Ruffled Bouquets: Queer Domesticity in the Work of Larry Glawson

Now what we desire is space
To turn up the thermometer and sigh.

— ‘To Jane, Some Air’, Frank O’Hara.

Al nist by the rose, rose,
Al nist bi the rose I lay,
Darf Ich noust the rose stele,
And yet Ich bar the flour away.

—‘Al Nist by the Rose,’ Anonymous.

Many years ago, I picked a few flowers that grew by a river path and then arranged them in a highball glass that belonged to the house I’d been looking after. I put the glass on top of a note that detailed some of my more serious mishaps there as well as a few delights. My two friends—two queers—and their son had entrusted their big wooden house to me while they worked in another province, and I had inhabited it like a lonesome tumbleweed, rustling through the rooms and brushing by the things that they, in those same moments, were likely missing. Their house is in a nook of Winnipeg that has no grocery stores or corner shops or, in fact, any kind of retail, as well as little in the way of public transport. So, if I wanted to leave a bunch of flowers to welcome them home, I had to nose around the river path and make a bouquet from the grasses and weeds.

It is lovely to return home and encounter fresh flowers in a vessel that was not previously thought a vase—a colourful tin that once contained Italian tomatoes is a favourite of mine. A vase of fresh flowers—whatever their ilk—is a lighthouse illuminating the presence of life, or its absence. They may be the last living thing in a hospital room, strange and lonely; or serve as props of wealth in corporate offices, waxily arranged into monstrous perfection, discarded long before their livingness leaks out with postponed decay. 

A carefree clutch of flowers in a room of one’s own calls forth the present in which the flowers, stems, and leaves remain bright and firm. They will fade and wilt and smell bad—as most of us will—but until then their scent is sweet, their water clear. To cut, carry, and display flowers may ensure they do not waste their sweetness on the desert air¹ as Thomas Gray writes; but Gray’s metaphor reveals a trickiness, implying that if something goes unseen, its life is unfulfilled and meaningless; but who must do the seeing to prevent this waste? Better to shift the emphasis from being seen to showing. By catching Gray’s eye, some rare flower bestowed immortality upon itself. I like to think that this flower was cruising Gray.

By being seen one can attain something—status, attraction—but also lose something—privacy, safety. As I wrote that, Weegee’s Gay Deceiver² popped into my mind. It’s one of my favourite photographs—in 1939, a person identified by the New York City police as ‘male’ broke the law by wearing clothes ruled ‘female’. I’m going to use the pronouns ‘she’ and ‘her’ for this person as I’m reasonably sure these are what her companions would have used. So, there she is, blonde curls cresting against the brim of her hat like the waves bearing Venus onto the beach. Her luminous smile and starlet eyes are directed toward us, her adoring public. She’s hitched her skirt to her hip, and her ankle is turned to show off her slender gams as she steps down from the paddy wagon, which she’s treating like a limousine parked alongside a red carpet she’s about to sashay down to glamour and glory, instead of a cold cell in a bigoted police station. In the seconds of that photo, this gal inverts—so to speak—the power of both the cop and sleaze-seeking journalist, turning herself into a luminous icon with the flashbulb, refusing to be one of the terrified queers whose photographs were printed in newspapers to publicly shame and punish them, putting their jobs, relationships, and lives at risk. Weegee did not print The Gay Deceiver until the 1950s, over ten years after he took it; perhaps he was protecting the public rather than the belle in this instance.

It’s a far cry from that paddy wagon to Larry Glawson’s living room in Winnipeg. Glawson is a photo-artist—white, queer, cis male born in 1953—who has lived and worked here for the majority of his life, making a significant contribution to the city through his art, teaching, and working in artist-run centres. His partner, Doug Melnyk, also an artist, has widely exhibited and published drawings, video, and performances. They met at art school in 1979, got together, and moved in a year later, becoming the art scene’s most famous homebodies. Their private—though not secret—life together has been central to Glawson’s practice ever since. His photographs of the two of them may not deploy the showmanship of the belle of the paddy wagon, but in their own way they display something as radical—the domestic life of a queer male couple in a prairie city in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century.

The interiors in Glawson’s series of photographs, home bodies (2000-2012), do not repeat the tropes surrounding queer domestic spaces. There’s neither the romantic squalor of Giovanni’s room or the desperate artfulness of a New York Times feature. Glawson’s images are deadpan and self-aware; their drama and banality, as well as the recurrence of interiors, people, and objects, have more in common with Wolfgang Tillmans, a German photographer whose images of his friends, lovers, and their shared spaces queered contemporary photography and challenged its normative themes and contexts. Tillmans placed his work in galleries, books, and magazines, playing with the hierarchy of these modes of dissemination and their authority in the market, academy, and other enclaves of cultural capital. Tillmans frequently displays previously seen photos in exhibitions of newer work, assigning swarms of 4” x 6” prints equal significance to the 20’ prints, all disregarding the sacred hanging height convention of 57”. Tillmans’ early images are steeped in alternative youth culture, centering sex, camaraderie, and irreverent behaviour. They are social images, their settings often transient—a corridor, a rave, rooms that have the sparse indifference of house-shares and rentals. There’s often an atmosphere of physical and emotional aftermath, which, with his astute use of light, can sometimes seem transcendent. Glawson’s photos occupy the same currents of lyricism and confrontation; he also primarily photographs people with whom he has relationships or close connections. But while Tillman’s work thematizes space—with its innumerable stories, affects, and relative accessibility—Glawson’s photography centres on place: a fixed location formed through use and memory, but whose boundaries are fluid.³ The series home bodies explores the setting of his relationship with his partner.

