Red Clover (under water) 

Morgan King | State College, Pennsylvania, USA 

Morgan King combines landscape photographs with images from the 1930s and 1940s of women swimming to consider the power water has on a community. King imagines these images in light of Larry Mitchell’s 1977 novella, The Faggots and Their Friends Between Revolutions, as a way to think about the lives of queer people in the past. The artist writes, “I incorporated images from the aftermath of the 1938 Hurricane in Ripton-South Lincoln juxtaposed with a series of images of young women enjoying the water at a small pond. I imagine how the community rallied and supported each other in order to come to terms with the destruction and rebuild their community. “I perceive the young women in the water as members of the queer community who are enjoying some leisure and respite from the challenges that face people, particularly queer people in the early 20th century. While making this work I read the short illustrated novella, The Faggots and Their Friends Between Revolutions, which touches upon many of these same themes.

It presents the reader with the reality of what it means to be queer and the difficulty queer people encounter in the face of a patriarchal and heteronormative world. They make space for joy, play and leisure time as that is the revolutionary action that is held together by the principle of community. “Mitchell writes, ‘Those who have power—the men—decide which divisions they find expedient. They decide, for whatever reasons, who is not them and so who is to be hated. Those without cocks, those who are hungry involuntarily, those who refuse to work assiduously, those who want to play always, those who do not believe in male worship, those born with color, those who love their own kind, those who follow the wisdom of the great mother, these are the ones the men have decided to hate.’ 4 This quote exemplifies how sometimes community is born in resistance to something or someone. In the case of these photographs and these works, community is borne out of the need for it after the hurricane and in the proposed history of the image of the young women, in a place where they can relax and enjoy each others’ company without the watch of men or people in power.