My Jesus Lives In Albuquerque:

An Interview With Delmas Howe
by Sal Monetti

During the run of the exhibition "My Jesus Lives In Albuquerque" at The Leslie ? Lohman Galleries (March 12 - April 27, 1996), it was my great pleasure to meet and interview the artist Delmas Howe. Following are excerpts from that interview.

SM: So, hi!...tell me about your childhood.
DH: How much time do we have? [laughs].

As much as you like.
Long, long ago in a place far far away...We all think our own childhood's are normal. Later, we find out that we lived in a dysfunctional situation. I don't know, how introspective do you want me to be? I think that one of the things I have to offer is that I've survived. I'm sixty and have been gay since the forties. A lot of us came from the type of household I came from. My father and mother were alcoholics, which in the area I lived in was not unusual. Men still drink a lot down there. I lived [and live] in the southwest. My friends were ranchers and rodeo people. We lived in the shadow of a rodeo arena. I used to work driving the tractor and grading the arena when I was a kid and was raised on the laps of the cowboy friends of my father. They would get together, smoke cigars, talk and drink whisky. I loved being on the laps of those men. To me, that (the whisky, tobacco, leather and sweat) was and still is a turn on. I always liked to draw. My mother directed me into the arts, especially music, but my dad wanted me to be a cowboy. He had me out fixing the fence, stuff with animals...I just hated it.. My mother guided me into arts and education. I look to my mother as my savior. My dad said, "education makes fools of men." [The telephone suddenly rings and Delmas said] "Oh, I thought that maybe that was him calling ? oh my God, I didn't mean it."

Was there a lot of art done even then?
I just played with drawing. I focused on music. I started playing piano, then the bassoon. That got me a scholarship to college and actually opened up the world for me. I got to play in wonderful groups and eventually wound up at Yale University. That came after the military. I was in the Air Force and was stationed in the Air Force Academy Band. It was there that I realized I had an interest in art. I had lots of free time and started to take classes. After the military, I wanted a place where I could do music and art so I thought ? New York City. I also wanted to be gay. I knew I was gay, but I hadn't really done anything except be frustrated.

When was that exactly?
1960. I came here and studied with the first bassoonist of The New York Philharmonic. Then I got the scholarship to Yale and took a teaching job in a college in Texas. I was teaching about three days and realized that this wasn't something that I wanted to do. So I fled back to New York after a semester and never did go back to music. I came back to New York and started going full time to The Art Students League and living the life of, well, this will date me, of the bohemian. I got to be a bohemian, a beatnik and a hippie.

Elaborate on that... New York in the sixties.
I think that this is what I have to offer to the gay community, having lived through these periods that have been real important in gay history. Mayor Wagner had closed down the gay bars. There were only private clubs and I don't think that men could dance. I may be wrong about that.

How did you find out about these clubs and network?
Friends would take you and see that you got a membership. It was very easy to become a member, a matter of paying money and signing your name. The first gay club I went to was as a guest of Fritz Lohman [co-founder of LLGAF]. It was a leather club and I was wide eyed and fresh to New York City. A motorcycle was hanging from the ceiling...straight out of Hollywood. All the central action was on the streets. Third Avenue in those days [the fifties] was incredible with the El. In the darkness of the El, there had been a lot of activity. Then they tore it down but everyone still congregated there even though there was no darkness. It sort of reminds me of when I was in Oslo and met a gay guy and had a wonderful time. The bars close at three in the morning and he took me to all the gay haunts, the park, the brambles or something and everybody was busy in the bushes except at that time of year, the sun never sets ...well anyway, the gay people still used Third Avenue as their cruise ground. In those days all the activity was out on the streets.