[Doug] has been there since the beginning and has been involved in every body of work I’ve produced. … We have this sort of long-standing understanding that because of the kind of photographer I am—someone who focuses on the personal—Doug is a 24/7 subject. This means I’m allowed to photograph him pretty much any time I have an impulse to. ⁴

Glawson met Melnyk in art school, although he’d clocked him a couple of years earlier in a queue for a Fellini film. When Glawson saw him next, in the hallways of the art department, Melnyk’s tight jeans left a fateful impression. Although Melnyk had not been “emancipated from the closet”⁵ for long before meeting Glawson, he’d done enough partying to know that he’d rather his new beau avoid the same bars, mindful that they might interfere with their burgeoning romance. This was no problem for Glawson’s shy temperament.

From early on, Glawson photographed his life with Melnyk, but before this his “rapidly reproducing, very heteronormative birth family”⁶ was his subject. It was on them that he honed the skills he’d been taught in a course on commercial photography at Red River College that he took after graduating high school. This early work also marks the beginning of the centrality of home to Glawson’s work.⁷

Perhaps repeatedly photographing his straight family partly informed Glawson’s creation of Family Album, a body of work he exhibited in Winnipeg at the artist-run centre aceartinc. in November 1983. The title brings to mind the posthumous book and exhibition of Diane Arbus’ previously unseen portrait work, also titled Family Album, as well as the seminal exhibition, The Family of Man (January 24 – May 8 1955, MOMA, New York City). Taking photos from magazines and domestic settings, where, until the mid-twentieth century, they were predominantly disseminated, and hanging them on a gallery wall was a firm assertion that they were contemporary art and, thereby, heir to the prestige of contemporary artists as well as the institutional and cultural power of galleries and museums. Yet, the works of Arbus and those curated by Edward Steichen in the MOMA exhibition regularly fetishized the photographers’ subjects—who were outsiders and insiders—and misbalanced their humanity.

There is a portrait from Glawson’s Family Album that I really enjoy, likely because it is the opposite of an Arbus portrait—Untitled (Doug & Larry, McMillan Ave Wallpaper) (1983, toned silver print 25.5 x 25.5 cm) taken with a Minolta Autocord Twin Lens Reflex. Melnyk and Glawson are pictured in the first place they lived alone together as a couple. They sit on two upright, mismatched wooden chairs in front of a brick fireplace, its mortar painted white. The wooden framing of the fireplace has the clean brightness of a fresh coat of paint. The wallpaper is rich with leaves and flowers and nods to the fecund freedom of a William Morris design, although it was actually found by Melnyk at Winnipeg’s Western Paint and Wallcovering store. On the mantelpiece is a goldfish bowl as big as the two men’s heads and a few happy plants. The fish bowl–and the portrait itself–present a world within a world, wryly evoking the idea of looking and being looked at, as well as what is private and what is not. Next to the bowl are knick-knacks and art, and below it is a small square photobooth picture of three people—Melnyk, Glawson, and their friend Terri—stuck between the grooves of the mantel’s woodwork. The three of them were founding members of aceartinc., and Melnyk and Terri worked as directors there too (I was also a director of ace some thirty years later). Two cropped window frames hover on either side of the fireplace, and on one of their sills is a four-legged feline ornament, perhaps a leopard, which echoes the large Siamese, John, standing on Melnyk’s lap with the air of a familiar. Melnyk’s pose with the cat conjures Ossie Clark in David Hockney’s iconic portrait, Mr. and Mrs. Clark and Percy (1970-1), in which Clark, a British fashion designer, and Celia Birtwell, a British textile and fashion designer, sit with Percy, their cat, in their flat in Notting Hill Gate, west London. (The fact that Clark was bisexual, Hockney gay, and Birtwell straight, as well as both men’s muse and collaborator, seasons this apparently heterosexual portrait deliciously). In the McMillan portrait, Melnyk’s hand cups his cat’s forepaw while Glawson’s rest in his own lap with an air of casual concealment—is this where the shutter release is located? Although the couple’s poses are relaxed, with Glawson’s feet crossed on the rug and one of Melnyk’s knees raised for the benefit of the cat, Glawson’s brow carries a shadow, perhaps of recent aftermath. Both men look at the camera, neither smiling or scowling, and this, in combination with the staging, gives a strong impression that the photo is a document as well as a portrait. It marks the triumph of decorating the room they are sitting in, but, more significantly, the photograph shows Melnyk and Glawson as homemakers.⁸

The arrangement and furnishing of our homes “give off signs, particular aspects of our personalities with all its complexities of dreams and aspirations, as well as status and position, wealth and class.”⁹ In the McMillan room the two young men, in their casual shirts and soft jeans, provide the “queer twist” in a home that “confidently articulate[s] a radical politics and a sense of felt difference.”¹⁰ In early 1980s Winnipeg, a portrait of two men showing themselves as a couple in their home, unaffected and looking directly into the lens without an air of complicity, is confrontational in its nonchalance. We are not invited to immerse ourselves in their lifestyle, neither are we provoked to question it, and this makes way for the pleasure of finding connections, symbols, and allegory.

