Return to Sodom

Description of event

Until not long ago, the canon of gay art and literature was inextricably linked with transgression and tragedy. Generations of queers grew up on Jean Genet’s prison prose which aesthetically linked homosexual love with criminality. Bruce LaBruce mixed blood with taboo politics in his films in the 1990s. Dennis Cooper’s celebration of violent erotic excess and suffering won the novelist a cult following.

These artefacts are uneasy records of homosexual dystopias. Today, by contrast, queer art is full of saccharine ideals that show gay love as free and easy. In the Hallmark version, sexuality has no dark history and is unencumbered by moral or physical strife. If queerness encounters opposition, it is the result of social stigma rather than any internal contradiction.

This is progress, for sure. Yet, Oscar Wilde’s views might perversely land him in prison again were he alive today. Was something of value lost in the move from transgression to celebration and, ultimately, obedience? The symposium will critically examine the aesthetics of histories and artefacts that expose the pernicious yet liberating links between homosexuality and now justifiably taboo ideas. If, as artists and critics believed a hundred years ago, true freedom requires a utopian return to Sodom, who is today’s visionary Jean Genet?