In late June 2024, a couple of weeks before Joe Biden withdrew his bid for reelection and Kamala Harris launched her campaign for president, the artist Gail Thacker sent me an email with the cryptic subject line “For your election time please.” Its body simply contained a link to a digital file, her video Devoted (1980).
The eight-minute work begins with a lean, mousy man, practically a boy, clad only in diaperlike leather shorts that hold in place a comically pointy dildo. He suggestively scrubs the knobby legs of a kitchen table. As the camera pans out, a woman in a skirt and blazer, with a butch lesbian demeanor, enters into view and starts pacing around the room. The man takes a momentary break from his cleaning to look up and say, “Congratulations on winning the election, Ms. President.” In a strangely alluring, drawn out voice, she responds: “Thank you.” While he continues attending to the household duties, she performs a repetitive monologue, addressed to no one in particular. It is comprised of various versions of the following lines, accumulated from multiple takes and edited together, as if to emphasize the redundant, formulaic, and narcissistic nature of political speech:
When I decided to run as a candidate, I knew I’d win this election. Order is established just by the mere fact that I won this election. A country run by women for women. I made no promises that I would not form a female-dominated cabinet.
“I have so many questions,” I wrote back. Though I had a deep knowledge of Thacker’s queer punk photographs, for which she is most recognized, I was unfamiliar with her video work. Did she create Devoted in earnestness or in irony? Was it a celebration of women in power or a critique of liberal feminism? By the time I first watched this video in early July, amid confused murmurings about Harris’s then-possible candidacy, social media had already become a miasma of Charli XCX’s track “Von Dutch” spliced with rambling commentary on coconut trees and Venn diagrams. Were the makers of these videos mocking Harris or genuinely excited by the idea of her candidacy? This was a couple of weeks before the pop star’s fateful “kamala IS brat” tweet and the Harris campaign’s desperate appropriation of the trending album’s aesthetic language. And then a few weeks later, as Israel continued its genocidal violence in Gaza with a thumbs-up from Biden and Harris, Charli XCX seemed to suggest that her endorsement wasn’t ironic in an interview with Vulture. “To be on the right side of democracy, the right side of women’s rights, is hugely important to me,” she said. “I’m happy to help to prevent democracy from failing forever.” What could Thacker’s video and its skepticism of representational politics, I wondered, offer us in this queasy political climate?
Gail Thacker, Devoted, 1980. Courtesy the artist.
But regardless of the neon-green historical moment in which I encountered Devoted, almost forty-five years after Thacker created it, I could already tell that the work is a queer feminist marvel. It’s the second video of When Women Run the World (1979–80), her series of absurd political vignettes about real and imaginary women politicians, and she had never screened these works or shared them with anybody, ever, except for back in the day, when she possibly showed them to a couple of her friends who appeared in them.
Thacker produced the series before the mainstreaming and whitewashing of LGBTQ+ politics, at a point when the prospect of a woman, let alone a lesbian, running the country was all but unimaginable. This pipe dream would later echo in Eileen Myles’s “An American Poem” (1991), in which the writer famously pretends to be a Kennedy and a president, as well as Zoe Leonard’s epochal poem I Want a President (1992), which begins with the sincere lines, “I want a dyke for president. I want a person with aids for president and I want a fag for vice president.” At the same time, When Women Run the World brought into focus how disenchanted Thacker and her friends were with the lofty political realm—one that seemed disconnected from their everyday confrontations with homophobia and misogyny as well as their class struggles as poor art students in Boston. Of course, progressive women politicians existed in the 1970s: there was, for instance, Shirley Chisholm, a fierce advocate for women, people of color, and the poor, who became the first Black woman elected to Congress as well as the first woman to seek the Democratic presidential nomination in 1972; or, Elaine Noble, a lesbian activist who fought for the desegregation of Boston Public Schools, who, when elected to the Massachusetts House of Representatives in 1974, became the first openly gay person to hold a state-level office in the country. Yet, many more prominent and visible women, such as Sandra Day O’Connor—a Republican state senator from Arizona whom President Ronald Reagan later appointed as the first woman justice of the Supreme Court in 1981—and the United Kingdom’s Conservative Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, reproduced rather than challenged heteropatriarchal logics of governance.
Gail Thacker, Devoted, 1980. Courtesy the artist.
In Devoted, Madam President lacks the refinement of such politicians, and her humble abode can hardly be described as presidential. I recognized this location, with its bare walls and pinkish light, as Thacker’s former apartment on Westland Avenue in Boston, situated between the Fens and Massachusetts Avenue. Thacker and I had gotten to know each other through an exhibition I curated, As the World Burns: Queer Photography and Nightlife in Boston, on view last spring at Tufts University Art Galleries at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. I had featured a few of her early color pictures taken in this very apartment in 1980: endearing scenes of her rambunctious friends (the art-world legends Pat Hearn and Mark Morrisroe, among them) getting ready for, and later returning from, a fashion show at Spit nightclub, the epicenter of the local punk and new-wave communities. It was a couple of years before this larger-than-life trio descended on New York and made names for themselves. Whereas Morrisroe became famous for his sexy, dexterously manipulated Polaroid self-portraits, Hearn became a pillar of the East Village, Soho, and Chelsea art scenes by running the Pat Hearn Gallery and cofounding the Gramercy International Art Fair, later renamed the Armory Show. Both Morrisroe and Hearn died prematurely: the former of AIDS-related complications in 1989, the latter of liver cancer in 2000. While Thacker had been making Polaroid pictures of queer shenanigans since the mid-1970s, it wasn’t until about a decade later that she started creating the poignant works she is best known for today—chemically altered Polaroids made from long-decaying 665 positive-negative film. Transgressing technical norms brought attention to the image’s unstable materiality and produced spectral insertions and distortions that gave her subjects—friends, lovers, and collaborators—magical auras.
