i-xxii Front matter.qxd - Brandeis Institutional Repository

A Gallery of Players / 125“Batman-Dracula” (1964), appears here as an establishment ƒgure, the sophisticatedcritic for the Village Voice and Vogue. Because both his suit and hisshoes seem too large to quite ƒt, Bourdon becomes a “suit,” playing his conservativerole whether or not it ƒts him. Battcock, on the other hand, is out in theopen, his existence displayed as unself-consciously as in his part in “13 MostBeautiful Boys.” If Bourdon protects his private life, Battcock reveals his, andhis exposed position seems to leave him vulnerable. 46 Battcock’s joyless emergencefrom the closet in 1970 is one that Neel pictures as threatening to hisperson, which in social terms, of course, it remained. 47Why, when gay men had long been accepted as part of the New York artworld,did the post-Stonewall era frequently ƒnd them still in the closet? Theanswer, of course, is that both public and private patronage tends to come fromconservative sources, which are often stridently homophobic. But by 1985,The Pennsylvania Academy, ninety-nine years after its dismissal of ThomasEakins, put a color reproduction of David Bourdon and Gregory Battcock onthe cover of its catalog, Alice Neel: Paintings Since 1970. By this time the artworldhad caught up with Neel, and over the next decade gay and lesbian artwould be widely exhibited and performed. Nan Goldin’s Ballad of Sexual Dependency(1986), the photographs of Robert Mapplethorpe (The Perfect Moment,1988) and Ru Paul’s video Supermodel (You Better Work) (1992) are afew among the many examples of the increasing visibility of the subjects of homoeroticdesire and gender „uidity in the mainstream artworld. The consolidationof a movement of gay art in the 1980s is comparable in many ways tothat of feminist art in the 1970s, especially in its establishment of its own networkand the focus on the topic of sexual identity. Neel’s art presages both.If her portraits had charted the uneasy position of the gay male in straightsociety, Neel’s portrait of John Perreault (ƒg. 121) is the apotheosis of the liberatedgay male. Completed in 1972 when Perreault visited her studio to borrow“Joe Gould” for an exhibition “The Male Nude,” which he was curating forthe Emily Lowe gallery at Hofstra University, John Perreault is a deliberate rethinkingof the ideal male nude. The critic wrote frequently and admiringly ofNeel’s work in the 1970s, and she returned the favor with a painting that is „atteringbut not idealizing. The pretty-boy type of Malanga is replaced by theeven, alert features of an intellectual face propped on a sleek body whose sensuallycurving body hair signals “satyr.” Coincidentally, the pose nearly replicatesa photograph made by Eakins of one of his students at the Art StudentsLeague, Bill Duckett in the Rooms of the Philadelphia Art Students League(1887–1892, ƒg. 122). Although Eakins’s nude photographs were not exhibitedor published until recently, Neel expressed her ongoing admiration forthe artist to Karl Fortess in 1980, adding that when she entered life drawing