Looking Like a Lesbian

Laura Gilpin Was a Lesbian

Every scholar of gay or lesbian biography has heard the question a million times: How do you really know? And I’ll be honest: it is a question I have succumbed to myself, even though I have never once wanted incontrovertible proof that Georgia O’Keeffe and Alfred Stieglitz (for example) had sex, or material evidence that Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo (for another) did likewise. Those are not accidental examples: both O’Keeffe and Kahlo have been the subjects of queer inquiry, and documentary evidence has indeed been brought to bear on the question of their sex lives.24 On one level, I find this academic demand for evidence of sexual activity reductive—but on another level, I am constantly seeking it out as evidence of myself and my place in the world. This, then, is a type of lesbian gaze: the gaze that seeks out recognizable experiences in the lives of others in order to affirm the validity of the self. I characterize it as a lesbian gaze rather than an individual preoccupation because I know I am not alone in this desire: for example, Adrian Oktenberg wrote critically of Sandweiss’s monumental 1986 biography of Gilpin, An Enduring Grace (which accompanied a retrospective exhibition of the same name at the Amon Carter Museum), that

she ducks the question of . . . whether Gilpin could be identified as a Lesbian. Using that classic archaic word, Sandweiss refers to Forster throughout as Gilpin’s “companion.” . . . The fact of Gilpin’s commitment to Forster is unarguable. Nevertheless, I still want to know more about its nature. If the historian decides it doesn’t matter, she ensures that we will never know.

Oktenberg is blunt: avoiding this question “suggests myopia, if not homophobia.”25 Given the apologia delivered to me repeatedly by librarians, colleagues, curators, and friends as I began to pursue this project that 1986 (the publication date of Sandweiss’s text) was “a different time,” one suspects that Oktenberg was precisely right. “Different,” in this context, is a synonym for “homophobic.” Before we jump headlong into accusation, however, should we consider the possibility that this reluctance is a forgivable failure of the straight gaze? The art historian and critic Jan Zita Grover points out, after all, that while “all audiences can read signifiers [of lesbian identity] intended for primarily male producers/consumers,” heterosexual audiences have a “limited ability . . . to interpret quite another set of images produced by lesbian-feminist photographers primarily for lesbian audiences.”26 Straight observers of Gilpin’s photographs and archive—and life—might simply not have been able to see the codes of lesbian experience in her texts. Compelling as this argument is, it is ultimately too generous: in several significant instances including An Enduring Grace, Gilpin’s queer erotics were intentionally censored by straight scholars and curators.

This censorship is particularly ironic—not to say enraging—because although she was never an activist in the lesbian community, Gilpin lived her life with Forster quite openly and insisted on marking their presence as a couple in public presentations, exhibition catalogues, and other documents—including, most significantly, The Enduring Navaho. As she developed the structure of that book, she rehearsed various narratives in lantern-slide presentations that she gave around the country. Gilpin’s presentations exploited various elements of performance, including sound recordings, to elicit emotional support for Navajo self-determination from those in attendance. Standing in front of her audiences, Gilpin implicated her own body, as photographer, in her narrative: she put herself on view as well as the people she photographed. Although there is a close narrative relationship between Gilpin’s book and her slide presentations, the latter relied heavily on Gilpin’s performance: harking back to early magic lantern performances, she sought to engage her audiences with sound as well as sight, and she used her own intimate relationships to present herself as an informal insider rather than an academic expert. As one might expect given her intimate connection to the book’s history and content, Forster, too, became a part of the show. Newspapers eagerly reported that “Miss Forster was in the audience” whenever they reported on Gilpin’s appearances.27 Forster’s experience as a field nurse lent an additional dimension to Gilpin’s observations about Navajo life, but her presence also called implicit attention to their relationship, reminding audiences that like the Navajo people for whom they advocated, Gilpin and Forster occupied a precarious position in relation to mainstream society (a fact even if audience members insisted on perceiving them as two single women). The photographer’s uncensored bequest to the Amon Carter Museum was a final, fully public affirmation of their relationship, transforming their private words and images into public record.

An early letter fragment from Gilpin to Forster rejoices, “remember how I love you, love you, love you”; Forster, in turn, assures Gilpin, “You say you are glad I love you—Be glad, be glad for me.”28 A few short years later, Gilpin and her best friend, the sculptor Brenda Putnam, embarked on a seven-month voyage to England and France. Although Gilpin and Forster mourned the time apart, from a historian’s perspective it is good luck that circumstances required so many letters early in their relationship—and that the couple held on to them so carefully over the decades. “My one sensation is when I am just going to sleep,” Gilpin wrote to Forster while on that trip. “It is the most precious one. I feel myself surrounded by yellow I feel your arms creep around me. I kiss you and—I’m asleep. And oh Bets my beloved, I’m finding out every day just how big a part of me belongs to you.”29 Another letter treats Forster’s words as an extension of her body: “Bets darling:—Your sweet letter came yesterday and I hugged it and took it to bed with me.”30 This sentimental gesture is in keeping with the overall intensity of Gilpin’s feelings; after catastrophically dropping her lens into the harbor at New York moments before setting out, for example, she was on the edge of despair. But she wrote to Forster that their love would give her strength: “Bets my very dearest:— . . . I wish I could tell you how strongly I feel the glory of your love. It will carry me through any trial I may have to bear. Carry me with courage and love which would be hard indeed to muster, if ever I could, without you.”31 While she was away, Gilpin arranged to send letters alternately to Forster and her mother, asking them to share with each other so that she didn’t have to repeat her news—although when she wrote to her lover, the photographer advised her to “practice typing and copy the part of it that’s public reading and give it to mother”—a material transformation that would have clearly signified and unblinkingly acknowledged the excised intimacies to the older woman. “I want to do and share everything with you,” Gilpin lamented; “I miss [you] of course more than I can say, but I am happy in thinking of all I can bring home to you, for oh my dearest I do love you so greatly.”32 Although circumstances prevented them from living together even when Gilpin returned from Europe, the two began making regular camping trips together, “which led to extensive acquaintance with [the] Southwest and Navajo country” as well as with one another.33

