It’s a rough day here in the U.S. I spent election day paralyzed by deep dread; today, I have inauguration day off work (because, ironically, it is also MLK Day), and I anticipated it might be more of the same. I didn’t think I was going to be able to get anything done, and it's looking like I won't manage to get out of the house to the local they bar or craft night. One of the contradictions of writing “The Bent” is that I’ve never fully been immersed in the kind of in-person community centered on queerness that this fic depicts. It’s true that most of my irl friends are queer, and many of them create art, but I’ve always had a little too much social anxiety to really get in on that sort of queer scene, especially the parts involving late nights at the club (lol). But I always remind myself that fandom counts—queer fandom—it’s real queer community and real queer art. When you read comments on queer fics, you know how much they mean to people. So I decided to write some fic today: some really gay shit with lots of bodily fluids and queer&trans pleasure and anti-authoritarian politics, so that hopefully I, and anyone reading it, can feel some connection amidst this mess—connection to each other, to our bodies, to the parts of ourselves we refuse to stamp out. And it felt right to return to the world of “The Bent” today, given the political situation. This little Bent bonus, "Obscene Material," takes place in the immediate aftermath of a raid on the Flaming Bush, which sparks a need for care and closeness amongst the Marauders + Lily.

Sending love and solidarity to you wherever you are—goodness knows that many people are in precarious or difficult positions all over the world right now—and hoping you find some sense of belonging today. If you are a reader, a writer, a lurker, you belong here; you count. You have a home.

chapter 1 on ao3

1985, London. The wizarding queer art scene revolves around a gallery called the Bent, where conceptual artist Remus Lupin and photographer Sirius Black exhibit their works, and a club called the Bush, where they spend time with Jane and Lily Potter, who work at a nearby heath clinic. Although war with Voldemort was averted, the wizarding world is still simmering with tension. In the face of increasing intolerance and calls for censorship, Remus’ art takes a riskier, more political turn, and he must figure out how to balance self-expression and safety. Also, he might be falling in love with his best friend.

Author's notes:

This fic came out of both love and anger. Love for queer and feminist artists in the 80s and 90s who risked their reputations, safety, and livelihoods to take photos of men in BDSM gear or talk openly about sexual violence, who refused to whittle themselves down into something straight society would be comfortable with. And anger at contemporary laws like Florida's "Don't Say Gay" bill and violence directed at drag queens and trans kids, and at the strain of gay conservatism that thinks the solution is to eliminate representations of kink, nonconformity, and radicalism from queer art and media. This is a fic about the struggles and the joys of being queer in a way that isn't meant to make other people comfortable.

It's also about friendship and intimacy and solidarity and falling in love! It's about sticking together in the face of danger and figuring out who's really got your back. It's also about what happens when you accidentally have sex with your best friend in the bathroom of a gay club. Oops!

I wasn’t alive in the 80s, but this era of queer life and culture has always felt singularly important to me. Part of this probably had to do with the fact that I was a theatre kid, and theatre people tend to remember the AIDS crisis pretty vividly, since it took so many of their own. (Also, I was very into Rent in high school.) Part of it is because a lot of foundational queer theory comes out of this moment. I imprinted pretty hard on Epistemology of the Closet in particular, which is in many ways a response to AIDS-era homophobia. And many of my teachers were around, or taught by people who were around, during this exciting, terrifying period of queer history. As I post a new chapter every Sunday, I'll also post author's notes, photos, and links to additional resources about the real-life people and events that inspired this fic.

This week, here's some stuff about queer art and artists in this period:

Photos by David Gwinnutt of Stephen Linard and Cerith Wyn Evans

Some good articles:

Blitz spirit: the queer art underground of 1980s London – in pictures

Queer Life in the '70s and '80s: Art, Activism, & AIDS

22 Photos of LGBTQ+ Writers, Artists, & Activists of the '80s and '90s

chapter 9 on ao3

1985, London. The wizarding queer art scene revolves around a gallery called the Bent, where conceptual artist Remus Lupin and photographer Sirius Black exhibit their works, and a club called the Bush, where they spend time with Jane and Lily Potter, who work at a nearby heath clinic. Although war with Voldemort was averted, the wizarding world is still simmering with tension. In the face of increasing intolerance and calls for censorship, Remus’ art takes a riskier, more political turn, and he must figure out how to balance self-expression and safety. Also, he might be falling in love with his best friend.

Author's notes on ch. 9:

Just a short note today. I wanted to touch on queer periodicals, since the question of the future of Riot Scene, Frank and Alice’s newspaper, comes up in this chapter. In the 80s, the tabloids and the mainstream press reported on queer issues with open hostility. During the AIDS epidemic, headlines screamed about the “gay plague.” Queer and alternative newspapers offered a different perspective on current events and were often key elements in building queer community and political movements. Here are some images from around this time, along with links to articles with more information:

‘Gay plague’: The vile, horrific and inhumane way the media reported the AIDS crisis shares some information about how the tabloids reported on the AIDS crisis.

Capital Gay was a London newspaper that ran from 1981-1995. Its offices were firebombed in 1987.

chapter 5 on ao3

1985, London. The wizarding queer art scene revolves around a gallery called the Bent, where conceptual artist Remus Lupin and photographer Sirius Black exhibit their works, and a club called the Bush, where they spend time with Jane and Lily Potter, who work at a nearby heath clinic. Although war with Voldemort was averted, the wizarding world is still simmering with tension. In the face of increasing intolerance and calls for censorship, Remus’ art takes a riskier, more political turn, and he must figure out how to balance self-expression and safety. Also, he might be falling in love with his best friend.

author's notes for chapter 5

Sirius’ work is largely based on Robert Mapplethorpe’s, a famous gay photographer of the 70s and 80s known for, among other things, his stark black-and-white photos of gay men and the S&M scene. A couple people I talked to said they thought Remus would make more sense as a Mapplethorpe type, but I thought it would be interesting to have Sirius in this position, because I think his background might make him might struggle with a somewhat unwished-for talent for taking very aesthetically polished, professional-looking photographs. Sirius comes from an extremely polished world—that of an old Pureblood wizarding family—and I can imagine him being frustrated by being good at something that might associate him with that world. His goal in doing this style of photography isn’t actually to gain respect from more traditionalist quarters, however grudging, but he’s worried it’ll be read that way: as an attempt to sneak in through the art establishment’s backdoor. Remus, meanwhile, finds Sirius’ photographs moving in their starkness and simplicity, and insofar as they are a response to establishment art or his shitty family, they’re more a defiant appropriation than a concession to traditionalism.

In a 2016 Guardian review of a LACMA and J. Paul Getty retrospective on Mapplethorpe, Jason Farago articulates what's going on with a similar apparent contradiction in Mapplethorpe's work: “Mapplethorpe was sexing up of the language of photography itself, by routing sex through the classical ideal…That was Mapplethorpe’s project: to compose images of leathermen and nudes with the same traditionalism and exactitude given to still life or portraiture, without dissolving the risk and antagonism that America still assigned to gay sex. (The coming Aids epidemic would multiply this contradiction a hundredfold.) The rigor and the stillness of the most explicit images are bound – a word the boys at the Mineshaft would appreciate – to a confrontational and unapologetic political stance, which made a virtue of not just homosexuality but promiscuity. The pictures are still. The acts are in your face.” Mapplethorpe received a lot of pushback from conservatives both before and after his death from AIDS-related complications in 1989. Protests were staged against exhibitions of his photos and were sometimes cancelled as a result, sparking counter-protests from the many in the art world. 

He has also received a very different kind of critique for his photographs of black men, which are often considered racist due to their assertion of black men’s physical and sexual superiority (a common dehumanizing trope). Kobena Mercer’s “Reading Racial Fetishism: The Photographs of Robert Mapplethorpe,” is a fascinating two-part examination of this issue; it contains a more condemnatory piece from 1986 and a partial revision of these views written three years later; Mercer writes that the reassessment of his own critique came largely out of the shifting political context both in “black gay art practices and in the repressive cultural politics of Jesse Helms and the New Right.” It’s an excellent analysis of the intersections of race, sexuality, gender, and kink in art, as well as an instructive look at how one’s views might evolve in complex ways in relation to cultural and social developments.

Here are some of Mapplethorpe’s photos, all from the Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation's website:

Hi! I have news: I’m going to be posting a new multi-chapter HP fic soon! It’s a canon divergent 1980s fic about the Marauders as part of London’s queer wizarding arts scene. (Spoiler alert: Remus and Sirius are going to fall in love in it.) It’ll be called The Bent, after the gallery where the Marauders show their works.

