F. Douglas Blanchard, a pioneering artist who depicts scenes from history, has launched a series project that captures the Stonewall era (1969). His oils, sensual, dramatic, and informative, resurrect the legendary faces and forms of many of gay liberation's founding lights. Discovering Blanchard at home in Manhattan's East Village, GayToday arranged the following interview:

Jack Nichols: First, tell about the Stonewall era's legendary male lovers, Marty Robinson and Tom Doerr, two of your subjects. I remember them well because Lige Clarke and I placed them on the cover of GAY in June, 1970, to celebrate the first anniversary of the Stonewall uprising. They had appealing masculine auras, sweating real earnestness, fearless courage. Tom, as you know, introduced the Lambda symbol into the movement. How'd you learn about them?

F. Douglas Blanchard: I blundered into them. I do volunteer work at the National Archive of Lesbian and Gay History here in New York. One of my tasks was to prepare for researchers a collection of papers and memorabilia bequeathed by Marty Robinson to the archive.

Jack Nichols: You've been painting in oils since you were ten. What inspired you at such an early age?

F. Douglas Blanchard: Well, that was a while ago. My parents had a good friend named JeDon Washington who was an artist, whose work they very much liked. They had several of his paintings in the house. JeDon was confined to a wheelchair and my father used to help him stretch canvases. I would occasionally go with my father to visit his small frame house in an old part of town.

His paintings were standard fare; western scenes, mountain landscapes, still lives, flowers, etc. At the time, I thought his paintings were magical and his ability to do them, marvelous. I could draw very well for my age at that time, and I wanted to take a crack at oil painting. My mother bought me a small oil paint set. My first attempts were pretty lame, but over the next 2 or 3 years, I got better. I used JeDon's paintings as my standard of excellence.

Jack Nichols: I have only one good friend—Gary Comingdeer—who paints. Along with his interest in painting I've noticed he's quite philosophical. Are you? What are some of the ways your approach to painting relates to how you see the world?

Our first point of all reference is our selves and our neighbors. Our first responsibility is to each other, to ourselves, and to the world we inhabit. I believe that art is human before it is spiritual or anything else. My specific kind of art is about human action examined from a human point of view. My decisions about form, perspective, color, etc. and rooted in an understanding of human perception.

Jack Nichols: You're from a town—Dallas, Texas—that's one place from which I'd never expect an artist of your caliber to emerge. Tell me a little about your early Texas days. Do you think the atmosphere there contributed in some way to your interest in art?

F. Douglas Blanchard: I don't know where my interest in art came from, and neither does my family. My parents are very middle class Texas folk. They both worked during my childhood. My mother still works as a physical therapist and my father owned and ran a small car wash on the edge of town. He has recently retired due to illness and my younger brother now runs that business. My brother worked a variety of jobs before that ranging from cowhand to railroad engineer.

My family is made up of very prosaic people living in a very prosaic corner of the world. My father and brother love all things mechanical, and preferably obsolete, from steam locomotives to World War II fighters.

My mother's enduring passion is for horses. She once taught riding when she was young. She follows horse racing and never misses the Derby. They have no interest in anything even remotely connected with art. They liked JeDon's paintings, but they were not interested in art.

They were not happy when I announced my ambition to be an artist. They were even less happy when they began to figure out that I was gay about the same time I began to figure it out. To their great credit, they always stood by me, even when it would have been easier for them not to. However, Dallas was and still is a deeply conservative place that is not very friendly to either artists or gay people. I felt very isolated and alone there and I always looked forward to leaving.

Jack Nichols: Once you decided to be an artist, you began preparing yourself for a lifetime of painting. How did you do this?

F. Douglas Blanchard: While in Dallas, I painted on my own in isolation. I had no formal schooling in art at the time. I used very cheap hobby-store paints on cheap pre-stretched canvases. I used an old pie tin for a palette. After awhile I came to agree with John Constable's remark that a self-taught artist has a very poor teacher. I knew my limitations, and I wanted a formal education. My family resisted.

After high school, I worked in a movie theatre and took courses at a community college. Some teachers at this college recognized my talent and urged me to go to art school and pursue art professionally. My family relented and I went to the Kansas City art Institute, the alma mater of both Walt Disney and Jackson Pollock. I then studied art history at Washington University in St. Louis. I finished my education here in New York at the New York Academy of Art where I earned a master of fine art degree cum laude.

Jack Nichols: History—particularly gay history—fascinates you. I've never seen art in oil such as you've created—that captures the Stonewall era—or any other timeframe in gay history. Why have you been drawn to the Stonewall era?

