Tommy Lanigan-Schmidt, Resident Artist Lecture 1997

Tommy Lanigan-Schmidt tells stories about growing up gay, Catholic, idealistic and poor; about running away from home; confronting his sexuality; and coping with the poverty and homophobia in the late 1960s. He shows slides of his home, of family and people he knew growing up and as an adult, and of his art. Lanigan-Schmidt plays a couple of songs that are meaningful to him and shows a short clip (the lipstick scene) from a Jack Smith movie called “Flaming Creatures,” which was banned by the Supreme Court. His art theory is based on what he calls the two art forms that transcend everything else, spiritual arousal and sexual desire, and he makes numerous references to the issue of pornography. The recording is incomplete.