Out of the closet
CHRISTINE REDFERNMONTREAL — From Monday's Globe and Mail
Published Monday, Aug. 14 2006, 1:34 AM EDT
Last updated Monday, Apr. 06 2009, 10:40 PM EDT

If you list Paul Litherland's passions - base-jumping, skydiving, motorcycle riding and boxing you might assume he's a macho man. Anyone who knows him wouldn't hesitate to call him aregular guy. He is a respected professional photographer, now 44 and happily married to fellow
artist Karen Trask. Yet take a look at his series of self-portraits, titled Absolutely Fabulous, andsuddenly his personality no longer fits so neatly into the realm of what society traditionallyterms "masculine."
But Litherland decided to challenge the very idea of masculine identity. In the early nineties,
during the heyday of hardline critiques of the straight white male, he took a series ofphotographs currently on view at Montreal's Galerie Thérèse Dion. In half the portraits, hewears a pink dress, making no attempt to hide his hairy legs or bulge. In the remaining photos,
he dresses up and projects the attitude and uniform of a schoolboy, a businessman, a lesbian, asadomasochist and a dead man. It is rare and somehow visually refreshing to see this type ofexperimentation publicly displayed so unabashedly by the boy next door.
"I look at this on one level as just trying stuff on," Litherland explains, "to look at being a manfrom different points of view. And I don't think I go that far, quite frankly. I don't feel the work
is actually that extreme. It represents my own hesitations as much as it is an exploration oftrying to be free from expectations. Both in and outside of my art practice, I think many of thethings I do are about trying to feel alive, whether it's riding a motorcycle, freefalling, boxing oreven wearing a dress.
"These actions make me feel more alive, because I am putting something at risk. I put mymanliness at risk if I dare to name it, never mind play with it like in this series of self-portraits."
Regardless of the tough talk about risk, the images were never shown in public until now. The
concept of personally articulating and revealing a position outside of the powerful social ideal ofheterosexuality, Litherland comments, was difficult "mostly because I was embarrassed." Heexplains the Catch-22 inherent in this type of project. "The minute you start questioning
masculinity, the fact of questioning it means that you are up in the air. Heterosexual power
relations exist in silence. When you start to put them on the table, you instantly feel that you aregoing against the grain. Any time you question this kind of relationship, you are putting yourself

on the other side, the other side being gay or female or not part of the team."Internally, Litherland felt like a heterosexual man; externally, the vibe was that "real" men don't
act this way. He remarks that he is a different person now than when he originally took thesepictures. It is as if he recognizes the need for some distance before he was able to exhibit theimages. The dead man photo resurfaced last winter as part of the group exhibition Faking
Death: Canadian Art Photography at the Jack Shainman Gallery in New York. That exhibition
and the accompanying coverage in Artforum, ARTNews and The New Yorker resulted in thewhole series finally being dragged out of the closet 13 years later.
As we move around the room, we pass a photograph showing Litherland wearing lipstick andpantyhose. In another he is naked, tied up and sporting a sex toy. We talk about how our society
is quick to link sexually charged male nudes to homosexuality. Somehow with the male-centric
viewpoint that dominates our culture, we find it easy to associate masculine sensuality withhomoerotic art, but find it difficult to connect it to our preconceived notions of the typicalstraight man. "I believe that part of me is lesbian, part of me is gay, part of me is my mom," says
Litherland. He points to the image that shows him wearing a dress, holding a cigarette andtilting his head to the side as he stares directly at the viewer. "That one is based on my mom."
In the end, maybe what is inspiring about Absolutely Fabulous has nothing to do with how
Litherland looks or how he is dressed, but that he found the guts to show a side of himself thatin many would easily lead to feelings of humiliation. Absolutely Fabulous laughs in the face ofthe fear of looking stupid. "What is really stupid is saying you are not a man because you havefeminine attributes," Litherland counters. "Or that if you even think about being a man, it makes
you less of a man. It is such a crazy part of the code: Real men don't think about being men."
Paul Litherland's Absolutely Fabulous continues at Galerie Thérèse Dionin Montreal until
Sept. 2 (514-398-9204). His boxing performance will be part of the Rencontres internationale
d'art performance in Quebec City, Sept. 21 to 24 (418-529-9680). Special to The Globe andMailFollow us on Twitter: @GlobeArts [https://twitter.com/@GlobeArts]