Beyond posterity, what is the value of preserving and sharing regional queer histories? This year, an author and a museum curator in Santa Fe serendipitously aligned in their respective pursuits to answer this question. Armed with a remarkable memory and a quiver of juicy anecdotes, Walter Cooper spent years researching and writing his memoir Unbuttoned: Gay Life in the Santa Fe Arts Scene, which he self-published in 2016 and updated last year. And nearly contemporaneously, Christian Waguespack was gestating the current group exhibition Out West: Gay and Lesbian Artists in the Southwest 1900 –1969, at the New Mexico Museum of Art.
At 84 years old, Cooper has lived in Santa Fe for 50 years, having arrived in 1973 after a closeted and stress-ridden stint as a New York adman. “I’m kind of surprised that I’m still here, period,” he says. “I’m one of the last people around.” By “people,” he means gay folks of a Santa Fe heyday: the swinging 1970s, ‘80s, and ‘90s, a time when some prominent denizens of the midcentury Santa Fe Art Colony, such as Janet Lippincott, Thomas Macaione, and Agnes “Agi” Sims, were still around, and a new generation of artists was on the rise.
“It was kind of a wild time,” says Cooper of the ‘70s. “I had an early introduction to a lot of people who were major players in the gay scene and the art scene. There were lots of dinner parties, after-show parties.”
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Like Cooper, Waguespack combines the early 20th century with the more recent in his storytelling, and draws on personal connections. He titled the show after Harmony Hammond’s curatorial project Out West, a 1999 exhibition of contemporary gay and lesbian artists in Santa Fe at Plan B Evolving Arts. The Galisteo, New Mexico-based artist has been another mentor for Waguespack, and her 1997 installation “What Have You Done with Our Desire” is an outlier in his show’s timeline that smooths the passage to more distant eras, like Cooper’s friends and their tales of the past.
The main arc of Waguespack’s Out West paints a picture of Santa Fe as a safe haven for queer, early-modern artists. National icons including Martin and Marsden Hartley appear with local legends such as R.C. Gorman and Will Shuster.
“Santa Fe was where you came if you were less established, more experimental, more bohemian… and that appealed to a lot of queer people,” says Waguespack. “[They] were interested in not only being artists, but also living a life that was pointedly different.”
In the same breath, he cautions against matching these historical figures with modern conceptions of being “out.” He adds: “Santa Fe offered some freedoms that other places didn’t, but it wasn’t carte blanche …. It did take bravery to [openly express gay identity].”
