Coming Down

Tyler T. Schmidt (bio)

A review of Montez, Ricardo. Keith Haring’s Line: Race and the Performance of Desire. Duke UP, 2020.

I keep thinking about Juan Dubose crashing in the hallway while his boyfriend, artist Keith Haring, soldiers through a dinner at the poet John Giorno’s house in January 1985. The event, peopled with gay stars of the art world, was in honor of William Burroughs. The couple had been partying the night before at the Paradise Garage, the iconic club at 84 King Street in SoHo. Dubose spent the evening at Giorno’s on the hallway stairs, reportedly with his head in his hands. For all their interest in queer nightlife as utopian possibility and the sexy hedonism of Paradise Garage, where legendary DJ Larry Levan turned vinyl into magic, students of queer culture have paid little attention to the “come down”—that treacherous, often shameful journey when the drugs wear off. “Shattered,” as I’ve heard some Brits describe these states of extreme fatigue or excessive partying, always strikes me as a perfect encapsulation of that fragile, queasy undoing. In his revelatory Keith Haring’s Line: Race and the Performance of Desire, Ricardo Montez keeps company with Dubose in the hall. Quiet companionship, in fact, is often what we need when we’re coming down from the party. Montez is the sort of thoughtful critic who gives theoretical weight and respect to those too undone from the night before to endure the dinner party banter. Returning to Giorno’s self-satisfying account of sex with Haring in the Prince Street toilets in his collection You Got to Burn to Shine (1994), Montez questions the way Dubose is both hailed and marginalized in most accounts of Haring’s cross-race desires, energies that profoundly shape both his life and art:

Giorno’s deployment and disregard of Dubose echo many of the ways in which Dubose exists as a defining and necessary figure in the romantic view of Haring as transcendent interracial lover, while being ignored and somewhat disposable in the setting of valued exchange between those in an esteemed gay artistic circle. (52)

As Montez demonstrates persuasively in Keith Haring’s Line, the “deployment and disregard” of racial difference are central features of Haring’s creative practice. His relationships and artistic collaborations are marked by both a still-rare self-critique of whiteness, and an obliviousness to—if not a downright dismissal of—the exploitative power dynamics within these cross-racial encounters.

My own return to Dubose in the hall admittedly risks sliding into the sentimental mythmaking and sloppy identification with blackness by white gay men that Montez interrogates. Dubose has become “a brown and black sign that is an amalgamation of projections” (16), not only in Giorno’s account of the dinner party, but in much of the scholarship on Haring’s art. A DJ and car-radio installer, Dubose was the first of several Black and Latino men with whom Haring was romantically and artistically involved. The thorniness of these relationships, in all their ethical and aesthetic complexity, is central to Montez’s book. Some will recognize Dubose from Polaroids taken by Andy Warhol in 1983—the source material for the ghostly silkscreens of varying hues that he made of Dubose and Haring. Montez confronts the material complexity of these images in the archive to see them differently. Now alight with intimacy, the images of Haring and Dubose intertwined refuse “narrative coherence” (18); they are what Montez calls “temporal freezes that index Haring’s notion of becoming other,” a fantasy of racial erasure that Haring believes interracial relationships might make possible (16). In returning to the archives to see what’s been missed or misread, Montez is not interested in historical rescue or corrective. In fact, he says such a project would be impossible in the case of Dubose, for whom no self-composed counternarrative exists. Rather, the book interrogates the ways in which narratives—particularly heteroheroic accounts of Haring’s life—invoke cross-racial desires but avoid any meaningful discussion of the very real humans hailed within these gestures and then fetishized, marginalized, and cast aside.

Montez’s book is a welcome addition to a constellation of projects—some foundational, others newer—that pay fuller, much-needed attention to the exchanges between race and queer desire in New York City’s “Downtown scene” of the early 1980s: for example, José Esteban Muñoz’s “Famous and Dandy like B. ‘n’ Andy: Race, Pop, and Basquiat” in Disidentifications (1999); Arnaldo Cruz-Malavé’s Queer Latino Testimonio, Keith Haring, and Juanito Xtravanganza (2007); Dagmawi Woubshet’s treatment of Haring in The Calendar of Loss (2015); Joshua Chambers-Letson’s recent work on Tseng Kwong Chi in After The Party (2018); and W. Ian Bourland’s Bloodflowers (2019), a brilliant study of photographer Rotimi Fani-Kayode. While Haring’s sexual and artistic interest in Black and Latino men is well-documented, Montez is up to something deeper; he interrogates Haring’s desire for these men as part of a creative practice often animated by racial fantasies, including an “unfulfilled desire to have and be something other than white” (5). Drawing from the worlds of graffiti and the dance culture of the city’s B-Boys, Haring believes he can access “a nonwhite interiority” through his art (14). “I’m sure inside I’m not white,” the artist writes in his journal. This “remarkable claim,” as Montez describes it, is one of the theoretically rich spaces he explores in the book (119). Haring’s fantasy of racial transcendence remains relevant to our current moment when many white Americans are eager to distance themselves from whiteness, arriving late to the idea that racism is systemic.

