A MAN IN A BLACK LEATHER-AND-snakeskin jacket and a magenta cowboy hat fringed with dangling knives looks like one dude you don’t want to mess with. But in this image of Texas-born visual and performing artist José Villalobos, taken by photographer Jeanette Nevarez, the man behind the piercing veil looks almost warily to his right. There’s a tenderness in his makeup-lined eyes. Beneath the leather is a bare and vulnerable chest.
Perhaps he’s invoking protection through his clothes. Maybe his outfit is a testament to machismo, or a reaction to the idea of what truly makes a man. Villalobos, a gay artist, counters the notion of an absolute duality between masculine and feminine presentations of self. In the image, his gender identity is much more fluid.
Queer identity is tough to define by firm boundaries of gender and sex. People reveals a certain longing for a feminine ideal while simultaneously contradicting it. The black-and-white self-portrait shows a topless Miller holding two melons over their breasts with their left arm while the handle of an axe rests on their right shoulder. Miller gazes down with a tender expression, cradling the idea of a well-endowed chest. That longing is offset by the powerful symbol of a provider, someone who can swing an axe and bring home firewood. The image conveys a need to embrace all aspects of a person’s identity.
