Homogenius
Group exhibition featuring recent works by gay artists in Toronto: Stephen Andrews, Alan Belcher, David Buchan, Andy Fabo, Robert Flack, General Idea, Micah Lexier, Ian McKinnon, Wrik Mead, Regan Morris, David Rasmus
Various Media
East and West Galleries

Toronto Artists

HOMOGENIUS

Opening Thursday June 22, 8:00 pm at Mercer Union is an exhibition of recent works by 14 gay artists in Toronto. Presented in conjunction with Gay Pride Week, HOMOGENIUS brings together both veterans of Toronto's art community as well as emerging artists, and will incorporate many divergent materials, strategies and styles largely addressing contemporary gay male concerns.

HOMOGENIUS celebrates the 20th anniversary of an event which took place at a Greenwich Village gay bar known as the Stonewall Inn. The response of the patrons who fought back against a raid on the bar, and the ensuing riot, have become recognized as the symbolic birth of the gay liberation movement, a movement leading to the establishment of a gay press, a range of gay activist organizations, a new consciousness among gays and lesbians, and a greater public awareness of these issues. As artists visible in the Toronto art scene, this collective wanted to underline the importance of sexuality to their art practice.

To complement the exhibition, the collective have commissioned an essay on the history of the local gay art practice by Toronto curator and writer Thomas Folland, produced with the generous support of The Lesbian and Gay Community Appeal, Copies of the essay will be available at the gallery during the exhibition. HOMOGENIUS continues in both Mercer Union's East and West galleries through Saturday July 22.

MEDIA RELEASE SUPPLEMENT

Entitled "Brief as photos", Stephen Andrews' drawing included in this exhibition is derived from a poem by John Berger. An abstract piece using figurative elements, the elements rely on poetic syntax, rather than forming a linear narrative. Stephen Andrews' work has been included in solo and group exhibitions across Canada, as well as in West Berlin and Zurich. He is currently represented by Garnet Press Gallery, Toronto.

Richard Banks will be exhibiting a small selection from a new series of large scale, abstract, monochromatic oil paintings. Richard Banks has participated in group exhibitions in Toronto, Guelph, Winnipeg, Saskatoon and West Berlin, with previous solo exhibitions at YYZ, Mercer Union and Garnet Press Gallery in Toronto.

Two works by Alan Belcher will be included in HOMOGENIUS, "Sheet," 1988, one of a series of five macro-photos of pubic hair mounted on a bedsheet and "Tan Line," 1989, a cibachrome photograph on wood with nails and ropes, depicting a picture of a hip with a tan line mounted on a wooden deck. Alan Belcher has exhibited nationally and internationally in both solo and group exhibitions for the past eight years, and is currently represented by Josh Baer Gallery, New York.

In his piece for HOMOGENIUS, David Buchan continues the appropriation of painting using the photograph as a vehicle for the dialogue between fine art versus commercial art. The notion of sexuality becomes an issue as well in this new work, based on its erotic subject matter. Since 1977, David Buchan has performed and exhibited throughout Canada, as well as in New York, Atlanta, Stuttgart, Frankfurt, Basel, Vienna, Brussels, and Paris. David Buchan is represented by Cold City Gallery, Toronto.

Andy Fabo brings together a collection of ephemeral, light-sensitive blue prints and sepia tones in a work entitled "Auto-da Fé." By citing the Spanish Inquisition where, among others, homosexuals were identified, named as heretics and then burned at the stake, the artist asserts the radicalism of Gay Liberations where gays and lesbians named themselves and actively crested themselves as subjects. Since 1975, Andy Fabo's work has been included in solo and group exhibitions in Canada, England, Germany, Switzerland and the United States. He is currently represented by Garnet Press Gallery, Toronto.

