FROM CARRIE MCCARTHY

If this belief from heaven be sent, if such be Nature’s holy plan, Have I not reason to lament what man has made of man? Lines Written in Early Spring by William Wordsworth

The year I was born, 1977, there was a picket sign at an anti-gay rally in Houston, Texas. “God made Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve” — it was the first known appearance of a slogan that has since become enshrined in the ‘How to Homophobe’ handbook. So much so that, 17 years later, I sat in a Religious Education class in my Catholic high school in Australia and listened as a teacher used it as the introduction to a lesson on homosexuality.

It’s a funny thing growing up both Catholic and queer. A lot is made of the ways in which religion and queer culture live in contradiction, but for those of us who navigated or are still navigating these spheres, there’s a lot of similarities. Denied access to the certainty and protection that faith promised heterosexual people, queers created our own belief system complete with temples (Stonewall Inn, The Imperial), icons (Judy, Divine, Keith Haring, Carlotta) and saints (Oscar Wilde, Marsha P. Johnson, Harvey Milk), and Testaments Old (Barbra, Liza, Dolly) and New (Madonna, Kylie, GaGa). We practised our rituals (marching at Pride, dancing 'til we peaked at Mardi Gras), and we knew our commandments — thou must not sleep with thou best friend’s ex — and our sins — thou slept with thou best friend’s ex. And if the local gay bar’s pool table wasn’t exactly an altar, it was at least a good place to flirt with a cute bit of trade. And in doing all this, we created our own safe space to shield us from the wrath of a supposedly charitable and ever-loving god that denied we existed.

Some time around the late 1990s, the Nature vs Nurture debate reignited, contextualised within the LGBTIQ+ community. Though dismissed by religion, biologists had been studying the inherent queerness of the natural world for decades and reported that displays beyond assumed gender and sex binaries had been observed among a large array of flora and fauna. In Sydney, one gay male penguin couple even hatched an egg. The now bonafide study of queer ecology has been a powerful corrective, confirming what most of us already knew about ourselves. Baby, we were born this way.

Yet ‘Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve’ remains a persistent counter to queer existence in some pockets of society. Human presentations of queerness are not viewed with the same fascination as other species of the natural world. ‘Natural’ continues to mean heterosexual, with any deviation beyond that considered ‘unnatural’, particularly when it comes to representations of queer parenting. Queue the handwringer’s lament, ‘Won't someone think of the children?’ This disjuncture lies at the heart of Jeremy Plint’s most recent body of work.

‘If such be nature’s holy plan’ maps Plint’s evolving relationship with queerness and queer culture as a parallel to his identity as a father and his family life with his son, Taimi. Though still employing camp and pop art aesthetics reminiscent of artists including Yves Klein, Katherine Bernhardt, Ron English, and Mike Kelley, here they’re layered with art historical and botanical references as well as paintings made in collaboration with Taimi, to present a view of contemporary queer family life that is more intimate and subtler than earlier representations, such as C. Moore Hardy’s documentary-style photographic series ‘Gay and lesbian family’ (1996), which featured the artist’s friends and their family units, be they single parents or couples raising children, couples with pets, or friends and community groups whose relationships overtime had grown to reflect a bond more akin to that of siblings.

The result is a loaded tableaux that celebrates fluid identities, contradictions, ritual, and the warm glow of family, while questioning what it means to be a parent, to protect, to love and to grow in a world that still sees you as something of an anomaly.

— Carrie McCarthy