With Gay Pride month coinciding with nationwide protests over racial injustice, how should we observe Pride this year?
My first experiences with gay pride day was a picnic at San Pedro Springs Park with ice chests filled with beer and friends taking mushrooms or whatever fashionable recreational drug of the late 1970s. We were together in queer solidarity, simple, quaint and charming, centered on living to be the ultimate best self in safety and unapologetically in our disco shoes. I have cultural currency when I say these two pandemics (AIDS and coronavirus) in addition to the global awareness of anti-racism and police brutality are helping me reflect on surviving as well as continuing to make a life through art. Hate and uncertainty are strengthening my love and emotional bonds with family, lovers and friends. More than ever, with gay pride I question what is truly important and how others live their daily reality. … For me the Pride never stops!
Has LGBTQ+ identity influenced your creative output in any way? If so, how?
From past to present, my joto identity is part of my DNA, mi conciencia, mi vida. Currently, I have reached new levels of awareness through reflection. There is wisdom in age. My intent has always been for the audience to understand my perspective, and maybe say, “I respect you because of the manner in which you are presenting yourself.” By contextualizing the content and putting all the cards on the table and saying, “Please accept and understand me! Do not just tolerate me.” In 2010, Bihl Haus Arts hosted my exhibition “Ancient Guardians of the Sky,” which included a new painting series plus several site-specific installations. “The Chapel Of Love” was an installation within the exhibit focused on marriage, commitment and inherited gender roles. The main component was a vintage lace wedding dress suspended in a small alcove. On the floor below, a pair of men’s wingtip shoes was flanked by a pair of white leather baby shoes. This tender montage was juxtaposed with black-and-white vintage photographs of sexually aroused nude men and religious statuary embellished with phallic accoutrements. The installation made the point that a spiritual union is more than a piece of paper and valid regardless of gender or religious beliefs. As Rita Urquijo-Ruiz points out in the exhibition catalogue, this “highlights the duplicity of homophobes who are closeted gay men only discovered when caught illicitly soliciting sex in public restrooms.” Because of the risk Bihl Haus took by presenting queer culture, the reward came later when “Ancient Guardians of the Skies” was selected as one of the best exhibitions of 2010 by the San Antonio Express-News.
Which LGBTQ+ artists (living or dead) have made impressions on you or your work?
Playwrights Virginia Grise and Oscar Wilde, painter Frida Kahlo, slam poet Joyous Windrider Jiménez and painter Caravaggio are some of my inspirations.
What does LGBTQ+ Pride mean to you? Does it spark visuals or memories beyond parades and rainbow flags?
Pride is everyday self-love. Pride is a couple who has been together for over 50 years. Pride is young non-binary relationships giddy with novelty. Pride is the memory of friends’ lives lost to AIDS. Pride is a big, juicy, intact cock. Pride is profound lesbian love. Pride is a sincere feeling of self, true humility and satisfaction of being you.
Where do you see the role of artists within the realm of politics?
In my opinion, the role of the artist within the realm of politics is as varied as the medium one chooses to use. When I speak of art and politics, I think of my connection to community and wish for an economically satisfying, safe, living human condition. Therefore, I personally cannot/will not separate my politics from my life’s work. To be honest is to be political. Telling our stories, nuestros cuentos, is an important conscious fundamental act. To coin an old phrase and appropriate a new version, I repeat what I have heard, “Silence = Death” — “Trump = Death.”
Has quarantine affected your work in any surprising ways?
These pandemics and global protests are helping me reflect on making a life through art. It is strengthening my emotional bonds with family, lovers and friends more than ever. I create installations from floor to ceiling and I sometimes don’t have time to detail the paintings that are within that installation. The queerantine has given me time to embellish three recent paintings that were exhibited but not totally completed. I’m currently (re)working the two paintings that were on exhibit in the McNay “TransAmerica/n: Gender Identity and Appearance Today” installation “El Arcoiris” and another painting for the installation “Make Water Pure Again/Bring My Baby Back to Life Again” at the Mexican Cultural Institute I have come to the understanding that, similarly to the portrait of Dorian Grey, my paintings have a life of their own. All of my work is fueled by love, memory and emotion which grow, change and blossom with joy.
Courtesy of David Zamora Casas
David Zamora Casas, Madre Inmigrante