For HOMOGENIUS, Robert Flack has produced two colour photo-animation works entitled "Daisy's Chain" and "(You Make Me Feel) Mighty Reel", which are based upon aspects of the social and psychological positioning of pleasure and identity. Robert Flack's work has been included in solo and group exhibitions in Toronto, St. Catherines, Kingston, Winnipeg, Montreal, Buffalo and Vancouver, as well as Amsterdam, Berlin and Sydney, Australia. Robert Flack is currently represented by Cold City Gallery, Toronto.

General Idea's painting in HOMOGENIUS is entitled "Crème de la Crème de la Crème", oil on canvas, 42" x 42", and is described by this collective as "General Idea's stylized geometric poodle machines go through the motions simulating sex tableau vivant in a post-empire manner". The three member collective comprised of A.A. Bronson, Felix Pertz and Jorge Zontal, was formed in 1968 and have since continued to exhibit extensively both nationally and internationally. General Idea is represented by Koury Wingate, New York.

Micah Lexier's "My Fear" revolves around the theme of a typical gay man's preoccupation with aging: originally the fear of growing older but more recently the fear of not growing older. The work's central image is a larger than life size dictionary illustration of a birthday cake which is animated with light and sound.

"Christmas, 1969" a 'black and white' painting by Ian McKinnon depicts his mother, his aunt and himself as photographed on Christmas of 1969. McKinnon is concerned with the conflict encountered when a factual record, such as a photograph, is mediated by personal memory. In light of the 20th anniversary of Stonewall, the twenty year perspective granted the viewer allows reflection on how individual lives are influenced and altered by larger transitions in society. Since 1982, Ian McKinnon has participated in exhibitions in Toronto, Montreal, Vancouver, London, and Buffalo, New York.

Wrik Mead's works will consist of a series of collages built from steel, rust, photography and paint, depicting human figures surrounded by a cold, hard and decaying environment. A recent graduate of the Ontario College of Art, Wrik Mead's work has been represented in local exhibitions and film screenings since 1986.

An extension of his earlier 'skin' paintings and the works in his recent exhibition, "Derma Logic" at Garnet Press, Regan Morris will be exhibiting a series of branding irons incorporating floral motifs taken from flock wallpaper. Replacing the typical letters and symbols used in traditional branding irons, Morris turns this archaic tool into one used for decoration rather than identification. Regan Morris has exhibited in solo and group exhibitions primarily in Toronto, as well as in Oshawa, Ottawa and New York City since 1984. He is currently represented by Garnet Press Gallery, Toronto.

Regan Morris and Micah Lexier's collaborative work "Your Name Here" combines one of Lexier's laser-cut metal images with Morris' manipulated skin-like surface to create a work which explores issues of masculinity and sexuality. The piece uses a dictionary image of tattooing superimposed over an organic surface patterned with numbers. Although this combination may suggest the kind of identification associated with Nazi Concentration Camp prisoners, it also refers to aspects associated with HIV infection, various medical statistics and monitoring, the 'lottery' of coming in contact with the virus, and the sheer magnitude of those affected.

David Rasmus will be exhibiting two new photo-works which continue his exploration of the photographic portrait as a Pop metaphor and a reminder of our mortality. Since 1979, David Rasmus' work has been represented in solo and group exhibitions in Toronto, Montreal, Ottawa, Banff, Edmonton, Vancouver, Mexico City, Dayton, Ohio, Ravenna, Italy, and Germany.

BROCHURE TEXT:

Stigma: Gay Politics - Gay Aesthetics?

by Tom Folland

Kelly was Lying on his belly, the bed clothes were on the floor--both men were naked. I saw Moore on the top of Kelly working away as if it was a woman. When the alarm was given Moore rose up and I saw his private parts come out of Kelly's body.

From records of sworn evidence before Robert Reynolds, Esq., Her Majesty's Justice of the Peace in Canada West, Western District; April 5, 1842. Quoted in Gary Kinsman, "The Regulation of Desire: Sexuality in Canada"

The suppression of the homosexual component of human sexuality became, and by corollary the oppression of homosexuals...a product of the same system whose rules and relations oppress women.

