unsanitized

unsanitized 2009

single channel video

Exhibition
LINEAGE: Matchmaking in the Archive. San Francisco GLBT Historical Society, San Francisco, CA. 2009.

unsanitized, Chronotopia, SOMA Arts, San Francisco, CA 2010

This work was created in collaboration with the San Francisco LGBT Historical Society archives. The work is a response to material in the archive of Charles Schwob. Schwob was an engineer who worked on the Manhattan Project. Schwob was also a gay man who was active in his community. The video from in the piece were sourced from an online archive of recently declassified films of atomic bomb tests in the South Pacific. The work is divided into an “overture” and three “chapters”. The overture introduces the secretive testing and policy. The second chapter beginning with the image of the bunker is the movement into the underground. Having grown up in the atomic era the bomb was always in subconscious. It is also the act of burying secrets…the secret of being gay. The second chapter is the destruction of structures. The bomb destroyed not on physical buildings, but also the sense of security and normality…much like LGBTQ people living on the fringes. The final chapter is the aftermath. The rubble of lives. Schwob created erotic photographs of military men. In this chapter shirtless soldiers prepare for atomic tests and soon afterward return to evaluate the results of the destruction exposing their bodies to high doses of radiation. Gay men in the atomic area were always at risk of exposure in their daily lives.

Claude Schwob helped engineer the future.  He was a gay in the military industrial complex with an eye for the boys.  He was the bomb.  A co-worker once stood up in a managers’ meeting and said, “So what if he’s gay, he’s a good guy”.  That’s when I became officially a good guy.  Engineers are fearful of their sexuality, “what if they think I’m gay?”  Claude seemed live a life of boys and big science.  How did he survive the most secretive of military programs with his sexuality intact?  But it seems to be the case.  Photos of him in uniform with loves and sex partners, those boudoir shots of young men, and proud credentials of his participation in Operation Apache – an A-bomb test at Bikini Atoll—all live in one box.  He was a good (and not so good) guy.