Introduction

This special issue of GLQ provides a forum for scholars of photography, visual culture, theater, performance, film, video, and new media to argue for the primacy of the arts to queer life and culture. Two questions define its central concerns: How have the visual and performing arts reshaped the governing terms of gender and sexuality? How have the arts fashioned a queer world, both in the past and the present?

We initially conceived of this project by talking to each other about our respective approaches to the arts, David as a scholar of theater and performance studies, Richard as a scholar of art history and visual culture. Both of us share a commitment to historical and archival research even when, as is often the case, we focus on contemporary art and culture. We are drawn to the texture and peculiarity of specific objects (whether photographs, performances, or pieces of ephemera) rather than to the work of synoptic analysis or strictly theoretical inquiry. We also share the conviction that "queerness" becomes most useful as an interpretive category when placed in relation to particular social contexts, historical moments, and cultural surrounds. We resist the use of "queer" as a transhistorical catchall for antinormativity and are discouraged by work that claims to queer artistic and cultural forms in lieu of seriously researching or analyzing them. We both believe that art makes a difference and has historically played a central, if still underexamined, role in the social and political lives of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer people.

In discussing these shared concerns, we started to wonder about how other scholars were conceiving of the task of queer research on the visual and performing arts. Our call for papers noted that "we would like especially to encourage submissions that draw on original archival research. The archives at issue may extend from the traditional to the obscure, from the historical past to the contemporary moment, and from the local to the global."

In issuing this call, we did not wish to reconstitute the archive as the site of ultimate authority or factual authenticity. Because the history of sexuality cuts across (and under) the holdings and classificatory systems of traditional archives, queer scholars must do more than retrieve new nuggets of original research. They must also consider how the history of sexual minorities shifts and reshapes scholarly knowledge, often in ways that cannot be known in advance of the archival encounter. Perhaps the most insistent challenge posed to scholars of queer art and culture is the difficulty of addressing a historical past in which alternative forms of sexual life were differently organized, named, and depicted than they are today.

As it turned out, we received so many excellent submissions that "Art Works" became too large for a single issue. GLQ will therefore devote two consecutive issues (12:2 and 12:3) to this topic. We believe that a close attention to both historical and contemporary art might do some of the work for queer studies today that critical theory has done in the past. Art can function, in other words, not only to illustrate theoretical paradigms but also to propose them. At its most inspiring, art works to imagine alternative forms of social, sexual, and creative life.

Our commitment to an archival approach to queer art and culture responds in part to the ephemeral, often fragile nature of the materials at issue. Because of the historical constraints governing homosexuality, many images, artifacts, and documents of queer life have been destroyed, censored, or simply disposed of as unworthy of preservation. The work of gay and lesbian historical societies, archives, libraries, and art foundations thus remains crucial both to the retrieval of queer culture and to its survival in the contemporary moment.

For the cover of this issue, we have chosen a photograph by the artist Michael Meads titled Aaron: As a Caravaggio VI, 1994. Meads's photographs of young men from his hometown of Eastaboga, Alabama, often restage homoerotic images from the canonical history of Western art. As Scott Herring points out in his insightful essay in this issue, Meads's photographs call upon a preexisting...