Gayle Rubin, "The Traffic in Women: Notes Toward a Political Economy of Sex" ("Toward an Anthology Of Women")

"The fact that in the present case a timid homosexual also fits within the same definition as a brutal rapist or a violent homosexual is not a justification for straining the plain meaning of the words of the definition," began John A. Scollin, Counsel for the Respondent, in 1967 during the appeal of the case Everett George Klippert vs. Her Majesty the Queen. Continuing, he added, "Even if such a sex offender as the Appellant is not 'dangerous' in the ordinary sense of the term, he is brought within the definition by the very specific language used.''l [emphasis mine] Brutal, violent, dangerous; his sexuality thus framed and his appeal dismissed, in early November of 1967 forty year old Everett George Klippert was given a life time sentence of preventive detention as a dangerous sexual offender under Section 661 of the Criminal Code of Canada. His offence? On four occasions he was caught having consensual sex with another adult in private. Apart from the psychic terrors of, and prohibitions against sexuality that permeate every discourse from cocktail parties to law and philosophy, it was a criminal act to have consensual intercourse with a member of the same sex until 1969 in Canada. Klippert's case was one that, in part, prompted the Criminal Code reform of 1969 (part of a larger Liberal reform but also a response to pressure from ad hoc gay activist groups and individuals), Bill C-150. The omnibus bill included, as well as amendments concerning sexual offenses laws, abortion reform, gambling and gun control measures. The result was a partial decriminalization of homosexuality summarized by then Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau's famous remark: "The State has no business in the bedrooms of the Nation." 2 The reform, while following the lead of the British reform a year or two earlier (informed by the 1957 Wolfenden report recommending a laxing of the laws regarding homosexuality), was essentially the fallout of what heterosexual law in Canada could really tolerate of this "dangerous", "brutal" and "violent" (homo)sexuality. Turning to the artificial construction of a public/private distinction (one that we now see increasingly defined by corporate control of the public sphere and a state defined notion of the private), Bill C- 150 retained visibility as a criminal offence--if it can be seen it is illegal: gay porn, washroom sex, park cruising, "bawdy-houses" (gay bars were even subject to increased police surveillance and harassment after 1969). The cost of the reform for gay sexuality was a consignment to invisibility (or so it was wished) and, paradoxically, an increased monitoring. "Its opponents," writes Stuart Russel, "protested that it had 'legalized homosexuality'. Its supporters hailed that it would ring in a new era of 'sexual reform'. However...the Bill did nothing to significantly alter the situation of gays." 3 What the reform did do was recognize the extent to which the existing code was unenforceable and thus reframe gay sexuality as not a legal problem--not, that is, if it confined itself to the psycho-social conventions of heterosexuality--but a moral, medical and psychological problem. In essence still a problem.

This exhibition of gay artists, Homogenius, opens in tandem with Lesbian and Gay Pride Day (only recently given tentative status as an official event), and marks the 20th anniversary of Bill C-150. It also marks: 20 years since the Stonewall riots in New York when gay and lesbians openly fought back against police harassment; 18 years since the first cross-Canada gay liberation demonstration on Parliament Hill demanding a repeal of all anti-gay laws, a demonstration noted as the birth of the gay liberation movement in Canada.4 And yet, in 1975, 65 gay people were in jail under Section 157 of the Criminal Code of Canada that states: "Every one who commits an act of gross indecency with another person is guilty of an indictable offence and is liable to imprisonment for five years."5 And yet, police raids upon Montreal bars in 1976, in Toronto the bath-house raids of the late seventies and early eighties, a rash of public washroom arrests in southern Ontario as recently as last year. And yet, in November of 1988 at a lecture by British AIDS activist Simon Whatney, advertised as "The Homosexual Body", three plain-clothes policemen were in attendance. Alongside of all this, with the advent of AIDS, there has been the call for new laws of quarantines, detentions...all in accordance with the Criminal Code reform of 1969, or at least according to its logic. For the code was not meant to condone or "tolerate" homosexuality (this is evident from the parliamentary debates prior to the code's amendment), but only to bring it under enforceable state control. The reform must therefore be seen in light of a continuing project of redefining and surveilling sexuality.

