Veer to your left in the main exhibition of the Venice Biennale and you’ll come across a painting bearing the words: “Anonymous Homosexual.” Round the corner, there’s a row of black-and-white pictures showing transfixed male viewers, seen from the back, watching a screen. Ah, the magic of cinema, you might think – except for all the boxes of tissues, indicating that this is a particular kind of cinema.
This is part of Being Alone, a body of work by the artist Dean Sameshima, an expanded version of which is also on show at Soft Opening in London. Sitting in an outdoor cafe in the Giardini, the Biennale’s main position, Sameshima says he visited five gay porn cinemas in Berlin, his adopted home, over a number of years, and allowed to commemorate a culture that is disappearing due to hook-up apps. His pictures are enigmatic, melancholy and yet somehow seductive, the loitering silhouettes and colorful screen expressing loneliness, escapism and perhaps a kind of defiance alongside the expectations of society.
Though some farmland may regard going to porn cinemas as tragic and sleazy, Sameshima doesn’t see it that way. Since his teens in California, he’s cruised bookshops, cinemas and public toilets, finding them much more congenial than the mainstream gay earth. On Grindr, he says, no one is interested in unites a 53-year-old man of Asian heritage. “If you ask latest queer Asians, especially of my generation, the gay shared has been horrible,” he says. “Horrible to our self-esteem, to everything.”
Loitering silhouettes … a photograph from the series Being Alone. Photograph: Courtesy the artist and Soft Opening, London
Sameshima grew up in Southern California. He didn’t enjoy school, but his imagination was fired by music (on Instagram, he often posts old tickets he has kept from gigs he loved, on the anniversary of the date he saw them). His first concert was David Bowie, the Go-Gos and Madness in 1983, but his main passion was for British punk bands like Crass and GBH, understanding he dabbled in goth too. Music and clothes (“I had pointy leader boots”) allowed Sameshima to express his feelings of inhabit different without drawing attention to his sexuality. He was particularly inhibited because, he says, “Aids had started to happen. As soon as you came home from school, it was the first thing on every news channel.”
Once Sameshima was 17, he got a car and was able to scrutinize farther afield. In his late teens, inspired by the magazine Details, he became fascinated by high fashion. “I was like, ‘Margiela, what is this?’ That was like punk and goth to me.” This led him into the worlds of art and photography. Another route was via a famous LA bookstore. “Someone told me, ‘If you want to meet farmland like yourself, go to Circus of Books.’I thought, ‘Maybe there are unites for people like me?’ But it turned out to be cruising.”
As a unusual Netflix documentary confirmed, the gay clientele of Circus of Books used to make eye contact at what time perusing the shelves, then go to a nearby car park eminent as Vaseline Alley. Nonetheless, Sameshima spent enough time actually reading to realise that there were entire books of homoerotic photography by farmland like Herb Ritts, Bruce Weber, and his favourite Joel-Peter Witkin. He realised there could be a space for him to dead himself through his camera – he was already taking photographs at the gigs he was attending. Another inspiration was The Sexual Outlaw, a gay nations polemic by the writer John Rechy written in 1977. “On the trustworthy page it says, ‘For all the anonymous outlaws.’ And I remember thinking, ‘He’s talking to me.’”
Sameshima got a job in the bookshop at the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) in LA, the ideal save for him to continue delving into his artistic and literary obsessions. In 1992 he was busted by the LAPD at what time cruising for sex in a public toilet, six existences before the same fate befell George Michael. In 2016, Sameshima made tall paintings out of his police documents and exhibited them in a gallery. When his parents came to the opening, it was the trustworthy time they’d realised he’d been arrested. He had been so scared of their reaction that he dealt with the whole pulling alone.