When Grover surveyed the Lesbian Herstory Archives—a public archive made up of private ones—in 1984, she discovered that “the vast majority of lesbian images are of the record-making variety. . . . Such photographs present us with a photographic practice that is specifically lesbian . . . in its content: it records social occasions in the lives of women living as lesbians—demonstrations, vacations, concerts, festivals, parties. It does so in a manner identical to that of other social groups, making such photographs lesbian only in the sense that the people recorded therein are self-identified as lesbian.”34 Grover argues that from a political standpoint, images function as “lesbian” only when they are declared to be so in public: private images, in her words, do not “circulate through institutions that allow them opportunities to propose themselves as lesbian representations.”35 When Gilpin transformed her private photographs, letters, and ephemera into public materials by donating them to the Amon Carter Museum, she created a lesbian archive. It is our duty to her intentional instantiation of that archive to ask how, where, and why we can see lesbian subjectivity in her work.

Lesbian Networks

In aggregate, Gilpin’s archive reveals the extent of her lesbian network. Photographs and correspondence work together to create a hybrid archive: visual and textual. Our pop-culture image of the lesbian network is Alice Pieszecki’s Chart, from the cable television show The L Word. A network diagram, it is also both visual and textual in character. “Alice is certainly not the first queer woman to draw a diagram visualizing the complex web of hook-ups and break-ups that form the fabric of her community,” acknowledges Julie Levin Russo, who nonetheless finds the televised chart expressive of “a savvy appreciation of the productivity of networked intimacy.”36 Alice charted close ties—marked by sexual encounters—between women in her community in a humorously recognizable way.37 Over the course of the show, the chart was invoked as a networking tool: in addition to charting sexual and romantic connections, it allowed Alice and others to create new professional relationships with strangers based solely on their shared identification as lesbians (indeed, both within and beyond the show, the slippage between economic and personal networking is routinely and sometimes intentionally blurred). Like Alice’s chart, Gilpin’s lesbian network was a powerful tool for both economic and emotional support throughout her life.

As the sociologist Mark Granovetter demonstrated in 1973, weak social ties between individuals contribute to larger and more effective networks than strong ones: in other words, weak ties are powerful elements of an individual’s network because they connect individuals’ networks to one another, vastly expanding the social reach of everyone within both networks with very little investment of social capital.38 The power of diffuse lesbian networks was vital to organizers, publishers, and artists throughout the twentieth century: when Grover sought submissions of lesbian photography in 1984, for example, she wrote directly to individuals and publications—but it was “through the informal lesbian networks nationwide” that she received additional entries, and thanks to that network, she “continued to receive work for well over a year,” from as far away as Australia.39 Gilpin relied on similarly diffuse networks to attract clients, arrange exhibitions, organize speaking engagements, and more. Some of those networks have been explored in the extant Gilpin scholarship: her place in the photographic community, for example, has been well documented by Sandweiss and others. But Gilpin’s queer community—and her extended lesbian network—has not been traced.

Historians who refuse to acknowledge Gilpin’s sexuality can hardly be expected to trace her lesbian networks—but it is also true that absent any awareness of their lesbianness, there were no obvious, close connections between the women in those networks. Relatively few of them lived in proximity to one another, and their sexuality was never overtly stated as a reason for their ties—instead, they encountered one another as colleagues, or friends-of-friends in need of Gilpin’s photographic services or products. By the 1950s, organizations such as the Daughters of Bilitis were bringing lesbian women together purely on the basis of their shared sexuality, but Gilpin’s social and professional circles had begun forming decades earlier, and in a necessarily more ad hoc manner. Despite this, ties between queer women were understandably maintained more assiduously than their purely professional connections would otherwise justify; as a result, Gilpin’s lesbian network had a profound impact on her career and personal life.

How—and how intentionally—did Gilpin’s lesbian network grow? With one exception, there is little evidence that the photographer sought out specific queer women intentionally. That exception was the novelist Willa Cather. Forster and Gilpin shared a love of her work—the former brought Death Comes for the Archbishop with her to Red Rock, and the photographer quoted the same novel directly in her 1941 book about the Pueblos. Throughout the 1920s and ’30s the couple made repeated attempts to meet Cather and her partner, Edith Lewis, through their mutual friend Alice Boughton. They never succeeded—and Cather rebuffed Gilpin’s offer of photographs as illustrations—but this lacuna in their network, disappointing to canon-focused historians, was more than made up for by the extensive lesbian network they did build over the decades. For instance, Gilpin lucked out (or was, more accurately, networked successfully through the architect John Gaw Meem) with a commission to create an advertising brochure for the Sandia School for Girls, a residential school in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Helen Seth-Smith and Carol Preston were on the staff at the school for just a year or two before the latter was hired as headmistress of the Potomac School, near Washington, D.C., in 1938—where Seth-Smith “helped out unofficially the first year, then joined the staff as head of the House Department. She eventually became Assistant Head, and remained so until she and Carol retired together in 1961.”40 Gilpin, Forster, Preston, and Seth-Smith stayed in close touch over the decades, and Preston repeatedly invited Gilpin to share her work with Potomac School students and other regional audiences, widening Gilpin’s reach for the Navajo project and materially supporting her friends in the process. When Forster died in 1972, Seth-Smith wrote to Gilpin expressing deep empathy: “I suffered with you during my visit with you last fall, for my own situation was somewhat similar. As I look back over the years that you have cared for Betsy, I marvel at your indomitable spirit; the way you’ve always been patient, loving + cheerful. I pray that I may be the same with Carol . . . So dearest Laura just know how much you mean to us + how we think of you without your Betsy.”41 At Sandia, Seth-Smith and Preston had worked with another couple, Jean Moore and Gretchen Schickle, who ran the Forest Park resort and riding school, adjacent to the Sandia School, and also taught the Sandia students riding. They also appear in a condolence letter on Forster’s death from Bertha Bourne, who recalls fondly the memories she had of watching Pueblo dances with them and their mutual friend Mildred Beardsley.42

