GAYLETTER

Who is Dina Martina? I like to think of myself as a comely lady who wants nothing more than to entertain the pants off of everyone.

What lipstick do you use? You’ll have to excuse me, but no true lady ever divulges her beauty secrets, just as she never reveals her age. I will, however, tell you my horoscopical signage. I am a proud Aquarium.

Are you single? Yes, due to a mutual unspoken agreement between me and men.

When did you begin singing? The first time I sang in public was in the Little Miss Las Vegas Pageant when I was five, and in the talent competition I sang a lovely piece by Beethoven.

Who or what inspires you? During the holiday season I find inspiration everywhere, especially in the simple things. I find inspiration in the glint of the snow, you know? Smiling at a blind person on the street. Things like that.

Where is your favorite place to perform? I loved playing in a little town in Southern California called Ensalada.

How do you come up with the material for your shows? It’s basically like drawing names out of a hat, only instead of a hat it’s a urinal.

What has been your favorite moment or memory from performing? Performing on the roof of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which I got to do in 2019.

How did you begin working in Provincetown? The Job Fair.

What’s your favorite color? …

A show of new paintings by Oscar yi Hou is on view at the Brooklyn Museum for nearly a year through mid-September of 2023. East of the Sun, West of the Moon, the exhibition’s title, refers to a poem by the artist that riffs on the feeling of in-betweenness and the innumerable stereotypes of East Asian people in Western cultural imagination. In yi Hou’s brushy, expressive portraits, the artist costumes himself and friends as a spectrum of characters — from Bruce Lee’s role of Kato on the 1960s television show The Green Hornet and anime Dragon Ball’s Son Goku to Old Hollywood “geisha-girls” and Spaghetti Western cowboys. He then builds painterly frameworks around his figures, centering them against a spare architectural scene. The compositions, reminiscent of symbolic quincunxes and coronas around saints, are then embellished with an intersectional mix of floating icons and symbols (including references to Japanese and Chinese artworks from the Brooklyn Museum’s collection.) These marginalia feature creatures like butterflies and cranes, sometimes swooping to overlap Chinese calligraphy or graffiti tags, motifs like Internet symbols and Taoist taijitu, stars from flags or sheriff’s badges. The illuminations contextualize their sitters as much as they obfuscate them, pointing to the rich complexity of the painter’s relationship with each subject and the ways in which constructed, long-standing identities may be adopted and rebuffed.

The show developed from a detailed 3000-word proposal yi Hou wrote, gathering many of his ideas from previous exhibitions and emphasizing the importance of pairing text with image, a central touchstone in understanding the re-appropriation at play in his work. …

Artist Linus Borgo is no stranger to periods of incubated change — over a decade ago he was involved in an electrical accident, resulting in the amputation of his left forearm and hand. In the hospital, he remembers the feeling of being a mere body, passed from one doctor to the next. Now, years later, he paints from his home and studio in Brooklyn, dissolving and reconstituting memories into potent compositions. These heightened visions and flashbacks exist somewhere between the corporeal and metaphysical, between dream and nightmare.

The painter credits his dance background and artists of the Italian Renaissance as having paved much of the territory on which he treads. “There’s a lot of choreography in paintings of the Renaissance,” he laughs, “and all those muscular bodies painted in the Sistine Chapel — many people were there to have a religious experience, I was just turned on.” Using thickly lain oil paint, Borgo extends the humanist traditions of Renaissance painting with an elegant attention to form and by grounding the work in his own personal experience.

“Sometimes I worry I am making trauma porn,” Borgo confesses. Memory is reductive; in our minds it flows, without bearing the broad monotony of time and place, charged by the lingering effects of elation and suffering that militate even our smallest experiences. As many of Borgo’s paintings are laden with the anguish and upheaval he once felt, they also might empower the viewer, reassuring them that the passing of time, no matter how slow it may feel, will inevitably change all circumstances. …

Fantasia Royale Gaga is many things, a showgirl, a Sagitarrius, and the season one winner of Out TV’s Hot Haus. Originally hailing from Jacksonville, for nearly a decade, “The Body” as she’s known has been perfecting her act down in Miami, a mainstay at Palace Bar in South Beach, which is also where she posed for us oceanside. She was on a birthday trip in Puerto Rico, however, when Brooklyn’s Chiquitita called her up for a heartfelt chat about a year of leveling up, early role models for transness, and how she’s navigated requiring respect from her family.

Hi, how are you? I’m good. How are you doing?

I’m good. Do you remember me by the way? [Laughs] We met at C’mon Everybody in Brooklyn. I was telling you that I stole something from you, and you said, “You stole something from me?” I was like, “I did.” And I pulled out this pink rhinestone. Do you remember? Oh my gosh, yes, yes, yes. Because they had fallen off my costume [Laughs]. I do, I do.

Oh my God. It’s good hearing from you. How is Puerto Rico? We are enjoying ourselves a lot over here. It’s my first time in Puerto Rico.

What made you wanna go to Puerto Rico for your birthday? Well, originally I was supposed to go to Paris again, so those plans failed. Then I was supposed to go on a cruise with some of my friends and they all booked their cruise. …

The memory of the artist Larry Stanton lives on through his gestural drawings, most notably his candid portraits of young men. Their boyish charm — emblematic of his own — is frozen in time, leaving minds to wonder what might have been had he not died at the tender age of 37 from AIDS related complications. In the five years before his death, he made some 500 drawings, providing a glimpse of New York City’s gay men in the late 1970s and early 1980s. In their fleshy flatness, his portraits are hopeful and romantic, focused on the vitality of the moment he made them.

Stanton was born in 1947 on a rural farm in Delhi, New York, and he moved to Manhattan when he was only 18 years old. During his life, he was championed by artists and writers such as David Hockney, Ellsworth Kelly, Henry Geldzahler, and William Burroughs, but he had very few public exhibitions and sold only seven paintings before his untimely passing. He spent much of his time in the Greenwich Village, always keeping a small sketchbook to jot down ideas and draw strangers he met at his favorite coffee shop. A collector of people and his memories of them, his studio there became a hub for artistic types and their admirers — the space full of canvases, photographs, art books, and stuffed animals that had been torn apart by his cat. By night, Stanton’s hook-ups became the subjects for many of his signature portraits on paper, with corresponding phone numbers often scribbled onto the other side. …