My interest in the Stonewall era is because I, like so many other gay and lesbian people, have a real stake in it. I don't think that the last quarter century of gay life would have been possible without it. It is currently fashionable among some historians to diminish Stonewall and the generation that followed as an overly-hyped phenomenon peculiar to New York.

The big transformation of Stonewall is that the cause of gay liberation became a grass roots movement among gays and lesbians themselves and not just the very isolated domain of a relative handful of brave and hearty souls. As many veterans and eyewitnesses point out, the whole arithmetic of power and powerlessness changed forever in those nights. The police, those unofficial arbiters and enforcers of all that is "normal", were put to flight or besieged. People who once meekly submitted to harassment and extortion finally dared to strike back and the cops blinked.

That one change was momentous and would gradually have a profound impact on the way gay people saw themselves here in New York and with time, everywhere. The immediate aftermath of the uprising consists of individuals and groups, many of who had no prior political experience, coming together and arguing, frantically trying to figure out what to do with this great golden opportunity that had fallen into their laps out of the clear blue sky. Such a series of events cannot help but be fascinating.

Jack Nichols: Did you move to New York in order to be—as the Unsinkable Molly Brown put it—"up where the jokes are going on?" You're now living in the East Village in the same block where Lige Clarke and I lived when the Stonewall revolt began. What is it that New York offers to an artist?

F. Douglas Blanchard: Just about every artist wants to come to New York, if only for a visit. It is the artists' Hollywood. It's where the stars are born. It is not quite the center of the world it once was back in the days of Abstract Expressionism and Pop, but it still has so much to offer to an artist than most other cities. It has museums and galleries.

Most important of all, it still has a large and lively community of artists, writers, musicians, actors who still produce work of considerable merit despite the best efforts of the city government, the police, and the real estate industry to shut it all down and pave it over. By the way, your neighborhood is still here, but you couldn't afford the rent. There are a lot more lawyers and stockbrokers living around the Russian Turkish baths and the Russian Orthodox Church than when you and Lige lived on the block. The artists, hippies, and poets are still here, but they either have rent stabilized apartments –like me—or they commute.

Jack Nichols: You've taught art history—in Berea College in Kentucky, and so you've had something of an opportunity to assess academia's impact on budding artists. You've told me you've had some great teachers yourself. You said you once thought schooling to be really necessary. Can't an artist teach himself or herself?

F. Douglas Blanchard: A good question. I believe that among the many problems facing art these days, one of the biggest is over-academization. Over the last 30 years, art has become too much of a creature of colleges and universities. I think that the predominance of concept over craft relates to the appearance of full-fledged art departments on college campuses, and the transformation of professional art schools into degree-granting institutions beginning in the early 60s.

Since intellectual life in this country can be very cloistered, art ended up taking vows of poverty and chastity in order to be admitted into the company of the liberal arts. The results are artworks that are very arid, over deliberate, torturously obscure, and too self-conscious with little or no aesthetic payoff.

Having said that, I believe education is vital for the artist. The self-taught have their limitations. The smart ones know this and either accept those limitations, or try to go beyond them. In order to go beyond the bounds of your own back yard, you have to know what is on the other side of the fence and how to find your way. While the American public cherishes talented naifs, the roster of distinguished men and women in this profession is full of well-educated people.

Mark Rothko went to Yale and excelled in higher mathematics. Rubens was famous for his classical scholarship as well as for his art. Picasso was renowned as a poet and a scholar of the Catalan language. We all know about Leonardo de Vinci. And Rembrandt, of all people, was the only noted artist of the 17th century who had a university education. He was fluent in both Latin and Greek, and probably knew Hebrew. While Academia can be stifling, education never hurts and skill is never a handicap.

Jack Nichols: You said an ACLU lawyer in Kansas City, a straight man, inspired your coming out process early on. You said he complained about the passivity of the local gay community in the face of injustices there. What effect did all that have on you?

F. Douglas Blanchard: I did not know this man, nor had I ever met him. But I knew about him from gay men who were part of the cruising scene at the Liberty Memorial in Penn Valley Park in Kansas City. They were frequent targets of police sweeps and entrapment, especially in election years. The local ACLU for years fought police raids on the parks.

Those caught up in such dragnets could be—and sometimes were—prosecuted under Missouri's sodomy law. The consequences of conviction could be severe. In addition to loss of job, housing, and reputation, the convicted faced several years in the state penitentiary and a record as a sex offender. These men always talked about this one lawyer, a straight man, who always took these cases and was always so angry with the local gay community for its unwillingness to visibly support his clients.

Kansas City had a surprisingly large and lively gay scene with dozens of bars and a bathhouse or two that catered to everyone from drag queens to college students to businessmen to the legions of country boys who came to town for the weekend. But, discretion counted for way too much.

I was only in my very early twenties, just out of the closet, and not very wise in the ways of the world, but I could see that this closely guarded discretion wasn't helping anyone. In addition to police harassment—including the occasional bar raid—gays were sitting ducks for violent crime. Muggers thought of gay men as easy targets. They had money, would not fight back, and would not go to the cops.

Many of the gay men I knew were beaten and robbed at least once. I met a young man with a mouth full of silver teeth; he lost his own after he was pistol whipped in the mouth by a mugger. I saw one of my gay neighbors in the wee hours drag himself home with lacerations and some broken ribs after he was beaten and his car and wallet stolen. In retrospect, it seems so odd that all of them, including me, would put up with all that rather than have families or employers find out.

Jack Nichols: What have been some of the more difficult times in your own life?

F. Douglas Blanchard: Aside from disappointments in matters of love, most of the difficulties in my life have come from the isolation of being an artist and being gay in places that are not friendly to either. I have known a lot of poverty. I worked all the way through school. I worked some awful jobs during and after. I worked in a laundry and as a fry cook. I spent too many Christmases working in retail.

Jack Nichols: I've noticed—with great satisfaction—that you've chosen Marsha Johnson—the beloved black street transvestite—as a central figure in your painting of the Stonewall rebellion. GayToday's contributing writer, Randy Wicker, made sure that Marsha had a roof over her head for many years. He says she was a true saint, ever generous and loving. She was later murdered, probably by homophobes. One of my criticisms of Martin Duberman's book, Stonewall, is that Marsha was maginalized in his pages. What alerted you to her?

The Stonewall Chorus Line (with Marsha Johnson, right) Oil on canvas, 36" x 48", 1998

F. Douglas Blanchard: I never knew her, but I know many people who did, and they all have very fond memories of her. I knew she was at the Stonewall riots, but I don't know what her role was exactly. I included her in the painting of the Stonewall chorus line as a memorial to her, and as a reminder that it was those parts of the gay community that still make so many people uncomfortable that struck the first blow that changed all the equations.

The patrons of the Stonewall Inn were not the nice upper-middle class boys who represent the gay community in made-for-TV movies. They were transgender and street kids with large numbers of African Americans and Latinos among them. Those folks were –and still are—in the vanguard of gay liberation. Instead of embarrassment over their unconventional lives, we should feel gratitude for their courage, which continues to open up more room for the rest of us.

Jack Nichols: Something else caught my eye—your choice of a Walt Whitman quote that graces the beginning of your pamphlet about your paintings of Tom Doerr and Marty Robinson. It goes:

I dreamed in a dream I saw a city invincible to the attacks of
the whole rest of the earth,
I dreamed that was the new city of Friends,
Nothing was greater there than the quality of robust love,
It lead the rest,
It was seen every hour in the actions
Of the men of that city,
And in their looks and words.

Why did you choose that quote?

F. Douglas Blanchard: It is one of the Calamus poems. (from Leaves of Grass) I think it best articulates the vision that drove Marty and Tom, and gave them the courage to do their work and to face what they had to face. Walt Whitman's poem is a dream, as vision that is unreal and perhaps impossible, but no less desirable because of that.

It is a kind of vision not meant to replace reality, but to inform all our actions in our continuing efforts to reshape it into something better. It is about safe and strong community of friends and lovers, where love is the strength that protects and binds people together, and is the driving creative force in all of their enterprises.

Jack Nichols: What are some of the most important things you learned about the late 1960s and the early 70s—the heyday of the counterculture in New York, spawning the official birth of our movement?

I'm not sure that the "counter-culture" ever really died out in New York. I think it changed from "counter" to "alternative." Underground magazines and music, even a drug culture, continue to flourish here. People who are young and not so young continue to try to form their own aristocracies of the outcast. Middle class culture continues to be scorned, though for probably different reasons now. The difference between then and now reveals itself, I think, in the words "counterculture" and "alternative".

There was nothing "alternative" about Sixties counterculture. It was out to destroy and supplant the bland, frightened conformism inherited from the middle class culture of the 50s. The ambitions of the 60s counterculture were revolutionary and transformational. The alternatives of the last two decades apparently want to secede, to be an alternative to a more crass and predatory version of that old frightened conformism that characterizes late 20th century middle class life. They still want to shock and shake things up, but this gets harder and harder as the public becomes more jaded and the gestures become repetitive. Frequently, they don't get much beyond a tantrum.