With its full extent revealed, we gain an unprecedented insight into the influence such a diffuse network can have on the cultural landscape. On a practical level, lesbian women created an important professional network for one another throughout the first half of the twentieth century. Gilpin discovered the power of such networks early on through her friendship with Putnam and other women in New York, London, and Paris. Gilpin made her living doing commercial photography, from studio portraiture to architectural and archaeological documentation, and many of her sales and commissions came through these connections. After Forster’s 1944 attack of polioencephalitis, Gilpin’s queer network offered vital emotional and practical support. One of the most poignant moments in Gilpin’s archive comes at Forster’s death, which prompted dozens of Gilpin’s friends, acquaintances, and colleagues to send letters of condolence. They are signed by single women and by couples, both lesbian and otherwise. Considering these missives and wondering about the identities of their authors, I was once again confronted by that primary challenge of queer history: How do I know if these women were lesbians? Given the censorship of homosexual identity and experience by historians, and the self-censorship that was often practiced by lesbian women themselves in relation to the archive, is it even possible to distinguish a specifically lesbian network from Gilpin’s broader social circle?

For example, Marion Hotopp, a doctor, and Elizabeth Norton, an artist, were both unmarried women. Silvia Saunders, also unmarried, lived with another woman and raised horses. Their correspondence with Gilpin makes no explicit mention of their sexuality or romantic preferences—and why would it? Their portraits, taken by Gilpin, are similarly silent on the question. As a result, however, their identity remains opaque in comparison with, for example, Alice Lee Marriott and Carol Rachlin, or Seth-Smith and Preston, who signed their letters to Gilpin as couples and expressed specifically lesbian empathy with the photographer when Forster died in 1972. In the context of a culture that expected women to marry, however, couldn’t Hotopp, Mayer, Saunders, and others of Gilpin’s unmarried correspondents be construed as socially queer? And when such women appear in the same social circles as women about whom we know more—women who had the freedom to be more open about their sexuality, either in their lifetimes or posthumously—isn’t it likely that at least some of them were also romantically or sexually so? Gilpin’s list of queer acquaintances encompasses women who were openly gay or bisexual, those who actively rejected queer identity but are contradicted by the archive, those for whom there is little extant biographical data, and those about whom the record is simply unclear: Alice Boughton, Dorothy Brett, Beverly Gile, Agnes Sims, Dorothy McKibbin, Bertha (“Bert”) Dutton, Irene Emery, Mabel Morrow, Amelia Elizabeth White, Berenice Abbott, Elizabeth H. Brooke, Elisabeth Spalding, Ida Haskell, Margaret Lefranc Schoonover, Erna Fergusson, Frances Koltun, Editha Watson, Alice Howland and Eleanor Brownell (a couple described by Jeffrey Hogrefe as “leading Santa Fe social figures”43), Mary Cabot Wheelwright, Dorothy Stewart, Georgia O’Keeffe, Elinor Gregg, Marion Davidson, Ida Senai, and more.

This network is manifest in Gilpin’s photographic archive as well as in her letters, and the series of portraits reminds us that Gilpin relied on her networks—queer and otherwise—to generate paid work. Her portraits of lesbian women, produced over decades and encountered individually in family homes, institutional brochures, or sent to friends, belong to a long-standing tradition of studio portraiture. But seen in aggregate in Gilpin’s archive, they become something else: they constitute a gathering, a material collective. Perhaps we are tempted to re-view these portraits from an anthropological perspective: Can we discern a typology of the twentieth-century lesbian in their profiles or dress? There is slippage here between the lesbian photographic archive and the Navajo one: a similar tension between our desire to see the individuals and our impulse to draw sweeping conclusions about the group. Gilpin and her lesbian colleagues on the Navajo Nation recognized the affinities in these temptations even as they sometimes fell prey to them; by the 1950s, Gilpin was becoming adept at mobilizing one network on behalf of the other. When Forster died, for example, the photographer mobilized her largely lesbian network on behalf of the Navajo Nation, establishing a book fund at the Navajo Community College in Forster’s name. Her longtime friend and colleague, Ned Hatathli, was president of the college at the time, which surely influenced her choice.44 This concrete gesture of allyship underscored the extent to which Gilpin and Forster identified with the cause of Navajo sovereignty, as well as their close social ties with specific Diné friends. It also demonstrated Gilpin’s understanding of the economic power of her queer network.

