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(It’s worth noting that today one of the most blatant and self-important urban penises is just next door to Tiffany’s: Trump Tower.) He dreams of dozens of penises, there at the center of his own queer New York City. Keith Haring, on the same sidewalk almost 20 years later, doesn’t wonder at jewelry but at cock.
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Holly Golightly wasn’t shopping at Tiffany’s she was eating a croissant and drinking a coffee on the sidewalk outside, peering in the windows at the unattainable wonders. The setting of Tiffany’s, visible nowhere but in the title, locates the penises in a field of queer significance: Truman Capote’s 1958 novella Breakfast at Tiffany’s, whose protagonist has been read as homosexual, and the 1961 Audrey Hepburn film of the same title. Keith Haring, “Drawing Penises in Front of Tiffany’s,” from ‘Manhattan Penis Drawings for Ken Hicks’ (1978) (image courtesy Nieves Books, © Keith Haring Foundation)Ī group labeled “Drawing Penises in Front of Tiffanys’ ” is typical of the collection: an image that appears dashed off but is in fact imbued with a sense of place, an inward-facing geography of queer space. Who Ken Hicks was or is I haven’t managed to uncover, but presumably he was someone who might have appreciated such an array of citified penises, built out of skyscrapers and fire hydrants and streaking like driving rain. The drawings were made in the late 1970s, when Haring was in his early 20s. Many of the drawings in the book aren’t so visually different from what you might find scribbled in the stall of a dive bar bathroom, but even the most rudimentary have a curiosity and intentionality to them that reveals the hand of the artist, rather than the puerile shock value of less purposeful hands. Titled Manhattan Penis Drawings for Ken Hicks, it’s more or less what it sounds like: a collection of roughly sketched penises, phallus-ified depictions of Manhattan landmarks, abstract fields of penises flying across the page, and a few phallic self-portraits. Keith Haring, “World Trade Center,” from ‘Manhattan Penis Drawings for Ken Hicks’ (1978) (image courtesy Nieves Books, © Keith Haring Foundation)Ī new book of Haring’s work, published recently by Nieves Books, reveals this side of Haring. “Once Upon a Time” is equally conversant in homosexual action and desire, but has a uniquely hedonistic levity that’s perhaps explained by its context: the men’s bathroom of what was then the Lesbian and Gay Community Services Center, a place that needed no grim reminders of gay reality. (The classic Haring man is in evidence in “Once Upon a Time,” too, albeit dwarfed by much of the action.) Haring was heavily involved with ACT UP, an advocacy group founded in 1987 to advance the cause of people living with AIDS, and the sexual explicitness of his late ’80s work is often more serious in tone: a penis-shaped monolith-tombstone (“The Great White Way,” 1988), a number of frank safe-sex cartoons. The “ Heffalumps and Woozles ” quality of the shape-shifting genitals keeps them from being strictly erotic, but the totality of the mural’s sexual content is bracing, particularly in contrast to the more mainstream Haring canon: a baby, a dog, a dancing man.
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The style is unmistakably Haring, even in its almost R.
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The subject matter is fitting for the space: an intricate, interwoven array of anthropomorphized penises and monstrous spermatozoa, which climb the walls and swim loop-the-loops around the room’s corners. In a small room that used to be a bathroom, now emptied of its fixtures and used on occasion as a meeting space, is “ Once Upon a Time ,” a mural Haring painted in 1989, just nine months before his death.
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On the second floor of the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual & Transgender Community Center on West 13th Street in Manhattan is a lesser-known Keith Haring masterpiece. Detail of Keith Haring’s “Once Upon a Time” (1989) at the LGBT Center (photo by Ben Sutton/Hyperallergic)