Shameless was first exhibited at the Darkroom Gallery in Berkeley, 1974.
The first exhibit of Shameless was at the Darkroom Gallery in Berkeley, California in 1974. The opening night exhibit was attended by over 400 people, most of whom were in genderfuck drag.
In this photo from the opening, Chris, Nice and Tanye are standing in front of a collection of artifacts from the home of Christopher Lonc--who was a subject of several of the Shameless portraits. Christopher created a wall of kitsch as part of the exhibit.
Among those signing the visitor log who saw this 1974 exhibit in Berkeley were authors Gay Talese and Samuel Steward, and photographer Richard Misrach.
In this photo from the opening, Chris, Nice and Tanye are standing in front of a collection of artifacts from the home of Christopher Lonc--who was a subject of several of the Shameless portraits. Christopher created a wall of kitsch as part of the exhibit.
Among those signing the visitor log who saw this 1974 exhibit in Berkeley were authors Gay Talese and Samuel Steward, and photographer Richard Misrach.
Shameless at the Alfred Stieglitz Gallery in 1976.
Two years later, I had my first big success in the art world in 1976, when I stood in a line of fifty photographers, all of whom had responded to an open call audition for a show at the Alfred Stieglitz Gallery in New York. I was the last one in line. I waited several hours while George Albert, the Stieglitz gallery director, examined forty-nine portfolios ahead of mine. By the time my turn came, he was so tired he asked his assistant to take over. Mr. Albert stood up to leave, went to the door and put on his hat and coat.
The assistant started to look through my portfolio, then went to fetch Mr. Albert, saying, "I think you'd better see these." Mr. Albert returned with a sigh, took off his coat and hat, and sat down to look at my work. He slowly went through my photographs, smoking a cigar. "Humph," he said after each one. When he'd finished, he took several puffs on cigar, and said, "Well, kid, I'll give you a one man show in September."
The poster, at right, is from that show at the Stieglitz Gallery. The poster was produced by photolithographer George Waters, who had worked closely with Ansel Adams throughout his career. The quality of the photolithography is commensurate with Mr. Waters' reputation.
The assistant started to look through my portfolio, then went to fetch Mr. Albert, saying, "I think you'd better see these." Mr. Albert returned with a sigh, took off his coat and hat, and sat down to look at my work. He slowly went through my photographs, smoking a cigar. "Humph," he said after each one. When he'd finished, he took several puffs on cigar, and said, "Well, kid, I'll give you a one man show in September."
The poster, at right, is from that show at the Stieglitz Gallery. The poster was produced by photolithographer George Waters, who had worked closely with Ansel Adams throughout his career. The quality of the photolithography is commensurate with Mr. Waters' reputation.
Shameless at the Hyde Park Art Center in Chicago in January, 1977
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Shameless was exhibited at the Hyde Park Art Center in January, 1977 and reviewed in the Chicago Daily News newspaper by art critic David Elliott (shown above). The paper published my photograph "Nice, with glitter lips, rhinestone necklace, pink flamingo, and Bruno Walter" without realizing that a photograph within the photograph (in the upper right corner) was a full frontal nude photograph of one of David's friends. No doubt the editors of the Daily News were too dazzled by Nice (the poet David Melnick) in the foreground to notice the nude in the corner. Later, this same photograph was published by Poetry Magazine as part of David Melnick's obituary.
The catalog for the Hyde Park Art Center exhibit featured my photograph of Stacey at age 8, posing as Gertrude Stein. When I'd asked Stacey if I could take her portrait, she'd said she wanted to pose like Gertrude Stein. She pointed to a book cover that showed Stein in a long black dress. Stacey went to her mother's closet and reappeared in a black dress, hat and veil. Her frank and serious expression aptly imitates Gertrude's. The photo upset critic David Elliott, who wrote in his review, "And what, finally, are we to make of a little girl who is posed as Gertrude Stein? The adults have a right to be affectedly childish, to have fun with their posturings and even make a life of it. By the look on some of their faces it may not be a bad life. But to make a child pose as one of the mother icons of avant-camp, to involve her even obliquely in a ritual confusion of sexuality, is simply depressing. Children have a right to their own childishness--besides, they're so much better at it." He talked to me at the opening but did not ask me about this photo. If he had I'd have told him that the costume, the pose, the imitation of Gertrude, were all Stacey's idea. His phrase, "a ritual confusion of sexuality" reflects the reaction of much of the art world to these photographs in 1977.
