The Company of Saints by Joanna Frueh

The Company of Saints

By Joanna Frueh

Saintly Eros

People believe they are sinners. I say, We are saints.

One way to live and work as a saint is to be an artist – whose aesthetic practice
heals human beings. Peter Brandt is such an artist. Using various media
– sculpture, photography, video, and watercolor painting – he encourages
viewers to de-condition their conditioning in sin. Glamour, beauty, kindness,
and gender bending, most often visually situated in the specificity of Brandt’s
unclothed body, serve to exorcise the damage, ignorance, and ugliness that
form the condition of sin. A condition is not necessarily a fact; a condition
is often a concept, like sin, that people perceive to be operating in their
lives because they believe its truth. In other words, the human mind creates
sin. The viewer who is moved by Brandt’s intercessions into her conditioning
– that her body is shameful, that the world is unalterably cruel – may awaken
to a change of heart, which may release her soul-and-mind-inseparablefrom-
body from being bound to the seeming reality of sin.

Brandt’s art is not religious, and perhaps no one but me would call it saintly.
When I use the word saintly I am seeing and feeling the spiritual aspect of
Brandt’s work. Neither religion nor spirituality are words with which contemporary
art professionals are comfortable. The art historian James Elkins devotes
his recent book, On the Strange Place of Religion in Contemporary Art,
to this fact and concludes that “[m]odern spirituality and contemporary art
are rum companions: either the art is loose and unambitious, or the religion
is one-dimensional and unpersuasive.”1 In a blunt phrasing of the situation,
Jackie Tileston titles her 2007 College Art Association conference session
“Unspeakable,” and states in the Call for Participation, “There is currently a
black hole around the subject of spirituality in the art world, art magazines,
and art criticism. . . This part of the art experience seems taboo or too embarrassing
to talk about.”2 Despite the argument that Elkins elaborates throughout
his book, he recognizes that because religion is “so intimately tangled
with everything we think and do,”3 professionals in art are “irresponsible” not
to talk about religion and contemporary art.4 One way to enter the “unspeakable”
is by considering the artist as a saint.

Modeling his Lives of the Artists, published in 1550, after the Lives of the
Saints, Giorgio Vasari created, according to Julia Reinhard Lupton in her Afterlives
of the Saints: Hagiography, Typology, and Renaissance Literature, a “new
covenant between narrative genres.”5 Vasari’s Lives is foundational for the
creation of art historiography. There and in the criticism of contemporary art,
artists are “canonized” as secular saints. The lives and works of artists and
saints share other constituents. For example, notions of sanctity change, just
as notions do about the most important qualities of art: postmodern irony
and aloofness, admired in the late twentieth-century photographs of Richard
Prince, are a far cry from the rending emotionalism of Matthias Grünewald’s
Isenheim Altarpiece (c.1510-1515). Saints’ cults have gone in and out of favor.
Likewise, artist ‘cults’. For example, the ‘cult’ of Pre-Raphaelitism
in the nineteenth-century faded as the star of modernism rose, and now,
as the Pre-Raphaelite star has risen over the last quarter of the twentieth
century, a major exhibition of Pre-Raphaelite works began a two-year tour,
in 2005, of the United States and the United Kingdom.6 Some saints appear
in the Christian liturgy, and some artists appear in the ‘liturgy’ written by art
historians. Relics, such as a body part or an object associated with a saint,
have been revered by worshipers. In the ‘church’ of art celebrity, one of Andy
Warhol’s signature silver wigs sold for $10,800 in June 2006, and sculptor
Chris Burden called attention to the venerated nature of art works when he
displayed props from his notorious mid-1970s performances in cases and
named the objects relics.

I define spiritual as an experience that is metaphysically true. Your heart and
your gut know that all is one – One – and that One is as sweet as can be. I see
religion as a corruption through rigidification of the spiritual – an attempt to
explain and give advice about the spiritual in terms of principles, doctrines,
and beliefs, such as sin.

