“Homo Diaries: Self-Portraits and Other Stories” is an exhibition directed by Qwien, showing in Vienna from June 18th to September 28th and spotlighting stories of queer life from the medieval period to the present day. Ahead of its opening, GAY45 spoke to Qwien founder and exhibition curator Andreas Brunner about his life and work.
Pictured: Andreas Brunner at Qwien.
Andreas Brunner packages his youth in the irreverent words of Bronski Beat: “I was a small town boy.” This soft-lipped musicality to his narration, to his general disposition, registers as both charming and apt. Apt for a man – an activist, an archivist, an historian – who affectionately places queer joy, both ephemeral and immanent, as the gravitational cornerstone of his labour. “I prefer not to tell stories of [queer] persecution,” he tells me, talking about his upcoming exhibition. “I want to find utopias, historical instances of thriving queer life.”
A small-town boy. Brunner grew up in a proletariat family in a provincial Austrian town. The country’s provinces, like those everywhere, are always more conservative, he emphasises, more restrained. And so he followed that queer rite in his 20s, that topos of queer coming-of-age: the flight from the geographic margins to the “lighthouse”-like radiance of the city, with its loudly whispered promises of sexual freedom and unabashed community.
He went to Vienna as a university student, the first in his family to be afforded the opportunity. Yet, he also “needed the city” as a site of sexual and social experimentation. He had always held a sense of heady difference within, but only in the controlled anarchy of urban life could he explore this difference’s contours, feel the libidinal warmth of its body, its fleshy materiality and baited, alcohol-perfumed breath.
Then another tragic rite of queer life at the time: the onset of the 80s, which ushered with it the black curtain and psychosexual injunctions of HIV/AIDS, smothering the city-lighthouse’s tender glow. As a historian of LGBTQ+ life, Brunner often excavates the unspoken extermination of said life in Nazi Austria, only acknowledged by the country’s government in the 1990s; and the cult of silence and shame that followed, as Austrian civil society refused to confront its fascistic malaise and afterlife. Brunner says that these sinewy sentiments – a calculated silence, a dissociative denial – defined Austrian attitudes to queerness throughout the twentieth century, well into the AIDS crisis. “There was always this hushing to how gay people were spoken about when I was growing up,” he reflects. “It was seen as a sad thing [to be gay], something to keep quiet.”
The AIDS years were bleak. Andreas recounts going to a recently-diagnosed friend’s 21st birthday party – that threshold into when one’s life only really starts taking shape – and its funereal air, the sense it would be his last (the friend fortunately survived, and continues to live today). But these years were also formative. “AIDS made me political,” he says, “made an activist out of me, made me feel like more than just a victim.” These were years of “pure fear” and “anger,” sure, but Andreas makes sure to caution against flattening queer life in such holocaustic times as a dearth of joy, agency, friendship, and love. A dearth of those very things that make us human.
So he remembers fondly the vitalistic, nourishing sense of community that the AIDS years built, that they deeply necessitated. The pamphleting and poster-making, the protests on the streets that felt almost like parties. It was also during this time that Andreas co-founded Vienna’s first queer bookshop, holding regular meetings or readings to disseminate safety information within the community. But also to build for people a makeshift home. This was, for some fleeting and flickering moments, one of those utopias he tries to find in his historical work, a way to counteract that Austrian cult of silence and give the self to something bigger, something almost cosmic.
The street protests he talks about had essentially become a motif of post-Stonewall, AIDS-era urban gay life. However it was only after attending a Christopher Street Parade in New York in 1994 – on the twenty-fifth anniversary of Stonewall – that Andreas remembers thinking, Austria needs this. Something that is not only a demonstration, but also a celebration. Something that writhes and throbs with joy, with the full spectrum of queerness, with “dancing half-naked young men and bare-breasted women… [with] queers in rubber and leather, queers covered in glitter and feathers.” Where that childhood sense of difference totally dissolves.
It’s the spectacle of all this that is important for Andreas, the making-visible of queer life spent its most ecstatically. Vienna’s Rainbow Parade is held each year on the Ringstraße, the country’s most prominent road, teeming like the Danube with bodies backdropped by all the boulevard’s “historical kitsch” – baroque opera houses and palaces lined decadent and iridescent in the June sun like “pearls on a string.” He doesn’t care if corporate sponsors are starting to cower from all this pure theatre. Which, he reminds, is inherently political in a society like Austria’s, with its history of silences and censorship. Which is inherently political amidst a global fascist uptick ratified by corporate avarice and desire.
“I think it’s a good development,” he nods when I ask about the recession of corporate sponsors from Pride, which for many has become symbolic of the neoliberal shallowness of these conglomerates. The first Pride parades never had all these floats and sponsors anyways. In a way, this made them purer, the more distilled essence of what it means to be a community in joyful, vibrant revolt. Or maybe this too – a yearning for a past, for halcyon purer yesterdays – is slipping backwards into the fascistic trap of nostalgia.
Or, maybe sometimes it’s just wise to learn from our past, the age-old lesson the historian is always trying to tell.
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