This article comes from Allergic’s 2024 Pride Month series, interviewing queer and trans elders in the arts community throughout June.
When Deborah Bright began to study her Dream Girl In 1989, just four years after she came out, she launched the Bright Series, and she did more than just make a queer voice in the art world. In this photographic series, she inserts herself into classic film stills alongside leading women and men—infusing them with queer sexual tension with her sleek, androgynous image—playing with sexuality, desire, gender roles, and Hollywood’s untold queer history. As conservative backlash against LGBTQ+ and women’s rights took hold in American politics, Bright’s artwork exposed the world of queer desire hidden beneath the veneer of heterosexual love in pop culture.
At the heart of Bright’s visual and conceptual realms is sexual seduction. The artist has never shied away from the passionate carnal aspects of desire: the energy of erotic desire permeates her images and lends them an exciting immediacy. She has continued on this bold path throughout her illustrious career as a visual artist, educator, and writer. In addition to publishing numerous essays, she has edited the acclaimed anthology Passion Camera: Photography and the Body of Desire (1998), which explored the representation of the body in photography through a queer lens. During her decades as a professor at institutions including Harvard University, the Rhode Island School of Art and Design, and Pratt University, she influenced countless young artists.
Since retiring as the Dean of the Fine Arts Department at Pratt Institute in 2017, Bright has returned to her roots in painting and drawing, creating pops of color that appear to express free-flowing desire through abstract forms. Upon closer inspection, however, those abstract forms begin to look a lot like sex toys. We had the pleasure of speaking with Bright via email about queer desire, sex positivity, and what’s next for the latest phase of her vibrant and irreverent art.
allergy: You came out during the AIDS crisis. What made you come out at that moment? What was it like to come out at that time?
Deborah Bright: Did I choose the times, or did the times choose me? I grew up in a conservative Christian family in the postwar 1950s-60s. However, I knew at a young age that I had special feelings for certain girlfriends and older women, but like 99.9% of girls my age, I thought I would marry a man because there were no obvious options. The boys I dated were more like friends than objects of desire, and this continued into college, although I had several intense, non-sexual relationships with several women. In 1980, I married a man I had been living with, but five years later I fell into the arms of an openly lesbian. Finally! A different outcome! No longer married, but for the first time I felt like a whole person, and that was exciting. Yes, I came out during the AIDS crisis, but as a newly out and proud lesbian, I was ready to fight the social, medical, and religious prejudices that killed so many people.
H: In 1998 you edited the anthology Passionate cameraHow did this happen and how did people react to it?
DB: In 1994, I edited an issue of touchthe journal of the Photographic Education Association, on sexually radical photography. This inspired me to want to create a more comprehensive record of sexually radical image-making and writing in the decade after the AIDS crisis transformed gay activism and the NEA scandal led to institutional retrenchment. I also wanted to explain the role played by the feminist culture war in pornography, a war that pitted gay and straight women against each other, a war that was instigated by religious and cultural conservatives who wanted to ban all images of sexual themes they disapproved of, especially gay themes.
I also noticed that the second wave of feminism was mobilizing rapidly among the same voters who had elected Ronald Reagan. I was not at all sure that the modest gains in visibility and activism we had achieved in the mid-1990s would be sustainable, so I wanted to get this book into classrooms and libraries to ensure that these stories were told.
Passionate camera Nominated for the Lambda Literary Award in the Visual Arts category and widely acclaimed. Even though it’s been 26 years since the book was published, people still come to me at museum talks and conferences to thank me and tell me how much the book has inspired them. Mission accomplished!
H: You have been working in education for many years. Have you seen much change among the younger generation?
DB: Gender and sexual diversity and the ability to act on the truth of one’s lived experience (for those with social and economic agency) have grown exponentially in the years since I did my best to “make trouble” as a teacher of photography and critical studies. Social media and the internet have changed everything. … The backlash against “wokeness” by white conservatives is as much a movement to undermine the interests of women and minorities as it is against queer/trans equality. While this mirrors our opportunistic attacks on PWAs and “feminazis” 35 years ago, today’s reactionaries have far more political power and are funded by corporate billionaires who have corrupted the Supreme Court. Worse may be yet to come.
H: I like the sex-positivity in your work, which focuses not only on female desire but also on male desire (Cool Hands series of paintings) and the desire to flow freely. Can you talk about this aspect of your art?
DB: While the new work in painting seems quite different from my interests as a photographer, some of these early projects directly foreshadow what I am doing now. In the early 1990s, I began to revisit certain unnamed queer desires in my childhood memories: watching movies (Dream Girl); Playing with a toy horse (Existence and Riding); as well as Cool Hands The paintings you ask about are on my website but have never been publicly displayed. In addition, my time on the board of the Leslie-Lohman Museum deepened my familiarity with queer visual work in a variety of media and genres. I also think that my time at the Pratt reconnected me to how much I have always loved drawing and the essential alchemy of making a mark that is both a symbol and a symbol.
So what motivates me to make a mark? Feelings, desires, the desire to make visible what’s important to me. Yes, my desires are very fluid, and I openly embrace the different erotic subjectivities in my head, from surly paisan to gay cowboys and androgynous comic book heroes. Humor is always important – don’t take it too seriously, let the playfulness shine through. On sex toys: they were widely used in Puritan America, but carry a lot of social and psychological baggage. Doesn’t everyone have a vibrator? Why does the world act as if we don’t? Some sex toys are works of art in their own right, with prices to match. Why not celebrate objects that add so much zest and fun to life? One of the best things about being older is that you don’t care too much about what others think. You just hold onto your own truth and let things flow.
H: What’s next for you? Are you working on anything specific right now?
DB: For the past year I have been working on a series of paintings that are a whimsical hybrid of Ed Paschke and Betty Parsons. Paschke was a famous Chicago Imagist painter who was a straight man with a very queer and exaggerated sensibility. Parsons was a semi-closeted lesbian who was an abstract painter and sculptor and a well-known art dealer in the 1950s. Paschke grew up in working-class Catholic Poland, while Parsons came from an East Coast aristocracy (although her family disinherited her due to her divorce from her alcoholic socialite husband). These two artists are from very different times and from completely different planets in every way, including their aesthetics. But I am very excited to combine them in my work. The creative task for me is to incorporate aspects of these opposing sensibilities into new work that still works. I don’t always have the money, but the challenge keeps me going!
H: How do you celebrate Pride Month?
DB: My partner Liz and I will be attending the Dyke Parade with a group of close friends followed by a celebratory dinner. I am enjoying wearing my ‘DYKE’ T-shirt thanks to this excellent publication WMN: Lesbian Art and Poetrywhich just celebrated its fifth anniversary.