In this sense, any mythical notion of historical progress, of any kind of sexual revolution, of any kind of gain (this is not of course to minimize the very real and important gains that have been made in Canadian gay history, and it might be noted, largely through gay activism), any linear concept of progressive history should be taken with a fair dose of skepticism. As with legalized abortion--which seemed a fait accompli in the early seventies laws exist to be revoked at any time whenever it serves the needs of the state. History is more about construction or creation than continuity. The term "homosexual" has not existed for all time; prior to the 1860s, sexual practices of any kind were not associated with a specific type of individual. With the reformation of urban social space under nineteenth-century Capitalism, the "homosexual" as a specific kind of person was literally wrenched into being. Like the nineteenth century scholars of pornography and prostitution, sexologists emerged and felt compelled to study this new vile sexual being in all the various manifestations of his (the studies were predominantly concerned with males) sexuality. Havelock Ellis would distinguish between congenital and acquired "inversion" (the popular term for homosexuality in the late nineteenth century); Karl Heinrich Ulrich came up with the "third sex"; Krafft-Ebing gave name to a new "disorder": masochism, named after Leopold von Sacher-Masoch.6 Freud, whose theories on sexuality are anything but unequivocal, would divide inversion into three categories; absolute, amphigenic and contingent.7 Others would claim homosexuality to be a larger social symptom of degeneracy, claiming the fate of Ancient Rome as a predecessor. All of this, of course, suggests the irreducibility of this homosexual self implicit within the various attempts to contain it. In effect it was necessary to see all the signs emitted by the homosexual body as linked to its sexuality. "Nothing that went into his total composition," Michel Foucault writes, "was unaffected by his sexuality. It was everywhere present in him: at the root of all his actions...written immodestly on his face and body because it was a secret that always gave itself away."8 Foucault has written of sexuality as part of a long history constituting the western body, a history of controlling and surveilling the body in all its myriad manifestations of being; sexuality is one of the most recent and pervasive of the Western technologies of the self. In being turned inside out, the body was found (by psychoanalysis, by law, by medicine), to speak its ultimate truth, its sexuality; the ultimate unification of the social body.

[T]he potential for anti-capitalist struggle is greater than ever. New political subjects...have arisen on the political terrain and have occupied a mass of democratic positions infinitely more diverse than those existing at the beginning of the century or even on the eve of the second world war. Yet, on the other hand, to link these positions together--that is, to transform them into popular positions towards the goal of constituting a "people"--is more difficult than ever. Any new hegemony must begin with this fundamental fact and must construct forms of popular equivalencies which exclude all authoritarian unification. 9

the notion of a single "gay community" is ultimately unhelpful and unconvincing. For whilst we may collectively resist particular instances of injustices, campaign for the improvement of our civil liberties, and celebrate and support ourselves within a culture of sexual affirmation, this does not imply any essential unity to homosexual desire as such. 10