Looking Like a Lesbian

In 1924, Forster and Gilpin were joined by Putnam on a road trip from Colorado Springs along the eastern edge of the Navajo Nation. Putnam, a self-described city girl, ordained herself historian, and thanks to her thirty-nine-page typescript, we have a uniquely intimate record of the venture.45 The sculptor appears occasionally to have commandeered one of Gilpin’s cameras to document her companions, and ironically although Putnam censored her own (queer) archive before donating it to Syracuse University, her documentation of this vacation is the best visual evidence we have of the physical relationship between Gilpin and Forster.46 In one photograph, we see Gilpin leaning over Forster, who is crouched down, apparently in the process of packing up a bedroll (Figure 1.1). Gilpin’s left hand rests gently on the other woman’s shoulder. Most of that hand is in shadow, but the sun catches her thumb—and her scarf, evocative of scouting uniforms and an odd nod to fashion in this sparse, desert scene, hangs straight down, pointing directly to it. There is not much else to look at: the women’s tent fills the left-hand side of the frame, and the flat scrubland in the foreground leads only to hazy mountains and a washed-out sky.

One element that immediately strikes contemporary viewers on the lookout for queerness is their clothing: unusually for both Gilpin and Forster (at least as far as the photographic record can tell us), the two women are wearing tall boots and jodhpurs, with collared shirts, rather than skirts. Although it is tempting to associate this alteration in dress with the sexual freedom afforded by camping in isolated desert locations, it was unlikely to have been construed as a marker of lesbian sexuality by onlookers at the time. The historian Laura Doan has convincingly argued that throughout the 1920s, “boyish or mannish garb for women did not register any one stable spectatorial effect”—specifically, it was not routinely read as a marker of lesbian sexuality in popular culture, despite its appearance in, for example, the portraits of Romaine Brooks or the literary representation of the “invert” made famous by The Well of Loneliness.47 Looking beyond those iconic examples to a broader cross-section of popular cultural representations of lesbians, in fact, we see that lesbian difference is more likely to be coded by outsiders in terms of ornament (or the lack thereof) than gendered fashion. In Reginald Marsh’s drawings and prints of the Chop Suey club in New York, for example, the artist relishes explicitly in the sameness of the couples as he aligns skirted legs in various poses, or makes a relatively subtle distinction between the sober skirt and collared shirt of a tall dancer with the ruffled dress and pearls of her shorter, curvier partner, as in Chop Suey Dancers #1 of 1929 (Figure 1.2). The feminist scholar Alix Genter has noted the “visual disconnect between what one might expect butchness to look like and what it did look like” in photographs of self-described butches in skirts at midcentury, reminding us that the more overt butch-femme representations were useful only when artists or designers were trying to convey lesbianness to straight audiences—as on the cover of pulp novels, for instance.48 Thanks to the prevailing fashion for masculinity in the 1920s—in clothes, but also in actions and interests—masculine dress was multiply coded. While we cannot discount the possibility that Gilpin, Forster, and Putnam felt a decidedly queer pleasure in abandoning their skirts, they would not necessarily have been perceived as lesbians by outsiders—an ambiguity that Doan suggests “was part of the pleasure in this sartorial playground.”49

Rather than construing masculine dress in terms of binary gender roles, Grover encourages us to understand the rejection of restrictive feminine fashion as a specifically lesbian claiming of “human physical and social power denied women through conventionally ‘feminine’ dress and deportment.”50 This distinction was underscored by butch lesbians at midcentury who “modeled their style not on men but on other butches.”51 The pragmatism of this attitude seems to reflect how Gilpin and her friends approached their decisions about clothing: in a variety of urban settings, from nursing to turkey farming, Forster is seen in Gilpin’s photographs wearing dresses and aprons, but while camping, both women adopted clothing more suited to the activities and terrain of the desert. In so doing, they were far from alone: outfits just like theirs were marketed to women for a wide range of athletic activities, particularly in rural spaces, even as they remained censured in other aspects of social life.

Masculine fashions were popular, and therefore ambiguously coded, in the 1920s, but what about later? A photograph of the faculty at the all-girls Sandia School in Albuquerque, taken by Gilpin in 1938 in preparation for a publicity brochure, reveals a group of ten women, all but one of whom are dressed in skirts or dresses (Figure 1.3). That one (Helen Seth-Smith) sits, perched on the arm of a chair, apparently in conversation with another faculty member to her right. She is wearing a white, short-sleeved, button-down shirt with fitted jodhpurs that disappear into tall riding boots, the scuffed toes of which suggest their practical function. In Gilpin’s photographs of Sandia School students, we see a clear pattern of clothing matching the activity: the girls wear trousers when on an archaeological dig or camping, but skirts when they are playing music or dancing. It is tempting to assume, therefore, that the faculty member’s clothing is similarly practical, reflecting her role at the school. Even if such an explanation is true, however, her clothing stands out—and is perhaps why she is absent from a second photograph of the faculty taken the same day.

Little record remains of the role played by Helen Margaret Seth-Smith (1902–1994) at the Sandia School. She was a British Girl Guide leader who immigrated to the United States in the early 1930s, having traveled to New York several times before to serve as a Scout leader at summer camps. Perhaps New York is where she met Carol Preston, who taught at a school in Brooklyn, and who shared Seth-Smith’s passion for scouting—and also folk dancing. The two moved to Albuquerque together when Preston was appointed head of the English Department at the Sandia School. Seth-Smith’s inclusion in the faculty portrait indicates that she was on staff—perhaps as a physical education instructor, which would have excused her sartorial choice, or perhaps to lead the archaeology digs, which would have done the same. Both Seth-Smith and Preston were interested in the indigenous cultures and history of the Southwest, which likely enticed them out to the Sandia School (even though they went back to the East Coast, they returned annually to New Mexico). Regardless of her role at the school, we know that Seth-Smith’s performance of masculinity went beyond her choice of clothing in this photograph—she went by “Seth” to her friends, for example, and her hair, styled off the forehead and cropped closely in the back, not only is characteristic of lesbian fashion at the time but also clearly contrasts with the longer styles, careful waves, and central or side parts of her colleagues. Whether casual viewers would have recognized her gender expression as lesbian is an open question, but the deep friendship that developed between Seth-Smith, Preston, Gilpin, and Forster suggests that Gilpin, at least, read Seth’s coding accurately in that early encounter. Returning to the 1924 road trip, it seems newly plausible, also, that Gilpin, Forster, and Putnam enjoyed the queer coding of their clothing, even as it was also fashionable.