The catalog for the Hyde Park Art Center exhibit featured my photograph of Stacey at age 8, posing as Gertrude Stein. When I'd asked Stacey if I could take her portrait, she'd said she wanted to pose like Gertrude Stein. She pointed to a book cover that showed Stein in a long black dress. Stacey went to her mother's closet and reappeared in a black dress, hat and veil. Her frank and serious expression aptly imitates Gertrude's. The photo upset critic David Elliott, who wrote in his review, "And what, finally, are we to make of a little girl who is posed as Gertrude Stein? The adults have a right to be affectedly childish, to have fun with their posturings and even make a life of it. By the look on some of their faces it may not be a bad life. But to make a child pose as one of the mother icons of avant-camp, to involve her even obliquely in a ritual confusion of sexuality, is simply depressing. Children have a right to their own childishness--besides, they're so much better at it." He talked to me at the opening but did not ask me about this photo. If he had I'd have told him that the costume, the pose, the imitation of Gertrude, were all Stacey's idea. His phrase, "a ritual confusion of sexuality" reflects the reaction of much of the art world to these photographs in 1977.
Shameless at The Darkroom Gallery in Chicago in October, 1977 and the New Art Examiner debate
Letter from H. C. Westerman to tell me he was no fan of art critics!
The Shameless exhibit at The Darkroom Gallery in Chicago in October, 1977 was reviewed in the New Art Examiner. In her review, critic Candida Finkel had nothing to say about the lighting, composition, tonal range or quality of my prints. Instead, like many art critics, she based her critique on the people in the photographs. She described the subjects of the photos as absurd exaggerations of feminism, lisping, posing and pretending, with faces distorted by makeup. She called the photos "no more interesting than snapshots taken at a Halloween party." She characterized the Men Loving Men photos as pornography.
In the same issue, another critic, Devonna Pieszak, wrote a review of the work of artist Lynda Kahn, a friend of mine. In addition to disliking her work, Devonna described Lynda as, among other things, inept, incompetent, awkward, coarse and sloppy. I was so bothered by Devonna's piling on of personal put downs, that I wrote an essay and sent it to the editor of the New Art Examiner.
In my essay, I questioned the purpose of critics lambasting artists personally. I wrote about how much courage it takes to create art of any kind and how unhelpful it is to the world of creativity in general to have critics lambaste anyone. I lauded the writing of photography critic A. D. Coleman, who wrote passionately about work he loved and mostly ignored work he did not like.
The Examiner published my essay, which elicited the largest number of letters to the editor in that art journal's history. There were strong opinions on both sides. There were supportive letters from many artists, and there were letters from an even greater number of art critics, who wrote personal defenses of their trade, and laid on additional criticisms of me and Linda to boot. One artist who wrote a funny supportive letter was H. C. Westerman. A portion of his letter is shown in the image here.
There were also letters from ordinary people—some encouraging me, others not. One letter writer called me a “nasty bitch,” “ego-posing,” “sinister,” “decadent,” and a “sickie.” He referred to my work as “photographic garbage.”
Ironically, the essay I wrote was nominated by the Chicago Sun Times for a Chicago Art Award for best art criticism of 1978.
In the same issue, another critic, Devonna Pieszak, wrote a review of the work of artist Lynda Kahn, a friend of mine. In addition to disliking her work, Devonna described Lynda as, among other things, inept, incompetent, awkward, coarse and sloppy. I was so bothered by Devonna's piling on of personal put downs, that I wrote an essay and sent it to the editor of the New Art Examiner.
In my essay, I questioned the purpose of critics lambasting artists personally. I wrote about how much courage it takes to create art of any kind and how unhelpful it is to the world of creativity in general to have critics lambaste anyone. I lauded the writing of photography critic A. D. Coleman, who wrote passionately about work he loved and mostly ignored work he did not like.
The Examiner published my essay, which elicited the largest number of letters to the editor in that art journal's history. There were strong opinions on both sides. There were supportive letters from many artists, and there were letters from an even greater number of art critics, who wrote personal defenses of their trade, and laid on additional criticisms of me and Linda to boot. One artist who wrote a funny supportive letter was H. C. Westerman. A portion of his letter is shown in the image here.
