Exterior view of the Leslie/Lohman Gallery at the corner of Wooster Street and Broome Street, mid 70s

Interior view of 55 Wooster Street. gallery group exhibition, mid 70s.

Interior view of 55 Wooster Street, The Gallery Retrospective, June 1978

Opening early 90s in the current gallery space at 127B Prince Street.

Quentin Crisp and Patrick Angus at the opening of Patrick's Strip Show exhibition, April 8, 1992 at 127B Prince Street,

AN INTERVIEW WITH CHARLES LESLIE
BY BILL DENOYELLES

On August 24, 2002 I met Chalres Leslie at the loft he and Fritz Lohman have shared for many years on Prince Street in New York City. It is the very same space that housed their celebrated Loft Show in May of 1969. An event that launched them head first into the realm of collecting, selling and promoting gay art. We spoke quite intensely for roughly two hours before adjourning for lunch. When we returned Charles told me he would allow me one hour for the interview. Tape recorder on - Charles answered each of my questions with precise focus, elaborating on them with fine details and historical import. When we had truly exhausted both my questions and Charles' insights I had found that we had spoken for exactly one our. Here is that interview.

BD: You first showed explicitly gay erotic art publicly for one week in May of 1969, am I correct?

CL: It was actually over two long weekends. Fritz (Lohman) and I were both collectors, independently and together. Being Soho pioneers in 1968 we became acquainted with the local gay community in Soho. In those days at least a third of the artists living in Soho were gay. Some of whom were quite well known and we discovered, in the context of friendship, that all of them had produced a certain amount of erotic or even sentimental gay work. Because of our personal interest we proposed the idea of a private show of that work. Some of the artists didn't feel free to use their own names because they were associated with uptown galleries. We said "That's OK!" We didn't have any formal guest list so we sent out invitations to everybody in our personal address book which was fairly large. We said: "You and Your friends are Invited to a Showing of Homo Erotic Work at 131 Prince Street…" The response absolutely staggered us. We thought we'd have 25 or 30 people show up, we had hundreds - both weekends. Right here in this space. The doorbell did not stop ringing, we sold a fair amount of work and even a couple straight artists got so interested they produced 'gay interesting things' for the show (laughs). That was the beginning.

BD: Up until that point the two of you were just collecting art.

CL: We were collecting, involved with our own careers and our own lives. But we both loved gay art. We were finding gay art years before. It was only accessible by word of mouth or perhaps you saw something in a friend's apartment and said "Who did that?" and they'd say "Oh he's a wonderful artist…" and they would give you a name and a number but gay art was essentially, strictly underground at that time.

BD: Was it primarily painting or was it a mix of mediums ?

CL: Painting, drawing, sculpture, objects de art. Some things very witty, some things very serious. It ran the gamut. It hadn't entered the realm of political art yet but it certainly had a lot of erotica in it. It also had a lot of romanticism and sentimentality in it, some social commentary in it as well.

BD: This is before Stonewall. (CL: Yes!) 1969 is a milestone year in terms of human rights, gay rights - all across the board. Was there a general feeling at the time that things were loosening up in regard to personal freedom and self-expression?

CL: I would say that there was a great deal of hope. We were members of the Gay Activists Alliance which had its firehouse right down here in this neighborhood which was wonderfully convenient which also had something else we and everyone else seemed to love - the first proto disco that I'd ever been in. I truly think disco was invented by gay people in the context of the gay movement and organizations. The Firehouse had a Saturday night that was delirious, euphoric…all these wonderful, writhing male bodies dancing. There wasn't a lot of drugs involved, there was a little pot but not like it is now where they have ecstasy and things. I think disco probably emanated from the Firehouse on Wooster street.

BD: Another aspect of our culture.

CL: Absolutely. Gay people invented disco and it went out into the greater world.

BD: Our 'subculture' always influences the mainstream.

CL: And not just ours - the Black subculture influences it, the Women's Movement influences it, everything influences it on some level. But we were the root of that (disco).

BD: Did Stonewall inspire the two of you to think that perhaps you should keep showing art of this nature and continue on a broader level?

