Cruising the Past – workshop with Fiona Anderson & Laura Guy

Dr Fiona Anderson is Lecturer in Art History in the Fine Art department at Newcastle University. At the moment, she is completing a book on the art and gay cruising scenes on New York’s derelict waterfront in the years immediately preceding the HIV/AIDS epidemic, looking most closely at the work of David Wojnarowicz and Peter Hujar, and working on a new project on the culture and politics of the drug AZT.

Dr Laura Guy is based between Edinburgh College of Art and Glasgow School of Art, where she works as a Lecturer in Fine Art Critical Studies. In 2017 she received her PhD from Manchester School of Art for a thesis titled ‘Manifestos: Aesthetics and politics in queer times’. She is currently working on a book that explores intersections between lesbian feminist politics and visual culture, particularly focusing on polemics, pornography, and graffiti.

Cruising the Seventies: Unearthing Pre-HIV/AIDS Queer Sexual Cultures (CRUSEV) explores LGBTQ (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer) social and sexual cultures of the 1970s, and their significance for LGBTQ people across Europe now and in the future. CRUSEV reconstructs aspects of LGBTQ cultures and interactions from the 1970s, the decade before HIV/AIDS, to consider what this knowledge can contribute to queer politics and identity in Europe’s present and future.
The three-year research project is financed by the European funding agency HERA, under HERA’s ‘Uses of the Past’ theme.
https://www.crusev.ed.ac.uk