An embroidered posy hangs between the stage-left windowsill and the curved arm of the armchair on Glawson’s side. It was this chair’s arm that gave me a punctum-pause, bringing to mind a line drawing by Elizabeth Bishop. Best known for her poetry, Bishop also drew and painted, mainly for herself and those close to her. Murray Hill Hotel (c. 1930s/40s, pencil, 6 ½” x 5 ¼”) is a drawing of a hotel room, likely from the perspective of the bed, featuring a radiator, drapes, lamp, dresser, door and, in the centre, an empty armchair. The perspective is a little crooked and the picture has the ease of a drawing done for the sake of drawing. The armchair looks comfortable enough, but Bishop chose to draw it unoccupied, implying an absence—an empty chair was, after all, less provocative, less revealing than an empty bed. This caution was likely necessary for a queer woman living in the middle of the twentieth century. Bishop had a number of female lovers, the most famous of them being Brazilian architect, Lota de Macedo Soares. Yet, loneliness preoccupied Bishop. “When you write my epitaph,” she told her friend, the poet Robert Lowell, “you must say I was the loneliest person who ever lived.”¹¹ The hotel room, a transitory place where she was an irregular guest over many years, perhaps serves as too easy a metaphor for loneliness and alienation from the comforts of domestic life. Indeed, the only decoration in this drawing is inadvertently provided by the logo of the hotel stationary that Bishop used, and this detail steers me away from the dreary trope of the sad queer. Bishop loved to travel and did so independently while pursuing a career as a poet at a time when doing so was not easy for women. Bishop’s centring of a single, unoccupied chair with its curving arms can symbolize independence, self-sufficiency, and the luxury of occupying a bed by herself or with whomever she pleases. We don’t know if this chair’s cousin in Glawson and Melnyk’s photo is occupied or not, since we only see the arm, an empty perch. All this brings another artist to mind, Xavier de Maistre, and his book A Journey Around My Room, where he writes fondly:

It’s an excellent piece of furniture, an armchair … During the long winter evenings, it is sometimes sweet and sometimes sensible to spread out in it at your ease, far from the din of crowded assemblies.¹²

De Maistre wrote this in 1794 when he was confined, with his butler, to his quarters for forty-two days as punishment for participating in an illegal duel. The attention he pays to his furniture and domestic objects bears a defiant curiosity, a refusal to be bound, and an embrace of the meaning held within one’s home.

“Home” is a soft word. It shares the gentle vowels found in ‘warm’, ‘comfy’, ‘domicile’…  A home’s ease and freedom is underpinned by safety and can be found in a person as well as a place. Melnyk and Glawson’s at-homeness is shown by their open collars, relaxed postures, and ease with each other. Their relationship is subtly disclosed through Glawson’s left knee lightly, thoughtlessly touching Melnyk’s right knee—such an everyday thing within the physical relations of a couple, but for a queer couple in Winnipeg, 1983, this happenstance could only occur in specific environments such as a queer home or club. The photo is not so much a statement—this is a gay portrait—than a document of queerness, whose power lies not in confrontation but in normality.

The works in Family Album were made early in Glawson’s career. He went on to create a widely exhibited series, The Anonymous Gay and Lesbian Portrait Project (1992-2005), and became a sought-after exhibition photographer, a much-loved instructor at the University of Manitoba’s School of Fine Art, and an integral part of Winnipeg’s artist-run centre community. In 2002 he exhibited home bodies at Artlab, University of Western Ontario for his MFA graduating solo exhibition. It was shot mainly on a Mamiya C330 and a Canon EOS 7D. Glawson would continue to work on this series for the next ten years. Clearly related to Family Album in subject matter, this series not only centred his and Melnyk’s bodies, which had passed through nearly two decades since that former work, but their domestic interiors—the landscape—of their home.

In 2008 Glawson rented 284 William Avenue and exhibited home bodies. He baked a fresh pie more or less each day it was open and staffed the space, regularly rearranging his photos and objects to change their relationships and nuance. Glawson’s installation responded to the building’s architecture, but he placed his photographs on walls and other surfaces according to a personal logic that brushed against wider narratives. The space had the cleared and clean look of a gallery but retained hints of its other uses through the absence of white walls as well as any institutional or administrative infrastructure—no desks, computers, or phones, no logos or gallery name. The building is known as the Winnipeg Saddlery and was built for Archibald Francis Wright in 1903 to house his business. From the start it was notable for its bad luck and ill repairs, and has been considered to be in poor condition by the City since the 1930s. Its continued existence is due in part to its place in an historic streetscape, but one suspects it is also because of the weird—some say suspicious—ability of dysfunctional buildings in Winnipeg’s centre to remain vacant without intervention. However, its lack of integrity—the building’s, that is—latterly encouraged short-term leases for interesting businesses such as Outlaw Books, a vintage clothing store, and a brief but noteworthy period as an exhibition space run by the intermedia artist, exhibition maker, and academic, jake moore, in the early 2000s. The Saddlery’s chequered past enhances its sense of in-betweenness—manufacturing/gallery, public/private, sacred/profane, erotic/explicit, document/artwork.

