Proud at OCAD U Library

The poodle as emblem in the subversive multimedia works of the influential Canadian collective Founded in Toronto in 1969 by AA Bronson, Felix Partz and Jorge Zontal, General Idea implemented media critique and queer theory in paintings, posters, photographs, installations, videos, magazines and other multiples. Known for "its wit, pampered presence and ornamental physique," the poodle arrived into the visual lexicon of General Idea in the early 1980s and quickly became a vehicle by which the group addressed issues ranging from sexual stereotypes to the commodification of contemporary art. However, beyond its use as an agent of subtle yet substantive political and social critique, the poodle also served as a kind of heraldic device--an emblem for the mythology of General Idea and its processes of mythmaking. Through its various incarnations of the poodle, General Idea strived for a metanarrative that skirted the boundaries between artifact and artifice; history and fantasy; truth and fiction.

Kiss My Genders celebrates the work of more than 20 international artists whose practices explore and engage with gender fluidity, as well as non-binary, trans and intersex identities.Featuring works from the late 1960s and early 1970s through to the present, and focusing on artists who draw on their own experiences to create content and forms that challenge accepted or stable definitions of gender. Working across painting, immersive installations, sculpture, text, photography and film, many of these artists treat the body as a sculpture, and in doing so open up new possibilities for gender, beauty, and representations of the human form. This publication includes texts from writers, theorists, curators, poets and artists who have made key contributions to thinking in the field. From pop culture and gender dissidence to the embrace of the 'monstrous' or 'freaky', from the politics of prose to trans-feminism and politics on the street, each of these writers throws light on a different way of seeing. Also featured is a round-table discussion between a selection of artists and exhibition curator Vincent Honoré. In addition to these original texts, the book reprints a key text by Renate Lorenz and includes poetry by Travis Alabanza, Jay Bernard and Nat Raha. Published on the occasion of the exhibition, Kiss My Genders at Hayward Gallery, London (12 June - 8 September 2019).

A spectacular book showing life and work of the Finnish icon from an unknown perspective with around 150 illustrations and well researched texts. Tom of Finland has became the most famous and influential Finnish artist of the 20th century. Born Touko Laaksonen in 1920, his iconic depiction of self-confident and life-affirming gayness gave decisive impulses to the international gay movements from the 1960s onwards. But although we clearly associate his portrayals of sensual and powerful cowboys, farm hands, soldiers and leathermen with the USA, Tom of Finland's rise to gay icon received the game-changing impetus neither in his native Finland nor in the USA. It was, of all places, the city of Hamburg and Tom's friendship with key exponents of the local gay scene in the early 1970s that helped him to his first exhibition ever. He even created a grand mural for the legendary "Tom's Bar", until today the only one legitimately named after him. Regular commissions to design posters and ads for gay events in Hamburg allowed him to launch his artistic career after quitting his day job as advertising executive, and led to the creation of the most extensive private collection of his drawings to date. Galerie Judin is now devoting an exhibition and a comprehensive publication to these seminal, but thus far little researched years, the art they generated and the friendships they formed.

Collection of the caricatures and portraits of 27 writers and artists that appeared in the magazine over the previous decade, accompanied by excerpts from biographical articles by many of the magazine's contributors over the past 27 years.

In the spirit of Richard Avedon, this book contains striking photographic portraits of 10,000 people from across the US, bringing readers face to face with LGBTQ America. The Declaration of Independence states that it is self-evident that we are all created equal. Millions of people in the US, however, are deprived of basic rights merely because they aren't heteronormative. Believing that it's impossible to deny the humanity of anyone once you look into their eyes, iO Tillett Wright embarked on an ambitious project to photograph the faces of people across the country who identify as anything other than 100% straight or cisgender. This enormous undertaking--10,000 people from all fifty states, shot over a nearly ten-year period--is presented in its entirety in this aweinspiring book. In these pages readers will encounter faces of every complexion, lined with age or punctuated with piercings, smiling broadly or deadly serious. While some faces are famous, most are familiar. They may look like your grandmother, your neighbor, your mail carrier, or your doctor. Each of these images tells a personal story. And each of these stories has the power to transform stereotypes into complex views of a multifaceted group of people. Self Evident Truths asks fundamental questions about identity and freedom while proving that the concepts of sexuality and gender are not black and white. They are 10,000 beautiful, bold, and unapologetic shades of queer.

