Adrian Street’s Welsh Working-Class “Exotic”

“Conversation Piece” is a British Art Studies series that draws together a group of contributors to respond to an idea, provocation, or question. For this special issue Queer Art in Britain since the 1980s the editors invited a response to the provocation ‘Instituting Queer Art in Britain'.

My conversation piece takes an intentionally personal and embodied response to this provocation, inviting a re-consideration of a beguiling photograph of the Welsh wrestler, pop star and artworld pin-up Adrian Street that has been bugging me (in a good way) for years. A "revenge photograph" for Street, an economic prophesy for artist Jeremy Deller who brought this image to my attention, and some kind of reconciliation with sexuality, class and education for me. Devoid of the struggles of LGBTQ+ people of the time, I argue that Street's "exotic" gimmick and homosexual satire tells another story in which "queer" is appropriated into the mainstream and burgeoning neoliberalism precisely in the moment it finds its liberation in the UK, but not only this.