Jimmy DeSana quickly became a beloved member of New York’s East Village cultural scene in the 1980s, often capturing the community as subjects for his documentary and memorial photographs. DeSana devoted his ambiguous and erotic artmaking to members of his underground avant-garde queer communities. His works were experimental, photographing himself and his friends to celebrate sexual liberation and queer aesthetics. After contracting HIV in the late 1980s, DeSana used photography to push against normative conventions of representing queer bodies. In this work, that impulse is visible as he presents us with an unexpected, alternative revision of the Virgin Mary.

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