If Putnam had simply wanted to capture her companions’ clothing, however, she could have taken a photo at any moment on their road trip—as Gilpin did, for example, of Putnam sitting at a camp table making notes, perhaps writing the history of the trip itself (Figure 1.4). It seems, however, that the sculptor was specifically interested in this moment of physical affection—and perhaps even in the specific action of putting away the bedroll. Putnam’s journal of the monthlong trip reveals the women luxuriating in open expressions of affection. Just as they shed their dresses in favor of jodhpurs and boots, it did not take Gilpin and Forster long to shake off other social conventions: for example, on the second page of Putnam’s journal everyone is sleeping in separate bunks, but by page 3, Gilpin has “deserted her couch for Bets’, and they kept each other and Ruby [the dog] warm (?) the rest of the night.” Putnam’s question mark is a comment on the chilly night, rather than any skepticism about the pleasure Gilpin and Forster found in each other’s nighttime company—indeed, on September 4, after just three nights of camping, the women arrived in Gunnison, Colorado, and “shipped home one of our three bedrolls. It took up too much room,” Brenda explained, “and made extra weight,—and besides, Laura and Bets like sleeping together.” With Ruby relocated to Putnam’s feet, the arrangement worked for all four members of the party—as long as they found private places to camp.

Returning to the photograph of Gilpin and Forster outside their tent, we notice the bedroll anew. Leading out from the two women’s bodies, it extends them into horizontal space, offering a bright counterpoint to the looming tent. Its gentle curve, where Forster begins to roll it, continues the curve of her arm—just as the angle of Gilpin’s back spoons Forster’s bent form. The alignment of their bodies is augmented by Putnam’s point of view, which suggestively layers Gilpin’s body, slightly closer to the camera, over Forster’s. The two women’s closeness and their physical alignment is made more than a trick of the camera angle and moment, however, by Gilpin’s affectionate gesture of physical connection—the lit thumb and the shadowed hand whose fingers rest against Forster’s shoulder blade. Its casual nature is now legible as a sign of their deep intimacy. Given Putnam’s self-declared role as camp historian, we might even consider the possibility that, far from being a haphazard, lucky snapshot, the photograph was intentionally staged as a supplement to the written narrative. When the three women looked at this photograph alongside Putnam’s history, could they have failed to see it as an illustration of the anecdote of the superfluous bedroll? And with the closeness of their bodies in mind, would they have interpreted that slight touch as a metaphor for other, more intimate kinds of touching?

Craft and/as Touch: Queer Theory and Lesbian Hands

The complex and knowing exchange of touch and gaze in Putnam’s photograph of Gilpin and Forster encourages us to investigate touch as an iconography of queer intimacy in Gilpin’s body of work. Hands were a favorite subject for Gilpin—at one stage, she designed a collage of sixteen photographs of Navajo hands as the endpaper for The Enduring Navaho.52 Historians of American modernist photography will no doubt note that hands are ubiquitous among straight photographers as well as lesbian ones: from Stieglitz’s photographs of O’Keeffe’s hands to Tina Modotti’s images of workers’ hands, they are inescapable. Gilpin’s images queer this modernist trope; in her photographs, hands move beyond the iconography of labor or the aesthetics of modernist fragmentation and abstraction to signify more fluidly. Throughout the 1920s, Gilpin developed an iconography of creative exchange and affection, using touch and gaze in counterpoint as an expression of queer intimacy. I use the word queer here rather than lesbian because I want to emphasize the oppositional affect, alongside the sexual intimacy, in Gilpin’s visual code. As we survey Gilpin’s photographic record, we are confronted by countless examples of touch—and although it would be meaningless to assign a queer affect to all of them simply because we know the photographer was lesbian herself, it makes sense to ask when and how she deployed this private iconography of lesbian desire to political ends. Although her own lesbian identity and relationships may have been the source of this iconography, the politics it ultimately encompassed went well beyond private lives.

In all her work, Gilpin emphasized the importance of sensitive handwork—and her craft was consistently the focus of praise from colleagues and critics.53 Part of this praise applied to the work Gilpin did in the camera: Gertrude Käsebier, for example, described her protégée’s ability to capture light and shade as “masterful.”54 With Käsebier and Putnam, Gilpin was willing to share proofs as evidence of work in progress, but she was conscious that they had the potential to mislead viewers about her intent for the final prints. Putnam wrote apologetically to her friend after showing some proofs to her studio mate, Eva Allan (later Julian Allan, also a well-known sculptor). “I know how you hate to have the proofs seen, but these negatives are so fine, irrespective of print quality . . . besides, she’s seen other finished things of yours—So she knows what you can do.”55 Gilpin took particular pride in her prints, and we can imagine her pleasure when her friend and fellow photographer Antoinette Hervey reported from a 1932 Camera Club exhibition of Gilpin’s work, “Not only the subjects but the prints are beautiful.”56 Ira Martin, of the Pictorial Photographers of America, likewise emphasized Gilpin’s prints as enhancing the inherent quality of her work. “They are splendid,” he wrote of photographs she contributed to a 1935 PPA traveling exhibition, “and like all of your prints, present a lovely appearance. They are particularly good for this season when we are laying stress on print quality.”57 Even when Gilpin was working on commercial assignments, she was protective of her photographs’ print quality. When her close friend and colleague Mitch Wilder, then director of the Taylor Museum at the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center, asked if he could purchase Gilpin’s negatives of objects in the museum collection in order to be able to print them on demand, she was firm:

