FAGGOTS

The genesis of Faggots was an incident I experienced in the 1990’s. My partner Charles and I were working in the yard of a friend's house when a man in a truck drove by and yelled "Faggot". I instinctively shouted back "Who, me?" and he said, "No, not you, the other guy". This begged the question of what constituted a "faggot" in the eyes of the beholder, i.e. what does a “faggot” look like? Was it the clothes Charles was wearing or some coded aspect in his demeanor that caught the eye of this (presumably) straight man? Can a person classify otherness by using evidence gathered from a glance, randomly negating identity from afar?

To address these questions, I invited gay men to pose in a completely neutral environment, eyes to camera, arms at the side, standing on the same mark, eliminating any nuances of lighting, focal length and pose that usually work to convey information regarding a subject’s status and interior life. The repetition of pose and setting exploits the camera’s, and the general population's, claims to objectivity, reducing the visible differences between those pictured to their most basic physical characteristics. Faggots was the basis for a one-person exhibition of seventy photographs at The Grey Art Gallery (1994) and portions of which have been shown and published extensively in the ensuing years.