Mark Morrisroe, Blow Both of Us, Gail Thacker and Me, Summer 1978, 1986. The Estate of Mark Morrisroe (Ringier Collection) at Fotomuseum Winterthur.
Gail Thacker, Mark Morrisroe, Eyes Closed (Pat’s Room on Day Tripper, Boston to NYC), 1980/2024. Courtesy of the artist and Candice Madey, New York.
A similar interest in playing with the media’s material dimensions is present in Devoted. The video continues while a loop of Paul Mauriat’s 1968 schmaltzy instrumental rendition of “Love is Blue” lurches on, interrupting the President’s pontification for a beat, and suddenly we encounter a new character: her punk lesbian lover with ruffled blond hair. While the man plays with two vintage girl dolls on the floor like a toddler, the two women nuzzle each other and rock back and forth in a tender dance. Both wear sunglasses despite being indoors. Filmed from above in a single shot, unlike the earlier jolting takes, this five-minute segment is a dizzying closeup, a spectacle of lesbian love with increasingly lurid video coloration and musical distortion, including the inexplicable brief interjection of a pounding beat that seems to make the women cackle just before its abrupt ending.
Thacker made this largely improvised video, shot on 3/4-inch tape, during her second year at the Boston Museum School. She had transferred from the Atlanta Arts Alliance in 1979, earning admission with a reel-to-reel video about a Tampax suicidally jumping out of its box. On her very first day, she became fast friends with Hearn and Morrisroe in a video-art class taught by Jeff and Jane Hudson. This husband-and-wife duo formed an influential art-punk band called the Rentals and mentored a generation of students navigating the exhilarating terrain of new media. Though her practice in the Museum School days focused on mixed-media painting, Thacker also continued her education in video alongside Hearn at the Center for Advanced Visual Studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The medium’s collaborative and experimental properties perfectly suited the gritty magnificence of the queer lives her friend circle dreamed up and led. It was all about the thrill of the experience in the moment, not the final product. As Thacker told me in a recent interview:
We were always there for each other’s project. Like, Pat calls, “Come on over. I’m dressed like Elvis Presley, and I’m going to sing on the roof.” Mark and I run over there with the video camera. … There was no question of whose concept it was. Just making of art.
Devoted came about in a similar fashion, and it starred her pals Steve Stain as the slave, Shelley Lake as the President, and Hearn as the President’s girlfriend. Lake and Hearn were a couple in real life, so that intimacy captured on camera was genuine.
About a decade ago, Thacker digitized these works from their original formats, though the third and fourth episodes have yet to be found in her archive. In her six-minute When Women Run the World: Part I, shot on reel-to-reel in a video-production room at the Museum School a year prior, Morrisroe plays a sultry slave in fishnet underwear serving store-bought cupcakes to an unhinged banquet of chain-smoking women, including Jane Byrne, a Democrat campaigning at the time to become the mayor of Chicago (she was elected its first woman mayor, not to mention the first woman elected to that office in a major US city). Hearn portrays Byrne as a brash liberal feminist espousing political statements, declaring, for example, that women “have been pushed around long enough” and complaining that “too much money is being spent on immigrants.” She locks horns with a far-right zealot, played by Thacker, on abortion rights and other issues. Because Thacker herself appears as a character, the lamentably inept, unidentified cameraperson failed to capture much of what was happening in the single take they recorded. But checking the full shoot’s quality didn’t even occur to the artist back then. What mattered was the wild exuberance of that sole attempt rather than the work’s longevity as a polished cultural object.
For Thacker, these whacky tapes were sites of both heartfelt fantasy and critical commentary on women in positions of power. “If it was my world, it would be two gay women, queer women, running the country,” she says. “They would be having their inauguration … and the men would be serving the cupcakes.” But the videos also interrogate the project of liberal feminism and reject the notion that women and LGBTQ+ people inherently make more enlightened and compassionate leaders. They channel a generation’s disenchantment with a contemporary political system that sometimes felt, perhaps paradoxically, replete with urgencies yet emptied of meaning, and beyond the force field of artistic practice. By the mid-1980s, however, as HIV and AIDS led to the politicization of queer people in new ways, many artists started to think of community-making and mutual aid as distinctly political work—an attitude that persists today. In the wake of the Harris campaign’s ruinous failure, Thacker’s videos, for me, do more than simply point out the enduring insufficiencies of representational feminism. that will be vital as we brace for another Trump presidency.
