Sexualizing Imagery

Troye Sivan "One of Your Girls" Music Video

Troye Sivan, "One of Your Girls" (Official Video), 2023

The song “One of Your Girls” was made in 2023 by gay Australian singer-songwriter Troye Sivan. The music video accompanying the song primarily shows a plethora of subjects. Multiple men, two women (briefly shown), and Sivan, presenting both masculinely and femininely in drag. Throughout the

video, the men and masculine Sivan are seen through a black and white video filter. When Sivan is performing in drag, the filter switches to full color. The color distinction between the men in the video and Sivan implies the way the men view Sivan. Masculinely and monochromatically, he is one of them. Femininely and in color, he is an object of sexual desire. The strategic color grading of the video is a direct nod to how heteronormative gender presentation still impacts platonic and sexual relationships. Despite Sivan being the same person throughout the video, the dichotomy between his gender presentation plays on the "black and white" view of sexual orientation. Sivan uses the color filters throughout the video to depose the idea that sexuality is strictly black and white.

Tinky winky teletubby, 1999

Tinky Winky Teletubby

In 1999, the strongly evangelical founder of Liberty University Jerry Falwell, Sr, published an article in the National Liberty Journal, titled “Parents Alert: Tinky Winky Comes Out of the Closet,” claiming Teletubby’s Tinky Winky to be an emblem of gay culture, promoting dangerous ideologies to children. Falwell’s reasoning included the pink triangle above the character’s head, resembling the symbol of gay pride often used throughout the HIV/AIDS movement, and originally as a demarcation for queer people throughout World War II, as well as the purse the toy could be seen sporting, representing a flamboyant or femininely accessorized gay man. Falwell’s public announcement only perpetuated the stereotype that queer people prey on children, framing Teletubbies and gay people as predatory. In the years following the scandal, the queer community adopted Tinky

Winky as a symbol of pride, reclaiming the toy and using it as a mascot of queerness by making shirts featuring his face, and rushing to stores to purchase Tinky Winky for themselves.

Bondage Device: Cross

Hal Fisher (b. 1950) is an American photographer known for his use of the medium as mock documentation of gay culture specifically where he was working, in San Francisco, California. The Bondage Device series is a subsection of his most famous work Gay Semiotics published as a book in 1977 based on a solo exhibition of the same title. Every image in the series has the signature look of white graphics imposed over a black and white photographs. The series at large deals with the “visual coding of homosexual men” as explained in the subtitle of his book. Fisher was using this diagram format as a tongue in cheek way to explain the different visual cues one can use to identify the different kinds of gay man, and in Bondage Device, explain how the devious homosexual used everyday objects in their

Hal Fisher, Bondage Device: Cross, 1977

sexual endeavors. The series was received well by art critics who took the images at face value and believed it was truly an informational display, but little did they know this played into Fisher’s tactics of separating those who are “in the know” and those who are not. The queer community instantly read the satire in this piece which solidified the divide in visual culture. Bondage Device: Cross takes this idea a step further and uses religious imagery within a sexual context and subverts expectations of both pious followers of Christianity and the heterocentered gaze with the outline of a thin masculine figure in a speedo laid against a wooden cross, which eerily resembles common depictions of Jesus’s crucifixion.