In my vocabulary – indeed, in my life – the experience of One is erotic. Erotic
experience includes the sexual, but is far larger than the languors and lustfulness
of sexual desire or the piquancy of orgasm. Connection, in the largest
sense, is erotic.

The saint makes a deeply erotic contribution to society.

The Heart of St. Brandt

The Other Venus, which Brandt considers to be “the most central work in the
show,” embodies glamour, beauty, kindness, and gender bending without representing
the human figure. This abstract sculpture itself functions as a set
of abstractions that evoke the intellectual and emotional heart of Brandt’s
exhibition. Scale alone gives the piece centrality, but more importantly, the
piece is quiet yet startling, bold yet understated, generous yet spare with a
presence that is hugely innocent in feeling. I look at The Other Venus and
sigh in relaxation. While being a sophisticated artwork, a minimalist object
with feminist overtones, The Other Venus – when I simply let myself observe
its materiality and absorb its energy – sweetens my spirit and expands it, as
does the energy of a saint.

Glamour: The Other Venus is luxuriously physical. Beauty: the materials
– translucent fiberglass and sugar icing for a cake – excite the senses of vision
and touch. The white icing is so available to my eyes and my fingers as
it’s been spread over 120 centimeters and below eye level. Metaphorically,
I am given kindness in the combination of sugar and innocence; I am given
the ‘icing on the cake’, the best part of a good experience. Gender bending:
sweetness is associated with women and with femininity, and, in Brandt’s
words, The Other Venus conveys “reversing roles. Putting me in the position
of ‘the other.’”7 That reversal has been a strategy of feminist artists over the
past forty years. In the dominant white male culture of Western civilization, two major groups of others have been women, any and all of them, and men
who love and make love with men, and Western civilization has commonly
gendered both groups feminine. In this essay I use gender to designate the
condition of being a human male or female; in other words, the conditioning
in femininity – how females are supposed to be – and in masculinity – how
males are supposed to be: what does cultural etiquette expect from the
sexes? Which, of course, in the common, constricting model, can only be
two, as genders also can only be two.

If The Other Venus is a non-representational self-portrait, then Brandt has
certainly queered Venus, the ancient Roman goddess of love and beauty,
for he is an other – on the outside of frustratingly and fatiguingly simplified
norms of gender and of sexual desire – who finds himself through yet more
others: heterosexual female secular saints – film star Marilyn Monroe (in a
project begun in 1999 and continuing) and, more recently, art star Hannah
Wilke (in works dated 2005-2007). He appropriates both women’s glamorous
self-styling and Monroe’s persona, in film roles and in public appearances,
of innocence, and he looks to Monroe as an avatar of kindness. In a poignant,
wistful prose poem titled Marilyn (2000), Brandt imagines her “to be just
as much on the outside as me,”8 and elsewhere he calls himself “purely sexual.”
9 Her audience perceived Monroe to be precisely that, and the crystalline
Beauty of the phrase “purely sexual” describes innocence as much as it does
the animal allure and desire, the unadulterated sexuality, that Monroe’s image
conjures up for many. Brandt’s self-designation of “purely sexual” points me
towards a different meaning, which is personhood unadulterated by sex and
gender categories.10 His appropriation of Wilke’s art includes its engagement
in androgyny, its potent sexiness, and its challenge to a culturally sanctioned
shame of the body.11 The women teach him how to reveal himself to himself
and his audience and ways to touch them through the social, aesthetic, and
sexual issues that matter to him.

