Outlaw Representation: Censorship and Homosexuality in Twentieth-Century American Art (Ideologies of Desire)

"I know it when I see it..." These words, famously spoken in 1964 by United States Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart, became the rallying cry of the anti-obscenity lobby as their enraged howls became the soundtrack to a tumultuous mixture of modern art, homosexuality, and public funding.

Author Richard Meyer charts the history of this American culture war through detailed analysis of the work of artists who fought on the front lines, often finding themselves personally vilified... and their artwork suppressed, denounced, and censored.

Meyer tells the heroic story of the artists who, rather than acquiesce to their critics, doubled down in their response and created an "Outlaw Representation" of homosexuality. Liberated by their new outlaw status, the homosexual art community was suddenly free to create some of the most socially important work of their generation.

Outlaw Representation is filled with brilliant artwork from some of the most celebrated artists of the 20th Century, including...

• Andy Warhol
• Robert Mapplethorpe
• Paul Cadmus
• Gran Fury
• David Wojnarowicz
• Holly Hughes

... and many more

About the Author
Meyer, Richard: - Richard Meyer, Robert and Ruth Halperin Professor in Art History, teaches courses in twentieth-century American art, the history of photography, arts censorship and the first amendement, curatorial practice, and gender and sexuality studies. His first book, Outlaw Representation: Censorship and Homosexuality in Twentieth-Century American Art, was awarded the Charles C. Eldredge Prize for Outstanding Scholarship from the Smithsonian American Art Museum. In 2013, he published What Was Contemporary Art?, a study of the idea of the contemporary in early twentieth-century American art, and, with Catherine Lord, Art and Queer Culture, a survey focusing on the dialogue between visual art and non-normative sexualities from 1885 to the present. Professor Meyer is interested in the relation between the academic discipline of art history and the practice of museum curating. Prior to arriving at Stanford, he taught undergradaute curatorial courses at USC and the University of Pennsylvania, both of which culminated in museum exhibitions. In 2014, he will co-teach an undergraduate curatorial course with Connie Wolf, the Director of the Cantor Arts Center at Stanford, that will result in a collaboratively organized show at the museum. Outiside the context of university teaching, Meyer served as guest curator of Warhol's Jews: Ten Portraits Reconsidered at the Jewish Museum in New York and the Contemporary Jewish Museum in San Francisco and of Naked Hollywood: Weegee in LosAngeles at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles.