The Emphatically Queer Career of Artist Perkins Harnly and His Bohemian Friends

Sarah Burns

• Publisher: Process
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN:
  9781934170885
• eBook ISBN:
  9781934170892
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Art General

The Emphatically Queer Career of Perkins Harnly is the story of a Nebraska-born artist (1901-1986) who over the course of his long life crossed paths with a staggering array of famous and infamous personalities, including Sarah Bernhardt; Paul Swan, a.k.a. "The Most Beautiful Man in the World, " who made women swoon when he danced in his tiny leopard-skin tunic; Rose O'Neill, the free-living artist who invented the Kewpie; William Seabrook, author and occasional cannibal who for better or worse introduced Americans to the zombie.The narrative traces Harnly's steps from remotest Nebraska through silent-era Hollywood, post-revolutionary Mexico, Depression New York, wartime Tinsel Town, queer Los Angeles in the repressive 1950s, and, in the 1970s, all around Europe and South America, where Harnly traveled to visit the last resting places of famous people, from Vladimir Lenin to Oscar Wilde, Queen Victoria, and Eva Peron.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Author’s Note
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1. When Bitchhood Was in Flower
• 2. Dead Movie Stars
• 3. What a Drag!
• 4. Land of the Dead
• 5. Fat Queens and Victorian Monstrosities
• 6. The Gay Thirties
• 7. Flaming Families
• 8. Gremlins in Hollywood
• 9. Decorating with the Stars
• 10. Trashy Cafeteria Queens
• 11. Sort of Famous
• 12. Such a Sly Old Man
• Epilogue/Epitaph
• Archival Sources
• List of Illustrations
• Index
• Coda (Additional Illustrations)