Montez’s deep dive into the meanings of Haring’s line, his signature strokes, seeks to disrupt restrictive narratives about racialized desire. Chapter One, which includes the critique of Giorno’s questionable commentary on Haring’s erotic life, begins with a discussion of the ways in which Haring’s bold, carved lines are problematically described as “primitive,” a discourse always burdened with Western supremacist ideology that seeks to contain “the Other.” In a moment of jargon-studded prose, Montez explains: “Haring’s citational line embodies the condition of the Western self that can only be recognized through a dialectical relationship with a premodern tribal other” (37). He links this re-evaluation of Haring’s primitivism to narratives of queer alterity, including Giorno’s. Placing Haring’s journals within a tradition of urban writing rooted in the “dark places of ordinary men” (50), Montez resituates Haring’s lines (on paper and concrete) within “a legacy of queer performative writing experiments” that are almost always marked by a romance with the “other” (34). Haring’s writing about encounters in the bathhouse documents feelings of “isolation and rejection” that also define these spaces of sexual promise (57).

Haring’s collaborations with graffiti artists and hip-hop dancers strengthen his street credibility while his whiteness neutralizes the rhetoric of criminality associated with these subcultures. Chapter Two begins with the work of Angel Ortiz, the graffiti artist known as LA II. Like Dubose, Ortiz is relegated to “a secondary timeline” in Haring’s biography (15). LA II, it becomes clear, had to be strategic in order to prevent his art from being eclipsed by the celebrity artist he worked alongside. He had to reclaim his lines repeatedly.

Montez scrutinizes Ortiz’s collaborations with Haring—which include a golden, graffitied sarcophagus—through an original analysis of power negotiations and aesthetics within a “queer economy of exchange” (63). Their relationship is read through discourses on public sex and rethinks the ethical complexities between gay men and “trade.” Montez is careful to draw out the nuances of the term, whose meanings include straight men who have sex with gay men, often for money. The chapter explores “narratives of queer urban contact” (67)—including those by John Rechy and Samuel Delany—in order to offer “trade aesthetics” as “a framework for thinking through the visual discursive field that both artists [Haring and LA II] come to occupy in the press and the reception of the work they created together” (72). This instructive analysis illuminates the ways an economy of desire also marks Haring’s lines, emerging in “friction of complicity, desire, and inequality” (82).

In a discussion of some of the more troublesome moments in Samuel Delany’s now canonical treatise on sex and public space (Times Square Red, Times Square Blue), Montez asks us to think more fully about the racial and class dynamics that shape these encounters, and the ethical questions that are often missing or glossed over in cultural studies of public sex. For example, he uses Delany’s account of stymying a pickpocket at the theaters to explore ways in which this murky “moral imperative” (70) has more in common with the policing of queer and Black bodies than many would care to realize. This instructive re-reading describes and questions a “john subjectivity,” one that celebrates interclass contact but prefers that it “remain unsullied by the money he [Delany] pointedly wants to protect.” And Delany evidently doesn’t like to tip a go-go boy. Montez argues that such moments reveal the way “trade as an object of desire is often denied care through the very operations of desire” (71). While acknowledging that none of us can exist outside of these economies of desire (this too is a racial fantasy), Montez’s reflections on LA II and Delany urge us to think more deeply about the incidents of mistreatment and stances of moral superiority behind these supposedly liberatory encounters and sites. Montez’s discussion of cruising culture demonstrates the sort of nuanced critique often absent in scholarship on public sex, despite increasing interest in pre-AIDS sexual practices that animated sites like New York City’s West Side piers, bathhouses and discotheques.¹ Given the longing within a younger generation of queers for the “good ol’ days,” queer scholars should continue to interrogate the limits of the utopic, liberatory possibilities that these forms of public sex and communal eroticism are said to offer (and sometimes do).