The only way in which I could be willing to let you make the prints would be under my personal supervision so that I knew exactly the quality of print that is to be released. I have never permitted anyone to make prints for me as I consider this perhaps the most important part of the work and I must maintain my own standard. When you have had more experience in photography yourself I know that you will understand why I make this stipulation.58

In 1939, Gilpin was invited by Frank L. Harvey of Easton, Pennsylvania, to write an essay titled “My Favorite Camera and Lens and Why.” She drafted her response to this prompt carefully, balancing a desire to express strong opinions about cameras (“it gives me great pleasure to say at once that my favorite camera is an 8×10 view camera”) with her belief that “it isn’t the camera but what you have learned to see and to feel and perceive and learned to put on paper through the use of that camera, that is the only thing that counts.”59 Later in the essay, Gilpin makes an explicit analogy between sight and touch. “Photography is,” she asserts, “the most sensitive of all mediums of expression. The least change in expression on a human face can be instantly recorded. . . . The value of careful study on a large ground glass is of the utmost importance. It is only through consistent effort of such study that the eye can acquire a sense of fine design and see the necessity for subtle and delicate adjustments, just as the musicians [sic] fingers acquire the same ability in the creation of sound.”60 Ultimately, Gilpin believed that it was the photographer’s responsibility to “choose the camera and lens best suited to the type of work you wish to do, then work hard to master that instrument so that it becomes a willing tool in your hands.”61

Associating her own hands with the craft of photography (as, for example, in her favorite self-portrait), Gilpin invites us to think queerly about the materiality of photographic media (Figure 1.5). As a result, her photographs of other people’s hands at work become inescapably reflexive, reminding us of her own hands, in which the camera is “a willing tool.” Her photographs of Forster at work as a nurse frequently depict her giving hands-on care to her patients. In Visiting Nurse with the New Baby (Figure I.3), for example, a uniformed Forster bends over a woman in bed. A child perches at its foot; he and his mother both direct their gaze toward the infant who is hidden from us by swaddling and Forster’s encircling arms. Together, the nurse’s body and the child’s form a parenthetical mandala around the mother and baby, their white clothes gently glowing against the darker walls and bedclothes. Although Forster holds the newborn, her concave posture refuses maternalism in favor of a more comprehensive care: the implication of the photograph is that the welfare of the whole family is her responsibility. Her gaze, too, suggests this holistic concern: directed away from the camera, it is ambiguous in its object, encompassing both mother and infant. It is a photograph about kinship that is also about the vitality of networks of care beyond the family. As such, it resonates with queer history—as well as with Gilpin and Forster’s shared biography.

As Gilpin stood behind the camera, framing her composition, did she think back to her own convalescence, and its unexpected result? Did she identify with the woman in bed or with the woman at work—as she was, in the moment? As I consider the photograph, I imagine the similar acts of professional care that both Gilpin and Forster perform: ensuring that their tools are in good order, reassuring the patient (and her son) that the baby is healthy and the photograph will be respectful, and exploiting their gender and ages (Gilpin was thirty-three and Forster somewhat older) to convey both authority and gentleness. Layered over their professional relationship is a sense of the personal pride and gratitude that Gilpin felt for Forster, and the intimacy of their life together.

In another photograph of 1924, of Forster treating an unidentified patient, Gilpin has once again framed the image so that the nurse’s body bookends the composition (Figure 1.6). This time, Forster is mirrored by the patient herself, a young Black woman who looks on calmly as Forster bandages a wound on her shin. Both women attend to the task at hand, their gazes bent to Forster’s hands on the white bandage. The nurse’s face is in shadow, thanks to the light streaming in from the window behind her; it catches the patient’s face, rendering it surprisingly legible even in profile. Perhaps her apparent stoicism is a response to the camera in the room: it is unclear how she came to be posing for Gilpin, and, indeed, whether the procedure being performed is real or theater. In other photographs that Gilpin took of Forster, we see her plucking turkey feathers at their farm, putting her arm around a Navajo child, or holding a skein of wool for Mrs. John Billy, who was teaching her to weave. Throughout Gilpin’s body of work, touch signifies multiply: as a sign of kinship, labor, communication, or care—and in so doing, recognizes the ways in which those categories overlap. We might think of this as a queer aesthetics of care, connected equally to intimacy, craft, and labor. Such an aesthetics demands that we see each of those elements—intimacy, craft, and labor—as a metaphor for the other. In 1917, when the photographer fell ill, Forster cared for Gilpin (the double entendres write themselves), and for the second half of their lives, after Forster’s devastating illness, Gilpin cared for her. Gilpin’s documentation of Forster’s myriad professional acts of care become allegories of the nurse’s care for the photographer and their mutual care for one another—just as the care Gilpin took with her craft allegorized care for her subjects, and in the bigger picture, for the sustenance of her family, including Forster.

The Australian writer Wednesday has described the erotic power of lesbian hands in elegiacally concrete terms: “Lesbian hands are measured by the strength they embody and by the pleasure they give . . . Hands hold our power, our independence, our talent, our strength, and most importantly, each other.”62 Gilpin’s lesbian hands took photographs of Forster that celebrated her lover’s power, independence, talent, and strength—and showcased her own. Touch likewise appears as a persistent theme within overtly lesbian art of the 1970s, echoing and extending Gilpin’s iconography. The bisexual photographer Nan Goldin once described photography as “an act of touching someone.”63 Many of the GALAS artists, too, explored the slippage between gaze and touch. When artist (and cofounder of Heresies) Harmony Hammond described her work as creating “lesbian places,” she explained that “they are about a female sensuous presence. Presence as essence made visible. A sense of touching.”64 Similarly, Deborah Jones “privileged tactility” in her sculpture Self Portrait: The Goddess, describing the “viewer’s eyes/hands” as though they were the same, “mov[ing] downward from the textured prominence of the mons pubis to the narrow slit formed by the carved folds of the labia and into the crescent-shaped opening of the vagina.”65 In contrast to Jones’s explicit language, most artists who participated in GALAS avoided overtly sexual imagery—but the theme of touch was pervasive.