Ernesto Laclau, in the article I have cited above, speaks of "[n]ew political subjects [that] have arisen on the political terrain," and then presents, somewhat surprising in its unlikely pairing, a list: "the feminist and ecology movements, racial minorities, nationalist and sexual groups, struggles within institutions," suggesting Antonio Gramsci's "war of positions" in a transformation to socialism that excludes the unitary mirage of the singular subject of history. Fredric Jameson (whose notion of history implicitly clings to that unified subject) writes that "the only authentic cultural production today has seemed to be that which can draw on the collective experience of marginal pockets of the social life of the world system," and then similarly proposes a list: "black literature and blues, British working-class rock, women's literature, gay literature, the 'roman quebecois'."1l Another surprising list, one that, while underscoring the very plurality of contemporary political struggles, ultimately has the effect of reducing the contradictions, the shared agendas, the differences to a simple list within a larger schema, a list that after acknowledging such struggles conflates them all under the aegis of a kind of radical formalism (giving new meaning, perhaps, to the traditional criticism of post-Marxism, "history without a human subject"). That is to say, one finds one's own struggle enlisted only for the purposes of subsuming it under a larger and unspecific broader agenda, co-determinous with traditional leftist theory and politics. Within such theory and practice, as Douglas Crimp has pointed out, "gay issues are the most marginal of political issues...gay struggles are mentioned only phatically, usually as the final word in a phrase like 'black, women and gays.'12 The history of the antagonism and reluctance to address sexual politics within the left is well documented 13 (Pier Paolo Pasolini, exiled and murdered member of the Italian Communist Party, is perhaps the emblematic figure of that antagonism). Less well documented is the (recent) history within the art world of, after years of "sexual difference" exhibitions, a reluctance to address sexuality outside the binary division of gender. That Phillip Monk's 1983 exhibition Subjects in Pictures, and its accompanying essay Axis of Difference, received so much more critical attention than, say, last year's Sight Specific exhibition at A Space of lesbian artists, has less to do, perhaps, with their hierarchical positions within the art world (or even, as it could be argued, the differing theoretical conceits of each), than with, as Leo Bersani has recently argued, "a certain refusal to speak frankly about gay sex," a refusal that finds itself couched in the most displaced and abstract theoretical forms 14--or not acknowledged at all--a refusal that would perhaps partially explain Crimp's assertion above that "gay issues are the most marginal of political issues." And, it should be added, aesthetic issues. Why, for example, do art historians generally not consider Courbet's painting The Origins of the World, a painting of a drastically foreshortened and cropped woman's genital area, in relation to his oeuvre? Or why the belated publishing of William Burroughs' novel Queer, three decades after it was written? In Craig Owens' important essay "The Discourse of Others: Feminists and Postmodernism" he titles a section of his essay "A Remarkable Oversight", a section in which he addresses a previous essay by him on performance artist Laurie Anderson. "In my eagerness to rewrite Anderson's work in terms of the debate over determinate versus indeterminate meaning," he writes, "I had overlooked something...an image of sexual difference."15 Owens' remarkable oversight is doubly determined; by, on the one hand, his professed inability to read a work by Anderson in terms of its relation to sexual difference, and on the other, his failure to locate his own sexuality within the parameters of his text and, perhaps more importantly, the field of sexual politics he outlines. Oddly enough, he discusses a work by Martha Rosler with a quote from an interview between Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze: "the indignity of speaking for others."16 An indignity, it turns out, not only to those others but also to himself.

Now of course people do speak frankly about sex insofar as it is institutionally defined, monitored and assigned its particular place with regard to morality and the law. Many people feel they can "tolerate" gay sexuality as long as it is confined to a kind of unspoken private realm, but its public discourse must constantly be suppressed or made into a kind of scandalous "issue". Gays on television, for example, are never just there naturally, as it were, but become spectacles of traumatic social scenarios, ones that must be resolved, accounted for or banished from the tranquil realm of the happy home. These are, of course, the social constructions of sexuality. More difficult is the problem of an inherent definition, one imposed and taken on, that overrides, it would seem, other social and psychical definitions. That is to say, if someone can be momentarily considered apart from the identification by class, race, physical disability or particular political beliefs, it is much more difficult to disassociate oneself from sex. "Are we sex by nature?" Foucault asks:

Well then, let it be but in its singularity, and in its irreducible specificity. Let us draw the consequences from it and reinvent our own type of political, cultural and economic existence....Always the same movement: take off from this sexuality in which movements can be colonized, go beyond them in order to reach other affirmations. 17

