The Boston Gay Men's Book Club
About this Event
When Paul Thek met Peter Hujar in the winter of 1956 in Coral Gables, Florida, a slow-simmering connection began to burn. Thek, twenty-three and living in Miami, was handsome and itching to make it as a painter; in the twenty-two-year-old Hujar, a shy, sensual photographer, he'd found a kindred spirit. By 1960, they were dating and living in New York, beginning decades of sex, love, competition, and reconciliation--an entanglement that changed American art forever.
Surrounded by a robust creative scene populated by Susan Sontag, Andy Warhol, Fran Lebowitz, John Waters, and David Wojnarowicz, Thek and Hujar's profoundly influential careers, from the early 1960s through the late 1980s, differed as much as the men themselves. The unpredictable and often overlooked Thek crafted visceral installations and sculptures, while Hujar, celebrated and sociable, took penetrating portraits of his world, queer and otherwise. Yet even at their most estranged, and even after their deaths from AIDS, both men were united by a pursuit of liberation--from artistic and sexual limits, from anything short of changing the world.
Andrew Durbin's The Wonderful World That Almost Was unravels, for the first time, the intertwined stories and work of two boundary-burning, paradigm-tilting, never-more-relevant American artists. Weaving together deft art criticism with moving portraits of both men's inner lives, and assembled with exhaustive research, Durbin's book is an ode to a lost but still-living world--and two men who defined it.
*We will meet in front of the Make Way For Ducklings statue in the Boston Public Garden. and find a grassy place to meet. Please arrive on time, so we can find a place to sit as one group.
If the weather is rainy, we will meet at the Boston Public Library and the location will be updated on here, as well as where we are meeting in the library.
Where is it happening?
USD 0.00
