An Art-Historical Affirmation of Homosexuality

A Letter to Vincent

Some texts move through an art world the way contraband moves through a prison yard: folded, quiet, and understood to be a form of allegiance. This is one of them.

It travelled for years with no author’s name on it — as a PDF forwarded from a forwarded PDF, as a stack of prints left on the free table at three residencies, as a rumour that somebody’s professor had written it after a bad studio visit and a worse breakup. We have gathered it here in one place, repaired the worst of the typos, and restored the passages that a decade of marginalia had begun to rub out.

We publish it because it is true, and because true things about art and desire are in short supply just now.

Read it slowly. It was written slowly.

— The Editors