Chapter Three, “Theory Made Flesh,” makes a satisfying pivot to consider Haring’s collaborations with the singular artist Grace Jones. With her hula-hoop antics and much-cited androgyny, Ms. Grace has become a patron saint of queer performance studies, and is deservedly fawned over by queer radicals. Montez’s reading highlights the way acts of “white male authorship” turn to Jones’s body “for the production of truth,” to realize creative plans rooted in an aestheticization of blackness (104–5). Critical of photographer Jean-Paul Goude for his manipulation of Jones’s physical form and personas to suit his own primitivist vision, Montez shifts our attention to the singer’s independent projects. Jones’s self-directed video “I’m Not Perfect (But I’m Perfect for You)” (1986) is dissected as a narrative of excess, an unraveling (or perhaps redirecting) of the pop primitivism foisted upon her by Haring, Goude, and other male collaborators. Ever-attentive to the nuances of creative collaboration, Montez does not position Jones as a victim of simplistic objectification or as a radical warrior dismantling the racial imaginary. He claims, rather, that Jones’s comments in her memoir about her decades of image (re)making express an “awareness of the impossibility of rescuing a prediscursive truth of black flesh” but also “her excited sense of complicity in the making of the Grace Jones myth,” working with and through the racist fantasies that animate many of her collaborations (87). This analytical move to recognize and value complicity as a form of artistic agency counters the eagerness of queer scholars to find a radicalism, a promise of subversion, an unsullied agency or just some redemptive breathing space for the artists we admire, even adore, but whose political and aesthetic flaws make unqualified reverence impossible. Jones approaches her performances—including one at the Paradise Garage in which she dresses in Haring’s lines—as “a space of constant uncertainty” (90). Rather than evade white male authorship, Jones conspires with it as part of a “continual attempt at rewriting the possibilities of her flesh” (105). In our now, students of queer studies should welcome a similar critical and political uncertainty into their work; otherwise, the field’s fixed attention on the “transformative” and “disruptive” reduces the expansive ways radical politics and progressive artmaking engage both dissent and complicity.

The book’s final chapter shifts in structure and approach. Describing the chapter as a “subjective journey” into a cluster of Haring ephemera (112), Montez pushes against the confines of more traditional, chronologically bound artist monographs and the “heteroheroics” that often animate them. Placing himself within a lineage of queer critical writing, Montez uses “alternative modes of historical imagining” (111) to disrupt simplistic claims about Haring’s racial aesthetics as well as the staid forms often used to write about queer art. The chapter moves briskly and poetically through a range of objects, from Haring’s mural in the former men’s room of New York’s LGBT Community Center to his triptych at St. John the Divine to Rosson Crow’s radiant, drip-filled painting, a reinhabiting of the Pop Shop. While I am a fan of the collage format with its quick turns of poetic insight (haven’t we all spent more time than we wanted with an artifact in a monograph as a scholar’s close reading becomes microscopic?), these objects call for greater attention. Even as a “performance of ambivalence” (112), Montez’s fragments, observations, and refusals to make authoritative claims are too rapid, associative, and less satisfying than the careful, needed, and often surprising insights about Haring and his interlocutors offered in the previous chapters. However fleeting these object studies, I must admit that reading Keith Haring’s Line during this stay-at-home season made the textual visits around New York extra sweet, from the St. Marks Baths to the Whitney Museum of American Art to the LGBT Center to St. John the Divine. Despite the staggering amount of international travel that Haring did as his celebrity and commissions exploded, New York City was his home.

Like Haring’s line, Montez’s prose is crisp and decisive. In this final chapter and throughout his readings, his beautiful writing invites readers to rethink our scholarly machines, to reimagine what critical writing and our theory-laden prose can do. Keith Haring’s Line places its author’s affective investments on full display. Reading (which is to say feeling) a set of photographs of Haring and Dubose at a beach in Brazil, Montez admits that one photo, lovingly dissected, “forces me to a state of intimacy that is more turbulent than a general ‘research’ interest” (128). I admire such projects for their permission to write differently, to feel “our” art differently, to imagine an embodied, affective criticism that takes seriously the feelings we have for the subjects we write about. So much critical writing is after all a gussied-up version of our admiration and irritations, and this work attempts to square deep affection and thorny ambivalence. In writing differently, Montez also encourages us to read differently: outside of standard conceptions of time, outside of rote narratives about Haring or any queer, canonical artist (from Basquiat to Mapplethorpe to Baldwin), and outside of the “celebrity artist” industry with its tote bags and lapel pins.