There were also letters from ordinary people—some encouraging me, others not. One letter writer called me a “nasty bitch,” “ego-posing,” “sinister,” “decadent,” and a “sickie.” He referred to my work as “photographic garbage.”
Ironically, the essay I wrote was nominated by the Chicago Sun Times for a Chicago Art Award for best art criticism of 1978.
Shameless, Genderfuck, and Harmodius in Exile as seen 40 years later by author Dominic Johnson
The following text is excerpted from Transgender Studies Quarterly - Volume 2 Number 4 - November, 2015.
“Sitting. With a Candle? Up My Ass!”
A Portrait of Harmodius in Exile
DOMINIC JOHNSON
Abstract: “Sitting. With a Candle? Up My Ass!”explores the archive of the Bay Area photographer David Greene, focusing firstly on Shameless (1974), a series of portraits of transgender people, queers, and people in drag, often posed candidly in domestic and other domestic settings. It zooms into Greene’s work to draw out the story of the forgotten genderfuck poet and activist Harmodius in Exile—Greene’s lover and peer—posing archival research as an access point to concealed or “minor” histories of lesbian, gay, and transgender life in San Francisco in the 1970s. In my analysis, Harmodius’s strategic maximalism—captured so evocatively in Greene’s portraits and evoked in Harmodius’s own poetry (cited in the title)—is both a political tool and a technique of whimsy, a gesture of serious play that stages the poet’s commitment to aesthetic, political, and corporeal self-fashioning.
The ONE National Gay and Lesbian Archives in downtown Los Angeles is the world’s largest archive of such materials. It holds periodicals and books, ephemera, personal papers, and artists’ archives. Its holdings on artists suggest a vast series of hidden histories, including a secret account of photography at the margin of historical and cultural intelligibility. Many are interesting in their own rights. A case in point is the archive of the Bay Area photographer David Greene, including Shameless (1974), a series of portraits of transgender people, queers, and people in drag, often posed candidly in domestic and other private settings. The photographs are carefully framed, lit, and shot, and the prints are large, wet, clean, and compelling. Moreover, they serve as access points to other, concealed “minor” histories, from the macrocosmic story of lesbian, gay, and transgender life in San Francisco in the 1970s, to the interstitial narratives pertaining to particular subjects amid the same greater history. One of the “secrets” disclosed by his papers is the life and times of the “genderfuck” poet and activist Harmodius in Exile. Here, in the archive, transgender, transsexual, and genderfuck lives emerge into visibility, demanding to be seen.
Greene documented glitter queen, trans, and genderfuck characters in San Francisco from 1973 to 1976 and disseminated these images in underground magazines like Vector, and exhibitions in artist-run or independent venues in the city. (Greene also exhibited nationally from September 1976, and in institutional spaces, after a solo show, Shameless, opened at Alfred Stieglitz’s celebrated New York gallery.) A notable exhibition in a nontraditional space was Andy’s Donuts: Center of the Universe (from September 1975) at Andy’s Donuts on Castro Street. The cafe functioned as what Greene describes as “the center of genderfuck culture in San Francisco in 1975” and was the place to be seen after the bars closed at 2:00 a.m. (Greene 2011: 32). For three months, Greene photographed regulars there—residents with their children during the day, and queens at night—and the resulting photographs were hung in the donut store. A characteristic photograph shows Pristine Condition (of the Cockettes) seated in the plate glass window of Andy’s, holding a glazed donut that matches her glazed expression, beside several trays lined with confectionary. Greene writes, “Many have mistaken my photographs for fantasy or theatre. This mistake comes from the false notion that only in the theatre do people surround themselves in splendor and act in a mobile and unrestrained manner.” He adds, “What straights would call performance is, in fact, a joyous way of life.” The shamelessness of the subjects and his photographic gaze give the images what he calls a transformative, “magic appearance” (Greene, Shameless photographs: 40, box 1).
Greene’s portraits of Harmodius in Exile are exemplary in this respect. One of these lovingly recreates a portrait by Diane Arbus, in the bathroom of the home Greene shared with his lover, Harmodius, on Panoramic Avenue, Berkeley (fig. 1). Harmodius wears makeup, metallic stars, a towel-turban, and dungarees with one strap undone to reveal chest hair and one breast. The poet’s eyebrows are pasted out and lined over—thinner, higher. Makeup, toiletries, jewelry, and paraphernalia scatter the bathroom’s marble counter. Harmodius engages the camera with a frank, beguiling, gently smiling face. The poet is androgynous. Harmodius is mid-transformation. He is beautiful. She is beautiful.
