Unhealthy
On Hart Island, since the 19th century a Potter’s Field for New York’s indigent and marginalized, a new section opened in 1983 on the island’s southern tip. During the AIDS pandemic’s early stages, funeral directors refused assistance and so the deceased were buried anonymously in graves fourteen feet deep. When it became clear that a cadaver wasn’t contagious, regular methods of trench burial resumed; still, many AIDS burials remained anonymous due to social taboo and estrangement from families. Susan Sontag argues that diseases that aren’t well understood or curable—like tuberculosis, cancer, and AIDS—accumulate a dread that transforms into social metaphor: “Any disease that is treated as a mystery and acutely enough feared will be felt to be morally, if not literally, contagious” (6). Thinking about TB and illness against normative images of health, whether individually or as a Body Politic, eventually reveals a substratum of gender.
The economic devastation brought by the Great Depression caused a significant shift in American culture back to traditional family dynamics and conservative values. FAP prints and paintings often reflect this cultural shift, reinforcing masculinity in the factories and farms; femininity in the home. Even so, Dan Rico's Evening Meal (c. 1935) is uncomfortable for its juxtaposition of a mythologized painting on the wall—which seems to borrow its style from a WPA mural of pioneers—and dining room reality. The faceless woman dutifully serving a meal looks just as robust as the men. How did that become natural? A smaller portion of artworks from the period show a different perspective, showcasing the communities challenging this notion by displaying clear acts of gender expression and depictions of queer identities. Josh Kilmer-Purcell suggests that “Gay artists like Marsden Hartley and Paul Cadmus practically defined the era’s hypermasculine visual aesthetic,” and the New Deal Museum’s John Sharp brought a queer sensibility to a seemingly traditional farming mural.
Although the early-mid 1900s is commonly associated with a lack of a proud queer and trans community, this simply wasn’t the case. FAP artists mainly worked in big cities, which were home to underground communities like the “Pansy Craze” in New York City, where drag queens, often referred to as pansy performers, would perform at speakeasies. These tucked-away bars would also become homes for LGBTQ+ individuals to freely express their identities. Ida Abelman’s color lithograph Portia (c. 1935) possibly references Shakespeare’s cross-dressing character in The Merchant of Venice, and regardless is direct in its portraiture of a person not clearly conforming to idealized gender. In conclusion, it’s important to underscore that depictions of traditional life in many of the WPA’s most famous artworks did not accurately show the lives many Americans were living during the Great Depression. Those fantasies can be attributed to economic anxiety but it included so much more: “healing” the nation implies an overcoming of dis-ease, a return to some past that never existed.
Works Consulted
-- "Gender Roles and Sexual Relations, Impact of the Great Depression on." Encyclopedia of the Great Depression. Link
-- Kilgannon, Cory. “Dead of AIDS and Forgotten in Potter’s Field.” New York Times 3 July 2018. Link
-- Kilmer-Purcell, Josh. “The Queer New Deal.” Out 7 Oct. 2008. Link
-- “Site of Negro Coney Island and AIDS Burials.” The Hart Island Project. Link
-- Sontag, Susan. Illness as Metaphor. Farar, Straus, and Giroux. 1977, 1978. Link