This thoughtful journey into the thicket of Haring’s racialized desire got me wondering about his broader responses and commitments to racial justice and social change. I knew about his Free South Africa poster (1985) and Michael Stewart–USA for Africa (1985), his response (one can’t call it a portrait) to the graffiti artist’s murder. The latter was recently on display as part of a Jean-Michel Basquiat exhibition at the Guggenheim.² His journals make few references to politics in general and even fewer comments on current events related to race, racial justice, or activism; the murder of Michael Stewart and the acquittal of the officers who killed him are the exception. He writes of giving Stevie Wonder, whom he met backstage at a concert in Rome in June 1989, some Free South Africa buttons and a T-shirt (Journals 356). The year before he asks: “How can it be possible that apartheid still exists? Dr. King was speaking against it 20 years ago. The world knows it’s wrong: journalists, protests, books, songs, movies–no matter how many oppose it, it exists now in 1988 and it is as strong as ever” (289). This rare comment on the historical sweep and structures of racism is part of a larger reflection on elitism and “manipulation” in the art world in which Haring draws connections between art, race, and “Big Control”: “The art world is just a small model or metaphor of the Big Control.” He goes on to say that “things are changing faster and faster.” And at the end of the journal entry, he quotes (and I cringe) Fanon’s rallying cry: “By any means necessary” (Journals 289–90).

Montez’s project, in contrast, urges us to look at “Little” control: the daily workings of power that include the quotidian, interpersonal forms wielded by white gay men, and that Haring isn’t quite able or willing to engage. One of the great strengths of Keith Haring’s Line is its nuanced attention to the “various ways in which race is reified through often contradictory narratives” (5). The complexities of racialized desire are scrutinized in Haring’s art and journal writing, but Montez also composes a critical narrative that welcomes similar contradictions, neither condemnatory nor effusive about Haring’s creative engagement with racial difference. Haring’s fetishistic practices are laid bare, as are the murky violations of intimacies across race, but readers are also shown the ways Haring’s queer sensibility changed over time, though it can never be cleaved from racial eroticism and racial aesthetics. This sensibility was both (over)crafted and, most importantly, collective and collaborative. Montez insists that we pay attention to those collaborators and wrangle with the dubious ethics and problematic racial fantasies that emerge in our collaborations, both artistic and sexual.

Whether in Juan Dubose’s mixtape or the blurred lines Haring painted on Grace Jones’s performatively defiant body, Keith Haring’s Line: Race and the Performance of Desire engages both loss and excess to imagine a history always slightly out of reach. At one point, in his reading of Haring’s journal entry about a snub at the bathhouse, Montez suggests poignantly that love is a kind of “waiting to possess” (56). Juan Dubose is crashing in the hall, but he is also waiting for Haring. A history of intimacy is made in such minor moments. But a waiting love can be agonizing and undoubtedly exacerbated by the come down, that woozy space that remains when earlier joys take leave.

Tyler T. Schmidt is Associate Professor of English at Lehman College, City University of New York (CUNY) where he co-directed the Writing Across the Curriculum for nearly a decade. His essay “Lessons in Light: Beauford Delaney’s and James Baldwin’s ‘Unnameable Objects’” was published in the collection Of Latitudes Unknown: James Baldwin’s Radical Imagination (2019). The author of Desegregating Desire: Race and Sexuality in Cold War American Literature (2013), he is currently at work on a book about a group of Midwestern writers and visual artists who collectively reimagined queer portraiture in the 1940s and 1950s.

Footnotes

1. Examples of recent engagements with New York City’s architectures of public sex include: The Life and Times of Alvin Baltrop exhibition (2019) at the Bronx Museum of Art; W. Ian Bourland’s brilliant Bloodflowers (2019); Jonathan Weinberg’s Pier Groups (2019); The Queer Space Studies Initiative; Jack Halberstam’s “Unbuilding Gender: Trans* Anarchitectures In and Beyond the Work of Gordon Matta-Clark” (2018); and Fred Moten’s “Amuse-bouche” (2017).

2. The exhibition, Basquiat’s “Defacement”: The Untold Story, at the Guggenheim from June 2019 to November 2019, centered on Basquiat’s visual protest, initially rendered on the walls of Haring’s studio, of Stewart’s death.

Works Cited

Haring, Keith. Keith Haring Journals. Viking, 2010.