Gay Gotham: Art and Underground Culture in New York brings to life the queer creative networks that sprang up in the city across the 20th century—a series of artistic subcultures whose radical ideas had lasting effects on the mainstream. Co-curator Stephen Vider says that Jewish artists’ outness about Jewishness fits with a kind of sense of separateness that gay artists felt.
“Gay Gotham,” the landmark new show at the Museum of the City of New York, doesn’t directly address the Jewish experience.
But culture impresario Lincoln Kirstein and maestro Leonard Bernstein, are among the ten figures the exhibit explores.
“Through both men, we tell different stories about just how ‘out’ artists could be in that period [of the 1960s],” says Stephen Vider, a co-curator of the exhibit. “Kirstein’s bi, and married to [painter] Paul Cadmus’ sister. Bernstein’s also married, but having relationships with men, which his wife knew about. They represent an important turning point in the story we’re telling — that of defining American art created by queer artists who aren’t necessarily openly queer to audiences.”
Told in three chapters across two sprawling galleries, the exhibition is built around the notion of “queer networks” that began sprouting in the early 20th century – artistic tribes whose radical thinking ultimately trickled up to the mainstream.
There are more than 225 works of art in the show, along with now-poignant ephemera such as nightclub invitations and personal scrapbooks.
The exhibit also features the work of Deb Margolin, whose routines include a Yiddish version of West Side Story’s “America”; Tony Kushner, whose “Angels in America” provided a groundbreaking navigation of gay and Jewish themes; and Paul Rudnick, whose essay “Is Everybody Gay” brightens a glass case of late-20th-century gay literature.
“The Rudnick essay, written for the 25th anniversary of Stonewall, parallels Lenny Bruce’s idea about Jewishness,” Vider says. Bruce famously joked that living in New York means you’re Jewish even if you’re not.
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