This nonbinary Latinx artist honors his LGBTQ+ ancestors with a sexual renaissance

Michael Espinoza shows “Polaroid III (unknown)” in his art studio.

In a wooded park in downtown Portland, Oregon, two scruffy artists in black T-shirts and cutoff denim shorts hold an impromptu “queer funeral” ceremony.

They stand over a makeshift altar – a wooden box decorated with crystals, a bouquet of white flowers and four books by queer authors – and form a downward triangle with their hands wrapped in pink gloves.

“This is a sign of resistance,” nonbinary Hispanic artist Michael Espinoza tells viewers before reading sections from each book. This is a ritual, Espinoza says, to connect “the sadness of our queer bodies with the queer literary bodies” of queer artists who have lost their lives to persecution, erasure, illness, suicide, hiding and oblivion.

“In many cases, queer ancestors lived and died without community recognition, the opportunity to live out their identity, full participation in family life, and in the worst cases, without persecution and execution,” Espinoza writes on her website.

Espinoza’s artwork combines photography, embroidery, performance art and other approaches to honor our dead and translate queer bodies “into an offering to the ancestors by becoming a landscape that represents the future,” they write.

HIV and queerphobia are just two epidemics that have taken countless queer artists from the world. During the COVID pandemic, Espinoza explored the concept of “survival strategies” by creating works that reflected themes such as community activism, the resilience of queer embodiment, and a distrust of public health institutions. One of these works was a small face mask made from black and pink condom wrappers and a glory hole made from medical face masks.

“The glory hole has been used as a harm reduction technology to limit the transmission of HIV and COVID-19,” he wrote. “What other sexual technologies have been used for harm reduction?”

Espinoza was recently accepted as a summer artist-in-residence for the Tom of Finland House in Los Angeles and is a featured artist in the 2024 Oregon Contemporary Artist’s Biennial.

In our conversation, we discussed whether OnlyFans has ushered in a new renaissance of gay sex, which queer ancestors inspire them most, and how art teaches queer people how to survive.

Which queer artists inspire you the most?

I am heavily inspired by artists who lived queer lives and died from AIDS, such as David Wojnarowicz, Peter Hujar, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Robert Blanchon, Patrick Angus and many more.

If you’ve never heard of some of these artists, look them up. They were making queer art when it was more dangerous than it is today. I’m in the process of asking for guidance from queer ancestors to learn how to make my work, and it’s really important to me to name these artists.

When you say “what artists inspire me,” you probably mean contemporary artists. At the moment, the one I’m most inspired by is photographer Paul Mpagi Sepuya. I think I’ve learned a lot from his work about how I perceive my own body and how I can use art as a channel for community.

I’m also heavily influenced by other queer textile artists working today. Sal Salandra’s thread paintings are weird and funny and awesome, Jordan Nassar makes meticulous embroidery about his Palestinian identity, I’m very inspired by the work of Aubrey Longley Cook, who does very precise queer pop culture embroidery, and my friend Greg Hatch, a felt artist from Ohio – very kind and talented.

I am also very excited about my queer friends who work with different media: Edgar Fabián Frías, multimedia installation and performance artist, performance artist Pepper Pepper, sculpture artist Molly Alloy and collage artist Oscar Zamora Gallegos, to name a few.

What do you think about the fact that more and more gay and bisexual men are living out and commercializing their sexuality on OnlyFans and other platforms? Is this evidence of a renaissance of liberated gay sex or a homogenous reduction of gay culture to pornographic clichés?

The inspiration for much of my work is the post-Stonewall, pre-AIDS era, when our community experienced a great sexual liberation. There was a similar renaissance between the advent of PrEP and… the beginning of (mpox) or until the beginning of COVID (when more queer men were using social media more frequently to share their sexual selves).

It is apt to say that a sexual renaissance is taking place and I think it is encouraging to be part of it. I see parallels when we look back in history, particularly the Weimar Republic, Pompeii before the eruption and so on.

My historical perspective as an artist and as an activist of queer sexual liberation is that we will always come together as a community to celebrate our sexual liberation whenever possible. Our ability as a community to embrace those opportunities is very important.

I am interested in how we have organized communities around sex, sexuality, and sexual practices and sought collective liberation. As a consequence, I am interested in how we organize ourselves to teach each other how to survive, whether it is by promoting non-penetrative sexual practices – so bate culture, BDSM, etc. – whether it is by teaching each other safer sex with condoms, or teaching each other u=u (undetectable equals non-transmissible), or by communicating our HIV and STI status in order to take conscious risks.

I have learned safer sex from peers and elders in the context of seeking sexual pleasure. This is one of our strengths as a community, and although I am very afraid of risks, I am encouraged by how we have come together to spread information and updates as Mpox works its way through our bodies.

As far as porn stereotypes go, I think we have access to sexual expression that we didn’t have in previous generations. The fact that I carry a porn production studio around with me all the time makes it very tempting to make porn, right? My perspective, my actual perspective, is heavily influenced by the internet; my existence on the internet has been heavily influenced by looking at pornographic images.

I don’t think I could make queer art that wasn’t influenced by the aesthetics of porn. I feel like maybe I’m following some kind of cliche, but a cliche today can be an artistic movement in the future. I’m not ashamed to take part in it. I’ve even toyed with the idea of doing sex work as an art form.

To explore this, I have had conversations and interactions with sex workers who are creating novel art forms in their own way and using their bodies to produce artistic content. If I accept that sex work is an art form, what does the artwork look like and how do I create it? My ultimate goal is to learn to overcome the shame I associate with sex and empower myself and my community to use my gender and sexuality as a means of self-determination, to create beauty, and to communicate the truth of our existence.

I realize that I am conventionally attractive to some people, but my sexiness is based on my existence – just like yours. Therefore, I want every person I come into contact with to carry erotic potential within them. I want to interact sexually on some level with every new person I meet until the day I die.

I continue to make work that pushes the boundaries of what can be considered art and what can be considered porn. I am comfortable with this tension and feel an obligation as a queer artist to promote the reality of my sexuality first and foremost, especially as the work I produce relates to my identity.

We queers are more than just camp and fabulous and good taste and brunch and drugs and bars and rainbows. We have sex. We have sexual practices that are specific to who and how we are. I don’t want to look away from that.

What would you say to a queer artist who feels like they have nothing to say or that anything they could put out into the world would simply be worthless?

I’m really glad you asked that question because it describes a past version of me, and I’m always vulnerable to feeling that way in the future. I’ve never met a queer person who didn’t add value to our community. So what I would say is this: Your validity comes from the fact of your existence. The fact that you exist and have something to express at all is why you should express yourself.

I have strong doubts about whether or not my work belongs in this world, and then I remember my younger self: my proto-queer self, who needed proof that it had a future and could survive.

Keep going, keep expressing yourself because you never know who needs to hear your special voice because that is their reason for needing to keep existing.

Queer people, queer art, and queer voices saved my life and taught me how to survive. You are an important part of my survival and the survival of all queer people now and in the future.

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