SCI-FI, MAGICK, QUEER L.A.: SEXUAL SCIENCE AND THE IMAGI-NATION OPENING RECEPTION
Fisher Museum of Art at University of Southern California
Los Angeles
Sept. 5, 2024
A map at the entrance to the USC Fisher Museum of Art’s newest exhibit, Sci-Fi, Magick, Queer L.A.: Sexual Science and the Imagi-Nation (SFMQLA), weaves meandering pathways among the names of pivotal figures, organizations, and works representing Los Angeles’s storied past, from the early gay rights group the Mattachine Society to the Scottish Rite Freemasons, from the muscle magazine Physique Pictorial to silent film star Jane Wolfe, from French erotic novelist Anaïs Nin to the painter Frieda Harris to Church of Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard, and more.
What follows, as one explores the exhibit, is an ambitious interdisciplinary project — the first of its kind — a collaborative effort between two USC stalwarts, the ONE Archives, one of the world’s largest collections of LGBTQ+ historical materials, and the Fisher Museum, home to a diverse collection of American and European artworks.
Part of the Getty-sponsored PST Art: Art & Science Collide initiative, SFMQLA is the result of five years of painstaking research. As its title suggests, the exhibit illuminates the obscure intersections of queer liberation, science fiction, and occultism in midcentury Los Angeles.
On a far wall, superimposed images of orgiastic rituals bathed in red light flicker on a 38-minute loop in Kenneth Anger’s Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome (1954), the avant-garde Gnostic Mass – inspired short film created over two years of filming at the Hollywood Hills home of Samson De Brier, who stars as Lord Shiva, alongside artist Marjorie Cameron as Kali.
Wigged mannequin heads atop a mirrored wall recreate the dressing room in the old Scottish Rite Masonic Temple, leading towards a scaled-down — yet still enormous — reproduction of a scenic backdrop created by the same MGM-trained artists who worked on the famously queer-coded film The Wizard of Oz (1939). A floating marbled staircase, adorned with glitter and sequins that sparkle in the light ascending to a starry sky and the pinkish spiral of a supernova, conveys a queer aesthetic amid Los Angeles’s often hypermasculine all-male esoteric society. The presentation reflects a complex contradiction not unlike midcentury Hollywood itself, in which queerness was simultaneously marginalized and allowed to flourish — even mined for its creative expression.
In another room, a lightboard displays pinup girls, reproductions of the collection of peep-show Viewfinder keychains that Edythe Eyde — better known as Lisa Ben, an anagram for “lesbian” — accumulated from convenience stores in the 1940s, during a period when she was both working at the Los Angeles Science Fantasy Society writing letters for the fanzine Voice of the Imagi-Nation(under the pen name Tigrina the Devil Doll) and publishing the first American lesbian magazine, Vice Versa. Her letters expressed what other countercultural L.A. artists were then discovering — an emerging sense of belonging in the realm of SF fandom, which created a space where artists and fans could imagine a world unconstrained by rigid heteronormative conceptions of gender and sexuality.
Eyde’s journey of self-discovery at the intersection of science fiction, the occult, and queer activism is a microcosm of the central thread woven throughout the exhibit. While these three areas have been traditionally regarded as distinct domains, SFMQLA’s curators make a compelling case for their interrelatedness, demonstrating how they molded one another symbiotically in midcentury L.A. Curators employ a diverse array of media — including literature, art, theater, film, fashion and costuming — to illustrate how science fiction and the occult profoundly impacted the evolution of the modern queer rights movement in one of queer history’s most radical and formative cities.
Sci-Fi, Magick, Queer L.A.: Sexual Science and the Imagi-Nation is on display through November 23. Attendance is free, but preregistration is encouraged.
