Queer Joy as Resistance

Del LaGrace Volcano, an American photographer who showcases queer lives and identities, is best known for their staged studio portraits. Their new show Sensual / Mutual, currently displayed at Auto Italia in London, focuses on largely unseen photographs from Volcano’s time spent in San Francisco and Santa Fe during the AIDS epidemic. The exhibition is the artist’s first UK institutional solo show, which feels particularly poignant given that LGBTQ+ rights are increasingly under threat.

Sensual / Mutual sprawls across the gallery, cleverly divided to give each portion some breathing room. The front section is dedicated to photos of Scott’s P.I.T., a historic queer space in San Francisco that operated from 1970 to 1984. It was the city’s first lesbian biker bar, home to poetry readings, women’s groups, women’s political organisations, as well as plenty of punters looking for a drink or a fight: in one image, a woman raises her fist in celebration; in another, a crowd gathers to watch someone being slapped with a leather belt.

Next, we see photographs captured at the San Francisco Lesbian and Gay Freedom Day parades, the beginning of the city’s Pride celebrations, now one of the world’s largest. Amid LGBTQ+ political slogans, a woman playfully pulls her top to reveal a single breast, smiling at Volcano as she does. The snapshot is fun and silly, merging the free identity of leather subculture with campaigns for civil rights; it is illustrative of queer life, lived in all its shades.

Tender portraits of residents refreshingly showcase people living shoulder-to-shoulder. The battles against housing developments, though, are eerily familiar. An old man is pictured playing a violin for a young girl at Goodman Building, an artist’s commune in the 1960s and 1970s that famously waged a decade-long rent strike to stop its demolition; in 1983, the residents were evicted, and the commune was converted into an office and retail space.

Coincidentally, Volcano turns up at the gallery when I visit. Don’t let the predominance of black and white film fool you: this is not static documentarian photography. Volcano deeply embeds themselves in the scenes they photograph, candidly capturing intimate moments. The artist chats with the gallery’s assistant and realises they know their mother. Volcano is seemingly terminally about, always talking and making connections, always living. That is what makes their images so compelling. The life Volcano depicts is as much their own as it is other people’s. The small by design prints also help to draw the subject close.

Notably, the photographs do not prioritise one queer over another. People of colour are regulars at the gay bar; nerds and leather daddies share drinks; a person in a wheelchair glances over their shoulder; babies attend the parades alongside the S/M campaigners. Where identity has become further splintered in recent years, this show is a touching reminder that all kinds of people have been — and can be — queer.

It’s equally wonderful to see work that resists the narrative of women as soft, lacking in desire, or only capable of an unthreatening, tepid kind of desire. When Volcano photographs women having sex, the photographs are hot, full of flesh, dirty, illicit. Nudity itself isn’t necessarily sexual (as shown by a group of women lounging in a spring together) but when it is, it is thrilling.

Sensual / Mutual reminds us that we can, and should, live joyfully, and unashamedly, regardless of our political climate. The photographs encourage us to express without fear, and to live intersectionally. I hear Volcano point to an image and say, ‘This person was trans when it was hard to be trans.’ Queer liberation is an evolving movement, continuing way beyond the gallery wall.