In the corner between the mirror and back wall, a book of Arbus’s work is opened to show “Burlesque Comedienne in her Dressing Room, Atlantic City, N. J.” (1963). The portrait of the burlesque performer is itself doubled in the mirror, and redoubled in new, flipped terms by Harmodius, who poses in a fashion similar to the comedienne’s, with legs discretely crossed and one hand holding the other in its unguarded grip. Greene’s allusion to art history—notably the quotation and restaging of Arbus’s photograph—honors yet actively queers the style and substance of the “masters” of “straight photography” (Brassaı¨ is another frequent reference for Greene) by presenting candid shots of outsiders, while assuring viewers of his own intimate, often sexual relation to his sitters.
“Sitting. With a Candle? Up My Ass!”
A Portrait of Harmodius in Exile
DOMINIC JOHNSON
Abstract: “Sitting. With a Candle? Up My Ass!”explores the archive of the Bay Area photographer David Greene, focusing firstly on Shameless (1974), a series of portraits of transgender people, queers, and people in drag, often posed candidly in domestic and other domestic settings. It zooms into Greene’s work to draw out the story of the forgotten genderfuck poet and activist Harmodius in Exile—Greene’s lover and peer—posing archival research as an access point to concealed or “minor” histories of lesbian, gay, and transgender life in San Francisco in the 1970s. In my analysis, Harmodius’s strategic maximalism—captured so evocatively in Greene’s portraits and evoked in Harmodius’s own poetry (cited in the title)—is both a political tool and a technique of whimsy, a gesture of serious play that stages the poet’s commitment to aesthetic, political, and corporeal self-fashioning.
The ONE National Gay and Lesbian Archives in downtown Los Angeles is the world’s largest archive of such materials. It holds periodicals and books, ephemera, personal papers, and artists’ archives. Its holdings on artists suggest a vast series of hidden histories, including a secret account of photography at the margin of historical and cultural intelligibility. Many are interesting in their own rights. A case in point is the archive of the Bay Area photographer David Greene, including Shameless (1974), a series of portraits of transgender people, queers, and people in drag, often posed candidly in domestic and other private settings. The photographs are carefully framed, lit, and shot, and the prints are large, wet, clean, and compelling. Moreover, they serve as access points to other, concealed “minor” histories, from the macrocosmic story of lesbian, gay, and transgender life in San Francisco in the 1970s, to the interstitial narratives pertaining to particular subjects amid the same greater history. One of the “secrets” disclosed by his papers is the life and times of the “genderfuck” poet and activist Harmodius in Exile. Here, in the archive, transgender, transsexual, and genderfuck lives emerge into visibility, demanding to be seen.
Greene documented glitter queen, trans, and genderfuck characters in San Francisco from 1973 to 1976 and disseminated these images in underground magazines like Vector, and exhibitions in artist-run or independent venues in the city. (Greene also exhibited nationally from September 1976, and in institutional spaces, after a solo show, Shameless, opened at Alfred Stieglitz’s celebrated New York gallery.) A notable exhibition in a nontraditional space was Andy’s Donuts: Center of the Universe (from September 1975) at Andy’s Donuts on Castro Street. The cafe functioned as what Greene describes as “the center of genderfuck culture in San Francisco in 1975” and was the place to be seen after the bars closed at 2:00 a.m. (Greene 2011: 32). For three months, Greene photographed regulars there—residents with their children during the day, and queens at night—and the resulting photographs were hung in the donut store. A characteristic photograph shows Pristine Condition (of the Cockettes) seated in the plate glass window of Andy’s, holding a glazed donut that matches her glazed expression, beside several trays lined with confectionary. Greene writes, “Many have mistaken my photographs for fantasy or theatre. This mistake comes from the false notion that only in the theatre do people surround themselves in splendor and act in a mobile and unrestrained manner.” He adds, “What straights would call performance is, in fact, a joyous way of life.” The shamelessness of the subjects and his photographic gaze give the images what he calls a transformative, “magic appearance” (Greene, Shameless photographs: 40, box 1).
