Gay Art

Harter’s work is like a passport to a culture that I have dubbed “gay chauvinism,” when you felt that being gay, secret as it was, gave you a special insight into humanity that the non-gay world did not have. We were significant—and everyone was starting to get a whiff of it. Harter's work is serious with an often mellow sadness to it. This was also part of life in New Orleans; the city’s preoccupation with death (basically in a swamp, it had been the epicenter of many plagues), and overcoming it. Harter who had come from a repressed, but wealthy background, did not fully give himself over to art until the last decade of his life, and even then the homoerotic aspects of his work worried him. He wrote, “I have been turning out works of gay-oriented art for 30 years, most of which almost no one has ever seen. These paintings are ghosts to me . . . I am very conscious that art which touches on the sexual of whatever stamp is at the greatest risk against survival. It is the first to be discarded by the fanatical, the shortsighted . . . by the well-intentioned who would protect a reputation or a history, by sanitizing the inheritance.”

Three expatriate gay artists have had important careers in Bali.  Walter Spies (German) in the 1930s, Donald Friend (Australian) in the 1950s and Symon (United States) a contemporary.  Perhaps no other place has had quite the same history.  Bali today has a massive tourist industry, with very limited LGBT visibility.