Gays, Lesbians, and Queers, Oh My!: Tracing the lineage of David Wojnarowicz through the work of Every Ocean Hughes and LTTR

What does the work of gay male artist and AIDS activist David Wojnarowicz have to do with a feminist genderqueer artist collective? This is the question posed, and perhaps answered, by the artists of LTTR placing Every Ocean Hughes’ (fka Emily Roysdon) untitled (david wojnarowicz project) on the cover of the first issue of the magazine in 2002. Hughes’s image specifically mirrors a photograph from Wojnarowicz’s series, Rimbaud in New York (1978-1979). Just as Wojnarowicz invents a future for Rimbaud, Hughes brings Wojnarowicz into their own time. In this act of replication with substitutions, Hughes does not simply build on the past but collapses the past into the present. Untitled (david wojnarowicz project) invokes a gay past and incorporates it into a lesbian, queer, and trans present. The work’s combination of elements and identities both contains and explodes these categories. Hughes creates an image where identities can neither be separated nor completely eliminated. Each identity offers a history and lineage that is essential to the current construction of a queer identity. Placing this image on the cover of LTTR’s first issue, aptly named, “lesbians to the rescue,” furthers these histories. This paper explores this commitment to artistic citation and argues that this act allows for the examination of the complex and fluid relationships between lesbian, gay, trans, and queer identities. This act of lineage creation is one that is distinctly queer—the kind of queerness that resists its ever-growing capaciousness through historically specific connections to lesbian, gay, and trans histories.