I’ve been feeling the importance of our queer history especially intensely these last few years, what with all the transphobic and homophobic attitudes and laws that have been on the rise. In particular, I think it’s crucial to remember how central the fight against censorship has been to queer activism. In the 1980s and 90s, the AIDS crisis ramped up anti-queer sentiment, some of which manifested as pushback against queer art and literature. This art was called “obscene”: the bodies were perverse, the sex deviant, the people threatening to children and families. One response from some gay and lesbian people was to attempt to conform to straight norms, reassuring the public that they were harmless and ordinary—just like everyone else. Another response was to get weirder, defiantly embracing kink, non-conformity, and radical politics. These days, it feels increasingly important to me that we take the latter route; it seems clear that no amount of insistence that we are “safe” to be around will make queer people safe from the far right. 

So I wanted to write a fic that imagines a queer wizarding arts scene of the 1980s pushing back against rising anti-queer, anti-part-human, and blood supremacist attitudes and legislation. In order to make this work, I’ve gone a bit canon divergent, imagining that the war with Voldemort was averted but Death Eater ideology stuck around, simmering underneath wizarding society. The Marauders and friends all, therefore, got a chance to reach their late twenties, and no one had kids super young (sorry, Harry!). I’ve also decided that, like with other Muggle diseases, wizards don’t get AIDS, but the epidemic still has a big impact on the queer wizarding community. So everyone is navigating these complicated cultural waters together.

My plan is to post author’s notes here on Tumblr along with the link to each new chapter once a week. These notes will include some queer history related to the fic, with links for more info. I may also post some other stuff about 80s and 90s queer art and culture during the time I’m putting out the fic. I’ll tag it all “bent posting” and include relevant content warnings. I’m planning to post new chapters on Sundays, starting this weekend (Dec. 11); it’ll be twelve chapters long, and almost the whole thing is already drafted. It’s been living in my head for a long time and I’m really excited to finally share it with you all. <3 <3 <3

chapter 11 on ao3

1985, London. The wizarding queer art scene revolves around a gallery called the Bent, where conceptual artist Remus Lupin and photographer Sirius Black exhibit their works, and a club called the Bush, where they spend time with Jane and Lily Potter, who work at a nearby heath clinic. Although war with Voldemort was averted, the wizarding world is still simmering with tension. In the face of increasing intolerance and calls for censorship, Remus’ art takes a riskier, more political turn, and he must figure out how to balance self-expression and safety. Also, he might be falling in love with his best friend.

Author's notes on ch. 11:

This is the second-to-last chapter! I have to say, it's been a strange time to be posting an HP fic, even one that's giving a big middle finger to JKR and everything shitty about the franchise. The antisemitism of the Hogwarts Legacy video game and JKR's ever-worsening transphobia are just absolutely miserably terrible and both impossible and irresponsible to ignore. I believe strongly in the value of fanworks that reshape and rewrite canon in truly transformative ways; I believe in the power a bunch of weirdos getting our grubby little hands all over source material that wasn't really meant for us and taking what we want from it to turn it into a source of community, inspiration, and joy. I also know that sometimes the well is so poisoned the foul taste of canon and the creator linger no matter what. I've long since reached the point of no return when it comes to canon and the franchise; my engagement with Harry Potter pretty much begins and ends with very explicitly trans-inclusive and antiracist internet fandom spaces. I know lots of people can no longer even stand to participate in those spaces because it feels so bad just to think about Harry Potter now. I wonder sometimes if I'm leaning in that direction myself.

Except, look at you all--what a bunch of brave and gorgeous weirdos. It's good to be angry with you. It's good to be joyful with you.

One more chapter next week; for now, here are some brave and gorgeous weirdos from our queer past:

Artists and performers from Club 57 in St. Mark's Place, NYC, circa 1980.