I know of jake moore’s exhibitions through Winnipeggers’ fond anecdotes, as I didn’t live in Winnipeg at the time. However, I looked around the building in 2015 when my colleague, Jamie Wright, and I were on the hunt for a building to relocate aceartinc., where we worked (which Glawson co-founded in 1983 with Melnyk and other artists). The walls were still the robin-egg blue moore had painted them, but the rooms were lifeless. A huge bulge raised the floor in one corner, although the wooden floorboards remained unsplintered. The building’s two storeys were modest but spacious, and there was an office that looked more like a solarium with all its windows, built on a raised level on the first floor. Twin storefront windows lit the room, but the daylight struggled to reach the back. Jamie and I ran a queer dance party called Peggay at this time, and the space’s potential as a venue glimmered in our imaginations.

Glawson documented the William Avenue exhibition with the rigour and attention that had established him as one of the city’s most respected and sought-after exhibition photographers. It is primarily through the documentation uploaded to his website that I have looked at the home bodies exhibition. There’s a clear agenda to capture every piece and its placement—albeit on a particular day—and show their relationships and possible readings, as well as the pathway through the exhibition and the order of viewing. Within a physical exhibition space, the visitor can flit between walls and photos, ignoring the intended sequence; one can also shuffle the order of viewing on a screen. However, on Glawson’’s website the documentation starts with the exhibition flyer, then the estate agent’s property description, continuing to a street view of the shopfront, then three shots of the door that bring us closer, as if step by step through it, where there are three shots of the view into the room from its vantage. We travel clockwise around this room, to a back area, then the office, and finally upstairs to an open floor with a video projection on the back wall. Yet, any assumption that this path follows a linear chronology is debunked by the Photoshopped, black and white, Sears-like portrait of Melnyk and Glawson as geeky teens at the ‘start’ of the exhibition, followed by an image of a pair of firm, hairy buttocks exposed through the unbuttoned rear flap of a blue plaid onesie. We have already seen those cheeks on the promo flyer stapled to the front door, and they appear again on the back wall. This repetition is characteristic of the home bodies work itself. Objects, interiors and bodies (human and non-human) are repeatedly encountered and become familiar, and familiarity is a hallmark of a home—created by the continuity of things and use of space by the people who live with and within them.

Behind the office in the Saddlery was a room painted red. Among the photographs and video shown in the documentation image called lucy room 2 is a large print, whose actual title is untitled (Roses 03) (2007; archival Inkjet, 22” x 33”), hanging on the wall and lit by a flat light bulb balanced on the ridges of an old radiator. The wall in the photograph is also painted red; in front of it stands a tall, cylindrical, blue and white vase holding a dozen roses of various colours. The petals and leaves are a little dry, and the flowers display the spacing that wilting blooms gain as their moist, lush heads shrink. It was these roses, but not this photograph, that prompted me to write about Glawson’s work.

Both untitled (Roses 03) and untitled (Roses 01) (2007; archival Inkjet, 22” x 33”) were taken of the same bunch of flowers in the living room of Melnyk and Glawson’s home on Balmoral Street; the red walls of their living room are easy to recognise and appear throughout the home bodies series. It’s a room in which Glawson has staged himself and Melnyk, photographed still lifes, and taken impromptu pictures such as those of Melnyk asleep on the sofa. But there is something about his still life photographs of flowers against the red wall that expresses the queerness, domesticity, and particularity of Glawson and Melnyk’s home that I find very moving.

The roses in Roses 01 are off-centre, the vase isn’t in the frame, but the upright posture of the snugly gathered stems implies its modest diameter. The bouquet seems to have suffered little by way of arrangement—the flowers make a small crowd, heads turned in different directions as if inquisitive of their surroundings. They are slightly ruffled but not dishevelled—rather like Glawson’s appearance in the McMillan portrait—and in turn ruffle the composition, disturbing the geometry of the artworks hung behind them. The bordello red of the back wall makes the blousy pinks, oranges, yellows, and creams of the blooms appear even more saturated, like the red set of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes that Marilyn Monroe dances upon in a shocking pink ball gown. The rose heads chime with two rough medallions of low-fired clay on the wall behind them, like thought bubbles rising from the blooms. The medallions are part of a body of work called A Weight of Days (1983) by Melnyk and are negative and positive impressions from his childhood toy collection. The red one has the bumpy roundness of being shaped in a palm. From its mound a gorilla emerges, a chunk of its face chipped off. The primate’s right arm is at a right angle against its chest. A quick scan of online gorilla body language informs me that if the fist is beating against the chest, this gesture can mean “don’t mess with me”. However, a still arm placed this way, hand over heart, was used by Koko the gorilla to sign her name. Koko is one of a handful of primates famous for using sign language taught to them by their human caretakers, or captors. The medallion brings to mind another of Melnyk’s works, GORILLA, a performance written by him with visuals by Jack Butler, featuring Maggie Nagle, Alexis Butler, Martha Little, and Cathy Nosaty, that toured from 1988 to 1990. Melnyk also made a video called Lucy (video, 10 minutes, 1988) centred on a chimpanzee who was raised like a child by a heterosexual couple for a scientific experiment. Lucy’s fame not only derived from her circumstances but also her penchant for masturbating while looking at Playgirl magazines. Perhaps the red clay sculpture is a memento of Melnyk’s works. Perhaps the roses dream of monkeys.

