For Friendster Is Dead, Morrison made drawings of his friends from the online social network and reproduced them on adhesive stickers that cover a column in the gallery's main space. Although the images at first seem interchangeable and generic, they are actually coded to signify the status of each relationship. Platonic pals are signified with gold or silver stickers; friends with benefits, representing people with whom Morrison has had sexual encounters, are outlined in pink. Black graphite is used for acquaintances. Upside-down drawings, Morrison explained, represent people who have "de-Friendstered" him.
"With this piece, there's a gay tendency, I guess, because you realize that all the people I've had sex with were men," said Morrison, although were it not for the show's title one would hardly pick out this detail.
"It's all very depoliticized, which is OK," as Rimanelli said, referring to the new gay art. Since the personal used to be thought of as the political, he added, it could be that the absence of polemics and big statements is precisely the point.
As a Benetton-style tag line for the Swedish zine Loyal reads, there are "many colors in the homo rainbow." That may not be entirely the case, although the art world in general has become more inclusive of late. Yet the breadth of representation in The Male Gaze and the bumper crop of new gay publications suggest there is, at the very least, a broad and welcome dispersion.
"Gay culture has been more and more exposed, but what is it?" asked the artist Qing Liu, whose wall installations at The Male Gaze drolly rewrite tabloid headlines and entertainment gossip to alter the news in ways that might once have been thought of as "queering" the text.
"I am Qing Liu — Asian and queer, poor and artist, and many other things," Liu said. "Everything others claim I am entitles me to a question. And the one question I have been working constantly to raise is, What exactly is gay now?"
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