Gender seems obvious to many people, for they assume that femininity is the
essence of females and masculinity is the essence of males. Yet, people’s
behaviors,
desires, pleasures, and satisfactions are far sweeter and more glamorous
than the familiar, conditioned extremes of gender, which appear to be
moderate and normal. Cultural institutions, fears, and self-fulfilling prophecies
divide gender into soft – femininity – and hard – masculinity: women are
naturally more nurturing than are men; men won’t be men unless they act
out masculinity; women won’t attract men unless the women underplay their
intelligence. Clear divisions, though restrictive, provide comfort because they
tell a person where he belongs: he needn’t think about it. At the same time,
those restrictions create discomfort by keeping people chafing psychically
and erotically in their place. Like gender, sugar icing is both soft and hard
– your finger can easily press into its visually stiff surface – as is Brandt’s
body in his many photographs. He is muscular – hard – yet the muscularity
creates rounded contours – softness. His shaved head is hard while his penis
is soft. Brandt, like everyone, is between the normalized gender extremes, for
gender is impenetrable, like the fiberglass of The Other Venus to our gaze.
The translucence of the fiberglass invites visual exploration, but whatever we
imagine that fiberglass structure to hold remains mysterious, not in a hostile
or teasing way, but rather, like a lover, whose being is always a shimmering
mystery, no matter how much or how clearly we see into it. In actuality,
The Other Venus is empty, as is every object, every body, every human being
– everything – until we fill it with our own ideas and beliefs. The saint helps
us to become aware of what we are filling this every emptiness with.

Bending his ‘correct’ gender to bond with Monroe’s and Wilke’s femininity,
Brandt places himself in the company of saints. In her lifetime, Monroe was a
secular saint, like Willie Nelson is today.12 A black cocktail dress that Monroe
wore during The Misfits filming brought $66,000 during the same Manhattan
auction at which Warhol’s silver hairpiece sold. Perhaps that relic is the dress
worn by Monroe in one of the clips from The Misfits that Brandt uses in his
video Please Don’t Kill Anything (1999). In scholars’ recent writing of art history
– publications in this century – Wilke, who died in 1993, is a canonized
feminist artist. Hannah Wilke: A Retrospective, the first book published about
her work, in 1989, has become a collector’s item. The book, which includes
my first writing on Wilke, has long been out of print, and the other day, when
a philosopher friend of mine was looking to buy a copy, his research revealed
that he would have to pay at least $500.

Supposedly, saints smell sweet. Examples abound in Western saint lore, from
as early as the fifth century – St. Simeon Stylites, for example – into the
seventeenth century with the scent of Venerable Benedicta of Notre-Damedu-
Laus. The divine perfume of saints’ bodies – the so-called odor of sanctity
– resulted from spiritual goodness.13 Wilke subtitled one of her works
Memoirs of a Sugargiver (1977-1978; the complete title is I Object: Memoirs
of a Sugargiver), thus naming herself as a giver of sweetness – the pleasure
of her own glamour-girl beauty, which viewers could enjoy or with which
they could identify. Brandt, too, presents a body for viewers to enjoy through
identification and amorous desire. He, too, is a glamour-girl; and he is also a
glamour-boy. Both of those appearances mean that he is a pin-up of indeterminate
gender.

Wilke named herself Venus, the sugar-giving goddess par excellence, as in
her self-portrait nude Venus Pareve (1982), carved in chocolate whose delicious
scent caught me off-guard on a visit to her studio. Learning from Wilke,
Brandt becomes the goddess in Black Venus (2006), a small inkjet print of
himself nude, sumptuous thighs disappearing into a shell, which was the vessel
on which Aphrodite, the Greek precursor to Venus, arrived on the shores
of Cythera, known not only in myth but also in Western art as the island of
pleasure, where, as in Antoine Watteau’s Return from Cythera (1717-1719),
lovers could voyage in order to envelop themselves in the sweetness of love
and its bodily pleasures.

Since people imagine making love with lovely bodies, Brandt’s pin-up nudity calls
such pleasures to mind, even in his Scars & Stars (2005) series, from
which he chooses one of the three to use in Black Venus. Brandt darkened
his body with theatrical pancake makeup, then covered himself with olive oil.
His naked blackness, whose sensual luminosity highlights opulent patterns of
body hair, along with his dramatic and self-protective hand and arm gestures,
radicalizes the pin-up, so that it departs from the notions with which people
generally fill the pin-up – that it is simply and simplistically sexual. Brandt’s
compassion for black males – another group of others – who are envied
in a white Western vision that hypersexualizes them into objectified
things without feelings or consciousness, opens us to the black male’s vulnerability
and pain. Indeed, the look in the eyes of Brandt’s black Venuses ranges from
suspicious to fearful to just this side of tears.

