Glenn Ligon, A Feast of Scraps, 1994-1998

We are taught that, if we feel we really must have a record of the shameful same-sex portions of our lives, then we should do so by having two albums, dual collections, one for blood relations and one for our same gender loving brothers and sisters. And they should not be allowed to intersect. Our orientation is meant to be isolated, separate from and alien to the lives we live with our ‘real’ families. Far too often, however, within this constellation of the ‘real,’ black gays and lesbians wonder if we will even be in the viewfinder when the family portrait is taken. glenn ligon

Claude Cahun & Marcel Moore, Untitled (Cahun in Mirror), ca Claude Cahun & Marcel Moore, Untitled (Cahun in Mirror), ca. 1929 (detail) Claude Cahun & Marcel Moore, Untitled (Moore in Mirror), ca. 1929

The photographer’s shadow that regularly intrudes on the space of the photograph, the double exposures and mirror imaging, may be viewed as both uncanny and as intimations of an unseen collaboration, the “other me.” tirza true latimer

Our two heads (hair intermingling inextricably) inclined over a photograph. Portrait of one or of the other, our two narcissisms drowning together here, it was the impossible realized in a magic mirror. Exchange, superimposition, the fusion of desires. The unity of the image achieved through the close intimacy of two bodies. claude cahun

Claude Cahun & Marcel Moore, I’m in Training, Don’t Kiss Me, ca. 1928

Claude Cahun & Marcel Moore, Self-Portrait with Mask, ca. 1928

Aubrey Beardsley, The Peacock Skirt, 1894 Oscar Wilde and Alfred Douglas, ca. 1893

Claude Cahun & Marcel Moore, “La réponse,” Vues et visions, 1919

Kirsten McCrea, Gertrude Stein, from Hot Topic, 2006 – ongoing Pablo Picasso, Gertrude Stein, 1905-1906

Man Ray, Gertrude Stein and Alice Toklas in the apartment at 27 rue de Fleurus, Paris, 1922

Alice Pike Barney, Natalie in Fur Cape, 1897 Romaine Brooks, Natalie Barney, 1920

Portrait of Natalie Clifford Barney and Romaine Brooks Romaine Brooks, Self Portrait, 1923

A place where lesbian assignations and appointments with academics could coexist in a kind of cheerful, cross-pollinating cognitive dissonance. joan schenkar

Portrait of Vanessa Bell Vanessa Bell, Self-portrait, ca. 1915

Vanessa Bell, Virginia Woolf Knitting, ca Vanessa Bell, Virginia Woolf Knitting, ca. 1911 Portrait of Clive Bell by Roger Fry, ca. 1924

Portrait of Roger Fry by Vanessa Bell, 1912 Portrait of Vanessa Bell by Roger Fry (date unknown)

Portrait of Vanessa Bell by Duncan Grant, 1917 Portrait of Duncan Grant by Vanessa Bell, 1920

Portrait of Duncan Grant by David Garnett, 1915 Portrait of David Garnett by Duncan Grant, 1930

Jacob Lawrence, The Migration Series, Panel No Jacob Lawrence, The Migration Series, Panel No. 1: During World War I there was a great migration north by southern African Americans, 1940-1941

The Cotton Club The Savoy Club

At the beginning of the twentieth century, a homosexual subculture, uniquely Afro-American in substance, began to take shape in New York’s Harlem. Throughout the so-called Harlem Renaissance period, roughly 1920 to 1935, black lesbians and gay men were meeting each other [on] street corners, socializing in cabarets and rent parties, and worshiping in church on Sundays, creating a language, a social structure, and a complex network of institutions. eric garber

Gladys Bentley (1907-1960)

Langston Hughes (1902-1967)

Stills from Looking for Langston, 1989 Directed by Isaac Julien