In this special edition of the T List, in honor of Pride Month, T Magazine is sharing five articles from our archive that examine the people and art that have shaped our collective understanding of queerness today — from the female couples who own and operate their restaurants to the trans male actors pushing back against Hollywood norms to the women who identify as butch. Each piece is an essential read as well as a celebration of queer life. (Sign up here, if you haven’t already, and you can reach us at tlist@nytimes.com.) |
The Female Couples Remaking the Restaurant Industry |
 | | From left: Rita Sodi, Deborah VanTrece, Jocelyn Guest, Lorraine Lane, Jody Williams and Erika Nakamura — seen here with a bounty of their favorite dishes — are part of the growing cohort of female couples who run restaurants.Photograph by David Chow. Set design by Suzy Kim |
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By Ligaya Mishan T Writer at Large |
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Women chefs are increasingly at the helm of their own establishments, and among them is a vanguard of couples who are changing the notion of a mom-and-pop. Their emergence comes at a critical moment: In 2017 and into 2018, a number of male chefs and restaurateurs were accused by former employees of making unwanted advances and fostering work environments in which men felt at liberty to grope women on staff. These stories are part of a larger pattern of brutality built into the bones of professional kitchens, many of which follow some form of the brigade de cuisine, essentially a caste system that mimics a military’s unyielding chain of command. And so it’s worth asking whether there’s a difference in restaurants run entirely by women — particularly ones run by female couples linked in life as in work, who consciously model collaboration from the top down. “We’re trying to create a different kind of environment that doesn’t exist outside our four walls,” says Ann Nadeau, who opened the Indian pizzeria Navi Kitchen in the Bay Area in 2017 with her wife, Preeti Mistry. At their restaurant — as at some others — no one rules by fear. Read the full story here. |
The Gay Figure Artists Reimagining the Male Gaze |
 | | John MacConnell’s “Ernie” (2014), in pen and watercolor.John MacConnell, “Ernie,” 2014, watercolor and pen on paper |
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By Antwaun Sargent T Contributor |
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Working largely outside the gallery system, a group of illustrators, including John MacConnell, Louis Fratino, Kou Shou and Martin Bedolla, is reviving the discipline of male figure drawing and redefining how queer bodies are represented in art. The male nude is, of course, one of the oldest artistic fixations: The Riace bronzes, Greek sculptures cast around 450 B.C., depict naked, bearded warriors as exemplars of masculine strength and beauty; “Farnese Hercules,” a third-century B.C. marble sculpture of the mythical hero, once stood at Rome’s Baths of Caracalla. Over the next 2,000 years, capturing the male form became an essential artistic skill. But while some old masters fetishized the male body in barely coded ways, the idea of an openly queer artist expressing his desires from a queer perspective was only born in the last century. Today’s practitioners of the form are more often following in the footsteps of artists like David Hockney and Robert Mapplethorpe, normalizing gay bodies and desire and, in doing so, upending the traditional notion of the muse. Read the full story here. |
The Trans Actors Challenging Hollywood Norms |
 | | From left: Elliot Fletcher, Shaan Dasani, Theo Germaine, Leo Sheng and Scott Turner Schofield, photographed on Oct. 2, 2019, in downtown Los Angeles.Andy Freeberg |
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By David Ebershoff T Contributor |
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Despite years of progress, trans male representation in film and television has remained all but nonexistent. Last year, as a black transgender man struggling to break into Hollywood, Brian Michael Smith saw no obvious trajectory to a meaningful career. Even a college acting teacher said no one would cast him. “I saw zero representation of transmasculinity,” he says, using an umbrella term that means different things to different people but often describes trans men and nonbinary people who identify more with masculinity. “It was very isolating to grow up and have these dreams. I didn’t see how I was going to be able to do it.” But instead of succumbing, Smith told himself to create his own path, and so he did. In fact, over the last year or so, we’ve witnessed more trans male and nonbinary actors onscreen than ever before, individuals who are updating and expanding the very idea of the leading man. Read the full story here. |
