5 Feet of Fury

Smithsonian holds children’s activity day themed to gay exhibit

“Hands on arts activities,” indeed.

The exhibit includes a nude portrait of Frank O’Hara which “alludes to O’Hara’s poetical and personal celebration of cruising for sex in the city,” and an leatherman-themed “family portrait” by Mapplethorpe.

Not to mention:

The catalog description (p. 256) for “Charles Devouring Himself” says the artist Jerome Caja “mixed his friend Charles’s ashes with nail polish to create this image of Charles ingesting his own body. (Charles committed suicide once his life with AIDS became unbearable and recovery was beyond hope.) One can hardly imagine a more gruesome inversion of Goya’s famous painting of Saturn devouring his son. This searing condemnation of America’s willingness to devour its sons during the AIDS crisis is immediately undercut by Jerome’s campy frivolity and cartoonish vulgarity.”

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Actually, it was your fellow obstinate homosexuals refusal to curtail their dangerous, narcissistic sex-and-drug deathstyle, and take any personal responsibility for their behaviour, that killed them off.

But blaming the Pope and Ronald Reagan is so much cooler!