When Gilpin turned her handcraft to Navajo subjects, she likewise centered their power and independence—making an argument for their sovereignty by queering mainstream expectations for her images. In The Enduring Navaho, Gilpin ascribes particular significance to hands, both within Diné culture and in terms of her acculturation as an outsider. “Gradually,” she notes early in her text, “I was learning the customs of the Navaho and some of the simple things one must or must not do, such as always shaking hands, but it is unfriendly not to take off one’s glove.”66 This image, early in the book, of skin touching skin across cultures, marks not only Gilpin’s physical immersion but also the onset of a sustained attention to bodily affect, and particularly hands, among Navajo people. Her reaction to a 1953 photograph by her “good friend” Ansel Adams of a Navajo woman was simply, “I never saw a Navaho woman hold her hands like that!”67 Her most significant story about hands is one that highlights her camera as a point of connection and contention between the photographer and her Diné subjects. Over three pages, Gilpin recounts the story of a 1957 trip to Canyon de Chelly with Maria Teba, a Diné friend. On the way to the canyon, they made several other stops, at one of which Gilpin’s camera bag was stolen. She posted a reward and they continued on their journey. Forty miles away, in Canyon del Muerto, a woman asked them—in English—if they had found the bag. To Gilpin, this was “a striking instance of how news travels on the reservation and”—in a pointed role reversal—“how carefully all strangers are observed.” The following day, Gilpin and Teba offered two elders a ride to Window Rock, with the caveat that they must stop at the trading post where Gilpin had posted her notice of a reward. On the way there, Teba told the story to their guests and showed them Gilpin’s “dummy book”—the mock-up of The Enduring Navaho that she used to explain her project to the people she photographed. “As neither of these people spoke any English,” Gilpin explains to her reader, “I had to guess what all the talk was about.” At a key moment, Teba translates a single sentence: “go around that hill where it would be quiet.” “I couldn’t imagine what she wanted,” the photographer admits, “but I have never failed to follow such a lead.” A few sentences later, she reiterates her submission: “I still couldn’t imagine what this was all about, but I said nothing and followed directions.”68

Gilpin’s story really begins at this point. “To my complete surprise, [the old woman] began a hand-trembling ceremony over me. Hand tremblers are diviners—diagnosticians—and they are sought out by the Navaho People to find lost articles”—and also, Gilpin adds in a footnote, “to diagnose illness” using a more elaborate ceremony. At the end of her modest version, throughout which the photographer, invoking another foundational metaphor of photography, “watched the shadow of the trembling hand and arm in front of me,” the woman told Gilpin that the case would be returned to the trading post by two boys in four days. Gilpin paid the woman for the ceremony, and they all had lunch. Four days later, Gilpin returned to the post and discovered that the case had in fact been returned by two boys. “I know,” she wrote in The Enduring Navaho, “that the hand trembler and her husband had spoken to no one but Maria and me from the time they got in the car at Chinle, until we left them at Gallup. There are many accounts of lost articles being found by hand tremblers. That there are Navaho People who have extra-sensory perception has been noted many times by a number of people. Was my experience one of these?”69

On first reading, it may seem that Gilpin tells this story because of its mystical overtones—and it is certainly an intriguing conundrum. But given the evidence she offered earlier in the story about the speed with which news and gossip concerning outsiders spread across the Navajo Nation without supernatural assistance, it seems equally likely that she was attracted to the story for its metaphorical potential. Themes of trust and respect are interwoven with those of language, communication, collaboration, and healing. And at the heart of the story is the shadow of the trembling hand. Why would Gilpin—so rarely a poetic writer—focus on that detail? In her descriptions of photography, she repeatedly invoked light and shade as the core components of her craft. In this story—and in her note that “the Navaho name for this ritual is ‘To Search for Something without Looking’”—she draws a parallel between her work and that of the hand trembler. The real story is not the ritual but the mutual trust engendered by the social exchange of labor (Gilpin’s dummy book; the hand trembling), which implicitly suggests a strategy for her own viewers as they engage with the book in their hands.70

I can still remember the first time I touched Gilpin’s love letters. Surely one power of the archive is the indexicality of the object: the power not simply of sight but of touch to affirm historical facticity. We want to feel our objects of study—and perhaps we want them to feel us in return (“Your sweet letter came yesterday and I hugged it”). Scholars tend to be autobiographical in their pursuit of knowledge, whether or not they intend it. Certainly, my interest in Gilpin began when I moved to the Southwest myself, and intensified when I learned she was also queer. Her commitment to the craft of photography resonated with my object-centered approach to studying art history (my desire to touch things), and as I spent time with her letters, even her lack of patience with New York—where I was raised—struck a chord. A conference at the Courtauld Institute of Art in 2018, organized by David Peters Corbett and Alexander Nemerov, coincided with the start of my writing about Gilpin. They invited participants to consider the extent to which our autobiographical tendencies might be considered an advantage, rather than an impediment, to the pursuit of art-historical knowledge.71 It was a proposition indebted to second-wave feminism, although that genealogy was not made explicit—perhaps because the organizers chose, disappointingly, to place their commitment to autobiography outside the political sphere. But as feminist practice continues to assert, the personal is always already political—and as such, is a powerful and relevant scholarly tool. Our implicit and sublimated autobiographies reveal intellectual as well as personal identity politics; they reflect lived experience and learned commitments to particular canons and frames. Making those commitments explicit allows us to interrogate and celebrate them, enjoying their insights and prodding at their limitations. And, as the recent collaborative turn in art history has helped reveal, our understanding of our objects is enhanced by the increased diversity of observers. Throughout our work, in other words, it behooves us to ask who is inside, and who is outside our disciplinary conversations? Who is implicitly present, and who is completely erased? Erasure comes as no surprise to those who study Native American cultures and histories: the assertive catchphrase, “we are still here,” has been deployed in children’s literature, in film, by Native activists, and elsewhere in an attempt to counter the pervasive impression among outsiders that Native cultures are timeless, traditional, and firmly of the past.72