Stars & Scars is indebted to Wilke’s S.O.S. Starification Object Series (1974), in
which she poses as a pin-up in many costumes and attitudes, always marking
or ‘scarring’ her body with her signature cunt sculptures – in this piece, made
of chewing gum.14 S.O.S. points out that women, such as Wilke herself, whose
beauty makes them ‘stars’ of their sex, are simultaneously scarred by that
stardom because they provoke the envy of women. Wilke also illuminates
another social/sexual issue – that simply by being embodied with female
genitalia a human being is scarred; for example, marked as an object to be
raped and a drudge to perform domestic chores and the emotional labor in
intimate relationships. With Wilke as a guide, Brandt creates a self-portrait
that fits the art historian Maria Elena Buszek’s definition, in her book Pin-Up
Girrrls: Feminism, Sexuality, Popular Culture, of a pin-up used by women to
“mime, reword, and resignify the signs and stability of specifically female
sexual ideals.”15

In one after another of Brandt’s works, a ‘star’ of the male sex – Brandt,
himself, because he is beautiful – shows not only that men are scarred by
notions about gender, but also that those notions need to be transformed.
In work after work, Brandt desires that transformation, the “downfall of
masculinity.”16 Needed-Erase-Him (2006) very pointedly works towards that
goal. There, Brandt covers his head and torso with a black-and-white plaid
blanket, and text from Valerie Solanas’s brilliant and devastating critique of
masculinity, the SCUM Manifesto, surrounds him.17 Black-and-white: like the
normalized extremes of sex and gender. Gray: the more subtle tonalities of
Brandt’s experience of his own gender and sex. S.O.S. is, of course, a call for
help, and Brandt, in his response to Wilke’s distress and its cultural roots and
ramifications, answers that call with his saintly artistry.

The classical deities revived mortals with deliciously perfumed ambrosia and
nectar.18 Just as queer theorists ‘resurrect’ philosopher and activist Michel
Foucault (1926-1984) in order to awaken their intellectual, political, and
Everyday activism for the transformation, the sweetening, of gay lives, so
Brandt resurrects Wilke’s sugargiving Venusian sweetness – the sanctum, for
him, of her work – in order to revive people’s faith in their own ability to be and to give
sugar. One resurrection that strikes me as particularly sweet is
Read My Lips Before They Are Sealed (2006). (The title’s words, Brandt tells
me, are from a 1992 art work by Zoe Leonard and Suzanne Wright.) On a big
wool blanket that looks cozily soft, the bold red words of the title, printed
on cloth, are themselves softened by the unsophisticated stitching – in pink
thread – that attaches the cloth to the blanket. Embroidered flowers further
soften the words’ poignant harshness. Read My Lips… references Wilke’s
Needed-Erase-Her (1974), composed of cunts shaped from kneaded erasers.
Soft as the blanket is, Brandt’s piece combats the cultural erasure of others.
Indeed, for the saintly warrior, who is the spiritual warrior, softness is of the
essence.

Pink, a traditional symbol of love, comfort, and sweet femininity, is one of
the blanket’s colors, and pink appears again in Elective Affinities (2006), a
watercolor series titled after Wilke’s Elective Affinities (1979), a large group
of small ceramic cunts. In Brandt’s piece, the eye can easily find phallic
forms, contoured in red, the color of passion, surfacing from the nuanced
pink ground. They are one of various shapes that can be read as parts of the
body, from ear to breast to organs. In a field of pink and in its own pinkness,
the penis assumes particularity but no dominance.