Greene’s portraits of Harmodius in Exile are exemplary in this respect. One of these lovingly recreates a portrait by Diane Arbus, in the bathroom of the home Greene shared with his lover, Harmodius, on Panoramic Avenue, Berkeley (fig. 1). Harmodius wears makeup, metallic stars, a towel-turban, and dungarees with one strap undone to reveal chest hair and one breast. The poet’s eyebrows are pasted out and lined over—thinner, higher. Makeup, toiletries, jewelry, and paraphernalia scatter the bathroom’s marble counter. Harmodius engages the camera with a frank, beguiling, gently smiling face. The poet is androgynous. Harmodius is mid-transformation. He is beautiful. She is beautiful.
In the corner between the mirror and back wall, a book of Arbus’s work is opened to show “Burlesque Comedienne in her Dressing Room, Atlantic City, N. J.” (1963). The portrait of the burlesque performer is itself doubled in the mirror, and redoubled in new, flipped terms by Harmodius, who poses in a fashion similar to the comedienne’s, with legs discretely crossed and one hand holding the other in its unguarded grip. Greene’s allusion to art history—notably the quotation and restaging of Arbus’s photograph—honors yet actively queers the style and substance of the “masters” of “straight photography” (Brassaı¨ is another frequent reference for Greene) by presenting candid shots of outsiders, while assuring viewers of his own intimate, often sexual relation to his sitters.
Figure 1. David Greene, Harmodius, with Burlesque Queen Photo, 1974. ª David Greene. Courtesy of the artist
Greene confirms this distinction when he writes, “My approach was distinguished from them in that I sought an openly collaborative art—one in which the subjects had a strong hand in creating the portraits. This came from both aesthetic and political impulses” (Greene, pers. comm., February 23, 2013).
A further, striking photograph shows Harmodius sitting on a bed, pipe in mouth, with an artificial hibiscus behind the poet’s ear, and wearing a facial spray of glitter stars and rhinestones around the eyes and cheekbones. The transformation to total “genderfuckery” is complete. Harmodius’s bushy beard is caked in glitter. A box of costume jewelry lies open on the unmade bed, surrounded by layers of shiny satin sheets. Greene’s works are significant for their formality and respectful sensibility. The images suggest tenderness, beauty, calm, community, and safety, with an attractive veneer, and his sitters tend to demonstrate a personal charisma that suggests poveraopulence and cluttered extravagance. Harmodius’s maximalism is both a political tool and a technique of whimsy, a gesture of serious play that evokes the poet’s commitment to aesthetic, political, and corporeal self-fashioning.
Harmodius in Exile was the author of a rare mimeographed book, The Poems of Harmodius in Exile (1974). The cover featured a double-negative composite photograph by Greene with Harmodius in and out of genderfuck drag, raising a palm to meet him- or herself, while gazing at the camera. Harmodius was born Anthony J. Rogers, in Columbus, Ohio, on May 7, 1947. “In shedding my ‘slave name,’” he writes, Harmodius took a new name after the Greek lovers Harmodius and Aristogeiton, recorded in history for assassinating the tyrant Hippias (or Hipparchas) in AD 514 and setting Athens free. The name, he writes, “seemed to fit the mood of my life as a Gay Revolutionary” (Harmodius 1974: ii). “In Exile” was added for effect. The poet David Melnick remembers that Harmodius in Exile took his name during a demonstration against President Richard Nixon at the Republican National Convention in Florida, in one of the first demonstrations by gay people at a US political convention. Melnick writes, “I never met the Aristogeiton who took his drag name at the same time, though years later I was told he visited San Francisco” (pers. comm., February 20, 2013). Harmodius’s activism involved organized protests, consciousness-raising meetings, and flamboyant interventions into public and private spaces. Melnick remembers going with Harmodius to rouse Harvey Milk into acting on behalf of a lesbian friend who had been arrested during a demonstration in September 1974, and remembers his more casual—yet still outlandish—interventions, as “a selfdramatizing apparition” (pers. comm.).