What is more, a suburban culture that so quickly gets bored constantly looks for novelty and likes an occasional shock and frequent titillation. Madison Avenue always keeps an eye on the East Village and places like it for something it can sanitize for middle class sensibilities and sell to the suburbs. Despite all their best efforts to rebel and become unstuck from this nasty voracious consumer culture, the biggest impact of "alternative" has been not on the social fabric or the political structure, but on fashion and spending habits. The difference between then and now was ambition and expectation. People then really believed they could change the world, not just secede from it. That was the dry kindling waiting for the spark of Stonewall back then.

Jack Nichols: You refer to gay liberation as an integral part of a larger and older project, the 2,500 year old unfinished project to enfranchise all of humanity." I very much like that thought. Elaborate, please.

F. Douglas Blanchard: I believe that ever since that day in the 5th century BC when the democratic faction of the Athenian Assembly succeeded in turning a procedural matter over whether or not people should be paid for jury duty into a successful challenge to aristocratic power and privilege, there has been an ongoing project to give everyone a say in the determination of their own destiny and in the destiny of their communities.

In 5th century BC Athens, it began exclusively with male citizens seeking a larger role in the life of the city which they saves from Persian conquest. It was they, the shopkeepers, artisans, and farmers who rescued Athens and not the descendents of Theseus. Over the centuries—especially within the last 300 years—people once singled out and marginalized came forward to claim their place in the sun; women, labor, former slaves, Jews, Gypsies, immigrants and refugees, the disabled, and all the rest of the outcast and disinherited; including gays and lesbians. Our movement is part of that continuum.

Jack Nichols: Your work has appeared in various galleries, most recently showing in New York. What goes on at exhibitions when you're an openly gay history painter? Isn't it a new field?

F. Douglas Blanchard: Yes, I suppose it is a new field. I haven't thought of myself as a trailblazer. Strange as it may sound, some of my most enthusiastic admirers are straight people. They like this project, and think it is worthwhile and overdue. One has even gone so far as to help bankroll supplies for it. This project always had gay admirers and supporters, but only now is it being more widely circulated in the larger community.

Jack Nichols: What does being a history painter mean to you?

F. Douglas Blanchard: Well, it does not mean to me what it meant to 19th century artists who did painstaking research to produce "And You Were There!" visions of ancient and medieval history. Their work is more historical genre; costume pieces with Alexander the Great or Cardinal Richelieu without much reflection on what those characters meant then or now.

I thought about a kind of photojournalist approach to the subject with fragmentary compositions at peculiar angles, like news photos. But I decided that that would be just an updated version of what the big salon painters of the 19th century did. If I paid so much attention to period details and such, the effect would have been to distance these events from us, to show them to have happened in the distant past like an old museum case, or an old news photo.

I am more interested in their legacy which is still alive and still with us. Besides, historians and enthusiasts for period minutiae are impossible to please. I looked back to the example of earlier artists, from the Baroque and the renaissance and back to the artists they looked at from the ancient world. Figures in their religious and historical paintings sometimes wear clothes from the artist's own day, or an event from religious or secular history is set in an artist's own city.

Christ enters a Jerusalem that looks a lot like an artist's native Sienna in Duccio's pictures. Tintoretto's and Tiepolo's paintings of ancient Roman naval battles look very much like the Venetian navy in combat. These decisions were deliberate and had nothing to do with historical ignorance. The artists and their audiences didn't care. What mattered about these events was not the forensic details, but what they meant to people in the here and now and into the future. They composed their pictures in such a way that the human action, the conflict ands drama, would have a sense of the momentous. This was not any battle or any love affair or any death. This event matters because it reveals meaning and speaks to what it means to be human. This is what I am trying to do with Marty and Tom's experiences in the early Stonewall days.

Jack Nichols: What are you working on now?

F. Douglas Blanchard: This project still consumes a lot of my attention. I'm working on a painting of Marty and Martha Shelley speaking at a rally in Washington Square Park just weeks after Stonewall. I intend to do a painting about Tom Doerr and the lambda symbol. I plan to depict a few zaps and other episodes. This project could last a while. I continue to do portraits and mythological subjects.

Jack Nichols: If people wish to know more about your work, how can you be contacted?

F. Douglas Blanchard: They can contact Nexus Gallery at (212) 982-4712; or they can write to me directly at 256 East 10th Street #3B, New York, New York 10009.

Jack Nichols: Thanks a million for granting this interview to GayToday. I'm really really glad you exist.