CL: Not really. Stonewall seemed to us, at the time, an anomaly. For one thing Stonewall was not a mainstream gay phenomenon. At that time most gay people were trying to act straight. The clientele at Stonewall were not trying to act straight. They were real outsiders even within the gay community and therefor perhaps even more heroic. A huge number of them were drag queens or of ambivalent sexuality. It was not Stonewall that propelled us, it was our abiding interest in gay art. Stonewall didn't hurt. I've never stopped honoring Stonewall because it finally galvanized all the middle class gay professionals who were working so hard to cover their asses before Stonewall. Suddenly they woke up to the fact that "Oh maybe we have a case and a cause!"

BD: You mentioned before that a lot of these artists had a stash of 'secret work'

CL: It was like "I have some work but I can't show it at the gallery that shows my work." So we dubbed it 'The Secret Work'

BD: That was something that was happening even at the Robert Samuel Gallery where photographers would casually mention that they had this 'other work' meaning gay, male, explicitly sexual.

CL: Absolutely. When you look back at it now some of it was so bland and inoffensive
You can't even believe there was a time when this was considered compromising or scandalous BUT in those days it was. There was a lot of fear. You must remember that the great weight of the law was against gay people, in this country, historically. That is up until recently. Europe is light years ahead of us in the matter. It had more to do with fear than it did shame. There were artists that were certainly not at all ashamed of being gay but they were fearful of losing careers if they were discovered being gay. Like the situation of state coercion, state terror. For most of the history of this country gay people have lived under a siege of state terror and still do in some places. America talks a good game but it's sort of fake.

BD: There seems to be a gap between your first show in 1969 and your showing of artists in 1975. Did you have things going on between that time period?

CL: We didn't open the gallery right away. We had these weekend shows here. Then we found that gay art couldn't really sell enough to be of any redemptive value to the artists. People who would buy a still life of a bowl of fruit for $800.00 wouldn't spend $50.00 on a beautiful gay image. People didn't feel free to hang it in their homes. Finally we called it 'bathroom art' - you could put it in your private bedroom bathroom but you couldn't put it in your living room. That's when Fritz and I started hanging gay art in our own apartment. Fritz had a wonderful line, he said "I was born to get these paintings out of the closet and onto the walls!" We even knew collectors who would collect the art and never show it, we didn't know what they did with it. Some of it is probably still in closets or in storage.

BD: You showed Paul Cadmus?

CL: We had some Cadmus prints, we never showed Hockney, who I find to be a quasi gay artist. I don't find he resonates with a broad gay public in any way.

BD: I understand you showed Mapplethorpe in your first gallery exhibition.

CL: We did. And that's because someone came to us and said they knew a brilliant young photographer and had a couple prints and wondered if we would be interested in showing the work. It wasn't for sale by the way. We liked the work so we showed it.

BD: After the first show was it easier to find gay artists?

CL: We did have the interesting experience of suddenly receiving a phone call from someone who said "Hi. I'm an artist and I visited your loft show and if you're going to do it again I have some things you might be interested in." I would say that over time maybe two dozen artists approached us. Which was quite amazing and interesting to us. It also revealed to us that there was a lot more work out there that no one knew about that was available. Of course in time there was a whole lot more gay art around.

BD: In 1975 you opened your commercial space.

CL: I had finally dragged Fritz out of his beautiful east side duplex to come down to live with me in the bowels of Soho, which was then not totally evolved, and open his design office. Fritz had a major interior design office for 37 years in New York. He was on east 58th Street just off Sutton Place. His friends thought he was mad moving to Soho. It didn't change his business at all, everything worked beautifully, his clients followed him. In the mean time we had this ground level space on Broome Street so we decided to open the gallery. The first show we had was the work of a woman artist named Marion Pinto who had done a series of male nudes. Which was still a questionable subject matter in America and still is. You can show pussy galore but to show a dick is still very tricky in this country. People are terrified of penises, I don't know why. Straight men mostly. Straight men are such big sissies about such things, odd isn't it?

BD: Fear of being penetrated most likely…

CL: And perhaps liking it.
The show was called Man As A Sex Object and it was wonderful because the first show we ever had which you could see at street level resulted in the police coming. An elderly Italian lady from the Village saw these nude men and was horrified and called the police. It was the corner of Broome and Wooster. A beautiful building built by a famous social architect Sniffen who was famous for a street in New York called Sniffen Court and he must have built this for a social friend in the commercial district. The police came and we invited them in to see the show. The report they had gotten was that there were naked people in the gallery. We explained to the officer that these were paintings by an artist and that there were no naked people here and I asked him if he'd like to look at them. It was wonderful for us.