Harmodius was known around San Francisco as a poet, gay rights and AIDS activist, spiritual explorer, and genderfuck “character.” An obituary lovingly described Harmodius as “a suave street-wise Sufi dancer, a magik man” (Bay Area Reporter 1992). Harmodius was a provocative and engaging poet. The poems in his extant collection were written between July 13 and September 8, 1973. Harmodius’s range includes militant cries, paeans of love (to David Greene, the book’s dedicatee), and comic erotic writings. An untitled poem in his unpublished notebook reads as a love poem, as well as a cry of self-determination. Its repeated refrain, “We are the Brothers of the Templar / We are the Faggots from the Flame,” accents the litany of political possibilities that have become available in the historical moment of its writing: “Come out from the Bar rooms darkened / Come out from the Closet Game / Come out from the Men’s room Stinking / And tell the world our name” (Harmodius 1973: 1). Both the manuscript and the edited selection in the published book contain erotic line drawings laid over the text by hand. The drawings—of couples having sex, embracing, or masturbating—draw out the sexual and emotional candor that typifies Harmodius’s writings. In “Sitting with a Candle (Poem for David)”, Harmodius writes a sutra of sorts—a simple, listed, syllabically restrained aphorism: “Sitting. / With a candle? Up my ass! . . . If every one sat. / On just one little candle? / What? / A bright world! This would be” (Harmodius 1974: 21). In “Supreme Act of Copulation,” late in The Poems of Harmodius in Exile, the poet turns this expectation on its head, writing:
Taking your flesh and seed inside me, Feeling your golden juicy wetness in my mouth, . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Knowing this is the supreme act of copulation with nature.
Eating an orange. (Harmodius 1974: 22)
The poem parodies our expectation of erotic self-narration and disclosure, while at the same time eroticizing a pedestrian act, namely, the luridly described encounter with the “flesh and seed” of a simple orange.
Harmodius’s greatest brush with notoriety occurred on the night of July 7, 1979, when he was spending the evening with his lover, Robert Opel—renowned for streaking the 46th Academy Awards ceremony in 1974, during David Niven’s speech, on live television—and cabaret singer Camille O’Grady in Opel’s legendary gallery, Fey-Wey Studios, in San Francisco, a block north of Folsom. Two armed men broke into the gallery and took the three occupants hostage; Opel was fatally shot in the melee. As a result, Jason Dilley recalls, Harmodius became “notorious south of Market Street” (Dilley, pers. comm., March 2, 2013).
In his final years, Harmodius revived his “slave name,” Anthony, and lived in the Bourgeois Palace, a commune on the northwest corner of Castro and Fourteenth streets. His creative and activist activities were sidelined as he became progressively more ill during the late 1980s. Harmodius died of an AIDS-related illness in San Francisco on February 17, 1992, at age 44.
Greene stopped showing his work shortly after a solo exhibition (at Hyde Park Art Center in Chicago) received a scathing review in the New Art Examiner in October 1978. Art critic Candida Finkel dismissed his portraits, insultingly and inaccurately, as “no more interesting than snapshots taken at a Halloween party” (quoted in Greene 2011: 44). Upset by the misrepresentation, on the back of related concerns about the commercial art world, Greene responded with a letter to the editor, which garnered support from critics and artists. H. C. Westermann encouraged Greene, writing, “I think I would rather die than give a critic the satisfaction of knowing they had injured me. . . . Listen David forget the fuckers—critics don’t count, they come and go—what is beautiful though is an artist, such as yourself, trying to do something constructive & beautiful. I think that’s the finest thing in the world” (quoted in Greene 2011: 45). In his turn away from photography, however, Greene confirmed or consolidated his marginalization by art history. Today, his work is primed for “rediscovery,” as an exemplar of queer, LGBT, or subcultural photography in San Francisco in the 1970s. By uncovering and celebrating his corpus, a series of undisclosed, secret, or sidelined histories can also be reconstituted—including, but not limited to, the life and times of Harmodius in Exile.
____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Dominic Johnson is a senior lecturer in the School of English and Drama at Queen Mary, University of London. Johnson is the author of Glorious Catastrophe: Jack Smith, Performance, and Visual Culture (2012), Theatre and the Visual (2012), and The Art of Living: An Oral History of Performance Art (2015) and the editor of four books, including most recently Pleading in the Blood: The Art and Performances of Ron Athey (2013) and Critical Live Art: Contemporary Histories of Performance in the UK (2012).
References
Bay Area Reporter. 1992. “Obituary: Anthony J. Rogers (Harmodius).” March 12. Archived at Obituary Database, Gay and Lesbian Historical Society, San Francisco. obit.glbthistory .org/olo/index.jsp.
Greene, David. Papers, Coll2014-007 (uncatalogued), ONE National Gay and Lesbian Archives, USC Libraries, University of Southern California.