Did you live alone? Did you have a roommate?
When I first came to New York, I lived with a man I had met in the military. Mayor Lindsay came in and legalized gay bars and they opened up everywhere. I continued my art and gay education. I lived on the upper east side in Yorkville and remember a bar on the edge of Harlem called Charades. Black men hung out there but there were a few of us white boys from the neighborhood who liked to hang out there too. It was a wonderful bar and the most wonderful men went there and there was dancing. I don't know what happened to them later. It was a bar that was owned by the black Mafia. This was about 1968 or 1969, before Disco. Disco was happening in Europe. It hadn't really come here. Gays weren't allowed to dance together, but in this bar, they were. The police raided them and closed it down and they took it to court. The court ruled there was no law against men dancing and the next day was the birth of Disco. Thousands of them opened up in New York. It wasn't that elaborate but it was about then that the party started that went on until AIDS. I saw that whole thing develop - incredible, sexual party - freedom of expression.

Did your art get involved in this?
In those days how did I know what I?d wind up doing? I loved being part of the gay community. The excessive lifestyle that was acceptable in those days and still is. I was studying art. I loved drawing the figure and I did work for some of the gay magazines and actually, Charles and Fritz [Charles Leslie and Fritz Lohman] were really good friends through that period. Charles and I put together some erotic shows first in the basement gallery and also what is now the upstairs loft. I consciously made a decision to let my work be a bridge from that period to what may happen in the future. Even though I've lived through all that gay people have been through for the past decade or so, I'm not an angry young man and my work is not filled with angst. It's still a celebration of the male figure and gay sensibility. I decided, it's kept me poor, but my art work would be an honest reflection of my own homosexuality and would remain in the gay community rather than aspire to the universal and unapproachable. Now I'm being rewarded for that and see my work as a direct link back to the magic realists of the thirties like Cadmus and Jared French and those guys who are honest about their sexual orientation and suffered for it.

Do you see that changing now? You said the word 'suffer.?
No. Absolutely not. I still cannot show these works in a mainstream gallery. They just won't show it. I was recently going to the Arthur Tress opening and he apologized that his male imagery would not be there because the gallery won't show it. As a matter of fact, it's worse now then it was a few years ago. In my shows in Santa Fe, they have to put notices on the door saying, "Adults Only, Parental Advisory" just because I use male nudes to discuss what I want to discuss. I never do pornography or even exaggerated nudity. Occasionally I do, but I don't usually show that.

I've got to ask, why not?
I don't think it's necessary. Other people do it very well so I don't need to do it. I may be obsessed but I'm not obsessed with exaggeration. I think that the most interesting artists are obsessed about something and that obsession comes through in their work. I try very hard for my work to be a discussion of what I am at the present and what I have been and maybe what I hope to become. My work is turning darker because I'm very upset about the war declared on us by the Christian right. I was in a human rights discussion recently and someone said, "What is all this 'them' and 'us' thing" I said, "There is a them and us and they've declared war on us." They are spending great amounts of money and are very organized. They've set out to focus on us as the enemy and we have to be conscious of this. I'm doing a body of work now that's going away from the celebration of men and the western. I'm getting into what I'm calling Christian mythology and doing the Stations of the Cross. I talked to a couple of priests about it and they said that they thought it was a perfectly wonderful idea. It is not documented particularly and ethnic groups, since the stations were created by the Franciscan monks, have used it to express their pain. I've decided to set it at the piers where so much gay activity happens. It's very dark. I have a few studies here and I suppose the most graphic one is Veronica's Kiss. I'm choosing to paint Veronica in obvious drag. I'm trying to find a grant but there are no grants. I'm a gay artist and really want to express myself honestly. We can attract crowds but it's very hard to sell. The straight community is not interested for obvious reasons, but the gay community doesn't buy it because who wants to pay a lot of money for a big painting to hang in a living room that says, ?I'm gay? to everyone who walks in the door. Well, in New York it may be OK in a lot of places but where I live there are not many people who can do that.

