“The London Boys were Edem Ephraim (lead singer) and Dennis Fuller (backing vocals, choreographer) both from Greenwich, London. Plus “third” London Boy Ralf-René Maué based in Hamburg, Germany who wrote and produced all their material. Selling millions the London Boys reached nearly double platinum status in the UK plus gold/platinum and double platinum in various countries throughout Europe and especially Asia. Sadly Dennis and Edem died in a horrible car crash in 1996. But their music will live on. London Boys 4ever. Enjoy!”
The Queer Zine Archive Project, an online archive based in Milwaukee and run by a group of 6 anonymous people since 2003, is collecting queer zines from the last three decades and making them available online for free. I really recommend spending some time over there, since it’s a a really entertaining lesson in queer history full of real treasures such as a all issues of J.D., the legendary queercore zine by G.B. Jones and Bruce LaBruce from the late eightis/early nineties or hilarious zines by Vaginal Davis, such as “Evil Taco” or “Yes, Mrs. Davis”. They also have an “Calls For Submission” section in case you have you’re own zine and still search for contributiors or want to publish your own stuff.
Here are a couple of my favourite covers of zines you can find in the archive, starting with my favourite one, the cover of the 4th issue of the “Queer Fuckers Magazine” from Salt Lake City, Utha, published in 1992. For mor of them click here:
The picture above and the following ones are taken from a photographical essay called “Comrades & Lovers – Portraits of Men 1978 – 1998″ by Vancouver based photographer and environmental planner & designer Gordon Brent Ingram. About his motivations to take these pictures he writes: “I came of age in a relatively pleasant and safe West Coast maelstrom spanning both Canada and the United States and cultures with English and French spoken and with links to a wide range of overseas communities. In this part of the world, recent decades have seen some of the most rapid cultural and social change in human history especially around the confluence of gender identities, sexuality and cultures. These transformations of communities and how individuals and networks of friends have made their ways through them, and in deed how we have been remaking ourselves, has been one of the sources of fascination for my photographic portrayals.”
Voguing: The Message is a nice little pre-”Paris Is Burning” documentary about the emerging New York voguing scene with a lot of footage and some awesome performances and statements by Willi Ninja from the House of Ninja. The film was shot in 1988 by Jack Walworth, David Bronstein & Dorothy Low and released in 1989.
A little journey through last 3 decades of pop culture I just put together for a German music magazine. You can watch all the music videos after the jump, and don’t forget to click away the advertisement in the Dailymotion videos by using the cross in the right corner.
It was Andy Warhol, who introduced Grace Jones and Keith Haring in the mid-eighties. Haring managed to engange Jones as a living canvass for some of his “tribal” style body paintings like the one he had done in collaboration with dancer Bill T. Jones and which ironically played with ideas of “the primitive” (you find an interesting comment on Jones’ play with race / gender stereotypes through Harings paintings on the Postcolonial Studies website of the English Department at Emory University, Atlanta). The paintings were presented and eternalized in different contexts like a legendary photo shoot with Robert Mapplethorpe (1984)…
… at one of Jones’ performances at the Paradise Garage (1985) …
I strongly recommend the website Culturehall.com, an online platform for selected artists, which is especially interesting because of its “Feature Issues”, for which every two weeks people from the art scene select four artworks of contemporary artists. The current Feature Issue (No 60) curated by Brooklyn based photographer Tema Stauffer is devoted to the medium of photography. I was really excited when I saw that amongst the featured photographers is Doug Ischar, a photographer whose work I’ve always been interested in, but I’ve never really got the chance to see. Ischar is a Chicago based artist who is especially known for his photographies of gay culture in the Eighties. It looks like in the Nineties he retired from photography, since 1990 he works as an associate professor at the photography department of the University of Illinois. On Culturehall Ischar has a portfolio with around 40 pictures which are part of the two series “Marginal Waters” and “Honor Among…”. I’d really love to post all of them here but I guess this would be sort of ridigulous (and I guess illegal as well), so please check out Culturehall for more. Picture on top via Ischar’s Facebook profile.
I have a new favourite tumblr called Cruised Or Be Cruised. The blog (which I’m pretty sure is run by a German) by artist Dean Sameshima is only a few days old, but even at this early point the collection of pages you can click yourself through so far offer a pretty entertaining journey through the history of gay subculture, starting with John Rechy book covers and Hanky Code guides over works of contemporary artists to zine covers like the one on top of this post (it’s from a zine called “GSM” [gay skinhead movement] from 1991). The tumblr looks like the attempt to make a private collection of these kinds of artefacts accessible online, so if you have a tumblr yourself or don’t mind putting tumblrs into your blog reader this could be a good chance to take part in something nice.
IXE (pronounced Eeks) is an experimental movie from 1980 by a French filmmaker called Lionel Soukaz – an associative collage that feels like a stream of consciousness or a rush. The movie combines different sorts of film and audio material from various sources (mostly the TV) and through this it deals with various topics such as war, sex, religion and drugs while it also has autobiographical elements. Soukat himself describes the movie like this: “Ixe may be (…) an analysis, working on oneself (a mirror), a snapshot of the ’80s, anything you like, it doesn’t matter – but let Ixe be the shiver of life, that thing that gives you goosepimples.” More about the movie here. Thanks Todd for introducing me to this. Click here to watch the movie:
