Do we fear the freedom of others because it reveals our own imprisonment?
In 1974 Andy Warhol was commissioned by Luciano Anselmino, an Italian art dealer, to capture the portraits of the queens of NYC’s drag scene. The series of photos turned screenprints was titled “Ladies and Gentlemen 135”
There are lives that do not conform to the world but confront it. Lives that disrupt not by opposition, but by embodiment. When someone walks through the world in a body they have claimed for themselves, in a gender they have authored, in beauty they have created, they are doing far more than simply existing. They are disrupting established norms.
These Polaroid portraits of Marsha P. Johnson by Andy Warhol derive from his series Ladies and Gentlemen, which focuses on drag queens and trans women, primarily of colour in 1974.
This kind of disruption shakes the foundations of a society built on conformity. It threatens the architecture of many individuals’ self-images, constructed through processes of compromise, and the seduction of safety.
When confronted with such disruption, the instinct is often defensive: rather than interrogating our own denied potential, we attack or attempt to erase those who embody what we’ve repressed.
Castro Street Fair, San Francisco, CA, August 1980. Photo by Paul Fusco.
Their presence is disruptive because it forces a confrontation with parts of ourselves we thought we’d buried deep: Could I be more than this? Could I live more freely? Could I reclaim parts of myself I have locked away? This disruption is deeply uncomfortable, unbearable even.
Zanele Muholi, Charlottesville, Virginia, 2015. © Zanele Muholi. Courtesy of Stevenson, Cape Town/Johannesburg and Yancey Richardson, New York.
We learn, early and often, to fit ourselves into frames not of our making. We are taught to contort our instincts, our desires, even our silence into shapes that will be accepted. But some do not, some unlearn, and in doing so, they live in a kind of radical presence that is unnerving. They are reshaping the world, revealing that many of its so-called truths are just conventions in costume.
Image by visual artist and creative director, Mayara Ferrão
But for those of us still buried beneath the rubble of who we were told to be, such living can feel like a provocation. Freedom becomes dangerous. Not because it breaks the rules, but because it breaks the spell.