———. Shameless photographs, Coll2013-011, ONE National Gay and Lesbian Archives, USC Libraries, University of Southern California.
———. 2011. Photographs. Chicago: David Greene.
———. 1975. “Shameless.” Vector 37 (October): 37–40.
Harmodius in Exile. 1973. “Untitled (We Are the Brothers of the Templar).” In “Poems of Harmodius in Exile” (unpublished notebook). David Greene Coll2014-007.
———. 1974. The Poems of Harmodius in Exile. San Francisco: GAWK (Gay Artists and Writers
Kollective).
Greene confirms this distinction when he writes, “My approach was distinguished from them in that I sought an openly collaborative art—one in which the subjects had a strong hand in creating the portraits. This came from both aesthetic and political impulses” (Greene, pers. comm., February 23, 2013).
A further, striking photograph shows Harmodius sitting on a bed, pipe in mouth, with an artificial hibiscus behind the poet’s ear, and wearing a facial spray of glitter stars and rhinestones around the eyes and cheekbones. The transformation to total “genderfuckery” is complete. Harmodius’s bushy beard is caked in glitter. A box of costume jewelry lies open on the unmade bed, surrounded by layers of shiny satin sheets. Greene’s works are significant for their formality and respectful sensibility. The images suggest tenderness, beauty, calm, community, and safety, with an attractive veneer, and his sitters tend to demonstrate a personal charisma that suggests poveraopulence and cluttered extravagance. Harmodius’s maximalism is both a political tool and a technique of whimsy, a gesture of serious play that evokes the poet’s commitment to aesthetic, political, and corporeal self-fashioning.
Harmodius in Exile was the author of a rare mimeographed book, The Poems of Harmodius in Exile (1974). The cover featured a double-negative composite photograph by Greene with Harmodius in and out of genderfuck drag, raising a palm to meet him- or herself, while gazing at the camera. Harmodius was born Anthony J. Rogers, in Columbus, Ohio, on May 7, 1947. “In shedding my ‘slave name,’” he writes, Harmodius took a new name after the Greek lovers Harmodius and Aristogeiton, recorded in history for assassinating the tyrant Hippias (or Hipparchas) in AD 514 and setting Athens free. The name, he writes, “seemed to fit the mood of my life as a Gay Revolutionary” (Harmodius 1974: ii). “In Exile” was added for effect. The poet David Melnick remembers that Harmodius in Exile took his name during a demonstration against President Richard Nixon at the Republican National Convention in Florida, in one of the first demonstrations by gay people at a US political convention. Melnick writes, “I never met the Aristogeiton who took his drag name at the same time, though years later I was told he visited San Francisco” (pers. comm., February 20, 2013). Harmodius’s activism involved organized protests, consciousness-raising meetings, and flamboyant interventions into public and private spaces. Melnick remembers going with Harmodius to rouse Harvey Milk into acting on behalf of a lesbian friend who had been arrested during a demonstration in September 1974, and remembers his more casual—yet still outlandish—interventions, as “a selfdramatizing apparition” (pers. comm.).
Harmodius was known around San Francisco as a poet, gay rights and AIDS activist, spiritual explorer, and genderfuck “character.” An obituary lovingly described Harmodius as “a suave street-wise Sufi dancer, a magik man” (Bay Area Reporter 1992). Harmodius was a provocative and engaging poet. The poems in his extant collection were written between July 13 and September 8, 1973. Harmodius’s range includes militant cries, paeans of love (to David Greene, the book’s dedicatee), and comic erotic writings. An untitled poem in his unpublished notebook reads as a love poem, as well as a cry of self-determination. Its repeated refrain, “We are the Brothers of the Templar / We are the Faggots from the Flame,” accents the litany of political possibilities that have become available in the historical moment of its writing: “Come out from the Bar rooms darkened / Come out from the Closet Game / Come out from the Men’s room Stinking / And tell the world our name” (Harmodius 1973: 1). Both the manuscript and the edited selection in the published book contain erotic line drawings laid over the text by hand. The drawings—of couples having sex, embracing, or masturbating—draw out the sexual and emotional candor that typifies Harmodius’s writings. In “Sitting with a Candle (Poem for David)”, Harmodius writes a sutra of sorts—a simple, listed, syllabically restrained aphorism: “Sitting. / With a candle? Up my ass! . . . If every one sat. / On just one little candle? / What? / A bright world! This would be” (Harmodius 1974: 21). In “Supreme Act of Copulation,” late in The Poems of Harmodius in Exile, the poet turns this expectation on its head, writing:
Taking your flesh and seed inside me, Feeling your golden juicy wetness in my mouth, . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Knowing this is the supreme act of copulation with nature.