The penis, ‘enlarged’ in cultural imagination into the phallus, an anatomical
abstraction that we joke about – cigars, for example – and that we ‘see’ in
skyscrapers and the weaponry of knives, guns, rifles, and missiles, dominates
the contemporary unconscious through divisive division: we can laugh at
phallic references, such as the ones that I’ve listed, yet the inequality between
the sexes may startle us when we realize that vulval and vaginal references,
privately or publicly made, are comparatively nonexistent. What a
saintly kindness to tart up the male body19 – Brandt as a pin-up; to ‘erase’
its phallic grandeur – Brandt’s Aftermath (2005), in which, appropriating
Wilke’s own self-representation in I Object: Memoirs of a Sugargiver, he tucks
his penis
between his legs to display himself, still hairy and flat-chested, between
female and male, masculine and feminine. What glamorous activism:
to show that the truly human nature of being a person is to be in-between
the normalized extremes. The current meaning of glamour as elegance, allure,
and charm comes from the archaic meaning of magic: Brandt handles
his body and our cultural notions about bodies in a magical way.

Miraculous Indulgence

The saint is human. However, because saints are known to work miracles,
they appear to be superhuman. But that belief stems from people’s thinking
that miracles are difficult to create and are beyond their own capacity:
miracles happen every once in awhile, or maybe never.
We might change our ideas about miracles.
Scholar David Halpern, author of Saint Foucault: Towards a Gay Hagiography,
declares, “As far as I’m concerned, the guy [Foucault] was a fucking saint”20:
because Foucault worked – and is still working, after his death – miracles, not
only for self-designated queers, but also for the queer in all of us: the ways
that we all depart from our femininity and masculinity, from the ‘
correct’ acts and practices of males and females, from the agony and sheer impossibility
of being always and forever straight: straight-arrow; straight-laced;
straight-jacketed by convention.21 In such straightened conditions, we weep
as we walk a straight and narrow path, on which miracles – from a deliciously
hot sun touching the top of your head to the greeting of a stranger whose
unexpected warmth draws both your heart and your desire to him to your
transformation into ever-growing sweetness – do not occur. When we fail
to recognize miracles, we forfeit the release from sin that St. Brandt’s art is
offering to us.

In popular misconceptions, the sweetness of saints places them above the
rest of us. Those imaginings align goodness and goody-goodyness, sweetness
and meekness. Historians disabuse us of those notions. The following descriptions,
given by two historians, picture saints as people who were often
overwhelmingly attractive in acts and being and who endangered the social
norms: the saint has been an individual “possessed of a charisma that is patently
dangerous and anarchic,”22 “at heart a non-conformist,”23 the “most
vocal member of society,”24 and “hardy, forceful, even aggressive in … enthusiasm.”
25 As saints have assailed political and religious orthodoxies and
intervened in the ritualized narcoses of everyday behavior – the neuroses of
I-know-what’s-going-on, when, really, this every emptiness of human existence
is a mystery – they have been boldly self-inventing and self-authorizing.
In other words, the saint is a model of creativity. To be abundantly creative
is to be unlike most people and consequently, to be queer. St. Foucault, St.
Wilke, St. Brandt: saints are some of the queerest people on planet earth,
because, unlike many people, they are themselves and no one else. Being
that way, they serve as beacons for all of us, so that we can be ourselves,
luminously.

