Hide to Reveal: Sharon Hayes' Love Letters to an Unnamed You

This paper will examine Sharon Hayes' usage of the epistolary form in her performances Everything else has failed don't you think it time for love (2007) and I march in the parade of liberty but without you I'm not free (2008). Starting with "My Dear Lover," both performances are structured as love letters addressed to an unnamed “you,” delivered by Hayes on the streets of downtown Manhattan. In the letters, Hayes appropriates and re-articulates historical and political texts, largely sourced from queer archives, creating parallels between queer epistolary traditions and political speeches. This paper will argue that the artist reconstructs the original need for anonymity that was necessary for queer individuals to navigate heteronormative societies, mirroring the coded language used in historical queer correspondences, and extends this to the experience of United States politics as a site of heartbreak. By delivering these letters publicly, using a microphone and a megaphone, Hayes highlights the tension between the private and the public realms, illustrating how the lives of queer people are often publicly exposed without consent—often by releasing correspondence as evidence of someone’s queer identity. The act of reading these letters to no one in particular on the busy streets of New York City, poses an interesting consideration of Bakhtin's concept of "addressivity" - the idea that meaning is shaped by the addressed. Complicating the supposedly confessional nature of the epistolary form, this paper will explore how meaning is shaped when the writer is queer, and the addressed is unfixed and fleeting.