Explore the stunning, moving, and exciting work of visual artist-activist Zanele Muholi   Born in South Africa in 1972, Zanele Muholi came to prominence in the early 2000s with photographs that sought to envision black lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, queer, and intersex lives beyond deviance or victimhood. Muholi's work challenges hetero-patriarchal ideologies and representations, presenting the participants in their photographs as confident and beautiful individuals bravely existing in the face of prejudice, intolerance, and, frequently, violence. While Muholi's intimate photographs of others launched their international career, their intense self-portraits solidified it. The illustrations include images from the key series Muholi has produced over the past 20 years, as well as never-before-published and recent works. This book, and the exhibition it accompanies, present the full breadth of Muholi's photographic and activist practice.    

Imagining Everyday Life surveys the expansive field of vernacular photography, the vast archive of utilitarian images created for bureaucratic structures, commercial usage and personal commemoration, as opposed to elite aesthetic purposes. As a crucial extension of its ongoing investigation of vernacular photography, The Walther Collection has collaborated with key scholars and critical thinkers in the history of photography, women's studies, queer theory, Africana studies and curatorial practice to interrogate vernacular's theoretical limits, as well as to conduct case studies of a striking array of objects and images, many from the collection's holdings. From identification portraits of California migrant workers, physique photographs that circulated underground in queer communities, to one-of-a-kind commemorative military albums from Louisiana to Vietnam, these richly illustrated essays treat a breadth of material formats, social uses and shared communities, offering new ways to consider photography in relation to our political affiliations, personal agency and daily rituals. By reconsidering the multiple contexts and meanings of often-overlooked photographic practices, Imagining Everyday Life is a groundbreaking contribution- articulating the vital debates and complexities within an energizing new field. It is critical in thinking about vernacular photography and the history of photography to recuperate or salvage objects whose backstories have often been lost or curtailed. These vernacular photographs are documents of social histories that would not otherwise be explored; they are key historical artifacts of suppressed or oppressed lives, and studying them is a way to reanimate their histories.

Examining increasingly fluid notions of masculinity over the past six decades, this book offers a culturally diverse collection of work from some of the world's most celebrated photographers. This photographic exploration draws together the work of approximately fifty artists of different ethnicities, generations, and gender identities to look at how ideas of masculinity have evolved since the 1960s. [...] Each chapter in the book opens with an essay by a key thinker in the fields of art, history, culture, and queer studies. Spanning decades and continents, this exploration shows how increasingly difficult it is to define masculinity.

"This book is all about fearless queer photography." i-D / Vice Art, more than anything, opens up the possibility of approaching one's own sexuality beyond the limits imposed by taboos. Not only does it allow for a risk-free, playful exploration of gender and forbidden desires, but it is unique in capturing its contradictions. In recent years, a young and active queer photography scene has emerged, helped in large part by social media. Indulging their desire for self-presentation, affirmation, and reflection, many photographers portray male homosexuality in particular as a private idyll. At the same time, they shine a critical light on their own and society's approach to transsexuality and gender roles and expose the corrupting but also affirmative power of pornography. Films, series, and mainstream cultural appropriation suggest that society has largely embraced queer lifestyles. However, a number of documentary photographers provide evidence that being gay or lesbian can still lead to marginalization, isolation, stigmatization, and violence in certain countries and communities. Their works also take the regime of sexuality itself into account and show that many bans on same-sex contact have colonial origins. This carefully researched and richly designed book introduces 52 contemporary photographers, including those of well-established notoriety as well as plenty of unknown and less well-known talent.

An original examination of the ubiquity of glitter-from bodily adornment to activist glitter bombing-and its vibrant and transformational properties. Glitter is everywhere, from crafting to makeup, from vagazelling to glitter-bombing, from fashion to fish. Glitter also gets everywhere. It sticks to what it is and isn't supposed to, and travels beyond its original uses, eliciting reactions ranging from delight to irritation.In Glitterworlds, Rebecca Coleman examines this ubiquity of glitter, following it as it moves across different popular cultural worlds and exploring its effect on understandings and experiences of gender, sexuality, class and race. Coleman investigates how girls engage with glitter in collaging workshops to imagine their futures; how glitter can adorn the outside and the inside of the body; how glitter features in the films Glitter and Precious; and how LGBTQ* activists glitter bomb homophobic and transphobic people. Throughout, Coleman attends to the plurality of politics that glitter generates, approaching this through the concepts of hope, wonder, fabulation, and prefigurative politics-all of which indicate the making of different, better worlds, although often not in ways that are straightforward or conventional.

