On September 30, 1991, protesters outside the White House called for a national plan to address the HIV/AIDS epidemic.
Some held posters with the words “BUSH AIDS FLAG” below the US flag motif, with fifty skulls and crossbones in place of the stars. Meanwhile, President George H. W. Bush was at Walt Disney World celebrating the resort’s 20th anniversary.
The 1980s and 1990s were decades marked by loss for queer communities who endured the general neglect and avoidance of politicians and much of society. Activist art and ephemera produced in these years helped galvanize political mobilization and draw public attention to the struggle for the right to health care as well as equal treatment in schools and the military. The messages expressed in these posters and flyers illustrate queer community-building strategies that are still relevant today. Equally, this period saw the rise of influential, innovative queer artists and performers whose work remains the object of popular and art historical interest.
Examples of LGBTQ+-related graphic art and ephemera from the 1960s to the 1990s were recently acquired from the Merrill C. Berman Collection by the Getty Research Institute (GRI). The collection is largely comprised of posters, nightclub flyers, and performance invitations that document protests alongside the parties, shows, and happenings across three decades. Ranging from screen prints to photocopies, these bold graphic designs convey pressing messages effectively through creative, visual means. This graphic material was made quickly with inexpensive materials to circulate broadly in large quantities. It was intended to be used, not preserved, and so relatively few examples survive today.
The preservation of these rare, fragile materials is essential to the telling of accurate, nuanced histories of queer culture that highlight relationships and community and the art they inspired. Black queer theory and history professor Marlon M. Bailey says that while current popular culture can give visibility to important aspects of the experience, it can also flatten the complexities of history. “The challenge to that kind of visibility is that the circulation of the representations of the community are often out of the overall context of the complex lives of LGBTQ+ members, who are mostly working class and poor, Black and brown,” says Bailey.
Artistically layered and diverse in content, these archival materials animate a mere fraction of the rich history of LGBTQ+ life in the late 20th century—from the innovation of drag performance to the devastation of the HIV/AIDS epidemic, and from protests to the ongoing advocacy for LGBTQ+ rights. “It’s very important to find and to excavate those artifacts or ephemera, because it is a part of the story,” says Bailey. With its special collections, the GRI aims to support new research on this important chapter in American history.
My Pet Homo
Drag queens RuPaul and Mona Foot starred as two alien women who import a gay man to their planet. “It was a ridiculous play,” Mona Foot said in a 2017 interview. While most of the files that documented the performances were deleted or corrupted, the play’s printed flyer, with information about many of the people involved in the production, still remains.
Wigstock
Wigstock, an annual drag festival, was held almost every Labor Day in New York City’s East Village from 1984 to 2005. It started off with drag queen Lady Bunny and some friends staging shows in Tompkins Square Park and has recently returned with the support of actor Neil Patrick Harris and his husband, David Burtka.
This pink-and-green flyer was an invitation to a benefit for the festival at the nightclub Panty Girdle. The venue’s title and flyer reference the shapewear panties used to flatten the stomach and crotch. The flyer shows a photocopied cutout of a printed panty girdle ad and a drag queen’s face.
In this poster, announcing the second National March on Washington for Lesbian and Gay Rights in 1987, the silhouette of a crowd holds a banner reading “Come Out… Come Out…”
The inverted pink triangle in the background—first used by the Nazis to identify and persecute homosexuals—is now closely associated with HIV/AIDS activism. It was adopted in the Silence=Death Project in 1987 and became a symbol of pride and struggle for the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP) during the late 1980s and 1990s.
This march and its concluding rally, with speeches given by Reverend Jesse Jackson, Caesar Chavez, and Whoopi Goldberg, were just two among many events occurring across six days, including a mass wedding and the display of Cleve Jones’s NAMES Project AIDS Memorial Quilt on the National Mall. During the course of events, ACT UP (founded in early 1987) was visible for the first time on the national stage.
Andy Warhol and Friends
Artist and experimental film star Mario Montez (René Rivera) gazes out seductively from this flyer advertising a benefit hosted by Andy Warhol in support of his then collaborators Montez and screenwriter Ronald Tavel. Just to the right of Montez’s face is a signature red lipstick kiss.
In the early 1960s, Montez worked as a model and clerical worker by day and collaborated on films and musical scores by night. The performer was later introduced to Warhol and quickly rose to fame, appearing in more than 12 underground films by the artist between 1964 and 1966.
Montez’s drag name was an homage to the 1940s film star and “Queen of Technicolor” Maria Montez. An innovative actor both on screen and stage, the artist contributed to the development of the “Theatre of the Ridiculous,” which incorporated queer and camp elements into experimental performances. The Life of Juanita Castro, billed first on the flyer, was one of Warhol’s films in this genre.
In an era strikingly similar to our own, when drag was not only seen as performance but also a punishable offense, Montez emerged as an influential collaborator. The benefit flyer is an important piece of this history and a tangible resource for researchers and historians.