BD: In 1975 at this point Soho was just forming, you must have been one of the first galleries around.

CL: One of the early galleries. Certainly in 1969 we were one of the first organized shows down here. There were others - Paula Cooper and a few others. Then of course, we learned you could not make much money on gay art but given our commitment we pursued it anyway and sustained the gallery. Occasionally we'd have a winner and an artist would make money, which made us very glad. The thing that ended the public gallery was AIDS.

BD: This was 1981/1982.

CL: Right. 81/2. I had a realization then that gay men in that era generally had a kind of good time syndrome. Nothing was worth anything unless it was, quote unquote, fun. Unfortunately the gallery scene was lumped together with the club scene. It did not occur to me that the gallery would fail with the advent of AIDS when the bars and the baths started to retreat and close down. People stopped coming. Then I understood that a huge number of gay people lumped gay art in with popular entertainment. This was a revelation to me and so we closed the gallery because attendance fell off radically after 1981, after the 'gay cancer' was supposedly identified. We didn't stop dealing or buying we simply did it privately. There was no point in having a public space because no one came. Everything went into a terrible pall.

BD: Did it happen suddenly?

CL: It was astonishingly abrupt. Once the Center for Disease Control issued its conditional findings and the fact that there was some ghastly plague that affected, at the time, only gay men. Suddenly the world shriveled. The baths closed. This seemed to happen overnight. It was breathtaking for us who had lived our lives doing anything and everything anywhere. It was a jolt. But we decided that this art is going to go on and we're going to support it even if we have to do it privately if not clandestinely. We kept in touch with artists whose work had sold and we provided work for interested people as private dealers. That lasted for almost 10 years.

BD: We're looking at let's say 1975 to 1981. Was the art you were seeing clearly reflecting things like the baths, the Mineshaft and having that all wrapped up in high art and popular culture?

CL: Yes. Definitely in relation to people like Neal Bate AKA Blade who limbed the life of public johns and prisons. Bate was as easily important as Tom of Finland or Rex or any of the later ones. He began in 1945. He was a merchant marine in the war, was shot and on a sinking ship in the war. But he had already begun to sketch homosexual imagery from his own experience in the merchant marine. When he came home to America he went straight to New York. He knew where he wanted to be and produced this prodigious body of intensely insightful erotic art which now, looking at it, has this strange naïve charm to it. It seems innocent by the standards of today because drugs were not involved or the absolute degradation of the body. It was just about wonderful sex between 2 people.

AIDS savaged the whole gay art world. It savaged lots of things. It never occurred to me that gay art would be one of the victims but it was because of gay men's association with visual art as purely entertainment. Not as anything that had any resonance for the future. In the great popular mind young American people are not educated in art. I can talk to French eighteen year old who knows more about art than an American fifty year old. We were all in a state of quasi depression. We were all losing friends. One of our first great gallery directors died of AIDS, 2 of our employees died of AIDS…It was a fucking plague! Within one year seven art venues in New York had disappeared or closed.

BD: So you were the first openly gay art gallery?

CL: Yes. Openly gay. Sam Hardison (of Robert Samuel Gallery) opened after us, Stompers opened after us in the mid to late 70's. There was another one called Off The Wall or something. There was more than one venue. There was a time in the 70's when gay men who were interested in gay art could go from gallery to gallery on a Tuesday night at the beginning of a show season. Go gallery hopping and see gay art, see themselves and work that spoke to them and of course it all came crashing down.

BD: Was there a comraderie amongst the gay theme art galleries like Stompers?

