"Trade" Marks: LA2, Keith Haring, and a Queer Economy of Collaboration

In Keith Haring's authorized biography, the Pop artist describes his contact and collaboration with a young Puerto Rican graffiti artist named Angel Ortiz, also known as LA2. Haring was seduced by LA2's signature, which he encountered throughout the East Village of New York City, at a time when he was hanging out with noted graffiti artists such as Fab Five Freddy. Amazed to find that the tagger was only fourteen years old, Haring took LA2 under his wing and encouraged the young artist to collaborate with him. Between 1982 and 1984, the two of them together produced hundreds of canvases and art objects. This period is significant in Haring's life, as it represents a moment in which Haring established himself as a major commodity within an international art market. As a crucial contributor to his mentor's success, LA2 accompanied Haring during his global travels and produced work on-site with him.

LA2's lines and graffiti tags greatly enhanced Haring's production of forms such as his radiant baby and barking dog. Filling in the negative space within and around Haring's bodies, LA2 added a new dimension to Haring's art. Also, LA2's authentic ties, both geographically and racially, to the street reinforced Haring's own status as an artist intimately engaged with the hip-hop culture of New York City.

In this essay, I develop the concept of "trade" as a means to explore the ways in which the artistic and economic exchange between LA2 and Haring is conditioned by desire and an imagined possibility in cross-racial contact. George Chauncey, in his history of gay New York City, traces the various meanings of the term trade from 1890 to 1940. The term refers to a multiplicity of sexual identifications and practices, including men who paid for sex with prostitutes, straight-identified prostitutes who serviced gay men, and straight-identified men who enjoyed having sex with gay men without the exchange of money.¹ Trade, with its historically shifting meanings and connotations, indexes a sexual economy in which the nature of encounter is often ambiguous. This category of queer sexuality is crucial in understanding LA2's slippery relationship to Haring and his constant struggle to remain visible alongside a highly commodified and popular figure. My use of queer in this essay does not merely reference homosexual or homoerotic desire. Instead, in describing trade as something queer, I am addressing a mode of relation—and its psychic, spiritual, and material effects—that cannot be clearly defined in normative terms of sexuality and exchange. In underscoring the queerness of trade, I do not privilege sexuality as the primary site of difference; rather, I am stressing a queerness inherently structured by race, class, and gender. By examining popular press narratives around LA2's collaboration with Haring, I demonstrate an inextricable relationship between race, desire, and capital gain. I critically address narratives offered in texts like Haring's authorized biography and the Village Voice as archival material that evidences popular conceptions of LA2 and the production of a racialized erotics around Haring's Latino partners and collaborators. Framing LA2 as trade insists on a queer reading of exchange—a reading that acknowledges the racist operations of the market while also complicating the terms of agency regarding LA2.

A Distaste for the Mercenary: Samuel Delany's Encounters with Trade

The autobiographical work of Samuel Delany, in which he details the psychic and material spaces of queer sexual contact in New York City, provides a framework in which to understand the queer economy of trade. I take a slight detour through Delany's narrative because his accounts of contact evoke the intricate and thorny ways of trade relationships. This critical departure paves a conceptual path through which to approach Haring's contact with trade. In Times Square Red/Times Square Blue, Delany argues that, within capitalism, life is at its most rewarding when individuals seek out and engage in interclass contact. Delany finds potential for a better life in the relations that occur in places like the adult pornography theaters and public...