Interesting example(s) of how famous LGBT people are "hetero-normalized".

Hetero-normalizing David Hockney

Last May I noted that most obituaries of Robert Rauschenberg 'forgot' that he was gay, and I explained why that was an important omission: Rauschenberg was on the vanguard of what was then called gay liberation, he was on the vanguard of gay migration from rural areas to cities and his work frequently addressed homosexuality and equality in a direct way that artists before had not. I wrote that the coverage of Rauschenberg's death "hetero-normalized" him.

In a Sunday feature already posted online, the New York Times and free-lancer Carol Kino have unfortunately hetero-normalized David Hockney. According to Kino: "In 2005 Mr. Hockney -- temporarily, he says -- left Hollywood, where he had lived full time since 1978, to transform the manicured green and golden slopes, woods and farmland of the East Yorkshire landscape into spare, quickly worked compositions charged with pink, orange and violet."

That's not true. Hockney did not leave California because the East Yorkshire landscape romantically called him home to England. Hockney left because the United States government would not allow his partner, John Fitzherbert, back into the country. In order to be with Fitzherbert, Hockney returned to the UK.

Even if Kino's error is one of what she and/or the NYT thinks is one of benign omission, it's not. America's discriminatory policies have driven away of the post-war era's most prominent artists -- someone who chose to live here because he loved being in America and who enriched the cultural life of our nation. America's treatment of Hockney, his partner and other men and women who have had to confront a similar circumstance, is a point of national shame, not a meaningless detail to be quietly dismissed.

From Modern Art Notes (10/16/09).