
SANTA FE — The introduction to George Chauncey’s Homosexual New York: Gender, City Tradition, and the Making of the Homosexual Male World, 1890–1940, a historical past of town’s pre-Stonewall homosexual underground revealed in 1994, accommodates a problem to different historians. The writer brings up “scattered proof” of early-Twentieth-century homosexual subcultures in a “handful” of different American cities. He mentions Chicago and Los Angeles by identify, however doesn’t rule out small cities that “additionally sustained homosexual social networks of some scope.” Then Chauncey lays down the gauntlet: “We should always by no means presume the absence of one thing earlier than we have now seemed for it.”
When he began his analysis within the Eighties, Chauncey was one among two American students — that he knew of, at the least — writing dissertations on LGBTQ+ historical past. In a brand new preface for the 2019 paperback version of Homosexual New York, he celebrates the “astonishing development” of the sphere. “The local people examine is now not the dominant kind in queer historical past or in different fields of historical past,” he declares.
Issues look completely different within the reverse nook of the nation. Santa Fe, New Mexico has lengthy been a homosexual epicenter of the Southwest, however cultural practitioners right here nonetheless face a steep problem with regards to illuminating regional LGBTQ+ histories. There’s quite a lot of historic excavation to do, and never as many fingers to assist dig.


Past posterity, what’s the worth of preserving and sharing regional queer histories? This 12 months, an writer and a museum curator in Santa Fe serendipitously aligned of their respective pursuits to reply this query. Armed with a outstanding reminiscence and a quiver of juicy anecdotes, Walter Cooper spent years researching and writing his memoir Unbuttoned: Homosexual Life within the Santa Fe Arts Scene, which he self-published in 2016 and up to date final 12 months. And almost contemporaneously, Christian Waguespack was gestating the present group exhibition Out West: Homosexual and Lesbian Artists within the Southwest 1900 –1969, on the New Mexico Museum of Artwork.
At 84 years previous, Cooper has lived in Santa Fe for 50 years, having arrived in 1973 after a closeted and stress-ridden stint as a New York adman. “I’m sort of shocked that I’m nonetheless right here, interval,” he says. “I’m one of many final folks round.” By “folks,” he means homosexual people of a Santa Fe heyday: the swinging Seventies, ‘80s, and ‘90s, a time when some outstanding denizens of the midcentury Santa Fe Artwork Colony, comparable to Janet Lippincott, Thomas Macaione, and Agnes “Agi” Sims, have been nonetheless round, and a brand new era of artists was on the rise.
“It was sort of a wild time,” says Cooper of the ‘70s. “I had an early introduction to lots of people who have been main gamers within the homosexual scene and the artwork scene. There have been numerous dinner events, after-show events.”

Although Cooper crosses paths with some New Mexico-linked celebrities in his guide — Georgia O’Keeffe, Agnes Martin, Shirley MacLaine — they function set dressing for a solid of native artists sure for regional fame. For instance, a secondhand account of Andy Warhol’s 1977 artwork opening in Santa Fe, for which Cooper didn’t land an invitation, facilities on Indigenous artists Ron Robles and Armond Lara (who’re homosexual and straight, respectively). Warhol spots Robles’s gold bear claw necklace and remarks, “I assumed Indians solely wore silver.” Robles cheekily retorts, “Silver? You eat off silver. You don’t put on it.” Thus, an anecdote which may’ve been packaged as a unusual footnote in a broader LGBTQ+ historical past is advised from the attitude of an Indigenous, queer protagonist — a tribute to the actual energy of regionalism and the “area people examine.”
Through the writing course of, Cooper says, the scope of his narrative began to increase, alongside together with his motivations. “At first I used to be simply writing about my time interval, the ‘70s via the ‘90s, however I wanted to incorporate prehistory for that,” he explains. “And I simply realized that no person had written about [Santa Fe’s gay history], not in any depth.”
In Unbuttoned, Cooper weaves in tales of an older era of artists whom he developed friendships with, comparable to Sims, an artist from Philadelphia who arrived in 1938 and cultivated a lesbian clique that included photographer Laura Gilpin and O’Keeffe’s longtime ranch hand Maria Chabot. Dialing again the clock additionally permits Cooper to incorporate enjoyable anecdotes comparable to Truman Capote declaring Santa Fe “the dyke capital of the world” after visiting Sims and her longtime associate Mary Louise Aswell, the fiction editor of Harper’s Bazaar, in 1976. Cooper additionally covers LGBTQ+ Santa Fe hotspots such because the midcentury homosexual saloon Claude’s Bar; out-of-the-closet Santa Fe artwork colonists comparable to Cady Wells and Witter Bynner; and under-the-radar queer actions by well-known turn-of-the-century figures like Taos arts patron Mabel Dodge Luhan and British writer and transient New Mexico transplant D.H. Lawrence.