Tell Me, how do you function out there?
Very honestly. Which means that a lot of people in the small town that I live cross to the other side of the street when they see me coming. I also have a great number of wonderful friends. We all insulate ourselves with our own extended family. Now, getting back to the Christian right, the government says that's OK ? you can bash gays. It's OK with the church, politicians and the media. It's a difficult time for gays. When I first started gay imagery, it was fun. It wasn't political but now just because I'm a man doing male nudes, it's political and I'm told that my gallery in Santa Fe that gets criticized all the time for showing my work. "Why don't we put up this work and say it's by Delores...this hot woman from SoHo," then things would suddenly be perfectly OK because they?re done by some woman artist, from New York.

Do you think that there's a place for "gay art" in art history"
That's a very good question, to isolate it as gay art. I have a very good friend who is one of the worlds leading art historians, Edward Lucie -Smith. We just took a long holiday in Europe where we saw hundreds and hundreds of masterpieces. Especially in London, Paris and Venice. I think it's wonderful now that a gay artist can paint what they want to and not disguise it as a religious, historical or mythological subject. I was looking at art from a certain viewpoint because I want to do the Stations of the Cross. I went to over a hundred churches in Venice and it occurred to me that the walls are filled with avalanches of homoerotic art. There's turgid male flesh rolling off the wall in every direction and the virgin coming out of it all. Artists, especially gay artists, always had to disguise their own interest in the popular genre and you can sort of get a feeling of who might have been gay even though history doesn't identify them. But everything has changed. I don't think people separated themselves until recently from the rest of culture into being gay or homosexual. I think it will be different from now on. Gay art will be a part of the art scene. I think that for the first time in art history we can say, "I'm a gay artist and I'm doing gay art for the gay community, and the hell with the rest of them.? That's the interesting thing in art history. It didn't even exist in the Renaissance when there were so many artists who were probably gay and loved the male figure and started the tradition where the male figure was the standard by which artists were measured. I definitely believe as we identity ourselves more and more, that more art through history can be defined as being gay. It may be the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel that's gay art.

Do you have any favorite artists?
I do, but selecting a favorite artist is like selecting your favorite fruit. There are bananas, apples and oranges. They're all fabulous in their own way. One of the works of art that has influenced me is Van Deer Widen's Deposition in the Prado in Madrid. Why? That would be a very complex answer. It's Renaissance work, Christian mythology, inspired by Roman, Greek and Egyptian friezes. It's through the Renaissance work of that kind that western art connects with all of history. It's erotic, it has a male figure, it has groupings of figures (if you're familiar with my work you know that I like to group figures) so that is one of my favorites. I love Italian mannerism and not just because I was recently in Italy. I always have. I like all that tortured male flesh that they did around the altar. The mannerists were very good then. I love Paul Cadmus. I love his honesty and his resolve to do the male figure in a period of our history when no one did the figure. He suffered for it historically and is still not thought of as a great artist because of what he chose to do. Ultimately when you look back at American art in the twentieth century, he'll begin to stand out as an important artist. He certainly is important to the gay community and to gay artists like myself. I was fortunate enough to get acquainted with him when I lived in New York. He's a delightful person. Other favorite artists...let me think because I just named some famous ones. Caracchi. I've been looking at a lot of his work. It's very erotic and he is a sensuous, wonderful man.

