Deborah Bright’s art brings sex back into sexuality

This article is part of Hyperallergic‘s Pride Month 2024 series, featuring interviews with queer and trans elders in the art world throughout June.

When Deborah Bright started working on her Dream girl Her series in 1989, just four years after coming out, established a queer voice in more than just the art world. The series of photographs, in which she places herself alongside leading women and men in classic film stills—her elegant, androgynous image lends the stills a queer sexual tension—plays with sexuality, desire, gender roles, and Hollywood’s unspoken queer history. As the conservative backlash against LGBTQ+ and women’s rights gained ground in U.S. politics, Bright’s art exposed a universe of queer desire beneath a façade of heteronormative love in popular culture.

At the heart of sexuality in Bright’s visual and conceptual sphere is the allure of sex. The artist has never shied away from the steamy physical side of desire: libidinal energy permeates her paintings, giving them a thrilling immediacy. She has followed this unabashed path throughout her impressive career as a visual artist, educator, and writer. In addition to publishing numerous essays, she edited the acclaimed anthology The passionate camera: photography and bodies of desire (1998), which explores how bodies are represented in photography through a queer lens. And she has influenced countless younger artists in her decades as a professor at Harvard University, the Rhode Island School of Art and Design, and Pratt University, to name a few.

Since stepping down from her position as chair of fine arts at Pratt in 2017, Bright has returned to her roots as a painter and illustrator, with pop-colored compositions that seem to manifest free-flowing desire through abstract forms. Upon closer inspection, however, these abstract forms begin to look very reminiscent of sex toys. It was a pleasure to speak with Bright via email about queer desire, sex positivity, and what’s next in the latest phase of her wonderfully vibrant and irreverent art.

Hyperallergic: Your coming out took place during the AIDS crisis. Why did you choose that moment and what was your coming out like?

Deborah Bright: Did I choose the time or did time choose me? I grew up in a conservative Christian home in the post-war 1950s and 1960s. Even as a young girl, I knew I had special feelings for certain female friends and older women, but like 99.9% of girls my age, I assumed I would marry a man because there was no visible alternative. The guys I dated were more friends than objects of desire, and that continued throughout college, although I had several intense, non-sexual relationships with women. In 1980, I married a man I had lived with, but five years later I fell into the arms of an openly lesbian woman. Finally! A different outcome! No more marriage, but for the first time I felt like a whole person and it was exciting. And yes, I came out in the midst of the AIDS crisis, but as a newly open and proud lesbian, I was more than ready to fight against the societal, medical and religious bigotry that was taking so many lives.

H: In 1998 you published the anthology The passionate cameraHow did this happen and what were the reactions?

Database: In 1994 I edited an issue of exposurethe journal of the Society for Photographic Education, on sex-radical photography. This inspired me to want to create a more comprehensive documentation of sex-radical imagery and literature in the decade after the AIDS crisis transformed queer activism and the NEA scandals led to institutional cuts. I also wanted to consider the role of the feminist culture war over pornography, which pitted women, both queer and straight, against each other, a war incited by religious and cultural conservatives who wanted to ban any images of sexual themes they did not approve of, especially queer themes.

I was also struck by how quickly opposition to the gains of second-wave feminism was mobilized by the same constituencies that had voted for Ronald Reagan. I wasn’t at all sure that the limited progress in public visibility and agency that we had made in the mid-1990s would last, so I wanted to put a book in classrooms and libraries that would ensure that these stories were told.

The passionate camera was nominated for a Lambda Literary Award in Visual Art and was well received. Even though it’s been 26 years since it was published, people still come up to me at museum talks and conferences and thank me for the book and tell me how much it has informed and inspired them. Mission accomplished!

H: You have worked as an educator for many years. Have you seen any major changes in the younger generations?

Database: Sexual and gender diversity and the ability to act on one’s life experience (for those with social and economic agency) have grown exponentially in the years since I did my best to “make good trouble” as a photography and critical studies teacher. Social media and the internet have changed everything. … The white conservative backlash against “wokeness” is as much a campaign to roll back the gains of women and racial minorities as it is against queer/trans equality. While this is reminiscent of what we saw 35 years ago with the opportunistic attacks on PWAs (people with AIDS) and “feminazis,” today’s reactionaries have far more political power and are funded by multi-billion dollar corporations, some of which have already corrupted the Supreme Court. And it could get worse.

H: I love the sex positivity of your work and it focuses not only on women’s desires but also on men’s (Cool hand drawing series) and free-flowing desire. Can you say something about this aspect of your art?

Database: Although my new work as a draftswoman and painter seems very different from what interested me as a photographer, there were earlier projects that directly anticipated what I am doing now. In the early 1990s, I began to re-examine certain childhood memories of queer desire before it could be named: watching movies (Dream girl); playing with toy horses (Being & Riding); and that Cool hand Drawings you asked about that are on my website but have never been shown publicly. Additionally, my time as a board member at the Leslie-Lohman Museum deepened my familiarity with queer visual work in all media and genres. I also credit my time at Pratt with rediscovering how much I’ve always loved drawing, and the elemental alchemy of making a mark that is also a symbol.

And what motivates me to make a mark? Feelings, desires, the desire to put something I care about into visible form. And yes, my desires are pretty fluid and I openly embrace the various erotic subjectivities that populate my brain, from hotheads to farmers to gay cowboys to androgynous comic book heroes. Humor is always important—I don’t take myself too seriously and let the playfulness come through. As for the sex toys: They are so common in puritan America, yet they come with so much social and psychological baggage. Doesn’t everyone have a vibrator? Why does the world act like we don’t? Some sex toys are works of art in and of themselves, and are priced accordingly. Why not celebrate objects that can add so much zest and joy to life? One of the best things about getting older is that you care less about what other people might think. You just get on with your truth and let things happen as they happen.

H: What’s next for you? Are you working on anything specific right now?

Database: Over the past year, I’ve been making a series of drawings that are quirky mashups of Ed Paschke and Betty Parsons. Paschke was a celebrated Chicago Imagist, a straight man with a very queer and affected sensibility. Parsons was a semi-closeted lesbian who painted and sculpted abstractly, and was a famous art dealer in the 1950s. Paschke grew up in the Polish Catholic working class, while Parsons came from the East Coast aristocracy (though her family disinherited her for divorcing her society alcoholic husband). The two artists were of distinctly different generations and came from completely different planets in every way, including their aesthetics. But I enjoy bringing them together in my work. The creative task for me is to incorporate aspects of these opposing sensibilities into new compositions that work nonetheless. I’m not always right, but the challenge motivates me!

H: How do you celebrate Pride Month?

Database: My partner Liz and I will be joining a group of good friends for the Dyke March and celebratory dinner afterwards. I will be wearing my “DYKE” t-shirt, courtesy of the excellent publication WMN: Lesbian Art and Poetrywhich just celebrated its fifth birthday.