The light emanating behind her was inspired by portraits of the Virgin of Guadalupe. That is what a vagina is in my mind.
David Ramsay
My inspiration for my vagina was Shirley MacLaine in All That Jazz. A pair of small fleshy caruncles hanging between her legs. Ultimately, though, we hope people do a lot of things; we hope they'll laugh, we hope they'll think about what it means to identify as a "gay man," we hope they'll think about ideas our culture has about bodies and body parts.
The artist explained in his letter that this was a drawing of 'a gay man with a vagina.' And we were like, 'This is awesome, we're putting this in the book.' And we are!"
So it seems to me that if anyone is guilty of "silently [erasing] trans* and genderqueer gay men" here it's Gantz. I made about 30 illustrations exploring the idea and settled on this version.
Peter Max Lawrence
I read articles and looked at diagrams of the clitoris for historical context.
As the project is currently involved in a Kickstarter campaign, The Huffington Post chatted with the pair this week how the project got started, what's surprised them the most and more.
The Huffington Post: Where did the inspiration for the project come from?Keith Wilson: Three years ago, we were at a restaurant with a bunch of other homos and the topic of vaginas came up.
After Keith spouted some dumbass theory about what a vagina was and wasn’t, Shannon pushed aside the bread basket and said, “If you know so much about vaginas, why don’t you draw one.” So he did. Her hair being the pubes, pointy nose-tip the clitoris, and her red-lipstick-covered lips the vaginal opening. Clearly this is a vagina that gets shit done.
One guy at our art booth in the Castro handed Shannon, who is a female-bodied person, a drawing of a vulva with the phrases "CLAMS ANYONE? Ultimately, a contributor summed up the dilemma for gay men this way.
Illustration by Aaron Blumenthal Cheyene
And, of course, someone's always going to give it teeth.
Illustration by Ian Kroll
Via Kickstarter they're looking to raise $37K for printing the book, which will be 220 pages long and off-set printed.
It sucked. What response are you hoping to get?Wilson and O'Malley: We just want reactions. “So you’re really committed to doubling down on using a term that you’ve been told many times is exclusionary & harmful?” asked one self-described intersectional feminist blogger.
Which brings us to this from Eva Gantz at the Good Men Project:
“Gay Men Draw Vaginas,” a project that—you guessed it—has gay men draw vaginas, has taken the internet by storm.
The underlying assumption that a gay man will have rarely or never seen a vagina/vulva assumes that all men have penises, as do their partners. As vaginas are usually worshiped, I figured good ol’ Jesus could handle the attention.
Olof Hansen Olof Hansen
Justin Dias of San Francisco, CA Justin Dias
Patrick Germany
Brandon L.
Davis of Phoenix,AZ Brandon L. Davis
Miguel Aguilar Miguel Aguilar
Sergio Zamora Jr. of San Francisco, CA Sergio Zamora Jr.
Jeremy Williams Jeremy Williams
Juan Gutierrez of San Francisco, CA Juan Gutierrez
Nemr Elsotary of San Francisco/Palestine Nemr Elsotary
Lonnie Haley of San Francisco, CA Lonnie Haley
Darrin Little of San Francisco, CA Darrin Little
Austin London of Shreveport, LA Austin London
Ben Colburn of Newport News, VA Ben Colburn
Gent Lee Ryder Gent Lee Ryder
Larry Carl Collins of San Francisco, CA Larry Carl Collins
Isi Tuifa of San Francisco, CA Isi Tuifa
Alesandro Larrazabal San Francisco, CA Alesandro Larrazabal
Chris Dotson of San Francisco, CA Chris Dotson
Marc Beuttler of Ventura, CA Marc Beuttler
Travis Curtis of Springfield, IL Travis Curtis
Gerry Beekman of New York City Gerry Beekman
John Holland of San Francisco, CA John Holland
I pictured her welcoming visitors with her jazz-hand vaginal lips.
Or make a quick phone call?
There's more info about "Gay Men Draw Vaginas" at their kickstarter page, and you can read a longer HuffPo interview with O'Malley and Wilson here.
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A pair of Oakland-based artists/humorists have been setting up vagina-drawing booths over the past two years, sometimes making appearances at Gay Beach in Dolores Park and in the Castro, asking gay men to draw vaginas, or whatever a vagina calls to mind, or what they believe a vagina to look like.
Or were you just in such a rush to draw attention to your own righteousness by leveling charges of transphobia that you couldn't pause to think things through? After I saw Chris's drawing my instinct was ask him to do a few more with the same feel, just for fun, especially since I had heard him talk about how he never had time to do his own artwork.
Wilson and O'Malley: Possible but not probable.
This is the question that led Keith Wilson and Shannon O'Malley to curate an ongoing public art project and upcoming picture book called "Gay Men Draw Vaginas." With the results ranging from fine art to clever depictions, the results are both humorous and telling about the relationship between gay men and vaginas.
Plimpton was surprised when some offended Internet feminists urged people to stay away, arguing that emphasizing “vaginas” hurts trans men who don’t want their reproductive organs coded as female. “Given the constant genital policing, you can’t expect trans folks to feel included by an event title focused on a policed, binary genital,” tweeted @DrJaneChi, an abortion and transgender health provider.