GAYLETTER

As a queer person, I know two things to be true: We can never have enough shit with rainbows on them and we can never stop supporting the members of our community in need. Tim-Scapes has created a new design to benefit the victims of the Orlando massacre. It features a rainbow and Tim-Scapes’s signature duct tape lettering. The design can be purchased as a print, t-shirt or tank top, with 100% of the proceeds going to Equality Florida’s Pulse Victims’ Fund.

Tim-Scapes is known as the “little shop with the big gay heart” based in Provincetown, Massachusetts. It’s run by Tim Convery, an ex-New York executive who moved to P-town back in 2010 and rediscovered his creativity with Tim-Scapes. As explained on his website, “Convery’s designs celebrate vintage travel posters utilizing his unique duct tape typeface and creating bold logos of over 50 American destinations. Each design is a colorful, geometric icon highlighting a famous landmark or drawing attention to a social cause.”

The Orlando logo was originally created only to show solidarity on social media. But, due to the reaction of his customers, Tim began selling shirts featuring the logo for charity. “I was really surprised about the design’s popularity and immediately went into production,” said Convery. “This whole project became a crystallization of what I want Tim-Scapes to be about – helping people through the power of design.”

While the exclusive Orlando design is available only through Labor Day, many of Tim’s logos are available as standalone prints, mugs and even trivets. …

Hollywood has a secret meant to disappear in the memories of those who have lived it. A secret that isn’t technically “new,” since it just turned eighty-seven years old. It is a secret hidden behind Marilyn Monroe, Bette Davis, and Katharine Hepburn. The secret was kept by a man who won three Oscars, designed costumes for 285 films, struggled with alcohol and shaped the look of the Golden Age of Hollywood. He also happened to be Cary Grant’s boyfriend. A love lost in the convenient homophobia of the 1930s American dream.

Australian filmmaker Gillian Armstrong has unearthed Orry George Kelly’s story in her new documentary, Women He’s Undressed. Through surrealist live narration in Kelly’s own voice and a network of interviews with timeless muses and industry heavyweights, the film crafts a confident persona of this uncompromising, gay Australian man whose legacy was lost because of his openness.

Armstrong sits down with actors like Angela Lansbury and Jane Fonda, and costume designers Catherine Martin of Moulin Rouge! and Colleen Atwood of Chicago to tease out the mechanics of the film industry and explore how Kelly behaved because of it. Through these conversations, we learn that Hollywood was (and probably still is) a boy’s club controlled by a handful of straight men at the head of each studio who were persistent on presenting the conventional family dynamic. Being openly gay in this environment was rare. “It was like being a communist,” laughs Fonda, one of the last to work with Kelly. …

Since its debut at the Tacoma Art Museum in October of 2015, Art AIDS America, curated by Jonathan David Katz and Rock Hushka, has been met with enormous controversy. This backlash comes from the fact that the show, which showcases art that came out of the AIDS epidemic, features hardly any work from black artists. This is troubling, especially when you consider that while black people represent approximately 12% of the U.S. population, in 2010, they made up about 44% of new HIV infections. Right now in America, gay and bisexual black men, as well as trans women, are most at risk for HIV/AIDS.

To their credit, the curators of Art AIDS America have taken the criticism of white-washing seriously — as each future iteration of the show seemingly becomes more and more aware of race. At the Bronx Museum of the Arts, the show is designed so that this elephant in the room is one of the first things you see when entering the exhibit. “Tongues Untied” by Marlon Riggs is projected in the entryway to the main part of the exhibit. Riggs’ film — about the black gay community — is one of the first pieces to draw your attention, and it is a telling choice by the Bronx Museum of the Arts to screen it at the start. Understandably, they’d like to show it off. The film is compelling—filled with men reciting provocative, erotic poetry, and confronting the camera with an intensity found also in the footage Riggs uses of parades and lovemaking. …

Let it be known that Tom Daley isn’t the only hot guy on Great Britain’s diving team. If you have any interest in toned, scantily clad, elite divers who also happen to DJ in their free time, you’ve probably come across Chris Mears. He’s the one with the fabulous scar and gorgeous eyebrows. He was once told he had a five percent chance of living. Now, he’s on the road to the 2016 Olympics. We photographed the 22-year-old in Los Angeles, where he spends his off- season, at El Matador beach in Malibu. Afterward, we asked a few personal questions. He couldn’t have been more forthcoming.

I met the artist Sean O’connor out and about when I was going to FIT in Manhattan and used to party 6 days a week (I think Monday was my day off). Basically I met him drunk. I think he was straight at that time or pretending, or just trying to do bro-masc, I was too drunk to remember the details.

Years later I saw him again and he told me he was working on some art and because GAYLETTER is always interested in what’s new, I asked him to share some of his work with me. After we saw the work, we got really into it. Which is why we want to tell you about his first solo exhibition in NYC, which features large paintings, works on paper, as well as “edition prints that depict vast and intricate floral patterns, paired with muscular men and athletes, snakes and reptiles, and classical icons of beauty.”

His work is “rooted in traditional decorative art practices such as “Toile de Jouy,” and printed textiles, and he repurposes these mediums to portray a contemporary look and examination of idealized male beauty in gay culture. The imagery in his work references historic and artistic symbols of masculine beauty ranging from ancient Athenian vases, to mid-century male pin ups and athletes, to current prevailing notions of manhood.  His work searches for the humor within the ‘homo-bromo’ social-media fixated culture, and also explores when appreciation for beauty and aesthetic morphs into vanity and narcissism.” It’s super sexy. …

We had a super busy Summer so far and we are very grateful for that. For those of you who were paying attention, we launched Issue 4 of our magazine with two separate covers, one by photographer Kostis Fokas and one by Gerardo Vizmanos. Our latest endeavour is a collaboration with Print All Over Me.

The official announcement should come soon, but you’re reading our newsletter so you get to find out first. “The collection is made up of utilitarian classics – T-shirts, baseball hats and tote bags – with full bleed prints of Issue 4’s striking covers…Their respective images depict a landscape of multiracial behinds and a portrait of a man making contact with his own reflection.”

More about Issue 4, which is almost sold out. It features work by photographer, Alvin Baltrop, Campbell Addy, Hal Fischer (author of Gay Semiotics), the comedian Josh Thomas, Rumi Mussabi (a founding member of The Cockettes), a look at the Tom of Finland house in Los Angeles, an amazing feature on Edmund White photographed by Slava Mogutin amongst other things.

The collection is available for purchase here. …