Electric Bed: Burned by electric nights, No kiss will fill the void in your body, Darkness consumes even memory.

• Author(s) / Creator(s)

  • Andrychuk, Darren

• From the early 80s to the mid-90s, gay male culture experienced a period of degradation and destruction because of the HIV crisis. In 1992 the word “Queer”, an exclusively gay male slur, was used to describe a theory and then became a label for a set of individuals for which it had no negative emotional context. In part, this was because gay men had lost their voice and numbers while other members of the LGBT community asserted their privilege. To investigate this timeline is to explore the history of the victims of a sort of cultural genocide. This photograph documents my installation art that examines gay conversion therapy. During treatment, electrodes were placed on the penis and the thigh of the patient. Witnesses verify that the electrodes burnt the flesh of those undergoing treatment. Physical documentation rarely exists as files and patient records were routinely destroyed upon the discharge of the patient. A friend, honoured in the title of this piece, suffered the loss of part of this penis from the process. His story is not uncommon among those who have undergone gay conversion therapy. He committed suicide in 1989. Gay conversion therapy is still practiced in the USA today. // Program of Study: Master's // Faculty/Department: Faculty of Arts, Department of Art & Design // Award: Semi-finalists Prize, Images of Research Competition 2018

• Date created

  2018-01-01

• Subjects / Keywords

  • Research image

• Type of Item

  Image

• DOI

  https://doi.org/10.7939/R3Z892W25

• License

  Attribution 4.0 International