The other clay medallion is grey and depicts an adult figure holding the hand of a small child, looking as though they are walking out from a forest towards us. They are surrounded with a pattern of thin stems dotted with leaves or fronds, like impressions left by a plant. There’s the small fan of a clamshell pattern in one corner as well. The adult’s trousers have the high waist common to menswear in the first half of the twentieth century. I don’t know if the figure is a man, but those trousers are so reminiscent of my grandfather’s that I’ll use that gender here. Like the gorilla, both his and the child’s face are chipped off, perhaps from a house move or an ill-judged leap of a cat. These defacements bring to mind religious icons, ancient gods, political figures; evidence of a conquering force’s attacks on the culture, faith, and morale of their foes, attempts to weaken a people’s resilience. However, the erasure of faces and figures can also diminish the oppressive power and judgement that they symbolize; vandalism can serve as a means of setting oneself free.

At the top of Roses 01 is a small square painting; a recent crookedness reveals a brighter red square beneath, undulled by sun and life. It is, in fact, the reproduction of a painting printed on a light switch plate that was likely purchased from the Royal Ontario Museum by Melnyk. In the image, a gold unicorn lies upon a night-blue background strewn with shady gold blades of grass and flowers. The beast’s gaze is directed towards an artwork by Kegan McFadden, Through the Mail. In recent years, the unicorn has been adopted by LGBTQQIP2SAA people in North America and Europe as a symbol, almost as prevalent as the rainbow. The resonance might come from the creature’s reputation—power and ferocity balancing sensitivity and loyalty. Like queers, the unicorn has appeared in different cultures and mythologies across centuries if one knows how to look. The miniature in Larry’s photograph is painted in medieval rather than saccharine millennial style; the background reminiscent of a millefleur, and the unicorn’s body oddly muscular. Although its red-tipped hooves give the impression of a recent visit to the nail bar, this likely stands for something grislier, for

[I]t is the only animal that ventures to attack the elephant, and so sharp is the nail of its foot, that with one blow it can rip the belly of the beast. Hunters can catch the unicorn only by placing a young virgin in his haunts. No sooner does he see the damsel, than he runs towards her, and lies down at her feet, and so suffers himself to be captured by the hunters.¹³

The unicorn and the virgin often symbolize the Annunciation but also, in stories of courtly love, self-sacrifice, something still understood today when relationships call for compromise. What part of himself has Glawson laid down for Melnyk and Melnyk for Glawson? For what did each of them allow himself to be captured? Love, surely.

A less mythical creature to rival the unicorn’s ferocity also appears in Roses 01. Below the miniature, propped atop another painting, is a collaged postcard (another work given by McFadden) of a harlequin tuskfish. As juveniles, these fish are shy and easily bullied by their peers, but in adulthood they are quite aggressive. Harlequins are carnivorous, and when they attack, their teeth change colour from blue to pink. Such queer undertones! They are found in the western Pacific Ocean and are difficult to maintain in captivity. Only a rare tank can contain two of them, as they tend to murder one another in these environments.¹⁴ An aquarium is visible in several photographs in home bodies, and in one, hb untitled (nude) (2005, archival Inkjet, 33” x 33”), Glawson’s alabaster reflection appears as a sunken marble statue in a tank of darting, blurry fish—not harlequins. The fish tank appears again in hb untitled (stare) (2004, archival Inkjet, size varies), a nocturnal photo where Glawson lies on a sofa or bed looking into the camera while behind him, in the dark, Melnyk crouches in front of the aquarium staring into its shadows. These two men, it implies, can share a tank with each other but perhaps with no one else.

The orange and silver-blue harlequins in the postcard clash with the shocking pink and orange background, just as the roses clash with the red wall. The postcard is a luminous landmark in this topography of artworks, its brightness contrasting the subdued palette of its perch—a painting of the sea. Boat (1982) by Martha Townsend, is a rectangular canvas only a little larger than the postcard, which Melnyk acquired through a trade for some pieces from his Weight of Days. Thick, slanted lines of bluish rain cross a white sky, falling onto the zigzag of blue-green waves moving in the opposite direction. Upon these waves and against the sky, Townsend has affixed a dull red painted oblong shape, protruding several millimetres from the background. The waves have been painted over it making it a tactile, rectangular hull. It’s a bit of a stretch to call it a vessel, but it does appear to float. It could also be a submerged screen, a painted wall, or a shipping container. This latter association conjures the ruthless utilitarianism of commercial shipping and the industries whose goods it circulates. This lone red rectangle floating on a stormy sea becomes an ominous harbinger, a reminder of the frailty of the places we call home and the supply chains that support them, of how vulnerable we are to a changing climate, a pandemic, and ever-increasing inequality, misinformation, and authoritarianism.

There is one more artwork that I’ve mentioned within Glawson’s photograph, of which two thirds is visible: Through the Mail by Kegan McFadden, a queer, white, cis male artist, curator, administrator, and writer known for his lyrical aesthetic. McFadden has also been an important champion of Glawson’s work, writing about it extensively and curating a successful touring exhibition, 27 x Doug: Portraits by Larry Glawson. He also provided institutional support for the home bodies exhibition at William Avenue, which took place when McFadden was the director of PLATFORM: centre for photographic + digital arts, where he and Glawson later became colleagues.