We mistake saints as saccharine beings, when, indeed, it is our overly sweet
sentimentality that cannot imagine a saint being severe with us. Some of
Brandt’s work may seem harsh, such as So Help Me Peter … (2005) with its
pistols, dynamic poses, and facial tensions and anger. Looking to Wilke’s So
Help Me Hannah, a video (1979) and photos (1979-1981) in which the artist
poses nude in standing, crawling, and prone positions while holding a toy
gun, Brandt, like Wilke, works to disarm the power of the phallus by instilling
the series with a melancholic violence whose despair will, hopefully, through
the miracle of catharsis, move the viewer away from neurotic, narcotic replication
of social rituals of cruel power.
We imagine that the saint is self-effacing. Some of Brandt’s work may seem
self-indulgent. Maybe his self-portrait pin-ups demonstrate vanity; maybe
his sexual politics are arrogant: maybe he is all ego. Halpern discusses the
charge that Foucault’s politics were fashionable and therefore self-indulgent.
26 Art critic Lucy R. Lippard charged Wilke with indulging in her own beauty.27 The “constantly increasing absentness of Heaven,” which writer
William Gass notes, leads me to love the self-indulgences of a secular saint
such as Brandt, who brings us the miracle of Heaven.28 To indulge oneself
is to be a good friend to oneself, and by virtue of that fact, to be a good
friend to others. Indeed, St. Brandt is a friend whose art fits Aristotle’s descriptions
of friendship. “With friends,” he states, “men are more able both
to think and to act.”29 (Let’s read “people” where Aristotle said “men,” both
here and below.) St. Brandt helps his viewers to think and act for ourselves,
as individuals and in community, no matter if we live in Copenhagen, the
European Union, or across an ocean or a continent from the Nikolaj, Copenhagen
Contemporary Art Center. The effect of St. Brandt’s art is strong, because
love – the sweetness in The Other Venus and so many of his works – is
strong, and, as Aristotle knows, “loving seems to be the characteristic virtue
of friends,”30 so it is the basis of friendship, which, for Aristotle, “depends on
community.”31 Why might viewers of St. Brandt’s miraculous self-indulgence
be joined in community? I use Aristotle to respond: “men address as friends
their fellow-voyagers . . . and so too those associated with them in any other
kind of community.”32 I imagine that St. Brandt addresses his fellow-voyagers
– in the glamour, beauty, kindness, and gender bending of his art – as friends.
Wilke is Brandt’s friend, Brandt is my friend.

Foucault is Halpern’s friend, and as Halpern understands, secular sainthood
is not about the saint living a perfect life – a perfectly moral life – but rather
about providing a “compelling model.”33 A good friend awakens us to excellence,
which is where the poet Robert Lax compelled his friend Thomas Merton,
a writer who became a Trappist monk. Merton recalls Lax asking, “What
do you want to be, anyway?”34 and Merton’s response, “I guess I want to be
a good Catholic,” was, according to him, “lame enough” and unacceptable
to Lax, whose love for his friend directed this strong suggestion to Merton:
“what you should say is that you want to be a saint.” Like most people would,
Merton thought this was “a little weird,” and asked Lax, “How do you expect
me to become a saint?” Lax replied, “By wanting to. . . . All you have to do
is desire it.”

I do desire a company of saints. Which is why I evoke one in this essay. Saints
help us awaken to the miracles that are always in our path. When we let
them, saints help us to be more receptive to One. Miracles have no measure,
as indicated in my little list of miracles above, for they all belong to One.
Miracles deliver us from sin, which is a condition of separation. Vision helps
people to see One. The saintly vision that challenges cultural blindness.
Text from John 9: 24-26 appears in Brandt’s video On The Other Side of Venus
(2006). The last line is the justly eternal “I was blind but now I see” (spoken
by, simply, “a man” who had been blind). Friendly sight is saintly sight. Friends
join together in a community of One.

St. Brandt, be patient, be gracious. A company of saints: all we have to do is
desire it.