Eating an orange. (Harmodius 1974: 22)
The poem parodies our expectation of erotic self-narration and disclosure, while at the same time eroticizing a pedestrian act, namely, the luridly described encounter with the “flesh and seed” of a simple orange.
Harmodius’s greatest brush with notoriety occurred on the night of July 7, 1979, when he was spending the evening with his lover, Robert Opel—renowned for streaking the 46th Academy Awards ceremony in 1974, during David Niven’s speech, on live television—and cabaret singer Camille O’Grady in Opel’s legendary gallery, Fey-Wey Studios, in San Francisco, a block north of Folsom. Two armed men broke into the gallery and took the three occupants hostage; Opel was fatally shot in the melee. As a result, Jason Dilley recalls, Harmodius became “notorious south of Market Street” (Dilley, pers. comm., March 2, 2013).
In his final years, Harmodius revived his “slave name,” Anthony, and lived in the Bourgeois Palace, a commune on the northwest corner of Castro and Fourteenth streets. His creative and activist activities were sidelined as he became progressively more ill during the late 1980s. Harmodius died of an AIDS-related illness in San Francisco on February 17, 1992, at age 44.
Greene stopped showing his work shortly after a solo exhibition (at Hyde Park Art Center in Chicago) received a scathing review in the New Art Examiner in October 1978. Art critic Candida Finkel dismissed his portraits, insultingly and inaccurately, as “no more interesting than snapshots taken at a Halloween party” (quoted in Greene 2011: 44). Upset by the misrepresentation, on the back of related concerns about the commercial art world, Greene responded with a letter to the editor, which garnered support from critics and artists. H. C. Westermann encouraged Greene, writing, “I think I would rather die than give a critic the satisfaction of knowing they had injured me. . . . Listen David forget the fuckers—critics don’t count, they come and go—what is beautiful though is an artist, such as yourself, trying to do something constructive & beautiful. I think that’s the finest thing in the world” (quoted in Greene 2011: 45). In his turn away from photography, however, Greene confirmed or consolidated his marginalization by art history. Today, his work is primed for “rediscovery,” as an exemplar of queer, LGBT, or subcultural photography in San Francisco in the 1970s. By uncovering and celebrating his corpus, a series of undisclosed, secret, or sidelined histories can also be reconstituted—including, but not limited to, the life and times of Harmodius in Exile.
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Dominic Johnson is a senior lecturer in the School of English and Drama at Queen Mary, University of London. Johnson is the author of Glorious Catastrophe: Jack Smith, Performance, and Visual Culture (2012), Theatre and the Visual (2012), and The Art of Living: An Oral History of Performance Art (2015) and the editor of four books, including most recently Pleading in the Blood: The Art and Performances of Ron Athey (2013) and Critical Live Art: Contemporary Histories of Performance in the UK (2012).
References
Bay Area Reporter. 1992. “Obituary: Anthony J. Rogers (Harmodius).” March 12. Archived at Obituary Database, Gay and Lesbian Historical Society, San Francisco. obit.glbthistory .org/olo/index.jsp.
Greene, David. Papers, Coll2014-007 (uncatalogued), ONE National Gay and Lesbian Archives, USC Libraries, University of Southern California.
———. Shameless photographs, Coll2013-011, ONE National Gay and Lesbian Archives, USC Libraries, University of Southern California.
———. 2011. Photographs. Chicago: David Greene.
———. 1975. “Shameless.” Vector 37 (October): 37–40.
Harmodius in Exile. 1973. “Untitled (We Are the Brothers of the Templar).” In “Poems of Harmodius in Exile” (unpublished notebook). David Greene Coll2014-007.
———. 1974. The Poems of Harmodius in Exile. San Francisco: GAWK (Gay Artists and Writers
Kollective).
This is the cover of Harmodius's book of poetry. Tony and I made the photograph used on the cover by making a double exposure of him posing in two different outfits on the deck of our apartment in Berkeley in 1974. Tony dressed for each pose to show a different aspect of his gender identity.