Queer Accomplices: This is not another photo of the gay male body

This is not another photo is an essay about the depiction of the gay male form in contemporary art. This manifesto is a call for an expanded queer aesthetics that puts as much emphasis on intersectionality as it does on the sexualized gay male form.

Oakley states in the essay "Sex sells. Contemporary queer photography is flooded with ableist images of white gay bodies. I am in no way trying to be anti sex-positive. My argument here is for a more critical and thoughtful depiction of queer bodies. Queer art is flooded with one-dimensional representations of queerness that flatten the complexity of what a queer body is and can be. Artists and photographers have celebrated the gay male form and given it a visibility akin to its straight counterparts’ photographs of idealized white women. These images have overpopulated queer art production--but what do these images communicate to society at large? And what do they tell the queer community? When bodies do not fit into this conception of what a queer body looks like are they unworthy of representation? While the non-gay world (dominant culture) continues to digest this normalized white gay male body, how do trans, fat femme, non-binary, differently abled bodies fit into these fixed narratives of the queer body?"