Notes
1 James Elkins, On the Strange Place of Religion in Contemporary Art (New York and London:
Routledge, 2004), 115.
2 Jackie Tileston, Unspeakable, in 2007 Call for Participation (New York:College Art Association of
America, 2006), 22.
3 Elkins, 115.
4 Ibid., 116.
5 Julia Reinhard Luppton, Afterlives of the Saints: Hagiography, Typology, and Renaissance Literature
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996), 143.
6 Waking Dreams: The Art of the Pre-Raphaelites has traveled or will be traveling to the following
museums: Portland Art Museum, Oregon; Nottingham Castle Museum and Art Gallery, England; Marion Koogler
McNay Art Museum, San Antonio, Texas; John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art, Sarasoto, Florida;
Philbrook Museum of Art, Tulsa, Oklahoma; Frick Art and Historical Center, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania;
Cincinnati Art Museum, Ohio; Saint Louis Art Museum, Missouri; San Diego Museum of Art, California.
7 Peter Brandt, information given to the author in a listing of exhibition artworks, 2006.
8 Peter Brandt, Marilyn, 2000.
9 Peter Brandt email to Joanna Frueh, 19 July, 2006.
10 I thank Robert Stewart for helping me to clarify my ideas about Brandt’s phrase “purely sexual.”
11 See Elspeth Probyn, Blush: Faces of Shame (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota
Press, 2005), for an intellectual sanctioning of shame.
12 In mid-June, 2006, I heard someone call Willie Nelson a “secular saint” on National Public Radio’s
Here and Now.
13 See Constance Classen, David Howes, and Anthony Synnott, eds., Aroma: The Cultural History of Smell (London
and New York: Routledge, 1994), 52-54, for information about the odor of sanctity.
14 In the late 1960s artists such as Wilke began to create work that abstractly represented female genitalia. By the
early 1970s the term ‘cunt art’, used by feminist artists, art critics, and art historians, designated those art works.
The intention of those art professionals was to reclaim the word ‘cunt’ from its pejorative naming of female genitalia.
‘Cunt art’ and the use of the word ‘cunt’ were intended celebrations of the female body.
15 Maria Elena Buszek, Pin-Up Girrrls: Feminism, Sexuality, Popular Culture (Durham and London: Duke University Press,
2006), 12.
16 Peter Brandt, statement about his video On The Other Side of Venus, 2006.
17 SCUM stands for Society for Cutting Up Men. The SCUM Manifesto was originally published by Solanas in New York in
1967. The first commercial press publication was by Olympia Press (New York, 1968). Solanas appeared in films by Andy
Warhol, and in 1968 she shot him. Her explanation for the shooting was this: “He had too much control of my life.” See Valerie
Solanas, SCUM Manifesto (Edinburgh and San Francisco: AK Press, 1996). That edition contains a concise biography, “About
Valerie Solanas,” by Freddie Baer.
18 See Classen, et al., 45-48, for a discussion of deities and scents in antiquity.
19See Joanna Frueh, Tarts, Stars, Jewels, and Fairies, Art Journal (Winter 1999): 88-89, for a lyrical and scholarly tribute
to the beauties of tarty queer men.
20 David Halpern, Saint Foucault: Towards a Gay Hagiography (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 6.
21 Halpern, 134-35, brings to the reader’s attention Sartre’s sanctification of another queer icon, Jean Genet, in Jean-Paul
Sartre, Saint Genet: Actor and Martyr, trans. Bernard Frechtman (New York: George Braziller, 1963).
22 Stephen Wilson, ed., Saints and Their Cults: Studies in Religious Sociology, Folklore and History (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1983), 14.
23 Edith Simon, The Saints (New York: Delacorte, 1969), 108.
24 Ibid., 108.
25 Ibid., 22.
26 Halpern, 23-24.
27 See Lucy R. Lippard, The Pains and Pleasures of Rebirth: European and American Women’s Body Art, in Lucy R. Lippard,
From the Center: Feminist Essays on Women’s Art (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1976), 126. Originally published in Art in
America 64.3 (May-June1976).
28 William Gass, On Being Blue: A Philosophical Inquiry (Boston: David R. Godine, 1976), 3.
29 Aristotle, The Nicomachean Ethics, trans. David Ross (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 192.
30 Ibid., 205-06.
31 Ibid., 207.
32 Ibid., 207.
33 Halpern,7.
34 All quoted statements in this paragraph are from Thomas Merton, Seeds, ed. Robert Inchausti (Boston and London;
Shambhala, 2002), 153.