And here are couple good articles on this club/performance space:

Club 57 and the sweet, sweet smell of St. Mark’s Place

ch. 12 on ao3

1985, London. The wizarding queer art scene revolves around a gallery called the Bent, where conceptual artist Remus Lupin and photographer Sirius Black exhibit their works, and a club called the Bush, where they spend time with Jane and Lily Potter, who work at a nearby heath clinic. Although war with Voldemort was averted, the wizarding world is still simmering with tension. In the face of increasing intolerance and calls for censorship, Remus’ art takes a riskier, more political turn, and he must figure out how to balance self-expression and safety. Also, he might be falling in love with his best friend.

Author's notes on ch. 12:

All right, my friends, this is the final chapter. I could get sentimental or talk politics or rage about current events--easily, with little provocation--but hopefully I’ve said what I needed to say in the story itself. Thank you so much for reading. I love you!

I’ll leave you with words and visuals from Keith Haring, a New York City artist who died of AIDS-related complications in 1990, and Tony Kushner, an American playwright whose most famous work is the two-part epic Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes, which is about AIDS, Reaganism, religion, and literal angels. It’s one of my favorite things anyone has ever written.

“This disease will be the end of many of us, but not nearly all, and the dead will be commemorated and will struggle on with the living, and we are not going away. We won't die secret deaths anymore. The world only spins forward. We will be citizens. The time has come. 

Bye now. 

You are fabulous creatures, each and every one. 

And I bless you: More Life. 

The Great Work Begins.”

chapter 10 on ao3

1985, London. The wizarding queer art scene revolves around a gallery called the Bent, where conceptual artist Remus Lupin and photographer Sirius Black exhibit their works, and a club called the Bush, where they spend time with Jane and Lily Potter, who work at a nearby heath clinic. Although war with Voldemort was averted, the wizarding world is still simmering with tension. In the face of increasing intolerance and calls for censorship, Remus’ art takes a riskier, more political turn, and he must figure out how to balance self-expression and safety. Also, he might be falling in love with his best friend.

Author's notes on ch. 10:

Part of this chapter deals with legal action being taken against Benjy Fenwick’s porn shop. This was something that really happened in the period, not just with porn shops but queer bookstores more generally. Perhaps the most famous instance of this in Britain was “Operation Tiger.” In 1984, Customs raided Gay’s the Word, a queer bookshop in Bloomsbury founded in 1979. They seized a substantial amount of stock and charged them with importing indecent materials. Graham McKerrow, the co-founder of the London newspaper Capital Gay and a coordinator of the shop’s defense fund, describes what happened next:

“Over the two years following Operation Tiger, Customs detained thousands of volumes of hundreds of queer titles – newspapers, magazines, history, biography, autobiography, politics, sociology, humour, books for young people, health guides, sex guides, counselling guides, books about Aids, contemporary fiction, erotic fiction, drama and poetry – imported mostly from the US and destined for queer, radical and left-wing bookshops, mail order businesses, the Gay Christian Movement and the London International Feminist Book Fair. Customs staff were seizing books and newspapers from the port of Dover on the south coast to Prestwick airport in Scotland. Essentially Gay, a mail order service, was put out of business by Customs’ seizure of its books. None of the other businesses went to court to challenge the seizure notices because they couldn’t afford to, or they had no faith that the courts would give them a fair hearing. Only Gay’s the Word decided it would launch a campaign and ask for donations so it could fight for the right to import books. […]

"When the bookshop declared it would raise the money, go to court and campaign to have Customs’ extensive powers of search and seizure brought into line with police powers, which are supervised by the courts, Customs responded by bringing exactly 100 charges against the nine staff and volunteer directors alleging that they had conspired to import indecent or obscene material, and carrying a penalty of up to life in prison and fines. […]

"The defence campaign hired two co-ordinators, of which I was one, to intensify and expand the campaign but suddenly in June, following a judgment by the European court about the importation of sex dolls and a change of the minister responsible for Customs and Excise, the charges were dropped and 123 titles were returned to Gay’s the Word, and 19 titles that Customs claimed were obscene were sent back to the supplier in the US. Copies of The Joy of Gay Sex were returned to the Gay Christian Movement. None of the books seized from Gay’s the Word was destroyed, no-one was fined or jailed, but there was no compensation either and Customs retains to this day the right to enter any building by force and search and seize any goods liable to forfeiture.”

Here's some more reading on Gay’s the Word:

25th anniversary of the raid on Gay's the Word

Gay's the Word: The little LGBTQ bookstore that refused to be beaten