I have two guests on the podcast today, and they have made something extraordinary together.
The first drew queer Britain into being for sixty years and quietly refused to call any of its art. It paid the mortgage. It was cheaper than being a window cleaner. He published the world’s first LGBTQ+ graphic novel in 1983, drew for Gay News, Capital Gay and The Guardian, made safer-sex campaigns through the AIDS crisis, and hung a nineteen-metre banner at Carrow Road for Justin Fashanu. All of which he called work – never art.
That guest is cartoonist David Shenton. The artist who finally insisted it was art is Ian Giles.
Together they have made Kindly Ease the Tension, David’s first ever institutional retrospective.
It begins with a small burnt doll, dressed in clothes knitted by a boy in a Lancashire terrace house and thrown into the fire by his father. The doll survived. So did the boy.
In this conversation we get into what happens when somebody finally calls your sixty years of work art. We talk about the Duvet of Love; an AIDS memorial David stitched in a bedsit that he never meant to be art. We talk about the trans baton being passed in a moment when many in the gay community have gone quiet. We talk about censorship and the rising conservatism in the arts, the works that have to be shown after hours, the double standard between classical nudity and queer images. And we talk about what intergenerational care actually looks like in practice.
David is seventy-seven and says this retrospective has stretched his horizon by another ten years. There is a lesson in that for all of us.