CL: We liked Lou (Weingarden). We published a book together on Neal Bate (Blade).
I want you to record one thing here: Long before the sixties, probably beginning in the late thirties there was a kind of sub rosa, ghost gay art gallery in the Village called the Frank Thompson Gallery. Frank Thompson was a strange old fuddy duddy who was born in frost free Florida who came to New York as a young man, being the queer in his family he had to leave home. He was a painter himself who painted nubile youths, not very good. But he had this amazingly alert eye for anything that had the slightest hint of anything gay. Like a young man in a bathing suit standing at the edge of a beach, all very subtle because in those days you couldn't show anything too explicit. He did have a collection of male nude photographs which were illegal to show in those times. He was on Cornelia Street. The Frank Thompson Gallery lasted up until around fifteen years ago, he was a very elderly man when he died. Any history of gay art in New York has to mention Frank Thompson. Gay people looking for art that had a little hint of something gay in it always found their way to Frank Thompson's gallery on Cornelia Street. It was a store front, he owned the building. There would be all these pictures like a landscape, a seascape then there would always be a couple of pictures of two young men arm in arm on a lane or 2 young men sun bathing on a beach. There was always something sexy and sweet and clearly homosexual to those who could see it. The majority of people who passed by the gallery never realized this but gay people knew it absolutely. Everyone went to Frank's. I have one or two things I purchased. I first went there when I came back from the army. I was in Europe for five years. I was a soldier in Germany then a student in Paris then I came home, worked in the theatre and I lived on Cornelia Street. Frank Thompson was across the street from me. [Charles leaves the room and returns with a delicately rendered graphite drawing of a nude (uncut) man that he paid thirty dollars for at the time]. One thing I would like to say is that in our attempt ,over more than thirty years now, to try and engage the serious critical establishment to at least notice the fact that there is such a thing as gay art just like there is such a thing as Black art and Women's art. We discovered that the worst enemies we have are gay men. They are gay men in the art establishment. They are the most vicious, reactionary know nothings that refuse to acknowledge gay art because they are covering their asses. They're covering their careers, I don't know what they are, they are like pieces of shit as far as I'm concerned! We used to work so hard to ingratiate them until finally we thought "Fuck them, we'll just go on with out them, we don't need them!" There were two terrible, powerful critics in New York years ago who were monsters of homophobia - Clement Greenberg and Hilton Kramer. They had such power and people who establish positions of power in New York can get away with the worst shit!

There was another strange phenomenon that occurred in 1939. Which may have been the first publication that featured, to gay people, clearly homosexual imagery. It was a magazine that lasted only one season called Bachelor. Some of the early gay illustration was in that magazine… romantic illustrations, very subtle - like a man in an arrow shirt lighting another man's cigarette.

BD: How did Tava come to you?

CL: He suddenly appeared one day, in the gallery. Shaggy hair and boots, wild eyes. He was always wild eyed. He said "I've got some art, you must see it!" I said "Yes, I'd like that." He said "Maybe you've already seen it, it's on the piers." He worked at night painting these huge murals on the piers. He had truck and huge ladder. Tava was astreet artist in the sense that he ran around in a little pick up truck at night with buckets of paint and a high ladder, an extension ladder and he'd paint these walls in underground tunnels and collapsing piers and warehouses. A crazed, artistic phenomenon.

BD: What about people like Frank O'Hara and Larry Rivers?
CL: There was an article in the Times today about Larry Rivers and it never mentioned his forays into the gay world, isn't that ridiculous? Years ago Fritz and I wrote off gay personages in the art establishment because they are not a help they are actual enemies!

BD: You are solidifying what I've always suspected. Let me tell you that I knocked on many doors trying to get my art seen and it wasn't until I heard Wayne Snellen on WBAI and then made an appointment to meet him that things changed. My mother was dying at the time and was very much in love with my gay art. She thought it was the strongest work I had ever done, she said "This is your real heart." She said to me that she thought that this was the work I needed to show. I met Wayne and he liked my work and told me to bring a matted shrink wrapped drawing down that could be kept on display. Within a week I had done that. My mother said "There - someone finally understands your work, these people understand you!" She died a week to the day later.

CL: It's wonderful she was able to communicate that to you.

BD: I respect the fact that Leslie Lohman has become an archive for so much of this work that would have otherwise been lost. I had always heard terrible stories about great gay illustrators that had had their work thrown away by their family after they died.

CL: It still happens all the time.

BD: It's tragic.

CL: There's another kind of strange thing. There's a billionaire who acquires gay work and then locks it in a huge warehouse. He likes it but its his, for him only. He has warehouses here and in London. He collects big names and lesser known names. When he likes it he buys it. What's going to happen to this when he dies I have no idea.