Dworkin is, however, not concerned with any kind of historicist premise. Her argument ultimately refuses to see the body as the locus of many investive forces or as, in other words, historically constituted. She draws mostly from a very heterogeneous (historically, geographically and otherwise) collection of literature to buttress an argument about intercourse as a fundamental violation of women's bodies, with an almost ontological bent about the murderous brutality of heterosexuality. Dworkin's stigmatized sexuality is a passive kind, one she finds in reading Tennessee William's "The Rose Tattoo" and "A Streetcar named Desire". While Blanche Dubois' sexuality is characterized by a capacity to feel and a sense of human consciousness, Stanley (who eventually rapes her) has no such feeling; his brutal (and very male) sexuality, Dworkin argues, "has no remorse; the rape is just another fuck for him."20 Now, of course, it could be argued that what Williams describes is really homosexual desire through the veil of an accepted form of literary female sexuality. What the important point is here is that Dworkin argues a politics of penetration articulated around a patriarchal and phallic heterosexuality; Leo Bersani will make the same point when he compares Dworkin to Foucault insofar as he sees them making the same claim: "to be penetrated is to abdicate power." 21 The hierarchical genital organization of patriarchy is disturbed, of course, by any such abdication of power (thus Marcuse in the 1960s would argue for a polymorphous sexuality as a libidinal-political act). Freud's willingness to accept, however hesitantly, deviation from the norm of heterosexual object relations, carefully tip-toes around this apple cart of institutionalized heterosexual power.22 The policing of female and gay sexuality makes sense in this regard since they appear as dangerous to this power, as does the predominate absence of lesbian desire (never really mentioned at all in the 1969 Criminal Code reform). The same man who can flip through endless spreads of Penthouse versions of lesbian sex will probably admit to an opinion poll a profound discomfort at the prospect of sitting next to a gay man on a bus.

Sexual identities are ultimately not, Andrea Dworkin notwithstanding, stable positions. We know, or think we know, from Lacan, that:

The unconscious undermines the subject from any position of certainty, from any relation of knowledge to his or her psychic processes and history, and simultaneously reveals the fictional nature of the sexual category to which every human subject is none the less assigned. 23

...if the good citizens of Arcadia, Florida, could chase from their midst an average, law-abiding family, it is, I would suggest, because in looking at three hemophiliac children they may have seen-that is, unconsciously represented--the infinitely more seductive and intolerable image of a grown man, legs high in the air, unable to resist the suicidal ecstasy of being a woman." 24

Art functions as a site for numerous inscriptions and representations of the dominant social order. It either affirms that system's logic (by offering aesthetic apologies in the guise of expression or autonomy), or transgresses it by turning those representational codes in upon themselves revealing not their timeless, transcendent or seemingly natural conditions but their utterly historicist, contextual and constructed reality. Alternatively, art can also conjure up new contexts, the backdrop against which it must be read. Although there could never be such a thing as a cohesive social/sexual identity since it is undercut by so many divisive factors (and since sexuality is, as well, if we adopt Bersani' s argument, primarily anti social), there can only be a provisional and pragmatic identity--the success, to a degree, of the battle waged against government genocide concerning AIDS by gay activism is a good example of an identity assumed for pragmatic ends. Homogenius represents such a divisive homogeneity (apart from its lack of gays from the working class and ethnic backgrounds). Consisting of a variety of artists who have exhibited before in different contexts (and will do so again), it is a spurious unity to be sure, a unity that one could say, at this particular historical juncture, is a very necessary one.

NOTES:

1. John A. Scollin, Everett George Klippert vs. Her Majesty the Queen, The Supreme Court of Canada (Yellowknife: Court of Appeal for the North West Territories, 1967), p. 5

2. For a more detailed account of Bill C-150 see Gary Kinsman, The Regularion of Desire: Sexuality in Canada (Montreal: Black Rose Books, 1987), pp. 164-172

3. Stuart Russel, "Canada's Anti-Gay Laws: What They Are and Why the Difficulty in Changing Them", McGill University, November 28, 1975, p. 1 (Canadian Gay Archives)

4.StuartRussel,Ibid., p.4

5. "Criminal Code", Pevised Statutes of Canada, vol. II, 1970, p. 1574, quoted in Stuart Russel, op. cit.