Key artists' writings that have influenced and catalyzed contemporary queer artistic practice. Historically, "queer" was the slur used against those who were perceived to be or made to feel abnormal. Beginning in the 1980s, "queer" was reappropriated and embraced as a badge of honor. While queer draws its politics and affective force from the history of non-normative, gay, lesbian, and bisexual communities, it is not equivalent to these categories, nor is it an identity. Rather, it offers a strategic undercutting of the stability of identity and of the dispensation of power that shadows the assignment of categories and taxonomies. Artists who identify their practices as queer today call forth utopian and dystopian alternatives to the ordinary, adopt outlaw stances, embrace criminality and opacity, and forge unprecedented kinships, relationships, loves, and communities. Rather than a book of queer theory for artists, this is a book of artists' queer tactics and infectious concepts. By definition, there can be no singular "queer art."

From the author of The Witch Boy trilogy comes a graphic novel about family, romance, and first love.Fifteen-year-old Morgan has a secret: She can't wait to escape the perfect little island where she lives. She's desperate to finish high school and escape her sad divorced mom, her volatile little brother, and worst of all, her great group of friends...who don't understand Morgan at all. Because really, Morgan's biggest secret is that she has a lot of secrets, including the one about wanting to kiss another girl.Then one night, Morgan is saved from drowning by a mysterious girl named Keltie. The two become friends and suddenly life on the island doesn't seem so stifling anymore.But Keltie has some secrets of her own. And as the girls start to fall in love, everything they're each trying to hide will find its way to the surface...whether Morgan is ready or not.

The eight delightfully eerie stories in Apsara Engine are a subtle intervention into everyday reality. A woman drowns herself in a past affair, a tourist chases another guest into an unforeseen past, and a nonbinary academic researches postcolonial cartography. Imagining diverse futures and rewriting old mythologies, these comics delve into strange architectures, fetishism, and heartbreak. Painted in rich, sepia-toned watercolors, Apsara Engine is Bishakh Som's highly anticipated debut work of fiction. Showcasing a series of fraught, darkly humorous, and seemingly alien worlds--which ring all too familiar--Som captures the weight of twenty-first-century life as we hurl ourselves forward into the unknown.

In The Pleasure of the Text, Sami Alwani weaves together themes of art induced dissociation, queer intergenerational polyamory, racial capitalism and esoteric mystical experiences into 20 slice of life comic stories that are equal parts comedy and tragedy. These stories question society and individual identity. A talking baby philosophizes away his own emotions. A half-man, half-dog cartoonist's spirit burns too bright when he alienates the entire alternative comics industry, drunk on his own power. A friendly ghost survives COVID quarantine with the help of CBD pot cookies and essential oil diffusers. There's something for everyone in this cheerful volume collecting all of award-winning Alwani's previous work to date (Vice, Now) with plenty of never-before-seen material.

Bron and Ray are a queer couple who enjoy their role as the fun weirdo aunties for Ray's niece Nessie. Their bi-weekly playdates are little oases of wildness, joy, and ease in daily lives that ping-pong between familial tensions and isolation. As their emotional intimacy erodes, Ray and Bron turn to repair their broken family ties. Taking a leap of faith, each opens up to their respective sisters and learns that they have more in common with their siblings than they ever knew. In time, the emptiness they feel after their break-up is supplanted with a deep sisterly love and understanding.

This book grants readers new insight into the work of an artist who has not only changed the way photography is exhibited but pointed contemporary art in dynamic new directions. Wolfgang Tillmans (born 1968) is among the most influential contemporary artists, and the impact of his work registers across the arts, intersecting with fashion, music, architecture, the performing arts and activism. Tillmans is the recipient of the Turner Prize (2000) and the Hasselblad Foundation International Award in Photography (2015). His foundation, Between Bridges, supports the advancement of democracy, international understanding, the arts and LGBTQ rights.

From Audre Lorde, Ntozake Shange, and Bessie Head, to Zanele Muholi, Suzan-Lori Parks, and Missy Elliott, Black women writers and artists across the African Diaspora have developed nuanced and complex creative forms. Mecca Jamilah Sullivan ventures into the unexplored spaces of black women's queer creative theorizing to learn its languages and read the textures of its forms. Moving beyond fixed notions, Sullivan points to a space of queer imagination where black women invent new languages, spaces, and genres to speak the many names of difference. Black women's literary cultures have long theorized the complexities surrounding nation and class, the indeterminacy of gender and race, and the multiple meanings of sexuality. Yet their ideas and work remain obscure in the face of indifference from Western scholarship. Innovative and timely, The Poetics of Difference illuminates understudied queer contours of black women's writing.