A lot of those self same folks and locations weave themselves into Waguespack’s exhibition as properly. “I used to be curating a little bit backwards,” he says. “As an alternative of developing with the concept and doing the analysis, it was years of accumulating these tales.” It began together with his work on a solo exhibition for the Massachusetts-born Wells, who landed close to Santa Fe in 1932. He was shut with O’Keeffe, who referred to as him “one of many two greatest painters working in our a part of the nation,” in keeping with Cooper’s guide.
“For [Wells] to have the ability to reside [as an out gay man] throughout this time interval was a little bit of a revelation for me,” says Waguespack. As he mapped Wells’s circle, after which the bigger scene, he was amazed by the variety of homosexual and lesbian artists who had helped form Santa Fe’s trendy fame — and the truth that their collective story had by no means been advised via a queer paradigm.
“It’s like anyone dropped a bucket of tiles and, look, there’s the mosaic,” Waguespack says. “I don’t take credit score for trailblazing analysis… these tales have been all there for anyone who wished to look in the direction of them. However simply taking the time to deliver all of them collectively in a single place was actually the undertaking.”

That’s how Waguespack linked up with Cooper, whose memoir was so influential to Out West that it’s quoted close to the exhibition’s title wall. The excerpt reads, partially, “Individuals are likely to underrate or ignore ‘the queer issue,’ the large impression homosexual folks have made on New Mexico’s distinctive cultural life.”
Like Cooper, Waguespack combines the early Twentieth century with the more moderen in his storytelling, and attracts on private connections. He titled the present after Concord Hammond’s curatorial undertaking Out West, a 1999 exhibition of latest homosexual and lesbian artists in Santa Fe at Plan B Evolving Arts. The Galisteo, New Mexico-based artist has been one other mentor for Waguespack, and her 1997 set up “What Have You Achieved with Our Want” is an outlier in his present’s timeline that smooths the passage to extra distant eras, like Cooper’s buddies and their tales of the previous.
The primary arc of Waguespack’s Out West paints an image of Santa Fe as a protected haven for queer, early-modern artists. Nationwide icons together with Martin and Marsden Hartley seem with native legends comparable to R.C. Gorman and Will Shuster.

“Santa Fe was the place you got here if you happen to have been much less established, extra experimental, extra bohemian… and that appealed to quite a lot of queer folks,” says Waguespack. “[They] have been serious about not solely being artists, but additionally dwelling a life that was pointedly completely different.”
In the identical breath, he cautions in opposition to matching these historic figures with trendy conceptions of being “out.” He provides: “Santa Fe supplied some freedoms that different locations didn’t, however it wasn’t carte blanche …. It did take bravery to [openly express gay identity].”
Out West additionally traces queer threads of regional Indigenous historical past. A outstanding pair of late-1800s images by John Ok. Hillers depicts We-Wha, a Two Spirit particular person, or a person within the Zuni tribe who took on each female and male duties. We-Wha was a pottery and textile artist in addition to a cultural ambassador who visited Washington, DC, and met President Grover Cleveland in 1886. Hillers’s black and white portrait of We-Wha at their backstrap loom, shot via the suspended warp, is maybe probably the most putting and poetic picture within the exhibition. One can nearly hear the twang of the loom’s threads because of the crystalline immediacy of the {photograph}, setting it aside from different historic portraits within the present. Here’s a totally fashioned queer determine of the previous, crashing via the historical past books to problem modern-day assumptions in regards to the vary of late-Nineteenth-century public gender expression.
Waguespack, who’s a millennial, says he “felt an infinite quantity of strain” in partaking elders like Cooper and the 80-year-old Hammond within the curatorial course of. “The path wasn’t set but, so we had to determine… how are we going to inform these tales and the place are we getting the tales from?” Waguespack says. “There was a relentless worry that I used to be lacking somebody.” He was decided to faucet threads of dwelling reminiscence whereas they’re nonetheless round, in order that Out West may function a small however vivid place to begin for future queer-centric explorations of Southwestern artwork historical past.
“Curating early-Twentieth-century paintings means quite a lot of archival analysis, which relies on what folks really feel like is effective for an archive,” says Waguespack. “What significantly resonates with queer folks is that you need to have a household or somebody left after you die to save lots of this data and champion you. Plenty of these artists didn’t have that.”
What they do have, for the second, are queer descendants like Cooper, Hammond, and Waguespack — a hyperlocal lineage of chosen household.
In Homosexual New York, Chauncey discusses how every era of historians tends to feed the following, like an ouroboros. “Historical past shapes the best way we learn — and write — historical past,” he writes. In a single sense, the regional histories of Out West and Unbuttoned kind a decent loop of affect. However in relation to nationwide histories, they hold outdoors of a bigger cycle, providing recent and disruptive threads for a brand new era of historians to find — so long as they’re on the lookout for them.