“Queer theory . . . enables movement and identification across embodied positions,” suggests the art historian Tirza True Latimer, and “within both queer and feminist studies, scholars face the challenges of studying subjects who have been ‘disappeared’ from . . . official accounts of the past.”73 As she points to the potential for intersectional experiences of embodiment, linking it directly to movement, Latimer articulates the central contribution of queer theory to my reading of Gilpin’s photographs as images that contend with Diné sovereignty through the lens of queer (and specifically lesbian) identity at midcentury—and vice versa. Rather than seeing Indigenous and queer politics as two separate interpretive lenses, I argue in this book that they can sometimes operate as complementary faces of a single lens. Extending the metaphor, we must acknowledge that the two sides do not—cannot—only move in parallel: each face curves both toward and away from the other even as they remain vitally connected. Indigeneity and queerness thus move toward and away from one another while working in tandem across Gilpin’s photographic landscape, generating instructive insights into histories that are otherwise undocumented. While a scholar such as Goldberg has written extensively about the erasure of Gilpin’s lesbian identity, revisiting her photographs with that in mind, his lack of attention to the Navajo people with whom Gilpin worked—and the impact of Diné worldviews on Gilpin’s lived experience as a lesbian and her decisions as a photographer—leaves significant gaps in his analysis.

The literature on queer theory is broad, encompassing a variety of theories of queer experience, from Judith Butler’s performative understanding of identity to more recent theories of embodiment from a trans perspective.74 Queer studies emphasizes queerness as an epistemological position with broad theoretical implications, distinguishing itself from LGBTQ2S+ studies by taking the position that queerness (and the stigmatization of the queer) is “connected to all dimensions of cultural normalization.”75 The art historian Karl Whittington has made the case for epistemological queerness as a broad frame for the cultural other: “Queer theory, as formulated in the 1990s and practiced today,” he observes, “has used the term to refer to topics outside the range of lesbian/gay studies, employing it instead as a kind of position against normative or dominant modes of thought.”76 The medievalist Karma Lochrie further suggests that periods and cultures operating outside the juridical modernism of post-“Enlightenment” western Europe are inherently “queer,” because their epistemological frames disdain any notion of the normative. The Diné historian Jennifer Nez Denetdale has picked up this theoretical argument to make a case of the queerness of Navajo culture in relation to colonial epistemological frames.77 While such a theoretical claim obviously needs to be historicized when applied, Lochrie and Denetdale remind us that queerness is not even always queer.78 This parallels the fact that the authors of queer theory, as well as the subjects of their studies, remain overwhelmingly White and/or male.

Lesbian (in)visibility is an ongoing problem in queer studies, which has been critiqued from a variety of positions for the erasure of embodied subjectivity and experience that is often implicit in its radically deconstructive approach to identity.79 “When it comes to lesbians,” wrote Terry Castle in 1993, “many people have trouble seeing what’s in front of them. . . . Some may even deny that she exists at all.”80 Why are we surprised, she asks, when we “find her in the midst of things, as familiar and crucial as an old friend, as solid and sexy as the proverbial right-hand man, as intelligent and human and funny and real as [Greta] Garbo.”81 This imaginary alternative lesbian character describes Gilpin to the letter: as her archive makes clear, the photographer’s life was full of intimate, long-lasting friendships, and she was universally described by others as friendly, welcoming, funny, and warm. She described herself in terms of emphatic solidity, joking about her figure and, later in life, her disability—but also always saying something meaningful about her resilience and reliability. And Gilpin was also sexy: the love letters that survive between the photographer and Forster would make that clear, even if we did not have Midsummer—the seductively luscious nude sculpture of her created by Putnam in 1929—as evidence (Figure 1.7).

Taking the embodied lessons of Gilpin’s archive under advisement, then, we must approach the intellectually colonial overtones of queer theory’s popularity among academics outside LGBTQ2S+ studies with caution, even if/as we remain committed to its value as an interpretive frame and a decolonial practice.82 This is all the more true because the effects of this distortion are felt far beyond the academy. The erasure of both lesbian and Indigenous experience has real-world political effects ranging from disproportionately low funding for lesbian-focused social programs to elevated suicide rates among Indigenous—and particularly queer Indigenous—youth.83 In this volume, I refute the normative and reductive lenses through which Gilpin’s photography has been registered, and in this sense produce a queer reading of her work. At the same time, to generate that queer reading it is necessary first to see Gilpin specifically as a lesbian. Unpacking the historiographical moves that have obscured that identity and its significance to her work begins to unravel the Indigenous history of the same moment—and thereby reveal the intersectional ideological structures that shaped not only The Enduring Navaho but American cultural politics as a whole in the second half of the twentieth century.