Abstract
“Sitting. With a Candle? Up My Ass!” explores the archive of the Bay Area photographer David Greene, focusing firstly on Shameless (1974), a series of portraits of transgender people, queers, and people in drag, often posed candidly in domestic and other domestic settings. It zooms into Greene's work to draw out the story of the forgotten genderfuck poet and activist Harmodius in Exile—Greene's lover and peer—posing archival research as an access point to concealed or “minor” histories of lesbian, gay, and transgender life in San Francisco in the 1970s. In my analysis, Harmodius's strategic maximalism—captured so evocatively in Greene's portraits and evoked in Harmodius's own poetry (cited in the title)—is both a political tool and a technique of whimsy, a gesture of serious play that stages the poet's commitment to aesthetic, political, and corporeal self-fashioning.