Through the Mail presents us with a two-page spread of a word search—the list of words on one side and the grid of letters in which they are hidden on the other. This can be read as an allegory of the necessity for many queers to obscure themselves from wider society. From this necessity arose a beautiful history of hidden signs and codes: handkerchiefs positioned in back pockets to indicate availability and predilection; the speaking of Polari, a secret language once used by some of Britain’s gay community and other subversives; and drag slang, with its strong links to African-American Vernacular English, widely used and appropriated thanks in part to RuPaul’s Drag Race. Wordplay and association as well as irreverent wit are characteristics of queer signs and language. Across the two pages of McFadden’s word search are close-cut drawings of flowers and birds by Melnyk. At first glance they seem to have guilelessly fallen, but on closer inspection, several have been placed over certain letters in order to make new words: “gloves” becomes “loves,” “socks” becomes “cocks.” In the word search itself some words have a light line passing through them, marking them as seen: “belt,” “coverall.” The game of a word search lies in finding what is hidden in plain sight; but every so often a rogue word becomes visible—“loves,” “men,” “oh,” “who”—perhaps included for those attuned to particular signs.

Roses 01 presents a cosmography of art and queerness. The eponymous roses—like an ephemeral offering placed beneath the wall pieces—are placed in perpetual relation to the other artworks in this photograph, an artwork itself. On first encounter with the print, one’s gaze fills with the red of the supporting wall, but gradually the flowers come to dominate the picture with their ruffled heads and vitality, the many shapes and colours in the bunch, their straight stems with leaves squeezed between them, the innumerable lines made by the petals, the contrast between the greens of the stalks and the confection of their heads. There is a lovely rhyme between the shape of the rose heads, the clay sculptures, and the body of the harlequin fish, as well as the cut flowers and birds drizzled across the word search. There is another visual rhyme between the straight lines of the photograph and the postcard, the Boat painting with its red oblong, and the neatly geometric wordsearch.

Roses 01 resists convention—it transforms work by a variety of artists into an artwork by Larry Glawson, not as an exercise in effacement but as a portrait of connectedness. “A large part of my overall interest is in what things end up being when they are turned into a photograph.”¹⁵ The artworks within the photograph are cropped, incomplete, and unnamed, but clearly valued and intimately known. The photo implies a bohemian home, and its image is genre-fluid, encompassing landscape, portrait, still life, documentary, performance, album, and archive, and it demonstrates the private logic behind the installation at the William Avenue exhibition, rejecting gallery conventions.

Do I contradict myself?

Very well then I contradict myself, (I am large, I contain multitudes.)¹⁶

Glawson’s disregard is serious, intentional, lightly handled, and astutely queer.

At 22” x 33”, the Roses 01 print is a few clicks larger than life, which emphasises its formal aspects and imbues it with drama. The roses resonate with the still life tradition’s preoccupation with mortality, symbolism, and morality—the rose heads appear in their prime, but their leaves’ disarray allude to the creep of decay. Glawson and Melnyk keep cut flowers in their vases until well past their prime, appreciating the changes in form and colour as they wilt and curl.¹⁷ This perhaps speaks to an ease with the untidy aspects of living and aging as well as their offbeat sensibility.

The repetition of spaces, people, and animals gives an album-like feel to home bodies. As I mentioned earlier, Glawson has played with this convention throughout his earlier body of work, Family Album. Part of an album’s importance is that “it can provide a sense of wholeness and belonging for those who possess it. … assembled for family and friends, albums invite viewers outside that circle of intimates into a private world.”¹⁸ For queer people and other underrepresented folks, seeing people similar to you in private or public settings is an invaluable means of experiencing kinship and community.

The idea of an album recalls Gaston Bachelard’s idea that “[p]ast, present, and future give the house different dynamics, which often interfere, at times opposing, at others, stimulating one another.”¹⁹ Perhaps a home is akin to a family album—both are formed of specific time- and place-based actions and experiences, personal associations and memories collected together. A home is a group of things in one place, woven together by the people who own or use them; a family album is comprised of photos of people, things, and places that are connected by kinship. The former is living because its inhabitants are; the latter only lives when those within it are recognized and known. The life of a home and of an album are comprised of interactions, albeit of different kinds. The inhabitants know the stories of the things they have gathered as they use the space and surfaces of their home in idiosyncratic ways, forming a record of the way they move within it. The cosmography of Roses 01 concerns how one’s eyes move from object to object along with one’s thoughts. A similar mapping happens with the movement of one’s body among the things and other living beings in one’s home—movement makes meaning. There’s a kinship with dreaming, where logic is disjointed by the unconscious, like a straw in a glass of water partially cleaved by the surface of the liquid.

