The Art of the Haas Brothers

Photography by Sophy Holland. Gerard (left) and Kelly at The Glass House. Groomer: Evanie Frausto. Styling by Stacey Berman. Clothing by Vince. Shot on location at The Glass House, a site of the National Trust for Historic Preservation The Glass House, the iconic modernist building located in New Canaan, Conn., was part of the home of architect Philip Johnson and his partner, David Whitney, for more than 40 years until they died in 2005. Now, its intimate history has led performance duo Brennan Gerard and Ryan Kelly -- who themselves have been involved in each other's lives creatively and romantically for more than a decade -- to develop a series of site-specific performance pieces they've titled Modern Living."Johnson had been living there since 1949, two decades before Stonewall," Kelly explains. "He and Whitney eventually lived there in this sort of gay domestic partnership, and they gathered a community of mostly closeted gay people from the art world -- Rauschenberg, Merce Cunningham, Warhol, Lincoln Kirstein -- for social events. It was very queer."Beginning in January 2016, the pair will begin to articulate the idea of "queered" spaces in West Hollywood's Schindler House, another modernist architectural touchstone (designed by Rudolph Schindler as an experiment in cooperative living between two families), and other key modernist homes, such as the Breuer House in the Hudson Valley, and the de Menil in Houston. So far, all of Gerard and Kelly's works have probed the idea of intimacy as a fluid concept that changes over time."That's part of the project of queerness -- questioning those narratives of how one should live one's life or spend one's time," Gerard says. "It's political for us. The model of marriage can be very constricting and cause a lot of problems for how one lives one's life. We think this alternate concept is a necessary story that needs to be told." Keep Reading →

More often, she is conscious of the daily, shifting psychologies of our relationships to history, both the personal and the social. In her 2009 painting The Triumph of Poverty, the ragtag poor pose next to a beaten-up car, facing left with a resignation that almost feels determined, not so much defeated as savvy to the economic system that put them together and down. A pea-green child stands next to a man with his pants and underwear pulled down to reveal his butt is in front and not in back, and holds a cup up to no one. She stands over a tiny band of people struggling to stay up, their leader tied to a thread held by the man with his ass out. The people seem to belong to the Depression era, but, then, it's our era, too, coming on the heels of the Great Recession to remind us that things change, but often they stay the same.What does Eisenman think about when she's on Fire Island? "Ghosts," she says, explaining that the island evokes -- or rather is haunted by -- the spirits of a generation of men and women: artists, thinkers, people of color, the affluent, the middle class, the ignored, the displaced, those let down by their government, those who caught the disease too early, those who didn't realize they had caught it at all, those who thought they would never catch it but who did, all of those who were lost to the dark times when she first came to New York City in the early 1990s, at the height of the AIDS crisis. Many gay men and women, many of whom would have been her peers, were dead and many more would die later. Her first major institutional show, a group exhibition of wall drawings at the Drawing Center in 1992, occurred the year activist Mary Fisher rebuked the Republicans for their policies of silence, tennis star Arthur Ashe had announced that he had been living with HIV for years, and the FDA approved the use of ddC in combination with AZT. It was a time of further disappearances. Crisis provokes lists: We count what's gone and what remains. Everywhere the island attests to the dead, to the bodies who are not there, the figures who might have been paintings, the figures who might have loved paintings. "You can feel them there," Eisenman says.It's a sweltering mid-July afternoon in Crown Heights and an almost overwhelming mugginess has enveloped the whole of Brooklyn. We're both aware of how far we are from the breezy relief of the Long Island coast, where nearly a year ago we swam naked for my hangover cure. Eisenman tells me she has been recently spending her days on the island drawing her friends. Later that night, she sends me images of the small works on paper. A woman sits looking at her computer, her head held up by her left hand. A man lies naked on a towel strumming a guitar while a woman, her legs open to reveal tufts of pubic hair, listens intently. Friends lounge on the beach, make a human pyramid, and check cell phones against a backdrop of beach grass. I consider the living as she considers them. Drawing is a way of keeping them there. Keep Reading →

Photography by Sophy Holland. When told repeatedly, by multiple publishers, that his manuscript was too far removed from acceptable portrayals of gay life, a lesser person might have bitten the bullet, surrendering to revisions or simply giving up. Christopher Stoddard, however, has always been resilient. Amid the frequent rejection of his novel White, Christian -- a bleak and raw account of a young gay man damaged by loss, then driven by drugs and sex -- Stoddard realized that it wasn't him, but the industry, that required change. "Several companies told me they really liked the book but that they didn't want to represent gay people in that way -- that they were trying to move forward," he recalls. "I found that disappointing, because these things still happen."Those early setbacks were eventually eclipsed by a book deal, but in the process, Stoddard, a Brooklyn-based advertising producer, saw that a platform was needed for alternative narratives. Life was improving for huge numbers of LGBT people, but it came at the price of conformity, with the experiences and lives of many swept out of sight. In 2013, he founded ITNA Press ("anti" spelled backward). The company focuses on publishing literature deemed too risque for mainstream readers, but even though its five authors are gay, ITNA is not exclusively LGBT."It just so happens," Stoddard says, "that a lot of gay people who find themselves outside of what is currently 'correct' in terms of being gay need this. Ultimately, I just want to find good, gritty books I'd want to read. It doesn't matter who's written them." Keep Reading →