The Spectacle of Privacy: Geoffrey Hendricks’s Ring Piece and the Ambivalence of Queer Visibility

Abstract

Abstract Geoffrey Hendricks’s 1971 Ring Piece was among the earliest works of performance art in New York City to respond to the movements sparked by the Stonewall uprising. The boldest of a series of performances in which Hendricks allegorized personal transformation and the disclosure of his sexuality, Ring Piece weighed the political urgency of a visible queer identity against its costs. Its public spectacle of privacy provides an opportunity to question the politics of visibility that defined the early lesbian and gay rights movement. It also challenges the protocols for recognizing differences in art history and, more directly, the presumption that queer lives must be visible to be viable.