An anthropological study of gay semiotics taxonomies and sexual behaviours
“An anthropological study of gay semiotics, taxonomies, and sexual behaviours.”
This somewhat-candid description accompanies singer-songwriter Brendan Maclean’s latest music video – and the video itself is even more “straight”-forward. House Of Air is the first track on Maclean’s June 2016 album release, entitled funbang1, but the documentary-style visuals only hit the video-sphere on the 3oth January 2017 at midnight UTC. Despite its explicit content, YouTube has – as of yet – not removed it.
However, “explicit” has a develop a term with varying degrees of definition. Directors Brian Fairbairn and Karl Eccleston have once again teamed-up with Maclean (after having directed two of Maclean’s previous videos) to bring Hal Fischer’s gay semiotics study to being. I’ll bet you never knew what a blue handkerchief in the right hip pocket says about your sexual desires, hey?
The video itself has been viewer-requested as age-restricted, although Maclean did not originally post it as such. Scenes within the song video go from innocent wide-angle shots, to full-blown (bad choice of words?) sex, fi
“Nothing That Meets the Eye” is a series of essays in which I think through the aesthetic and affective fallout of some of the odder, ubiquitous, and more stubborn byproducts of our culture of copies, reproductions, and fakes.
Hal Fischer. Street Fashion Basic Gay from the series Gay Semiotics, 1977/2014. Carbon pigment print, 20 x 16 inches. Courtesy of the artist and Ratio 3.
For Johnny, for showing me how to look.
“Taste has no system and no proofs,” writes Susan Sontag at the outset of “Notes on Camp” (1964). “Any sensibility which can be crammed into the mold of a system, or handled with the rough tools of proof, is no longer a sensibility at all. It has hardened into an idea . . .”
Part of what I am interested in tracing across this series is what happens after sensibilities harden into ideas, or into something else. What Sontag warns against is essentially a process of replication: the “mold of a system” is there to transform one kind of matter into the likeness of something else entirely. When ideas (or, tell, a particular work of art) are repeated across different forms and mediums, those repetitions, in change, produce their own kinds of effects, both spectacu
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ANTHGC14_ VXHL7 Candidate No VXHL7 How has the anthropological study of new media taught us about the nature and possibilities of sex? MSc in Digital Anthropology UCL March 29th 2012 ANTHGC14 _VXHL7 MSc in Digital Anthropology March 29th 2012 Introduction Sex is a major part of our lives and is massively present in both online and offline environments. The aim of this essay is to show how the development of new media has impacted sexuality in human relations and demonstrate that the nature of sex is not natural or given to us but rather culturally constructed, meaning “different things to different people at different times” (Seidman et al. 2006:271). These ideas are essential to lay the foundation of my analyses on sex and new media through the
“House of Air” by Brendan Maclean
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Brendan Maclean Wants You To Stop Being Such A Prude About Gay Sex
Everyone from religious institutions to the mainstream media to homophobic politicians have historically stifled expressions of queerness. Though society has made leaps in accepting, or even just tolerating, the presence of gay (and LBTIQ) people, homosexuality still remains a sketchy subject for some — which has only empowered others to broadcast it for the masses.
One artist publicising these kind of displays of queerness is Australian musician, actor and self-proclaimed “degenerate filth” Brendan Maclean. Maclean recently released an extremely NSFW music video for a new ballad titled ‘House Of Air’ (watch if you dare). He describes the operate as “an anthropological analyze of gay semiotics, taxonomies and sexual behaviours”, and the response was far more volatile than that description may lead you to believe.
The video for ‘House of Air’ features demonstrations of visual coding used by homosexual men in the ‘70s, and was adopted from a renowned 1977 photo-essay by Hal Fischer called Gay Semiotics. Fischer’s essay was published when homophobia was particularly rampant. He displayed the identifiers which