Ivan Bubentcov is my pseudonym, which appears thanks to the only online gay magazine in Russia, Kvir, which publishes my works. Far from a dispassionate study of the human figure as an ensemble of volumetric forms (it's only a sphere, a cylinder, a cone), Hockney proposes a necessary link between artistic achievement and sexual attraction. Furthermore, while queer artists such as Zanele Muholi and Kehinde Wiley have had mid-career survey exhibitions at major museums, an artist's identity, gender and race are more commonly discussed than sexuality. Details such as adhesive visibly used to attach fake facial hair on female bodied people foregrounded the performative nature of gender. At the time, gays and lesbians were seldom named as either producers or consumers of their own public culture.

As Alex Pilcher says: "The label has a history of being spoken in hatred - many of us remember being on the receiving end of it as a term of abuse - but from the mid 1980s onwards there has been a defiant move to reclaim the word. A few years later Keith Haring would use advertising panels for his street art, and David Wojnarowicz spray-painted graffiti on the Chelsea piers in the early eighties. Judith Butler, leading feminist theorist, wrote, "A feminist view argues that gender should be overthrown, eliminated or rendered fatally ambitious precisely because it is always a sign of subordination for women. The first gallery at Tate Britain is one enormous pre-Raphaelite swoon of bee-stung lips, bare breasts, togas slipping discreetly from shoulders and eyes half-closed in ecstasy.This painting was produced at the beginning of Hockney's career and represents a marked difference from what would become his more realist style. The feminist movement also provided practical support to the Queer movement in the form of health activism, as the AIDS crisis saw important information about the disease and its transmission withheld from gay communities. The words crowd him, filling the frame, oppressively at odds with the boy's youthful, optimistic expression. He wrote in the History of Sexuality (1976), "The sodomite had been a temporary aberration; the homosexual was now a species," hinting at a future where the queer experience would become an important branch of Identity Politics.

A final suggestion would be Queer Threads, an exhibition catalogue from a show at the Leslie/Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art in New York, in which fiber and textiles are used as a medium for exploring queer culture. In his 1991 work Untitled (Portrait of Ross in LA), the artist poured an enormous pile of brightly colored candies into a corner and invited viewers to take pieces of the candy. In 2015, the sculptures were vandalized (or improved - depending on one's viewpoint) when two of the figures were painted brown and wigs and colorful costumes added.positive imaging of identity and turned subcultural representation into a matter of scanning between the lines and reading the writing on the wall. Since our magazine stands for inclusivity, we strive to present to you works that might be omitted in a traditional art history course. Queer Art then can be seen to dance along a parallel line as it works to dismantle oppressive patriarchal norms. Amanda Lepore, queen of New York City night life and transgender performance artist, spills all the tea in her autobiography and memoir, Doll Parts.