The Contemporary Queer Artists Rewriting History |
 | | An original photograph commissioned by T that draws on themes of queer love and desire by subverting the style of a classical Renaissance painting.Photo by James Hawkinson. Styled by Jay Massacret |
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By revisiting and refuting the cultural history of the West, a number of artists are using time as their primary medium, looking backward to inform a different kind of gay future. Together they suggest not an invented false history but a secret real one, as if the queerness had always been there, a kind of digital potential waiting to be released. You can see it in the British writer Sarah Waters’s historical novels; the French filmmaker Céline Sciamma’s movie “Portrait of a Lady on Fire” (2019); the American playwright Matthew Lopez’s two-part drama, “The Inheritance” (which opened on Broadway this past November); and in art by Glenn Ligon, Catherine Opie and McDermott & McGough, to name just a sample from various disciplines. The watchcry for these works isn’t so much “Here I am” as “There we were.” Read the full story here. |
The Butches and Studs Subverting Traditional Ideas About Aesthetics and Identity |
 | | Standing, from left: the writer Patty Yumi Cottrell, the musician JD Samson, the artist A.K. Burns, the artist A.L. Steiner, the musician Meshell Ndegeocello, the artist Nicole Eisenman, the writer Eileen Myles, the writer Roxane Gay, the artist Mickalene Thomas, the filmmaker Lorena Russi, the filmmaker Su Friedrich, the artist Tiona Nekkia McClodden, the actor-model Jenny Shimizu and the writer Alison Bechdel. Seated, from left: the filmmaker Kimberly Peirce, the actor Roberta Colindrez, the choreographer Elizabeth Streb, the curator Pati Hertling, the artist Collier Schorr, the musician Toshi Reagon, the actor Lea DeLaria and the writer Casey Legler. Photographed at Outpost Studio in New York City on Jan. 27, 2020.Photo by Collier Schorr. Styled by Brian Molloy |
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By Kerry Manders T Contributor |
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Queer culture and the arts would be much poorer without the presence and contribution of butch and stud lesbians, whose identity is both its own aesthetic and a defiant repudiation of the male gaze. “Butch” has long been the name we’ve given a certain kind — that kind — of lesbian. The old adage applies: You know her when you see her. She wears men’s clothing, short hair, no makeup. Butch is an aesthetic, but it also conveys an attitude and energy. Both a gender and a sexuality, butchness is about the body but also transcends it: “We exist in this realm of masculinity that has nothing to do with cis men — that’s the part only we [butches] know how to talk about,” says the 42-year-old writer, former Olympic swimmer and men’s wear model Casey Legler. “Many people don’t even know how to ask questions about who we are, or about what it means to be us.” Read the full story here and watch the accompanying short documentary here. |
 | | Eli Reed’s “Mother and Son in Bedford” (1986).Eli Reed/Magnum Photos |
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For T’s new Instagram series, we’re asking prominent black American artists to share a work of art, whether their own or one created by another, that shows black people in moments of joy, hope, dignity, pride, sorrow and agency. In a country where there is a pervasive and violent tendency to deny black Americans their full humanity, these artists’ selections — to say nothing of the individuals they depict — are resounding acts of resistance. Pictured here is “Mother and Son in Bedford” (1986) by the photographer Eli Reed, who says this of the work: “I took this picture in the Bed-Stuy neighborhood of Brooklyn in 1986. The day before, I had done photography on a New York magazine story about drug trade in one section of this area. I saw this woman on a neighborhood street and asked if I could come back the next day and photograph her. When I did, she brought me to the upstairs of this house into a room full of people sleeping. I sensed it was a place people went when they had nowhere else to go. But her son was there, and I could tell there was more to the story. She took such pride in him, and was so clearly doing what she needed to to take care of him. The lights were out in the room, but there can be light in a person, a spark in the eyes. A lot of people are going through difficulties, and you always want to see them rise above, and she was definitely that person on that day.” For future installments, follow us on Instagram. |
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