6. See Geoffrey Weeks, Sexuality (New York: Tavistock Publications, 1986), pp. 19-66.

7. Sigmund Freud, Three Essays on Sexuality,(l905) trans., James Strachey (New York: Avon Books, 1962) p. 23

8. Michel Foucault The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1, An Introduction, trans., Robert Hurley (Vintage Books: New York, 1980), p. 43.

9. Ernesto Laclau, "'Socialism', the 'People', 'Democracy': The Transformation of Hegemonic Logic", trans., Roddey Reid, Social Text (Spring/Summer 1983): 119

10. Si non Whatney, Policing Desire: Pornography, AIDS and the Media (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), p.25

11. Fredric Jameson, "Reification and Utopia in Mass Culture", Social Text 1 (1979): 140

12. Douglas Crimp, "Strategies of Public Address: Which Media, Which Publics?", Dia Art Foundation: Discussions in Contemporary Culture (Seattle: Bay Press, 1987), p. 32

13. See, for example, Toby Marotta The Politics of Homosexuality (Boston: Houghton Mifflen Company, 1981), pp. 100-131

14. Leo Bersani, 'Ys the Rectum a Grave?", Oc~ober 43 (1987): 221

15. Craig Owens, "The Discourse of Others: Feminists and Postmodernism", The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodernism, ed., Hal Foster (Port Townsend, Washington: Bay Press, 1983), ~p. 60. Owens accounts, somewhat, for his omission in Owens, "Outlaws: Gay Men in Feminism", Men in Feminism, eds., Alice Jardine and Paul Smith (New York: Metheun, Inc., 1987), pp. 219-232

16. Owens, "The Discourse of Others", p. 69

17. Michel Foucault, "End of the Monarchy of Sex", Serniotext(e):Foucault Live (Interviews 1966-84), trans., John Johnston, ed., Slyvere Lotringer (1989): 144

18. Marotta, The Politics of Homosexuality, p. 112

19. Andrea Dworkin, Intercourse (New York: The Free Press, 1987), p. 35
20. Ibid.: 44

21. Bersani, "Is the Rectum a Grave?", p. 212

22. A norm, he admits, in much need of analysis: "Thus from the point of view of psychoanalysis the exclusive sexual interest felt by men for women is also a problem that needs elucidating and is not a self-evident fact..." Freud, Three Essays on Sexuality, p.33

23. Jacqueline Rose, "Introduction II", Feminine Sexuality: Jacques Lacan and the ecole freudienne, eds., Jacqueline Rose and Juliet Mitchell, trans., Jacqueline Rose (New York: W.W. Norton ~ Company Inc., 1985), p. 29

24. Bersani, "Is the Rectum a Grave?", p. 211-212

25. Leo Bersani, The Freudian Body: Psychoanalysis and Art (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), p. 41

26. Bersani, "Is the Rectum a Grave?", p. 218

This essay was commissioned by the artists to be published in conjunction with the exhibition Homogenius held at Mercer Union from June n to July 22, 1989.

Homogenius is an exhibition of recent work by gay male artists in Toronto including Stephen Andrews, Richard Banks, Alan Belcher, David Buchan, Andy Fabo, Robert Flack, General Idea, Micah Lexier, Ian McKinnon, Wrik Mead, Regan Morris & David Rasmus.

The commissioning of this essay and its printing were made possible by the generous assistance of The Lesbian and Gay Community Appeal of Toronto.

Mercer Union gratefully acknowledges the support of The Ontario Arts Council, The Canada Council, The Municipality of Metropolitan Toronto - Cultural Affairs Division, The City of Toronto through The Toronto Arts Council and The Government of Ontario through The Ministry of Culture & Communications.