana like a new school Tupac lost in his rhymes.

Selected Sources:

Michael Bullock. Interview with “Louis Crespo Top Hip Hop Homo Thug . . .” Butt. Number Six. Spring 2003. pp. 28-32.

Benoit Denizet-Lewis. “Double Life on the Down Low.” The New York Times Magazine. August 3, 2003.

Fab 5 Freddy aka Fred Brathwaite. Fresh Fly Flavor: Words & Phrases of the Hip-Hop Generation. Stamford, Connecticut: Longmeadow Press, 1992.

Jason King. “Remixing the Closet: The Down-Low Way of Knowledge.” The Village Voice. June 25-July 1, 2003.

Mike Weiss. “Black Dudes Are Different: The Cult of the R&B Thug.” WYWS: While You Were Sleeping. 24. Sex and Violence Issue. pp. 68-69.

Emanuel Xavier. Pier Queen. New York: Pier Queen Productions, 1997.

www.thebody.com
www.howdoilooknyc.org
www.keithboykin.com
www.rainbowflava.com
www.visualaids.org

Search “down low men” on www.google.com, and you will find many articles.

Special thanks to: Henry Aronson, AA Bronson, Bronx Academy of Arts and Dance, Charles Rice-Gonzalez, Visual AIDS, Dale Ogasawara, Louis M. and Loca Entertainment, Jorge B. Merced and Pregones Theater, all of the DL artists, and especially to my boo Junie.

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