I'm curious about something we talked about earlier and I really want to ask it. Why did you move from New York? Why did you leave after being here for quite a while?
It was a real struggle and I saw that to stay in New York I was going to have to do something radical. I would have to get a job [laughs]. That isn't what I wanted to do. I didn't want to wait on tables, hoping to be the next great American artist. I had many friends who were waiting tables and weren't able to paint. I had an opportunity to leave the city. I took a job designing fabrics for a firm in Texas and while doing that I started doing a lot of public work paintings for buildings and individuals. I enjoyed being able to use my skills. I didn't feel the need to come back to New York - less stress. I've never been the kind of person who liked playing the game, elbowing my way up to the front of the line which is what you have to do in New York. Mapplethorpe is a good example. He became very adept at elbowing. He never learned how to develop his own pictures yet we consider him to be a famous photographer. He was very good at schmoozing and was very successful. It does bring up something that I have learned and hopefully by the time that you are my age, you've learned a thing or two. Living in a little town out in the middle of nowhere I have learned what a great freedom there is in being removed from what's "in." It reminds me of a comment that Coco Chanel made when someone asked her why her clothing looked the same every year. She said it was because she was dealing with style when everyone else was dealing with fashion. I think the art world tries too hard to turn art into something fashionable and every year there's the "in" art, the "in" scene, the "in"-ism and I think that that has been a real detriment in our world because in New York it's very important to know who is the rage this season. I think that has absolutely nothing to do with art - that has only to do with fashion. When you live in a little town as I do, unless you make a great effort to find out about what the current fashions might be, you're not aware at all of that and you go back to the place from which art should really come - from inside of you and that's something I've learned because I used to go down the street and say, my God, maybe I should paint like that. I think an artist really has to search inside of themselves about what they are really doing.

It can take years some time to get to that point.
Oh, absolutely. It does and that's why fashion is not something that an artist should be concerned with. It takes years of focusing in one direction to start learning what you are and what to express. You have to have as many skills as you can possibly develop because you don't know which one you're going to use. I've been in situations where they said you don't need to learn to draw to be an artist. I think it's a tragedy to see whole student bodies coming out from the academic art world where nobody knows how to draw or paint or have the option even if they want to draw or paint.

Is there anything you want to add to this?
I do want to say how important I think the art foundation is [LLGAF]. One of the reasons is that one of my collectors died and the family walked into his house and saw my work on the walls and destroyed it because they were embarrassed by it. That's why archives are very, very important. I think that a painting of penises [he points to the painting by Ray Schulz in the archive office at LLGAF], this beautiful painting of penises is just as valid as a painting of petunias. I was in a public discussion and was being criticized for painting penises. There happened to be an exhibit at the fine arts center [in the southwest] of Henrietta Wyeths flowers and said, "Henrietta Wyeth likes to paint flowers, she finds them very beautiful. I like to paint penises. I find them very beautiful. I don't see that there's any difference." Why should I be forced to paint petunias? So there's a lot of people out there painting pretty penises but there's no place to put their pretty penis paintings [laughs]. So there!

When do you see the Stations of the Cross being done?
I would love to find a grant to paint these. There are no grants for a gay artist to paint gay art. There's no patronage. I'm going to have to be very ambitious without knowing how to support myself while I do it so I don't know when it will be done. Maybe paint petunias between penises. I want all those stations to remain as one piece. It won't make sense to sell them one at a time as I finish them. It has to be shown together. I have a couple of places already. There's a gay cathedral in the Netherlands that's interested. I also know a fellow artist who's becoming something of a patron of mine and wants to do the stations too. We?re even discussing building a chapel and having our two stations in it permanently for all gay people. That would be some place in New Mexico.

That's a great idea.
But how will we finance it? My Stations of the Cross are going to be the standard, small size, about 16"x24." I'm also going to paint a number of Altar pieces so that I am able to do something larger to go with the stations. I saw a wonderful painting by Sebastianni Ricci of one of the martyrs, a fallen rebel angel in the Dulles Gallery in London. It's one of the most homoerotic, religious paintings I've seen and it just has all these hunky, gorgeous men falling out of it. Falling rebel angels...every one of them adorable. I like the fallen rebel angel.

April 28, 1996 - It was a warm and sunny Sunday morning as we were saying goodbye to Delmas and his wonderful paintings. Only seven weeks ago was his arrival amidst the ice and freezing weather of a New York Winter. In the time between there were many laughs and intimate moments. Great talks about gay art and life. Hopes for the future, remembrances of things past and plans to get together soon. On a personal level, I realized that a new and dear friend was leaving, not to be seen perhaps for a while but memories of him and his art would remain constant and encouraging with an exciting and thought provoking eye to the future. SM.