If I were asked to name the chief benefit of the house, I should say: the house shelters day dreaming, the house protects the dreamer, the house allows one to dream in peace.²⁰

Our homes harbour the heady potential of becoming, which carries a queer utopic potential, as conceived by José Esteban Mūnoz.²¹ This becoming is rooted in privacy, which ideally leaves us less exposed to judgement or danger. By centering his home with Melnyk, Glawson draws on the assertiveness and authority—proving the existence of something—of documentary photography, and in so doing evokes a politics of visibility. He has navigated this politics throughout his career. Indeed, one of his other bodies of work, The Anonymous Gay Portrait Project, shows Glawson at his most strident, and several of his portraits of consenting queer people were displayed on city billboards as well as gallery walls during Canada’s culture wars in the 1990s, during which sexual morality was hotly contested throughout public space. The risk incurred by the folks in this project troubled Glawson, and eventually he ended the project out of concern for the safety of his subjects.²²

Glawson belongs to a long queer tradition of making our living spaces and homes into art. Alvaro Guevara’s Dame Edith Sitwell (1916)— a gay artist painting an asexual writer—springs to mind, its scarlet interior echoing Glawson and Melnyk’s red wall. Or Lilac and Guelder Rose (1932-7) by Gluck, whose lover at the time was the famous florist, Constance Spry; or Anna Hope Hudson’s Chateau d’Auppegard, after 1927, a painting of one of the houses where she and her partner, Ethel Sands, lived together. Glawson’s photographs display the same pleasure in flowers, furniture, architecture, texture, and colour as these paintings but with the pared focus popularized by Wolfgang Tillmans in the 1990s. Tillmans describes the significance of the interiors and bodies he photographed: “[o]n the level of the everyday, personal lifestyles are organised as modes of resistance in the midst of a normative capitalist society.”²³ This sentiment is neatly described by Matt Cook:

[C]laiming a queer identity—as homosexual, inverted, or indeed queer—did and does make a difference to domestic life because of the legal, social and cultural positioning of those identities.²⁴

Let us return to Roses 01, the object that serves as the impetus for all these trails. It would be hard to find a more storied flower than the rose. Extravagant Romans would release a rain of rose petals from their ceilings onto the heads of their guests after a meal, while others hung a rose over certain tables to ensure those guests knew that their conversation should remain secret. Poet and polymath Omar Khayyám was buried beneath large rose trees that covered his grave in sweetly scented petals. Rose oil was discovered by Nur Jahan, wife of Mughal Emperor Jahangir, when she observed it upon the river in her garden, filled with rose water.²⁵ Centuries later, the Victorians established the convention of giving a dozen red roses to one’s romantic interest—twelve is the number of months in the solar calendar and, thereby, symbolizes constancy. The rose is scattered throughout the world’s art, literature, and culture, from the ancient Persian motif of gul-u-bul-bul (Rose and Nightingale) to Vaslav Nijinsky’s famous performance in Le Spectre de la Rose, in which he played the eponymous flower. In a poster advertising that performance, Nijinsky is memorably portrayed by his lover, Jean Cocteau, with heavy-lidded eroticism, revelling in the rosaceous embellishment of the dancer’s body. And who can forget another of Cocteau’s roses, magically alive in the bell jar of La Belle et La Bête (1946), in which his partner, Jean Marais, starred.

Glawson and Melnyk’s shared life over four decades attests to constancy; the clash of pink, yellow, and orange flowers in Roses 01 with the red wall behind suggests vivacious amorousness. Indeed, the erotic gives way to the explicit in Glawson’s action images (archival Inkjet, 22” x 33”, 2012) that throw the banality of old bed linens and a messy bedroom into sharp contrast with their blurred fucking in the lounge. These pictures speak to the completeness of Glawson’s project as well as his sense of performance and genre bending. Neither he nor Melnyk can be identified in these blurred photos (created using a Gigapan and digital stitching software), but we know it is them by their inclusion in the home bodies collection. The viewer receives a wry nod from Glawson—we have been made familiar enough with these men’s home life that we can recognise them in their beclouded coupling via their decor.

For centuries, the rose has also symbolized aging and mortality. Something so beautiful, capable of bestowing such pleasure on its beholder, fades and dies. In Glawson’s earlier photos, before the home bodies collection, we see him and Melnyk as beautiful young men, the photos capturing their eroticism. The unabashed sexuality of his later photographs has the same directness of the Portrait Project, but with the give-no-fucks attitude that comes with age. The self-portraits of John Coplans come to mind, in which his large, hairy, longevous body fills the frame. Coplans didn’t show his face, preferring to skirt figuration with abstraction and propose his body as a ubiquitous subject. Glawson does not leverage aesthetic niceties either but channels the weird power of revealing oneself in a potentially unflattering light. One could read arrogance into the action photos and the nude/semi-clothed portraits, but the stronger impression is one of acceptance—a journey both particular and universal to queer experience. If the flowers in Roses 01 stand in for Glawson and Melnyk, for youth and its vibrancy as well as its inevitable passing, they also speak to how our younger selves are held in the present by those who shared all those days and years with us, who saw and knew us as we were and as we are now.

A print of Roses 01 hangs in my apartment. Its imposing size creates the impression of a window into another place, and I guess for me it really is. Glawson and Melnyk made their home at a time when to do so went against the grain in North America, let alone in a small city on the Canadian prairies. Their domicile and those made by other queers over long, dangerous centuries are in some ways my ancestral homes—a non-linear lineage that continues within the four walls of my own home, where everyday I am welcomed back by a big bunch of roses that has been passed along for years and years.

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Acknowledgements: Larry Glawson, Sharon Alward; WAG library staff: Olenka, Nicole, and Carolyne; Marisa Godfrey; Cam Scott; Michael Pace.

Epigraphs:

O’Hara, Frank. ‘To Jane, Some Air’, The Collected Poems of Frank O’Hara. Ed. Donald Allen (London: University of California Press Ltd., 1995).