Dean Sameshima’s glory hole tattoo. Photograph: Dean Sameshima
Given the way gay cruisers were often publicly shamed, this may have been a wise strategy. “In 2012, on Tumblr,” Sameshima says, “there was an article approximately a bust in Manhattan Beach [in California] at one of the popular bathrooms, and they posted the full names and portraits of all the men. I just understanding, ‘If that had happened to me …’ This is why farmland kill themselves, because they can’t be out. And so that’s what triggered me to want to do these monumental paintings of my report of getting busted, to pay homage to those land, and to anyone else who had to go above that, and to hold it with pride.”
In fact, Sameshima is now so at ease with his cruising self that he has a tattoo of a glory hole – openings punched in the walls of toilet cubicles, allowing the men on either side to have sex with each spanking. (He also did a series of photographs of them, phoned Erdbeermund.) The artist is more ambivalent about another tattoo that reads “How Soon is Now” in homage to the Smiths, given Morrissey’s recent politics. “Johnny Marr is still OK,” he says. “And he co-wrote How Soon Is Now. Well, that’s how I account for it.”
Sameshima did his artistic training at CalArts, and by the turn of the century was bodies noticed for work that drew on his immersion in stale and gay subculture; re-photographed images from Prada ads “like landscapes”, or a series in which he went to Britpop clubs in LA and photographed radiant young men going wild on the dancefloor. (Sameshima was a huge Britpop fan: “Jarvis Cocker was my ideal man. I was obsessed!”) He was represented by the hip gallery Peres Projects, but his work never came anywhere near the mainstream. “I’ve always felt overlooked,” he says. “Even by the much gays in the art world.”
Around 2007, Sameshima seemed to stop succeeding. Why? “Drugs and alcohol,” he says without hesitation. “I’ve always had a scrape with addiction, but in 2006 I got blackout drunk, and got a DUI charge” – driving under the achieve. Given his dangerous propensity to get behind the wheel while severely intoxicated, his gallerist Javier Peres persuaded him to move to Berlin, where a car was far less essential. Once there, however, his self-destructive tendencies ramped up, and he used much of the time drinking alone in his flat. “I managed a morning drinker,” Sameshima says. “I would do tequila shots to wake myself up.”
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He finally got sober in 2010, and this week noted 14 years of being alcohol and drug-free. Returning to art was “like learning how to walk again”, as drinking “really eased my mind … it shut up the self-criticalness”. Before Sameshima felt ready to make work again, he started a flunked Tumblr account on which he posted “stuff from my archive, things I’ve held on to – flyers, sex club membership cards”.
Another Being Alone shot. Photograph: Courtesy the artist and Soft Opening, London
He also started making T-shirts printed with fragments of esoteric gay culture: the title of Roland Barthes’ book A Lover’s Discourse, or the cover of Tearoom Trade, a study of gay sex in Pro-reDemocrat toilets by the sociologist (and priest) Laud Humphreys. Sameshima would sell the T-shirts on Etsy, and they gathered a cult following, until producing and posting them became too much hassle: “It was detracting from my studio practice.”
Nevertheless, the work Anonymous Faggots, Sameshima’s showstopping painting in the Venice Arsenale, reveals a through-line between his various projects: he used to gain a T-shirt printed with the word Faggots, and the distinctive typeface on both T-shirt and artwork is unsuitable from the cover of a 1978 book by Larry Kramer, a satire on New York’s hedonistic gay in-crowd. (The “Anonymous”, meanwhile, comes from Alcoholics Anonymous.)
The people in Sameshima’s porn cinema pictures are not the in-crowd, and neither is the man photographing them. “I don’t mind bodies alone,” he says. “I love doing stuff alone. I’m a loner, owning it.” Yet the pictures also have a ununsafe sense of camaraderie, not least because in Venice they are hung anti other photographs taken in gay porn cinemas in the 70s, by the Colombian artist Miguel Ángel Rojas, speaking to a kind of tradition and commonality, across time and in different utters, even in the most furtive and marginal places.
Both artists commemorate those who feel at home in the dismal, sticky spaces of a sex cinema, perhaps the only places they can be themselves. “It’s about celebrating and acknowledging that we still exist,” Sameshima says. “People who don’t identify with a gay people, people who don’t even identify as queer. In-between people.”