We've brought ourselves up to the 1990's when out of desperation gay life started to percolate again. Our accountant told us that we either had to close down this art dealership or turn it into a not for profit foundation and that's what we did. In 1990 we became an art foundation. It took us almost two and a half years to get our not for profit status from the federal government. Our lawyer would get the snottiest phone calls from some woman who would say things like "Where is this collection in your living room huh? Where?" Our lawyer would politely answer that it was a public gallery, functioning, serving quite a large public community in New York. She would always answer the questions. The rudeness of these federal officials was unbelievable. The people whose salaries we pay. It shows you the difference between New York State government and the federal government. New Yorkers understood it right away - It's a gay not profit foundation showing gay art.

BD: New York's not the rest of the country, unfortunately.

CL: Thank God!
I don't want anything from the federal government! That's the most dangerous thing you can ask for. If you're going to get in bed and fuck the government expect the consequences, I mean give me a break! All we ask for is the tax break because we don't make money. The other surprise I had was, as another measure of my naivete, I assumed that once this non profit foundation was established we would get important financial support from gay sources. NO! Not at all! They'll spend $3,000 to go to Fire Island for a weekend but when it comes to an arts foundation? Zilch. The largest contribution we ever got was $5,000.00 which was huge and that's it. God bless the people who send us $35.00 or $10.00 or $5.00. These are the same people who will give millions to the arts establishments that don't need that. To me there are two great amazements in my life. Number one is that gay people are our most villainous enemies and number two is that gay people wouldn't really support this. The religious right is right up there too. There are a few legendary gay characters in this city who are sort of emblematic of what happens in the gay cultural world and they have more to do with religion than anything. In the thirties, forties and fifties there was a notorious gay character here by the name of Donahue who used people, burned down people and lived an exclusively gay lifestyle with only exclusively gay friends. He had lovers and so on. When he died not one friend
or supporter or anyone who took care of him got a penny. All the money was given to the Catholic Church. That's an odd comparison I know but it seems so strange that people are so unwilling to support gay art.

BD: So many people have been unwilling to talk to me. People who took part in a vibrant, celebratory scene and life that paved the way for so many of the freedoms we have as gay people today, no matter how mundane, elaborate or unfinished. And they don't want to talk therefore there's even less of a chance of tribal truth being emerging.

CL: We have a little show coming up featuring Warhol's explicitly gay prints. We've sent releases out to all the press telling them that these are the unknown Warhol's…we'll see. I bet half of them won't come out and those that do won't write about it.

BD: That's something that's plagued Leslie Lohman even as a private gallery.

CL: Absolutely. The only time we got covered in New York Magazine was when we did a show on drag costumes. Can you believe that?

BD: Sure. The Met would even do that now. Couldn't you see that? It's quite possible.

CL: Male on male sexuality absolutely forbidden! But a man dressed as woman because it's funny, pretty. I was staggered. We got a wonderful note in New York Magazine for a show we had called Diamonds, Gold and Mer. It was the year of the Gay Games here so that was the gold, diamonds were the drag queens and mer was in regard to some AIDS related memorial art. Diamonds was all they picked up on. I will be forever amazed by the whole thing.

BD: Were you covered by the gay press or the Soho News when you started?

CL: We are rarely covered by the gay national press, almost never! We hardly get a mention, they will cover a Tom of Finland show - always! We don't always conform to the notion of hot sex. We're about something larger than hot sex.

BD: Right before everything disappeared in the early 80's places like Robert Samuel seemed to be steering more toward photography.
CL: We try to do only one photography show a year, which by the way is always our most successful because photography is more accessible. It leaves little to the imagination and people like 'hot sex' in photography, it's jerk off material.

BD: You can jerk off to a Domino or A.Jay drawing…there's a lot of stuff in this room that I could jerk off to. The little statue of the cock in boots got me hot before.

CL: Of course! We are interested in graphic art, which includes photography but photography is only one part of it. We have lots of good sculpture.

I don't know, it's a long arduous history and it's not finished - it's going to go on. I still have these questions - Where are the people who want to support this? As I always say to people "When Fritz and I die this will be a well endowed organization." We don't plan to die quite yet. We have a lot of other irons in the fire. We operate on a shoe string. People are under paid, we depend on our volunteers. The gods have blessed us in a strange way for what we lack in money and physical needs like our space which, let's face it, is in a basement. We make up for it with the people who come to us. There's this little core of people who know what we're doing, what we're about and appear.