Erasure Gallery: A Project by Curious Matter
- Eye Level
- 10 hours ago
- 7 min read
A tacit challenge from respected gallerists prompts a personal reflection from me.
I never felt the need to formally come out. It struck me as a redundant thing to do. Nobody in my life has ever treated me as if I was straight. In school, friends, crushes, teachers, coaches, and the many acquaintances who felt the need to assess my masculinity in pungent language all assured me that I was gay all day. I gave the unfriendlier characters points for creativity, linguistic invention, and persistence, even as I was running away from them.
It always amazed me that anybody cared about my sexuality or my gender expression in the first place. Yet they did care, very much, and as a child I was constantly reminded that I wasn’t measuring up. Everything about young me was suspect: the way I walked, the way I talked, how I did or didn’t throw a ball, my disinclination to compete with others, my interests, my slight shoulders, my whole unruly body. To paraphrase a famous rapper not known for sexual tolerance, my identity by itself caused violence — or at least extreme discomfort. Those acting in my interest tried to channel me toward activities befitting a boy. Nothing stuck. It is a rare point of personal pride for me that I never tried to fake it.
Once I moved to Jersey City, any reason I had to dissemble vanished. Ours is a community that celebrates Pride Month not once but twice. A rainbow standard flies over my church; frequently, there’s one over City Hall. Here was a place where nobody was ever going to give me a hard time over my desires or my behavior. On Newark Avenue, I got so comfortable being myself that I barely bothered to talk about my sexuality or my gender identity. Another Pride Fest just came and went. I did not buy a pink, blue, and lavender pin for my bicycle bag or put a flag in my window.
And in 2025, I’m afraid that’s not going to cut it. Too many people are going through too much pain. Too many others have put their heads down and chosen to say nothing. If I don’t make my allegiance clear — if I choose not to be vocal because I am disinclined to state the obvious — I make the majority look bigger than it is.
In his explanation of his reasons for rebranding the Curious Matter artspace (272 5th St.) the Erasure Gallery for the summer, Raymond E. Mingst spoke to me abut straightwashing: the tendency of historians and archivists, through omission and selective storytelling, to straighten out the life stories of the nonstraight artists. His exhibition prompted me to take a hard look at myself. My primary relationships have always been with women. I don’t present myself in any colorful or confrontational way; most of the time, I look as unremarkable as the next journalist with glasses and an introverted spirit. I’d be vanishingly easy to straightwash.
Not so for Mingst. He and his partner Arthur Bruso can’t be misrepresented, force-corrected, or ironed out; they named their publishing company Bentboiz for a reason. Bruso makes his coming out and the difficulties of his conservative Catholic upbringing in Albany central to So Far Away No One Will Notice [2024], his memoir. Mingst sees erasure in action and claps back, hanging a purple sign over the Curious Matter sign, rechristening the place, and challenging viewers to respond to acts of radical visibility. Bent they are and will stay, right out in public, not merely to pledge allegiance to a wider community, but because the art they make and the words they write cannot be fully understood otherwise.
Erasure Gallery features images of Bruso naked in bed. They’re beautifully shot and elegantly composed, but that’s not what’s remarkable about them. These photographs document a relationship between the man behind the camera and his subject. They record physical proximity and preserve specific choices about where to direct the viewer’s gaze. By chasing these photographs around the little gallery, we begin to grasp how Raymond E. Mingst, the photographer, sees Arthur Bruso: what it is about this other man that makes him curious, makes him draw near, makes him notice details, makes him step back to ensconce his lover in a sweetly familiar place.
From shot to shot, we follow the dance and the flirtation. Mingst catches the shadows of the folds in the sheets, the softness of the blankets, the diamond pattern of the mattress below, and the subject’s hands as he readies himself to record something in a blank book by pen. In one, Bruso presses a foot against a pillow as if to steady himself; in another, he wraps the linen around his chest and closes his eyes. Another still is almost entirely white, with cloth on Bruso’s body like a fresh snowfall.
This is the bed as a heroic, mythic environment, a soft topography for adventurers to traverse. There’s warmth in these photos, but also a kind of awe. The black and white prints become even more Olympian when Mingst, who loves flags, prints them on great sheets of fabric and suspends them between two white wooden poles. Thus rendered, the images are liberated from the rigid demands of paper and frames and allowed to indulge in the familiar dynamics of bedding: the softness, the pliability, the invitation to relax, the translucency that speaks of long weekend mornings spent half awake.The pieces look a bit like the banners that hang in the rafters of championship teams. They also resemble battlefield stretchers. Pointedly, Mingst has cut the fabric in the same dimensions of the panels of the AIDS quilt.
To understand why, it helps to know something else about Arthur Bruso’s story. He has been fighting cancer. This, too, is graphically, unflinchingly detailed in So Far Away. Bruso places his own health crisis alongside brutal stories from his youth in which he was denied access to grief itself by those around him who would not recognize his relationship with his late boyfriend. These passages bear the agony felt by the mark erased. Bruso was washed out of his own life story and exiled from the things that mattered the most to him.The tale stings not because it is extreme but because it is all too common.
But every passion has its own transcription and leaves its own peculiar trail. The mixture of adoration, longing, and respect visible in Raymond E. Mingst’s photographs of Arthur Bruso may remind you (if you are lucky) of your own experience of love — but it’s also a singular as a fingerprint. Since treatment, Bruso has been healthy and active, but those who have tangled with cancer know that they will never dispel the specter of possible recurrence. I feel trepidation in Mingst’s photographs: the protective caress of the lens, the whispers of fragility, the urge to tuck a lover in and keep him forever safe, the worry that always accompanies whiteness. The photographer is trying to place a record of a life lived with all of its particularity somewhere beyond the possibility of erasure.
In so doing, he’s acting on behalf of everybody whose story is in danger of getting negated. He is telling us: we are here, and we will always be here. Progress toward equality cannot be rolled back by forces as unromantic as court decree or executive order. If we must, we will inscribe our love stories on the sky.
At the same time, we know that powerful people are readying the eraser and that their fingers are itching to use it. Every creator feels it. At a memorial jam session at Moore’s Lounge (189 Monticello Ave.) on Friday night, the charismatic drummer Winard Harper spoke to the audience about erasure, the suppression of voices, the messing with museums and tampering with the archive, the denial of history and the on-the-fly editing and sanitizing of the American experience. Jazz, for Harper, is the antidote because it carries within it all of the evidence of the struggles and joys of a people that any halfway sensitive soul could ever ask for. Harper picked up his sticks and played, just as Mingst lifts his camera and prints his prints, and Bruso rattles away at the keyboard and binds his experience with threads of narrative.
I write too. Lately, I’ve taken to this page, one made possible by the largesse of a Foundation established through the will of a gay artist, to amplify the voices of those whose work I admire. Beyond that, I don’t bother to write very much about myself. I assume that the members of my beloved community of misfits know me for who I am. Yet those readers who don’t know me may see an ordinary-looking man in love with a woman, and as devoted to her happiness as any man could ever be. That’s important.
But if that’s all they see, then I am neither meeting the difficult moment nor doing justice to my writing. And I suspect there are many complicated people like me: those in a long-term monogamous relationship with a member of the opposite sex and whose gender presentation isn’t terribly unorthodox, but who are nevertheless no straighter than the most flamboyant character to take the Pride stage in the Pedestrian Plaza last weekend. If that’s you, too, the time to be counted has come. I refuse to let the eraser get me. May it leave you forever unmolested.
(Curious Matter is open from noon until five p.m. on Sundays. Shows are also viewable by appointment. It’ll continue in the guise of the Erasure Gallery through August.)