Anonymous. ‘Al Nist by the Rose,’ Bodleian Library MS Rawlinson D.913. Rossell Hope Robbins, ed., Secular Lyrics of the XIVth and XVth Centuries (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1952): no. 17, p. 12. PR 1203 S4 1952 Trinity College Library. https://rpo.library.utoronto.ca/content/al-nist-rose. 

All night by the rose, rose,

All night by the rose I lay.

Dared I not the rose steal

And yet I carried the flower away. 

(rough translation by Hannah Godfrey)

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Hannah Godfrey/hannah_g is a writer and artist based in Winnipeg, Treaty 1 Territory. She is the curator of Galerie Buhler Gallery in St. Boniface Hospital. Her book about five queer Canadian artists, Critical Fictions, was published in Spring 2023 by ARP Books.

1. Thomas Gray, “Elegy, Written in a Country Churchyard” (1751), The New Oxford Book of English Verse 1250-1950, ed. Helen Gardiner (New York & London: Clarendon Press, 1972).
2. (Arthur Fellig) Weegee, The Gay Deceiver, 1939, printed c. 1950, gelatin silver print, 33.3 × 26.0 cm, https://www.getty.edu/art/collection/
   objects/54619/weegee-arthur-fellig-the-gay-deceiver-american-negative-about-1939-print-about-1950/.
3. I’m using Doreen Massey’s conceptualization of space and place. See Space, Place, and Gender (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994).
4. Leah Sandals, “Everyday Person,” National Post, August 24, 2010, www.nationalpost.com/Every+person/3435051/story.html. Print out provided by Winnipeg Art Gallery archive.
5. Conversation between Larry Glawson and the author, October 1, 2021.
6. Correspondence by Larry Glawson with the author.
7. For those without a photographer in the family, department stores such as Sears or Eatons provided dependable portraits of couples, children, and families via a heteronormative lens. The sitters’ own homes were replaced with a bland background, creating the opportunity to show an individual or family unencumbered by material circumstances, displaying a semi-idealised version of themselves. Sitters trusted store photographers to create images of themselves that they would like and could share, that would become part of their family’s archive. It was also more convenient to go to a store rather than pay a photographer to bring their equipment to their home, and not everyone had access to a good camera, let alone the proficiency to take a good picture. However, even with a neutralised setting, the emotional and personal context could still be privately recalled by those sitters: attempts at unity in the face of divorce, mementos before unexpected death, crushing embarrassment, misplaced pride.
8. “It had been awhile before we got round to putting the wallpaper up, but finally hunkered down and had just finished it off before the photograph was taken. I had become quite fed up with the job by the time we got it done and was still in that frame of mind when the photograph was taken. Not sure about Doug. But I needed to formalize the installing of the wallpaper so we went ahead with the shoot.” Larry Glawson. Correspondence with the author, March 2022.
9. Matt Cook Queer Domesticity: Homosexuality and Home Life in Twentieth-Century London (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 13. Quoted from Mary Chamberlain and Paul Thompson, Narrative and Genre (London: Routledge, 1998), 13.
10. Cook, 227.
11. Gabrielle Bellot, “Alone With Elizabeth Bishop,” The New York Review, September 20, 2018, accessed January 11, 2022, https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2018/09/20/alone-with-elizabeth-bishop/.
12. Xavier De Maistre, A Journey Around My Room, transl. Andrew Brown (London: Hesperus Classics, 2004. First published in French, 1795), 7.
13. Guillaume, le Clerc de Normandie, Le Bestiaire Divin (1210-1238), cited inBrewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable, 14^th Edition, revised by Ivor H. Evans (London: Cassell, 1991), under ‘unicorn’.
14. Harlequins belong to the wrasse fish family, wrasse coming from the Cornish wragh or gwragh meaning “old hag.” Is this tuskfish a fag hag?
15. Sandals,2010
16. Walt Whitman, Song of Myself. (London: Faber, 2002), Section 51. Emphasis mine.
17. Conversation between Larry Glawson and the author, October 1, 2021.
18. Anthony W. Lee, John Pultz, Diane Arbus: Family Albums (New Haven: Yale UP; published in association with the Mount Holyoke College Art Museum and the Spencer Museum of Art, University of Kansas, 2003), 3.
19. Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, transl. Maria Jolas, 1964 (Massachusetts: Beacon Press, 1994), 6.
20. Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, 6.
21. José Esteban Muñoz, Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity (New York: NYU Press, 2009).
22. Conversation between Larry Glawson and the author, October 1, 2021. At the time of writing, the project has resurfaced on Melnyk’s Instagram account, where he regularly posts images from the series. This demonstrates the greater acceptance of queer visibility and lessened risk in the virtual space of Instagram, which oscillates between championing and abuse. The series can be viewed on larryglawson.net.
23. Wolfgang Tillmans, “Interview: Peter Halley in conversation with Wolfgang Tillmans,” quoted in Wolfgang Tillmans, eds. Jan Verwoert, Peter Halley, Midori Matsui (London and New York: Phaidon, 2002), 36.
24. Cook,24.
25. Allan Paterson, A History of the Fragrant Rose (London: Little Books, 2004). This book contains these and many other fascinating associations of the flower.

This article is published in issue 40.1 of BlackFlash magazine. Get this issue