Wu Tsang aspires to a state “in-between,” where labels are recognized as the barriers they can all too often be. Lyle Ashton Harris explores the ways in which his blackness and queerness coexist, conflict, and converge. But we aimed to focus on some of the many who have impacted the ways we understand identity, queerness, race, gender, and their intersections in the present.Īmong the profile subjects, Nayland Blake has long created spaces of comfort for everyone regardless of how they might identify. No single issue of a magazine could cover the whole of contemporary queer art, a designation that is itself highly problematic, which, as Editor-in-Chief Sarah Douglas writes in her Editor’s Letter, accounts for the name of this issue. On the occasion of that night’s 50th anniversary, we at ARTnews turned our attention to the movement’s history and its legacy in the art of today. When a police raid that night turned patrons into protestors against harassment that had gone on too long, the legend of the Stonewall Rebellion was born.

Many trace the current state of queer liberation back to the early hours of June 28, 1969, and a New York City bar that would become synonymous with Gay Liberation: the Stonewall Inn. We all live, as the artist Lyle Ashton Harris characterized it to me recently, in “a simultaneity.” Amid all the celebrations and the victories are brutal murders and mass shootings, the rolling back of hard-fought wins for justice, and moments of alienation and othering. That is not to say that America-and the world at large-is safe for the many who identify with the LGBTQ+ community. COURTESY THE ARTIST AND PAVEL ZOUBOK GALLERY, NEW YORKĪs the world has changed over the past half-century, one of the most profound shifts within our society is the way in which queer people have come out, empowered themselves, created communities and families, fought for civil liberties and rights, cared for one other in times of crisis, and celebrated life-proudly and with conviction.

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